electronic brain surgery since 2001

This article is part of a monthly series.

Every month I present a DokuWiki powered site which is special for its design, content or clever use of the software. To give you a first impression on what the site is about I'll send a short, interview style questionnaire to its creator.

Kustupedia

I like this month's site for its very special niche content which is presented with much love and dedication. DokuWiki is used as a simple CMS. Using a Wiki adds the possibility to open up the whole site or parts to other contributors at anytime.

Questions were answered by the site's webmaster Matthieu Dhennin.

Click to continue reading...

Last updated: 2008/07/02 21:38 · Permalink · Comments (1+)

What is wrong in this Code?

We have a web developer position¹⁾ to fill at CosmoCode and my task is to check possible candidates for their web skills. What I came up with, and what seems to work quite well, is a simple test. I show the candidate the following code and ask them to point out errors.

My rationale is this: any half decent PHP programmer will come up with quite a few obvious errors. But the better candidates will not only find those obvious flaws but will also point out non fatal errors and bad style. Those are the ones we're looking for. Unfortunately the market is very bad currently.

Anyway, give the code a try. What mistakes can you spot? Let me know in the comments :-) .

<html>
<head>

<style>
  body {
    font: "Times New Roman";
  }
</style>

</head>
<body>

<?
    $roles[andi]   = "Developer";
    $roles[detlef] = "Boss";
?>

<img src="logo.gif" align=left>

<H1>Hello <?= $roles[$_GET['user']]?>!</H1>

<?
    $list = new Array();
    $list[] = "Apple";
    $list[] = "Peach":
    $list[] = "Orange";

    for(i=0; i<count($list); i++){
      echo "<li><b><i>".$list[$i]."</b></i>";
    }
?>

</body>
</html>

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Last updated: 2008/06/30 22:40 · Permalink · Comments (21+)

DokuWiki Birthday Cake Post

DokuWiki turns 4 today. Time for one of those silly blog meme posts again.

Here are the rules:

Link to the DokuWiki website
Post a picture of a cake¹⁾²⁾
Let me know about the post and I'll link it here³⁾
Optionally tell the world how much you love DokuWiki

Click through to see all the cakes so far…

Click to continue reading...

Last updated: 2008/06/26 09:22 · Permalink · Comments (11+)

Google Public Relations

Yesterday, I got an unexpected package from Google. It contained a “thank you” letter, a Polo-Shirt and a USB card reader.

The whole story began a few weeks ago, when I had a call on my answering machine and a mail in my inbox from the legal department of Google Germany. A Google lawyer asked me if he could talk with me on the phone.

I immediately wrote him back and we talked later that day. It turned out the whole thing was about my gBrain extension for Firefox. He was very friendly, and explained that he was contacted by the guys in Mountain View, asking him, if he could ask me if I could stop distributing it. Talk about bureaucracy ;-) .

gBrain is a Firefox extension to automagically bookmark all pages you visit at the Google bookmark service. This effectively moves your browser history from your browser instance to a central place on the net (Google) where it is easily searchable from every computer.

I hadn't think to long about that request, because

I did not use the extension my self anymore
It wasn't very popular either
Google could have blocked it them self easily instead of asking me

So I agreed to abandon it, but my curiosity was aroused. I asked him about the exact problem with extension, but him being just the message bearer had no idea. But he offered to ask a Google engineer to contact me.

I did not really expect it, but the next day I got a call from Jeffrey Korn at Google California. He explained that he was the one responsible for building the Google Bookmarks and Google Web History tools. The problem with my extension was something I hadn't imagined: a scaling problem. Hehe, Google had scaling problems :-) .

The gBrain extension creates a lot of bookmarks. Several thousands a month. And the Google bookmarks system was never made with this amount in mind. What made things worse (and I didn't knew that), the bookmarks are connected to the normal web search. Whenever you use the web search, it checks it against your Google bookmarks. You can easily imagine what problems can come up when you have a several 10 or even 100 thousands of bookmarks…

Jeffery also made a few suggestions how the extension could be changed to make use of their Web history service instead of the bookmarks system. This would avoid the scaling problems. I may consider it some day.

But why am I telling this? Because I'm amazed how Google handled this. Instead of just blocking my extension at their side, or sending me a cease and desist letter¹⁾ they contacted me and asked. This is more than you can expect from many other corporations. Even after the whole thing was resolved, they had one of their engineers call me to explain the whole thing.

Well… and a few weeks later I even good a nice present :-) . Thanks Google.

Win a Shirt

Okay and because white Polo-Shirts are not my cup of tea I hereby give it away in a contest. It's labeled as L but is pretty large, so it might fit as a small XL, too.

The first commenter asking for the shirt gets it. As simple as that. Be sure to leave your real e-mail.

Tags:: google,; gbrain,; tshirt

Similar posts:

¹⁾ they probably could have come up with some TOS violation – IANAL

Last updated: 2008/06/25 20:37 · Permalink · Comments (61+)

DokuWiki Hack Days at FrOSCon 2008

This August the very first real life gathering of DokuWiki developers and interested users will happen. The event, dubbed “DokuWiki Hack Days”, takes place at FrOSCon 2008.

FrOSCon is a two day conference on Free Software and Open Source, taking place for the third time on August, 23rd/24th 2008 at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near the cities of Bonn and Cologne.

The idea is to have a DokuWiki developers meetup to talk, brainstorm and hack together on DokuWiki. Possible topics could be things like