Posted in php, collaboration, windows
Sat, 30 Jun 2007 17:11:00 GMT
I just installed MediaWiki at an organization to manage some information I was researching. The primary reasons I chose MediaWiki were (a) it's open source, (b) it has auto-TOC (table of contents), (c) it has auto-categorization and (d) I was familiar with it already. I ran into some rough spots during the Win2K3 R2 / IIS 6.0 installation getting PHP 5.2.3 and the php_mysql extension working but other than that the installation was pretty smooth. It seems that the php_mysql extension that comes with PHP 5.2.3 doesn't work and you need to get it from PHP 5.2.2. Also, rebooting after installing PHP from the MSI helps but that doesn't seem to be mentioned in the installer. The other issue is that IIS doesn't seem to come with rewrite capabilities so I tried a third-party rewrite filter before tabling that for now. It's hard to believe that IIS doesn't have rewrite capabilities.
Some "Enterprise Wiki" solutions include Confluence and SocialText but I don't have any experience with these.
Which wiki do you like for "enterprise" purposes and what features do you find to be key? Do any other wikis have auto-TOC?
6 comments
Posted in catalyst, authentication, singlesignon
Sun, 17 Jun 2007 01:06:00 GMT
If you are running a site without a subdomain, e.g. http://dev411.com and need to maintain cookie-based sessions across other server names with subdomains, e.g. blog.dev411.com and wiki.dev411.com, you will need to customize your session cookies.
To have your session cookie be used across multiple subdomains, set a wildcard domain which starts with a dot followed by the base domain name, e.g. ".dev411.com", which will make it qualify for all subdomains of dev411.com. This, however, will not work for http://dev411.com where there is no subdomain.
The have the same session used for http://dev411.com, set a second session cookie without domain. This way the domain-less cookie will be used for http://dev411.com and the wildcard domain cookie will be used for all subdomains.
Catalyst 5.7007 will only set one cookie per cookie name, however, this solution works best when you can set both cookies with the same name but different cookie domains. I put together a quick patch for Catalyst::Engine to allow multiple cookies when the cookie value is set to an arrayref.
1 comment
Posted in rails, typo
Sat, 16 Jun 2007 22:36:00 GMT
I finally got around to upgrading from Typo 4.0.0 r1188 to Typo 4.1.1 and it was pretty smooth. I had held off for a while because Typo was changing a lot under the covers with some much needed refactoring and I have a few hacks I didn't feel like modifying with every minor update.
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no comments
Posted in typo, dhtml, scalability, javascript, datetime
Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:28:00 GMT
Some considerations when displaying dates and times on a website include showing delta times, customized timezones and caching. Often it's nice to show a delta time like "10 minutes ago" or "5 days ago" to give readers a frame of reference instead of an absolute date. When the date is far enough in the past and an absolute date becomes desired, customizing the date to the user's timezone is useful. And if your site grows large enough that caching becomes useful, finding a way to display customized deltas and timezone information in a cacheable static page becomes an ideal solution.
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2 comments
Posted in scalability
Tue, 24 Oct 2006 16:56:00 GMT
Recently eWeek ran an article on eHarmony's storage scaling solution choice which discussed how they chose to go with proprietary solutions from 3PAR and ONStor. I was hoping to learn something interesting about their deployment architecture but the most interesting things I learned was that eHarmony has 8+ million users, 9+ million photos and their proprietary solution vendor choice. Some interesting quotes from Mark Douglas, eHarmony's VP of Technology:
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no comments
Posted in apple
Thu, 19 Oct 2006 04:03:00 GMT
I've been a happy iPod user for some time now, however I've only ever used my single iPod with a single iTunes install. I recently reinstalled my OS after wiping the hard drive for a clean start. To my surprise a fresh install of iTunes with the same iPod serial number would not import songs from my iPod into the iTunes library. iTunes had the gall to ask me if I wanted it to erase all the music on my iPod and replace it with the (empty) contents in its library. Essentially my iPod was orphaned. I've never thought about Apple DRM issues before but I'm no longer as excited about the iPod and iTunes as I was before.
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6 comments
Posted in mysql, scalability
Fri, 06 Oct 2006 03:07:00 GMT
I just ran across the MySQL Web 2.0 page which lists a number of their users including the following:
The most interesting thing from that page, however, is links to various presentations given by those sites on how they architected their sites to scale with MySQL, some of them scaling up to hundreds of MySQL servers.
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2 comments
Posted in mysql, perl, orm, unicode
Mon, 02 Oct 2006 15:35:00 GMT
One of the mysteries of Perl to me is that why, as of yet, is there no UTF-8 support in DBD::mysql although this issue has been discussed on the msql-mysql-modules list since at least 2003 (using the MARC archives). This is also given that MySQL does have UTF-8 support itself.
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8 comments
Posted in mysql, perl, xapian
Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:08:00 GMT
I recently looked at using various encodings for hashed UIDs, e.g. UIDs generated by a crytographic hash algorithm such as SHA-1 or MD5. These are often useful when the UID does not need to have human meaning but should exhibit some uniformity, such as character set and length. I considered Base64 and hexadecimal first because they are commonly used by crypto libraries and then decided on Base64 and Base32 where appropriate. Base36 is actually the most compact case insensitive encoding (using Arabic numbers and Roman letters) but is not an option for me at the moment because there's no Perl module for it that will take arbitrary text and binary input at the moment. Math::Base36 exists but only handles numbers.
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no comments
Posted in perl, unicode, postgresql
Fri, 29 Sep 2006 18:21:00 GMT
Perl has two UTF-8 encodings, utf8 which is Perl's liberal version and UTF-8 which is a strict interpretation, aka utf-8-strict. The liberal version allows for encoded characters outside the UTF-8 character set, however you can run into problems when interoperating with applications that expect utf-8-strict, such as PostgreSQL. Here's a function I wrote to strictify utf8 to UTF-8 using the Encode core module:
use Encode;
sub strictify_utf8 {
my $data = shift;
if (Encode::is_utf8($data) && !Encode::is_utf8($data,1)) {
Encode::_utf8_off($data);
Encode::from_to($data, 'utf8', 'UTF-8');
Encode::_utf8_on($data);
}
return $data;
}
no comments