A recent thread on the Drupal development list (started by me, I confess) led to Larry Garfield publishing his development environment online.
Assaf writes about, among other things, REST as a simplifier of development against an existing system:
REST plays the same role as open source and open APIs: It eliminates tooling and vendoring as artificial barriers to adoption.
To rename columns in a SQL Server database, you can use sp_rename. The syntax of the command, in Transact-SQL-ese, is:
sp_rename
[ @objname = ] 'object_name' ,
[ @newname = ] 'new_name'
[ , [ @objtype = ] 'object_type' ]
So say you have a table called t_est, with a column in it called est_client. You want to rename these to t_job and job_client respectively.
Steve Yegge on *Emacs, pointing also to the possible future direction of the *browser:
“IDEs are draining users away, but it’s not the classic fat-client IDEs that are ultimately going to kill Emacs. It’s the browsers. They have all the power of a fat-client platform and all the flexibility of a dynamic system. I said earlier that Firefox wants to be Emacs. It should be obvious that Emacs also wants to be Firefox…
The UK government’s Central Office of Information (COI) has produced a draft report on governmental departments' adherence to browser standards and asked for feedback.
We've recently had to integrate code with a large ASP application, which provided me with certain opinion-forming revelations about how the other half live. Part of this integration required us to write some ASP, an unexpected and un-wished-for surprise in itself. We had to generate livery in our own application---to make webpages from both sites consistent---and expose it to ASP via a HTTP call over the wire.
The considerably more hirsute than previously Rob Purdie put together yet another great Drupal for NGOs meet-up yesterday in London.
If you want someone to build you a website, don't let them build you a bespoke CMS to help you manage it. I've fallen prey to this very temptation, although in my defence it was as much an investigation into technology and the structure of my own content as a solution to the problem of managing said content.
Google are introducing paid-for extensions to Google App Engine quotas, which is great as it lets you build more complex applications if you're willing to pay the rates. At the same time they're reducing the baseline free quotas.
David Yelvington mentioned back in December 2008 that his Drupal site had over 30 content types:
Why on earth so many content types? It's easy to see good reasons for news items to be structurally more complex than a simple blog post. But we also have some types of content you probably wouldn't think about at first. Wire stories are an interesting case.... Promos are another....