// Domus Neminis }

Zotero: a great one for researchers

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

Especially if you are a researcher (and of course if you like to use Firefox, which I don’t, lately), this extension will make your day.

Basically, Zotero is a complete bibliography manager with some exceptional features which it can provide us with thanks to the integration with Firefox:

• Automatic capture of citation information from web pages;
• Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages;
• etc.

Looks really great anyway, even if I am not gonna use it, because I prefer a browser to browse internet, not an application container “wanna-be” (aka Firefox).

echo “techPortal”;

What’s techPortal? Well, it the first publicly visible piece of the PCE initiative from Ibuildings.

PCE – PHP Centre of Expertise – is an initiative to spread and promote the professional use of PHP, and techPortal is basically a technical blog where you can find specialized articles mainly written by the Ibuildings PHP Engineers.

The editor in chief of techPortal is Cal Evans, and the first technical post of the blog is by Lorna Mitchell: Getting Started with Memcached.

Enjoy and don’t forget: if you like techPortal, subscribe the RSS feed.

Scientific Computing in Python

Python Scripting for Computational Science.

The goal of this book is to teach computational scientists how to develop tailored, flexible, and human-efficient working environments built from small programs written in the easy-to-learn, high-level language Python.
The focus is on examples and applications of relevance to computational scientists.
These include binding together existing applications and tools, e.g. for automating simulation, data analysis, and visualization.
The book also covers steering simulations and computational experiments; equipping old programs with graphical user interfaces; making computational Web applications; and creating interactive interfaces with a Maple/Matlab-like syntax to numerical applications in C/C++ or Fortran.
The highly qualified author argues that scripting with Python makes you much more productive, increases the reliability of your scientific work and lets you have more fun – on Unix, Windows and Macintosh.
All the tools and examples in this book are open source codes. The third edition is compatible with the new NumPy implementation and features updated information, correction of errors, and improved associated software tools.

Written for undergraduate students in computer science, computational science and engineering; researchers

DPD – ConsumerSearch.com

ConsumerSearch.com is a website with a huge traffic. According to what Dries Buytaert reported is his post, this website gets 5.5 million unique visitors per month (and growing).

ConsumerSearch is a part of About.com group, a subsidiary of The New York Times Company.

DPD – Comprehensive lists

With this post I want to provide you with a comprehensive list about Drupal-Powered websites. I will probably be never able to review every single website built with Drupal, so the lists you find below could be very useful. However, some of the sites you will find there are likely to be covered in my next posts.

THE List, by Buytaert

Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead of Drupal. And of course he maintains a list of Drupal-powered websites himself, which is likely to be the most comprehensive resource about “large websites built with Drupal”.

45 Sites which you may not have known were Drupal-based

Another interesting list is this one, which focuses on those websites which don’t look Drupal-based at a first sight.
You will find there some unexpected names.

Cool Drupal Sites

A brief list of interesting Drupal-powered websites by Jeroen Coumans

Drupalsites.net

DrupalSites.net is a directory that lists any website powered by Drupal. A very large list not focused on a particular type of websites. Currently, more than one thousand websites are listed there.

DPD – JQuery Plugins

Let’s get this started. The first website I want to talk about for the ‘Drupal Powered Digest’ is actually the latest I’ve come to know: JQuery Plugins.

It is a pretty much standard installation of Drupal, with some additional modules, one of them being the ‘project‘ module.

The estimated number of visits per day is 3,930, according to Statbrain.

Well this one was a simple example, just to start. Next time I promise something more interesting.

Drupal Powered Digest

What

This post is to introduce a periodically survey of websites/applications powered by Drupal, the only CMS in the PHP world that actually deserves to be classified as a CMF.

From now on I will post a number of articles with the only goal to say «You see? another big one built with Drupal». Anyway, for the time being, I don’t feel to follow a regular schedule, so just except some “Drupal Powered Digest” posts every now and then.

Why

I’m recently moved abroad to work for the largest PHP company in Europe, Ibuildings, (London branch). As per consequence of this, I’ve started to have relantionship with a largely wider range of PHP professionals, and therefore I have the daily opportunity to compare different way of thinking about the PHP development.

Moving in such a large environment of PHP professionals, I could realize we share a number of things, but also we differ in some other things.

Both (me and the other PHP guys) believe in frameworks, enterprise PHP development, high-end application development, formal software engineering, agile development processes.

One of the main difference is about the utilization of frameworks. I sincerely think that the PHP professionals are currently relying too much on the Zend framework. It’s well designed sometimes, but over-engineered some other times, not complete (it lacks of many useful things, like a serious Form manipulation), not fully scalable.

Moreover, I’ve noticed a kind of «oh my god keep clear from the CMSs!».
Which is a feeling I can share, unless I do need a CMS.

Most important to me is to understand that while a “classical” CMS is sometime useless for some type of application developments, a CMF coul be extremely useful if you have to build your own CMS.

And when we are in the PHP world, by CMF I mean exclusively Drupal.

LIBSVM Plus 2.88 is out

With a huge delay, I’ve finally released the new version of LIBSVM Plus, back-porting the latest changes from the head version (2.88) of the classic LIBSVM.

This release is nothing more than a merge with classic LIBSVM code updates. All the “plus” features are the same of the previous (2.86) version.

Enjoy, test, and report!