I had been to Poland for a month (until mid-November), and was too busy doing bioinformatics there to make any updates to my blog. Now, though at home, I also do not have enough time - my wife had one of her back bones broken in a car accident, so now she cannot walk, and needs care and attention. Thus I cannot afford to have some spare time to update this blog. Sorry, if you are a regular visitor. I expect to add two new rather interesting articles within the first week of December - one will be the sequel of the HTTP caching article, and the other might be about headers handling in PHP-CGI installations - but did not decide on this one yet, so this can be something else as well.

As I previously mentioned, IBM uses Drupal to build a collaborative web-site, as a conscious choice of a solid CMS. They have a series of articles (Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site) describing in details the processes of considerations and actual implementation. About two weeks ago, a new article was added - Understanding the database layer:

Follow along in this series of articles as the the IBM® Internet Technology Group designs, develops, and deploys an extranet Web site for a fictitious company, International Business Council, using a suite of freely available software. In this installment, explore the Drupal database abstraction layer and learn how to use it effectively while developing a Web site. Discover best practices for module developers and details about using the Drupal database functions. You also learn to implement the necessary code to support a new database — IBM DB2® Express-C.

As you can see, not only the existing code was explored and explained, but also new code for DB2 support was added. Personally, I am not quite even sure what are main applicatios of DB2, but anyway it’s good to have one more option, probably for future extendibility or just more flexibility. There’s a discussion thread at drupal.org, you might want to comment.

Meanwhile, I have troubles installing the new Drupal 5.0 beta-1. I used to install Drupal 4.x without any problems, so I suspect that current 5-beta-1 might be more sensitive to server configuration or just somehow initially misconfigured… Need to see into this issue.

In this post, some definitions and examples are given. This is an introductory text.

First of all there is a need to explain why “intelligent” is in braces in the title. Well, it’s simple: whatever the agents are at the moment of writing, they are just specific, narrow algorithms with no signs of intelligence. As soon as I come across the evidence of the contrary, I will happily remove the braces around “intelligent”. But for now - braces stay.

What is an agent? According to the numerous sources I checked, agent is an entity with some characteristic features. These fundamental features are:
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Well, not a news, actually, but this one seems important.

Following the discussions, installation and administrative interface became much simpler, and thus easier for newbies. Other first-impression change is said to be the new default theme, which looks good as well.

I will surely check this new release out very soon, but for now you can try one yourself.

Update: beta-2 is available since November, 28, with over 160 bugs fixed.