I remember a moment that happened some weeks ago when Google was unavailable to me. I needed to search for something, but I couldn’t reach Google. I could visit other web sites, but not Google. I asked my friends if Google was working for them, some of them told me that it was working, while other ones said that it wasn’t working for them either. In a few minutes it started working again. So, I suppose it was a temporary problem with my ISP, probably some DNS problems. But I swear it was such a frustrating moment!

Have you ever faced a situation when you need to manipulate Excel spreadsheets with PHP on the server that is running Linux? If you had a Windows Server you could use PHP COM extensions. However they are unavailable on Linux. Hopefully, there is a solution. It is called Open XML. It’s a new format of Microsoft Office documents introduced in Microsoft Office 2007. Basically, an Open XML file is a ZIP archive that contains XML files that represent the document mark-up. You can view it yourself or read some documentation, my article isn’t about Open XML, but about the PHP library for working with Excel 2007 files. It also supports Excel 97 format by incor porating a PEAR library. The library is called PHPExcel. It allows you to read/write Excel spreadsheets, save them in many formats including PDF and HTML. It supports formulas,styles and etc

Do you remember your first experience of using a computer? It doesn’t matter whether it was DOS with Norton Commander or Windows. Anyway you had to learn how to find the necessary applications, how to execute them, once again it doesn’t matter whether you clicked on the folders and files on the blue background or used the Start menu. It’s important that you learnt the definitions or metaphors; you learnt that icon is an application or something else; you learnt that you have to click twice on it to open it and so on. Having got used to those metaphors, we easily use a computer unless we face an application with a non-standard interface that confuses us because we have to learn again.

In the article called "Getting BlogEngine.NET To Work With The Local Time Zones" I described how to convert the times of the posts to the local time zones of users relying solely on JavaScript. However I got a complaint that if JavaScript is disabled for some reasons, then no date and time are displayed.

LINQ to SQL is a great tool that saves a lot of time. However it has one disadvantage – it supports only SQL Server. Anyway it’s possible to write your own LINQ provider. Sure, there is one for MySQL. It is called DbLinq, in fact in supports many databases.

I was in the store the other day paying for my mobile phone. There was a middle-aged woman in front of me who was trying to pay for her mobile phone with the payment machine. This payment machine was recently installed, so it was difficult for some people to get used to it. Even I saw the machine for the first time. Anyway that woman was nervously trying to pay, however she even couldn’t go further than entering her phone number, since I hadn’t any experience with that machine as well, I advised her to read the manual that was under the button in the bottom of the screen. She got angry when she heard my advice. Then I noticed that she just didn’t fill in the region code, I told her about that, she didn’t listen, got angry and went away.

This tutorial doesn’t cover the theoretical basics of the new features and controls, instead it concentrates on the practical example of using the new features. This tutorial covers the following features:

It is not obvious that BlogEngine.NET has a built-in syntax highlighting extension. I mean the current versions 1.3.1, I'm not sure about the old versions though. Anyway you can find it in the extensions settings, it is enabled by default.

Of course, they don’t have the million losses; however they are missing millions of potential dollars and users. You may have already heard about the Facebook clones. We have one in Russia, it’s called vkontakte.ru, there are more than 13 million registered users, while there are only about 80 thousand Russian users on Facebook. Why? I mean why so many people in Russia use the clone instead of Facebook? Not only because the Facebook interface is English, but because it lacks Russian universities and schools, so it doesn’t fullfil its primary function – it doesn’t help people to find each other, it’s hard to find your classmates, it’s hard to find people you study in university with. I tried to add my university to the list, I wrote an e-mail, but for some reasons it wasn’t added.

I had a small project recently that outputted the results of some calculations to the label on the form, I replaced the label with a textbox and noticed that instead of the line breaks I had in the label I got a bunch of non-printed characters."