Archive - 2009

Rails Initialization process
require_frameworks
load_paths ( app/controller; app/models...)
load_environment
load_plugins
load_observers
after_initializeRead more >>

Digital cameras with swivel-lens (or swivel-bodies) offer the freedom to take impressive photos from any angle. Here I list all the swivel-lens digital cameras (with 2.0 or more Megapixel):Read more >>

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) comes with nginx 0.6.34. This nginx worked fine, until one day I tried to use "try_files". Nginx returned error : "Unknown directive: 'try_files'". Later I learnt only nginx version 0.6.36+, 0.7.27+ or 0.8.x support the 'try_files' command. So, I decided to upgrade my nginx to the newest stable version, and it turned out the process was so hard:Read more >>

I met the problem on Leopard again. Today when I tried to ejected my SD card reader, I saw the error message

The disk SDStorage is in use and could not be ejected. 
Try quitting applications and try again.

( SDstorage is my SD card label. )

I had no idea which application was using the card reader. After quitting most of my applications, the error popped whenever I tried to eject the disk. Then I found how to eject it by force, here is how:Read more >>

While it is not hard to create a new block region in drupal 6, to create one before comments section
is not as easy to many people. I have managed to add a new block region above the comments, and moved the "similar term" block into it. You can see the result on this page. Here is how I did it:Read more >>

Block regions are used to control drupal theme layout. Most of Drupal themes come with five regions:

Left sidebar
Right sidebar
Content
Header
Footer

What if you want more regions? Here I will show you how to create a new one.Read more >>

The new version of drupal 6, Drupal 6.14 was out. New drupal fixes some bugs and as well as critical security vulnerabilities, so upgrading is strongly recommended.

There is a upgrade instruction along with the drupal files (UPGRADE.txt), but I think it is a bit long, so I decide to rewrite it to make it shorter:Read more >>

Enabling drupal cache, drupal will save cached data to database and send data from database whenever the data is required. This save up time to query database and build pages / blocks from php code, hence the performance of your drupal site is significantly boost. But there is still a way to speed up your site to be even faster -- to save the cached data directly into server's memory and fetch from it. Memcached, a high-performance memory caching system is the tool for the solution. This post is an answer to the question of how to integrate memcached and drupal to speed up your site.Read more >>

One day, I found my mac running on Leopard no sound while playing flash. No matter flash on the web, or flash file that I downloaded to the disk, no matter using Safari, Firefox or adobe flash player ( adobe media player), there was no sound for flash. It was strange, because I had sound while playing movies and mp3 files. Then I googled the problem, and managed to fix the problem. here is how:Read more >>

To run your drupal site on nginx, the lightweight web server, you will need a custom conf file to make nginx working with php.

If you want to enable drupal's clean url function ( maybe you should because a clean url is both more user-friendly and Search Engine friendly ), you will need a additional nginx rewrite rule.

I have managed to get drupal 6 working on nginx, and here is what in my nginx configuration file:Read more >>