DBActive

I had a chance to visit 7 World Trade Center today, the newest office high rise to open in New York.

Instead of having up and down buttons outside the elevators, there”s a numeric keypad, where you key in the floor number you”re going to. Then an LED display tells you which elevator to wait for. Once you get in the elevator, you don”t have to press any buttons (and there are none to press).

This is more efficient than the old system, in which two people who were going to the same floor might have taken separate elevators, adding an unnecessary trip. Presumably, during the early morning rush, it is able to clump people going to nearby floors into the same elevator, thus getting more people to their destinations faster by intelligently optimizing elevator schedules on-the-fly, instead of letting any arbitrary person force any arbitrary elevator to take them to any arbitrary floor.

Can you guess the usability bug?

(select this paragraph for the answer:) People who aren”t used to the new system come into the lobby and see an elevator with an open door. They jump into it, and then get stuck going to some random floor because they can”t key in their destination once they”re inside. (end)

In that old Jack Lemmon / Shirley MacLaine movie The Apartment, a 1950″s-era accounting firm accomplishes the same trick by putting human operators (”elevator girls”) in each and every elevator, and having a human traffic director in the lobby direct people to the elevator that will go to their floor.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Working with big applications requires extending the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Membership API to handle more detailed member records.

Kevin Rose of Digg.com has recently announced that they are making a public API available to offer access to the vast amount of data stored on the Digg.com servers. The toolkit ships with a number of end points List Stories, List Events, List Users, Topics and offers several response types: XML, JSON, Javascript, and serialized PHP.

Kevin writes:

To kick off the API release, starting today we’re launching a contest for the most creative and innovative visualizations and applications developed by our community using the API and Flash toolkit. All of the top 10 finalists will get prizes, with a Grand Prize featuring a Falcon Northwest gaming PC, the full catalog of EA PC games, and the Adobe CS3 Master Collection.

It will be interesting to see which mashups that incorporate the new API will be released in the next few weeks.

Tags are becoming a very popular way for applications and web sites to offer a classification system for unstructured information.

Yahoo offers a web service, which is free of charge, in accordance to their terms and conditions that allows keywords to be extracted from a body of text. Using these keywords, tags can be simply generated.

This web service is extremely useful, for example, if you wish to code a blog aggregation application that tries to automatically classify the information contained in the blog posts.

Learn more:

• Yahoo Term Extraction
• Yahoo Term Extraction in PHP5
• Tags vs. Yahoo Term Extraction

Bill Gates recently announced in Beijing that Microsoft would be selling Windows XP Starter Edition for USD 3.00 to governments and students in emerging countries across the globe.

This move could come in response to Microsoft acknowledging the sucess of the One Laptop Per Child project, in which millions of children in emerging counties are receiving their first computer that runs Sugar, a Red Hat Fedora-based Linux variant.

In an interview with DesktopLinux.com, Mark Shuttleworth states:

“We’re seeing Ubuntu being picked up in Asia, Russia, Ukraine, and South America. So, those places have become a real focus for us.”

And, in particular:

“Desktop Linux is very attractive in emerging counties.”

Linux on the desktop is a highly viable alternative to Windows to the people of the emerging counties, as it can be downloaded and installed entirely legally for no cost.

The phpMyAdmin project has just released version 2.10.1 of their popular software. This version predominantly contains bug fixes in which a number of security vulnerabilities have been addressed.

Download the latest version from the project site:
http://www.phpmyadmin.net

Trademarks are becoming more and more of an issue in open-source circles. For example, Debian decided to rename FireFox IceWeasel in its distribution, taking exception to Mozilla’s Firefox trademark rules.

Mark Shuttleworth recently announced a trademark policy for Ubuntu in his blog. He writes:

“Classically, ’software freedom’ was about the copyright license associated with the code. But patents and trademarks are now being brought into the mix. For example, the discussion around Mozilla’s trademark policy was directly linking the concept of “freedom” to trademark policy as much as code copyright license,”

Commentators see his step a reference to Ubuntu becoming a major business distribution.

Removing tabs is one of the easiest steps, as we only have to search for the one character: the tab character. This time, however, we are not going to use preg_replace, but str_replace. According to research carried out by members of the community at http://www.php.net, str_replace is much faster than preg_replace and should always be used when regular expression matching is not required. As we will be parsing large amounts of text - the HTML from our web pages – it is always a good idea to thing about performance when we develop our optimization routine. Consider the following expression:

$source = str_replace("\t", "", $source);

The order of parameters is identical to that of preg_replace. This time, however, there is no complicated regular expression to understand. The first parameter (the character for which we are searching) is the tab character. That is replaced in $source by the second parameter, an empty string.

The first step involves removing all HTML comments from the source code just before we send it to the browser. As HTML offers only one type of comment, this is pretty easy using a PERL regular expression.

$source = preg_replace("/<!--(.*)-->/U", "", $source);

The regular expression is the first parameter of preg_replace. To be precise, it is the part between / and /. Let us take a look at that, character by character. The first four characters are the HTML code sequence, signalizing the start of an HTML comment; the next four characters are the PERL regular expression way of saying “match anything”; the last three are the HTML code sequence, signalizing the end of an HTML comment. The U after the regular expression is what is called a modifier and means “invert greediness”. For the time being, it is safe to ignore what that means.

The second parameter of preg_replace is the string with which we wish to replace the matched comment. As we want to strip out the matched string, we simply replace it with an empty string.

The third parameter of preg_replace is the string containing the HTML source upon which we wish to operate. In other words, it contains our HTML document.

There are basically four steps that we can take to optimize the HTML of our document. Consider the following list:

• Remove all comments
• Remove most tabs
• Remove most redundant spaces
• Remove most line returns

We will take a look at these four steps in the next blog posts.