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Online testing was an idea we stumbled upon when we were looking for an efficient and scalable way to select people who had good programming capabilities. Our earlier approach to selection of programmers was to shortlist based on the resume and call the person for an interview where we gave them a small programming task. And then we had the technical and HR interviews as well. But, in our view, this approach had a couple of weaknesses and we think these have effectively been taken care of by the new online testing approach.

BSNL had recently launched their 3G services in India with speeds of up to 3.6Mbps. Interestingly the 3G USB modem provided by BSNL also comes with a wvdial front end targeting GNU Linux users. Welcome change from the national telecom provider. Unfortunately the 3G USB device(ZTE MF626 HSDPA with device id 19d2:2000) had the same problem with switching the mode from the storage device, that it gets detected by default, like its predecessors. Here are the steps for configuring the BSNL 3G modem in Ubuntu. This should work with minor variations in other GNU Linux distros as well.

We have ported and contributed yet another drupal theme. This time it is jQ, ported from one of the most popular wordpress themes of the same name. You can see the Drupal jQ theme here.

A new breed of USB wireless modems with inbuilt flash storage containing the driver to install the wireless modem have been invading the Wireless Connectivity marketplace. A typical example is the Reliance Netconnect 1.x. The USB Modem gets detected as a cdrom when you plug it into your laptop. However a GNU/Linux user does not have anything to cheer about the driver in the flash storage, as these drivers are all Windows drivers (so far). Here is how to install the Reliance Netconnect in Debian Lenny. The instructions should work for debian variants like Ubuntu, Mint etc.

If you have ever hosted a reasonably good site on a shared hosting service then you would definitely have come across the dreaded "exceeded the email limit per hour" warning. If you use Drupal then you don't have to worry about this any more. If you are using Drupal then all you have to do is to install the MailQ module to queue all your mails.

While designing fixed width layouts it is advantageous to use percentage based width for inner containers in the layout to make it easy for easy scaling up of the layout for other widths. When doing so you should be very careful about setting the actual percentage values. The percentage based width should result in a whole integer as the width. If not, you will end up with fractions as widths of containers leaving the rounding off to the browsers.

The Views module in Drupal provides a Feed display that will allow for site owners to publish the content on their sites as RSS feeds. However, unlike a page or block display, the feed display does not allow for addition of custom tags inside the feed using the Views administration UI. There is however a way to add custom tags, attributes and values into the generated feed using hook_nodeapi.

If you use drupal as a blogging platform you would want to auto tweet your new posts on to twitter. Twitter and Shorten module provides you with the basic framework required to do this and all you will need to get it working is to configure these modules. There is also a small patch that has to be applied to the twitter module (until the patch goes into the CVS) to allow the use of shortened URLs in the tweet.

The following is the list of holidays at Zyxware for the year 2010. This may change as per government norms.

Feed API provides a powerful means of importing feeds from other sites directly into your Drupal site. What if you want to export your feed as an XML file to a content distributor who wants it on his FTP site? There is of course the traditional approach of using curl to read your feed URL and dump the text as files on to the ftp site. There is not much control that you have over this process. However doing this via Drupal Views will give you fine grained control over the process

SEO requires you to have descriptive titles and URLs matching the title. But when you want to publish your URL some place where the length of the URL is an issue you definitely want short URLs. One solution to the problem is to use URL shortening services like tr.im to shorten the long URLs to short and sweet 9 character urls. But the URL will lose your sites identity. Don't worry there is the drupal way to solve this problem.

We have been working with Drupal for the last 3 years now and we just love Drupal. Every day we work with it, we get more and more reasons to love it even more. As a token of our respect for this system, we have become official paid members of Drupal association. We can now proudly flaunt the association badges on our site.

If you create anything other than a very small site using Drupal you will end up using Views and CCK, two of the most important contributed modules in Drupal. Views allow users to dynamically create different presentation of tabular data from the database. However this also necessitates dynamic page titles for pages using views.