Open Source

I've been working with themes in Gallery for 6 years and it wasn't until recently that I started to give due consideration to a significant portion of Gallery's users, those whose native language is written from right to left. Shame on me, because it's really not that difficult to add proper RTL text and layout support to web applications. I hope the following helps out those who need to do the same.

I recently needed Java 6 to install an Eclipse patch. As you're probably aware, although Apple updated OS X 10.5 Leopard to Java 6 they probably never will provide updates beyond Java 5 for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The good news is that if you're running an Intel-based Mac, you can keep your Java environment up-to-date with SoyLatte, which is part of the OpenJDK BSD-Port project.

Are you ready to take a step beyond writing code in a text editor like UltraEdit, BBEdit, or TextMate? Would you like to see those PHP and JavaScript syntax errors in the editor, without transferring files to the server or opening a browser? If so, then you're ready to jump into the world of the IDE — Integrated Development Environment. I'll compare the free, open source Eclipse IDE to a few of its commercial competitors Then we'll go through the steps to install Eclipse PDT All-In-One, the Zend Debugger, JSEclipse, and Subclipse.

After thinking about doing it for many months, I finally converted 2tbsp.com from Wordpress 2 to Drupal 5. I didn't make this move because of anything wrong with Wordpress. Wordpress worked great for the past few years and is an excellent application. The truth is that I am working with Drupal too much now to not use it to power 2tbsp.com.

My goal was to do the migration as quickly as possible with few additions or changes. With the migration now complete, I thought I'd share the basic process I went through.

It's rare that I'm able to stay up late enough to see Conan O'Brian, and we don't have the Tivo thingy, but this makes up for a little of what I'm missing.