Groovy: Quick and Easy Scripting

Groovy provides a viable (hipper? More modern?) alternative to shell scripting and/or Perl.

World Bank Open API Data: Now in Google Search Results

Earlier this year we blogged about the launch of a new Open API, which Phase2 built for The World Bank. The Open API allows third-party developers and organizations to freely query World Bank's largest dataset containing world economic and business indicators and create all kinds of interesting mash-ups.

Today Google announced the addition of the API data to its search results.

A Story of a PHP Variable Reference Pitfall

If you think you have something as "basic" as PHP variables and reference rules all figured-out, you may have to think twice. Or at least that's what happened to me and following is an honest-to-heart story of it.

Need multiple IE clients for Mac / Linux? Run Virtual Box.

While looking around for how to run multiple IE browsers, I found a new solution and wanted to share it. Running a virtual machine of windows is nothing new really. But I discovered something that made it a little less of a hurdle, and Microsoft is responsible and it's pretty cool.

Knight Foundation Funds Open Source Innovation

As a leader in the news industry, the Knight Foundation is transforming the way communities and journalists create and disseminate content. Each year the foundation grants millions of dollars to this initiative and while it prides itself on giving to a wide range of projects, there does seem to be an exciting underlying trend¬open source.

Preload images with CSS, not JS

There's really no reason you should need Javascript to preload images when it can be done with a little CSS.

How to Enable Local SMTP Server (Postfix) on OS-X Leopard

The fastest way to send e-mails from your e-mail client (e.g. Mail) on OS-X is to use local SMTP server. You also need local SMTP if you are using your Mac as a development platform (say, for Drupal) and are testing some e-mail related functionality. Since OS-X Leopard is a powerful Unix system, installing a local SMTP server is not a problem. As a matter of fact, Leopard comes with pre-installed SMTP server (Postfix), we just need to enable it. The following quick tutorial, from the In Under 5 Minutes series, shows how to do it.

World Bank Open API 2.0 Launched

World Bank has been collecting massive amounts of data, for the past 50+ years, and now possesses one of the richest repository of information about economic development in the world. Phase2 Technology had the pleasure of helping World Bank architect and engineer a new major release of its Open API 2.0

As we steadily approach the next era online where open data and the semantic web gives us more than we ever dreamed, the launch of each new major web-services API is significant. When a rich and unique data repository like the World Bank's opens its data for free, a world of possibilities opens up.

Upgrading Subversion to 1.5 on CentOS 5.2 Using Yum

Quick step-by-step tutorial for upgrading Subversion to 1.5.x on CentOS 5.2 in under 5 minutes.