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Yes, we can change…and so can Microsoft. »

The Internet changes everything – especially the software business; and I am not echoing Larry Ellison’s mantra. It is unbelievable how Microsoft is changing itself nowadays, to be more friendly to open source community. As posted earlier, Microsoft has Express editions of its Visual Studio products, supports jQuery and it is now contributing Project Stonehenge code to Apache. You can read more about it here.

This is a good development. I believe the power of the Internet is not fully leveraged on Windows machines. Apple is far ahead with its iTunes and iLife. There are no compelling, similar products on Windows. I know that companies like Adobe are re-looking at developing more desktop based applications for the internet , like Adobe AIR. But there still are lot of cool internet-based apps that we can develop on Windows…though it is not too much of a fun!

PHP Template Engines »

Good template engines make it easy to work with designers, especially when the web application is quite big. I used Code Igniter for a big application before, without using its template parser class. I regret it now, because it is becoming increasingly painful to make changes to different parts of the application. But again, I did not use CI template engine, because I did not believe it to be as powerful as Smarty and others.

PHP has some great template engines and here is a list of some promising ones.

Migrating from Blogger to WordPress »

I finally made it! I moved techforceone.com from Blogger to WordPress this weekend. Even though this was a long overdue task, I hesitated to move over because I was afraid of losing my posts’ attributes. But after setting up a multi-user blog recently with WordPress MU, I was restless to move the blog over.

Before I explain the process followed, I need to let you know that I originally set up Blogger to publish (ftp) to my site. Now coming to the steps I followed:

1. Back Up at Blogger: I first backed up the blog using the “export blog” link under Blogger’s Dashboard-> Settings. This created a file on my mac in Blogger Atom export format.

2. Pre-installation steps on the Web Server: My webroot directory already had files from Blogger. I logged onto the server and physically moved all the files to a separate folder. The webroot folder is now empty.

3. WordPress Installation: I installed WordPress in the webroot folder. (I used fantastico, but manual installation of WordPress is also easy).

4. Import the blog: Here is where  I had an issue. In WordPress Admin Dashboard, under Tools, I clicked on the Import option to point to the XML file I exported in Step 1. But WordPress could not process it. I then went back to Blogger and under Publishing, I made the setting to publish to blogspot.com. (As mentioned earlier, it was orginally pointing to techforceone.com). By making Blogger point to blogspot.com, my blog was made available at techforceone.blogspot.com. I then went back to WordPress admin panel and imported the blog from techforceone.blogspot.com. This time, it smoothly imported all the blogs. I see that the tags did not get imported correctly; may be, this is because Blogger uses Labels and WordPress calls them Tags? I am not sure, but other than this, every thing else went on smoothly.

Amazon Web Services becomes easier with AWS Management Console »

AWS has just released a beta version of their web based management console. It is now so easy to configure an AMI and launch it – all with clicks. You can configure the storage blocks within the management console and all this makes things so easy.

However, I should add that my IE 7 on XP did hang once while I was working on the management console. I am now using Safari and it is stable…so far.

The last Macworld – Apple continues to innovate with iLife »

Windows is good, Linux is better and Mac is the best! To accept the statement, you don’t have to use Mac regularly, you can just try it once in any Apple stores. I am not saying this just because Apple products look cool. They do look gorgeous, but they come with every thing you would want from a computer…whether it is fun stuff, like organizing photos, movies etc or doing serious coding with XCode or even colloborating with iWork.

The new iLife 09 has excellent features, especially to its iPhoto and iMovie.

iPhoto 09 has following new features:

• Faces – Face detection and recognitions
• Places – GPS Geotagging
• Facebook and Flickr Support
• Slideshow Themes
• Travel Books

iMovie 09 has following enhancements:

• Precision Editor
• Advanced Drag n Drop
• Dynamic Themes
• Animated Travel Maps
• Video Stabilization

With over tens and thousands of pictures, the face recognition feature in iPhoto will instantly help me organize the pictures more easily and effectively. GPS Geo-tagging is very useful to group photos based on where the photos were taken. These two features are really a must-have in any photo management software. I wonder why Microsoft is not able to make their products as useful. If you get a PC based laptop, it really does not have lot of useful software. On my Mac, I can have Apache web server running with couple of clicks, share photos, learn music (Garage Band 09 has Learn to Play) and do lot more things.

Multi-User Blogging »

I recently set up a multi-user blogging software, for one of my clients. I googled for a while and came across a useful article, comparing Drupal and WordPress MU. I chose WordPress MU because I wanted some thing quick and with lot of features. WordPress MU installation was a breeze. I then add few themes and plugins. AdSense Manager was very easy to configure and Google Ads started showing up within minutes.

I had an issue creating sub-domains. I am using a shared account at Host Gator. I am not sure if I can use the script found here to dynamically create sub-domains, for every blog. For now, each blog is pointing to a sub-folder. For example: http://domain.com/blog1 instead of http://blog1.domain.com, which would have been much cooler.

I also found that some WordPress themes, like Stardust, are not compatible with WordPress MU.