ZD's random thoughts

Gmail released a new feature - multiple file upload for attachments. Multi-file uploading has almost become a standard feature on most modern web platforms such as Wordpress.

Finally this highly demanded feature arrived at Gmail… And apparently Flash is behind it as well.

While some people prefer a public social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, others prefer a private ones, or private-label sites.

There are many decisions to make when deciding to go with privates social networking sites. If you hate the administrative overhead, there are some “freemium” type of hosting services such as Ning and CollectiveX. Basically you can either a “free” private social networking site with a vender host name like yournetwork.ning.com or yourname.collectivex.com, or you can cough out some monthly subscription fee to use your own domain and some advanced features. And apparently these hosting providers put ads on the free sites to cover their cost (and sometimes to make a profit).

If you want DIY, there are options, too. Some open source packages exist there. Ellg is a PHP based open source social networking framework, and Community Engine is a Rails based one. If you want to stick to OpenSocial standards, Apache’s Shindig is worth looking into. In addition, Shindig has implementations in both Java and PHP. Partuza is an example open source social networking that uses Shindig implementation of PHP.

There is another PHP based open source social networking project called U Center Home. It looks nice. However, I am confused by its license. On their sourceforge page, the license is GPL, while on their corporate site, the license says – “free for personal/non-profit use”.

In a previous post, I described my experience with Windows 7 on E6400. Almost a month passed by, and I have some new findings.

This time I did a fresh install instead of upgrading from Vista. The system was pretty stable until I got numerous BSOD yesterday. On the BSOD, it said tdx.sys is the one to blame. I installed windbg to figure out what went wrong in the memory dump file but for some reason windbg could not run in Windows 7. Finally I did another fresh install. This time, I got BSOD from nwifi.sys and kl1.sys. nwifi.sys BSOD went away after I replaced the Windows 7 wifi driver with the one from Dell website. kl1.sys BSOD went away after I replaced Kaspersky with AVG.

Hope that helps.

To every ruby developer’s surprise, the built-in Net::HTTP does not support Multipart natively. There are a couple of solutions: write multipart function by yourself, use a third part plugin such as curb or RestClient.

Be aware though. Curb can easily crash your rails if the parameter is not a String. For example, if you have an integer stored in the session, and you pass that to curb directly, then your ruby server will crash. It took me a couple of hours to figure that out…