brians's blog

A web developer's quest for the ideal application platform always seems to be a never-ending journey. What may appear to be the perfect package today is likely to be discarded tomorrow in favor of an even better one. Drupal is an excellent PHP-based content management system (CMS) upon which to build web applications, but in an enterprise environment, integrating Drupal modules and content with back-end databases and systems can be challenging. Quercus, a Java-based implementation of the PHP language by Caucho Technology, offers the potential to ease these interconnections.

My wife has been asking me for some time to make it easy for her to dump photos off of our digital camera and upload them to Shutterfly. After some research, I determined that Google's Picasa software was capable of interfacing with Shutterfly, so I installed the Linux version in her Kubuntu laptop. However, when I inserted the memory card from the camera into the reader, KDE's device notifier pop-up only offered three options to process it: download the photos with Digikam, open the file manager or do nothing. I wanted a fourth option to download the photos with Picasa, and here's how I managed to get it working.

This posting continues where a previous one left off, with a basic exploration of how to configure a custom Tomcat installation for optimal use and flexibility.

Even though many Linux distributions make a Tomcat package available from their repositories, I prefer to download the binary directly from http://tomcat.apache.org and set up a custom installation. This gives me greater control over where everything goes, and more flexibility in regard to upgrades.

Recently I was inundated with Nagios notifications regarding an inability to connect to an OpenVZ virtual environment in order to check its status.

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