keeping the community informed...

At the end of August a lot of work went on behind the scenes at DaniWeb, migrating the entire system over to new and more powerful servers to enable us to cope with the demands that having nearly 200,000 registered members puts upon a support community such as ours. Please accept our apologies if you attempted to use our service during one of those occasions when the system was rebooting, a necessary evil unfortunately. However, please also join us in thanking blud who looks after our servers here at DaniWeb as a member volunteer. Going above and beyond the call of duty, blud got home from work at 8pm and worked through the night until hitting the sack for an hour or two at 6am before having to go back to the paying job. Thanks blud, you are an unsung IT hero, and a real asset to the community.

As an aside, hopefully you should have noticed the speed difference when reading and replying to forum posts. Back end tweaks and the new servers have speeded things up, making DaniWeb one of the most responsive IT communities online in all senses of the word…

your one-stop IT news shop...

The staff writing team here at DaniWeb continues to go from strength to strength. The latest appointments are Brian.oco whose Money Pit blog places an emphasis on the financial side of IT, and Nino Marchetti whose Tall Tech Tales blog draws upon his experience as both a freelance technology journalist and 20 years of high tech sector involvement. Nino was one of the first 20 employees at Yahoo! for example. Welcome to Brian and Nino both.

With great writers like these on staff, no wonder DaniWeb is building a reputation as a news source worthy of attention. Indeed, you can now find our news stories seeded at the likes of Google News on a regular basis.

every month one member makes the DaniWeb hall of fame…

The latest entrant to the DaniWeb hall of fame is Nichito who earns the much sought after 'Featured Poster' badge and our heartfelt thanks for diving headlong into our community since joining us just six months ago. In that time Nichito has been active in both the social side of DaniWeb, playing Posting Games and joining the heated and fun discussions in the Geek's Lounge with equal enthusiasm. However, Nichito has also been helping out other members in the serious support area that is the C++ forum, as those 140+ posts there will attest. Having recently passed the 1000 postings milestone, we thought we would get to know Nichito a little better:

How old are you?

19 but counting the days until I hit 20, in 5 months...

Where are you from?

I'm from Tegucigalpa, capital city of Honduras, in Central America.

What is your occupation?

I'm actually at my third year of Computer Engineering, still have 1.5 more years to wait until I get my degree *sigh*, so let's say I'm a student... Although I am experimenting a little bit with web development as well.

What brought you to DaniWeb?

I was having some trouble with a code, and looked everywhere for a solution. And then I found DaniWeb...

What were your first impressions of DaniWeb, and have they changed during your time with us?

When I first came here, I was limited to the C++ forum. So with Narue, ~s.o.s~ and Ancient Dragon hanging around it was evident that people around here really know what they are talking about. Plus that they were really into what they were doing. Then I discovered the Geek's Lounge and I noticed that besides what I mentioned before, they were also really nice people. Over the whole time I've been here I have continued to see people interacting with each other for the good of the geek community. Things really haven't changed too much in that aspect...

What makes you stay here?

I like it here because it is a nice place to hang out, either discussing stuff or helping other people, like DaniWeb helped me...

What are your interests within IT?

When I first started, I decided studying Computer Engineering simply because I liked it although I didn't know what I would do later. Ultimately I've been focusing myself in Web Design and database development. It seems like an interesting area in IT.

What are your interests outside of IT and outside of DaniWeb?

Hmmm, besides my career I am pretty much into my relationship, which has been going on for 19 months. I have got a big family, and I'm the oldest so I have a big responsibility within it.

Name the best thing about DaniWeb, and one thing you would change if it were in your power?

The thing I like most about DaniWeb is the huge cultural scale you find in it. There is every single religion (or lack of religion) and you find people from all around the globe. The people in here are very nice, you really can make very good friends.

One thing to change about DaniWeb, that's a tough one. Looks like Dani and the crew have been working on it for a while now, and they've done an impressive job. I would probably change the IRC client, I know Dani changed it recently (I was there) but still I liked the last one better.

How long do you spend, on average, on DaniWeb every day?

I am here around 8 hours a day, either answering to threads, posting new ones, or talking in the IRC.

Windows, Mac, or Linux?

Well, I'd have to say Windows since it's what I have been working with my whole life. I have nearly no experience in Unix, and have never touched a Mac, so Windows it is.

You seem to divide your time between helping people in the programming forums and kicking back in the lounges, does this 'rounded community' aspect of DaniWeb appeal to you?

That's actually one of my favorite aspects of DaniWeb, since it is not only a tech support forum but also a nice place to hang out and meet new people, and discuss random subjects. So, if you are looking for help, you are most certainly going to find it here but if you are also looking for a place to hang out, this is the place for you. You'll find everything here from PHP to Python to jokes...

by happygeek

Microsoft has been keen to get me to take a look at a new experimental site launched to showcase the potential of its Silverlight technology. Tafiti, which apparently means 'do research' in Swahili, is the site in question. An exploration of two trends: search specialization and the Web 2.0 rich user experience. It is meant to help people use the Web for research that spans multiple queries and sessions, and does this by letting them visualize, store and share the results. Or at least that is the theory. In practice what you get is an undeniably visually attractive interface that uses Microsoft Silverlight, but a pretty poor search experience in conjunction with the Microsoft Live Search engine.

Installing the Silverlight engine is not problematical, it is only a 6Mb download, unless you happen to be running Linux in which case you cannot play: this search game is for Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X users only. It does, however, seem to work well with most browser clients including IE 6/7, Firefox 2 and Safari 2. Surprisingly though, not Safari 3 or Opera. Once installed, however, the experience is nothing short of irritating.

If you want to perform a quick search and get the most useful results presented with minimum fuss, Tafiti is not for you. The interface sure looks pretty enough, and the drag-and-drop saved search results thing is neat.

Which search engine do you use? The answer is probably Google, and not some Adobe Flash powered thing of beauty. Why do you use Google? The answer is certainly because it delivers the results you want, when you want them, and without fuss. Why should Silverlight succeed where Flash has failed, that would appear to be the question Microsoft must answer when it comes to search at least.

What Tafiti appears to be trying to achieve is a search system that actually looks like the ones you see in Hollywood movies. In this regard some might say it has succeeded. But slick (well pretty slow if truth be told) animations and a search box that has the appearance of a piece of old paper do not a great search engine make. And don't even get me started on the 3D tree format option for search results.

Microsoft will argue that it is not meant to be a serious contender in the search space, it is just a showcase for Silverlight. To which the response has to be 'bad choice' because the overwhelming memory users will take away from their single visit to the site, and I fail to see why anyone would go back more than once, is likely to be of an overall negative experience. In the original announcement Microsoft said "the result is a search experience unlike anything you've seen before" and you know what, I really cannot argue with that…