Drupal - a very popular open source CMS (Content Management System) - doesn’t have a built-in support for mobile and handheld devices (PDAs). If you want to make your site more accessible to mobile users, your only option now is to have an additional “mobile” theme in your set-up, which would be very simple and lean, and somehow use it automatically when users access your site from small devices. Since automatic detection is required and you probably don’t want to change core Drupal files, you can use this module Mobile Theme - it handles the selection for you. It works pretty well, but please be aware that it also requires the Browscap module installed.

For years I was server-oriented developer, quite often writing code for Unix environment and helping others to do so. However I never mind doing occasional user-oriented application or two. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of .NET GUI development using WPF (Windows Presentation Framework). A small task seems to come up quite often. If you have a GUI application, you usually want it to start in the same state it was left it when used last time. In particular this is true regarding its position and size. Effectively, you would like your application to restore its position ans size automatically on startup. So the following procedure should take care of that.

It is nice to be able to blog about software. For instance, a few years ago I wrote an article about web development using C++ . I still get a comment or two about it almost every week, despite the fact that not a single line of code has been written for the project, unfortunately. However, if I ever took the initiative and started working on it, I would, no doubt, write some interesting progress reports here as well. As things go, it would be very neat to show off some code in the process. By using the Geshi source code highligher/formatter, it is much easier with Drupal nowadays. Just install the module, install the library and off you go!

I have never suspected that Microsoft had this built-in, but it appears to be the case. Code generator called T4 , which targets both C# or VB.NET, is built into your copy of Visual Studio and is available as you read this article. Basically, all you need is to add a new file to your solution with the extension

.tt

, and that’s it, besides from actually writing the code for the template. Read more about it in the article Visual Studio .NET Macros for quick insertion of C# Conditional and Iteration Statements .

Great new piece of software, recently discovered by me - Foxit PDF Reader . Just a few advantages over the standard Acrobat Reader: it’s faster, simpler and, most important, it allows you to save data in PDF forms ! Yes, the so much desired feature, that is not available in the free version of Acrobat is readily usable in Foxit absolutely free of charge.

To continue with the great news, OpenOffice.org version 3.0 has been released. Interface and functionality have been improved greatly - definitely worth giving it a try.

From the Internet:

*NVIDIA announced a new category of supercomputers — the Tesla Personal Supercomputer — a 4 TeraFLOPS desktop for under $10,000.

This desktop machine has 4 of the Tesla C1060 computing processors. These GPUs have no graphics out and are used only for computing. Each Tesla GPU has 240 cores and delivers about 1 TeraFLOPS single precision and about 80 GigaFLOPS double-precision floating point performance. The CPU + GPU is programmed using C with added keywords using a parallel programming model called CUDA. The CUDA C compiler/development toolchain is free to download. There are tons of applications ported to CUDA including Mathematica, LabView, ANSYS Mechanical, and tons of scientific codes from molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, and electromagnetics; they’re listed on CUDA Zone.*

I like Drupal a lot. It’s a great system, easy to set up and use, and the most important thing, there are plenty of modules, which provide additional functionality. However, every time the Drupal development team release a new major version, the module authors have to change their modules in order to adopt to the new platform. This is a major drawback, because it is a considerable obstacle for those, wishing to migrate to the new version. Module authors are often busy and it takes considerable time for them to make the necessary changes.

Finally Firefox 3.0 is out, grab it fast :)

After using Fedora Core 9 for some time I feel that I have the right to wine a little bit.

First of all, on my machine it feels rather slow, especially in X. Faster, than Fedora Core 8, so there is some progress, but still not as fast as I would like it to be. I have a pretty decent machine and its performance is quite acceptable in Windows. For instance, Firefox 3 simply flies under Win32, but is dragging under FC. I suspect, that the open-source drivers for my Radeon 9200 are to blame here, but my half-hearted attempts to use the proprietary ATI modules failed. To complicate matters, ATI has stopped support for my chipset, therefore all new releases don’t include it.

Firefox Release Candidate 1 is available for download and I decided to give it a go. My first impressions are quite positive - performance is must better on the same machine, the design has been improved and they have added quite a few usability features.

For instance, when you log into a username/password protected web site, Firefox will propose you to save your credentials only after you’ve logged in successfully, while previous versions would ask you to save them every time before the submission. Another nice feature is much more visible site security information, especially for HTTPS-enabled web site.