Drupal, the popular open source content management system/framework, is very useful in getting a site off the ground quickly.  It automates many tedious tasks and streamlines website building for developers and content managers.  Along with the proper modules, it also allows for fast content adding/editing.

We are receiving extremely positive feedback about iRa from the development community. The 350+ developers that saw the demo at the iPhoneDevCamp 2 in San Francisco last weekend were so impressed by the application that iRa won the “Coolest iPhone App” award at the end of the 2 day event.

Watch the demo below and then check out the Lextech Labs News page to see what people are saying about iRa!

July 10, 2008 — We’re working hard to wrap up the functionality on iRa, Lextech Labs’ surveillance viewing and control application for the iPod touch & iPhone. We recently pulled together some video footage showing off the many improvements and new features we have added since our technology demo video in May.

iRa iPhone Surveillance App Preview Video

I can’t think of any nice way to put this, so I’m just gonna say it: I really hate your website. Looking at it makes my eyeballs bleed. The pain and suffering that it inflicts upon the world has caused me to question my belief in a benevolent God. I just finished writing a letter to the Hague requesting that the creation of your website be prosecuted as a war crime.

Among its many grievous crimes:

I’ve been tinkering around with Canonical’s Ubuntu (Oo - boon - too) since the first release 4.10 “Warty Warthog” all the way up to their latest release 8.04 “Hardy Heron.” Since then I’ve flirted with other distributions, but I always end up back with Ubuntu for several reasons. The top three are as follows:

1. Nice package management and abundant repositories.

I thought we had a good thing going; I thought we could trust each other. I wouldn’t play with her heart, and she wouldn’t let me down. We seemed to be in a stable, long-term relationship. Then she just stopped trying and completely locked me out. I couldn’t figure out why her behavior just changed overnight, and I didn’t know what else to do. So I had someone follow her, to find out what was really going on.

Install day. Pull the car in from the 20 degree November day to the garage with the big space heater going. Numb hands and warming surfaces with a heat gun to make them pliable or to get adhesives to actually stick definitely slows things a bit.

Having developed several CakePHP projects in Eclipse, I’ve always been on the lookout for things to make my life easier. Not too long ago I stumbled across an addition to Eclipse’s PHP Development Tools (PDT), which integrates the Zend/Xdebug debuggers into the Eclipse environment.

So here is a problem we’ve run up against several times: displaying live, streaming video in real-time. Doesn’t sound that hard, but you’d be amazed. We are generally dealing with RTSP streams, which both QuickTime and RealPlayer handle just fine - for pre-recorded content. But I’ll tell you what, no matter how many preferences you enable with names like “Instant-On”, “PlayNow”, and “TrueLive”, these players will continue to suck for real-time video.

Our data center move checklist had 3 major parts - what to do before the move, what to do a short time before and at the time of the move, and how to validate that everything was up and running correctly. The advance portion of it included things like notifying customers of the planned downtime, figuring out who’s DNS was where so it could be properly modified at the time of the move, and quite a few others.