Drupal provides powerful and flexible built-in table sort functionality. However, it will only work with database query through standard db_query() and pager_query(). In many cases, rows are fetched from external system, e.g., mailbox. We may add a few lines to get the same behavior.

I would like to enable mbstring and/or iconv in PHP running on Plesk. This is a painful process. I have to compile and install lots of packages. The most important thing is the configure. Note that this host is FreeBSD.

Most of you may try to let servers run as long as possible to maximize availability in term of uptime. That is good. However, there is at least a side-effect originated by the nature of file system where as it is necessary to clean up something important. For example, ext2/ext3 should be checked for every 30 mounted or 180 days. It is fine to reboot a server once a year as long as the file system is not read/write too often, especially when there is very low free space. That's why you should force to run fsck sometimes.

One day you may want to rename your domain name to a new one due to inappropriate use of the old domain. However, the old domain is still valid and still valuable for search engines. It is possible to redirect all existing urls to the new domain gracefully. For example, http://abc.com/node/8 to http://def.com/node/8. Whenever one tries to access http://abc.com/node/8, webbrowser will be automatically redirected to http://def.com/node/8. This behavior also applies to search engines.

The trick is to use mod_rewrite in Apache HTTP Server

Sometimes, Mencoder is too complicated for such a simple task due to its flexible options. FFmpeg is much more simpler and straightforward for that task. For example, you have a music video in MPEG but it seems too big. However, you don't want to drop audio quality too much.

Sometimes I have videos in DVD structure. It is a suitable format for burning to DVD disc directly. However, I don't want this high quality format. AVI is enough to reduce disk space usage. My tool is Mencoder again.