SpeakingX

I was looking for a quick way for demonstrating Drupal to friends (.Net people). Asking people to install/config Apache and MySQL before they can feel Drupal has proven to be futile. Preferably I can have everything on a USB drive and the package can run on Windows with one click. Back to Rails days, I know Instant Rails can do the trick. Apparently there's no such thing for Drupal.

I have been struggling with user authentication for the services module ( 5-x.0.92). This is the first version I installed. However, by checking the handbook and the outdated examples, it's not hard to tell significant change has been made in this version, especially the user authentication part which requires api keys, HMAC with sha256 hashing function, etc.

I am trying to write a java xmlrpc client for Drupal's Services module. However, I got the "org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Content is not allowed in prolog" error when I tried to call "system.connect()". This error occurs no matter which library I use, Redstone or Apache.

After some searching, I found this: http://www.openrdf.org/forum/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=86
Java doesn't handle BOMs on UTF-8 files properly, making the three header bytes appear as being part of the document. ...

Drupal's Services module seems to be a right fit for my purpose as I am in the process of integrating a desktop application into my Drupal website. I decided to give it a quick test using Python. Although I don't know much about Python, there's an example  available on Drupal.org and it's a scripting language.

Advanced Profile Kit (APK), as described its author, is a module that glues several drupal modules together to give you a professional looking user profile page.

I am absolutely amazed by various of ways to create a photo album in Drupal

Popular modules include:
Gallery: uses external gallery2 package
Acidfree: uses Taxonomy, Image, Video, and Views modules
related discussion can be found here
Also see gallery review at http://drupalmodules.com/module/gallery

There are several modules in drupal that allow you displaying math equations on a web page.

DruTeX: Display mathematics written in LaTeX as images inline with other text, or separately as a downloadable pdf. It appears to be the most complete solution, but you do need to install LaTeX on your server. This becomes an issue for most sites sitting on shared-hosting server.

In order to avoid making the same mistake, I started some serious research on virtual private server (VPS), also called virtual dedicated server (VDS). This time I focused on Drupal.org and spent some time on webhostingtalk.com as well.

Wrong Gate

Early days
Before moving to VPS, I was using Hostmonster for my sites, which is quite good in general. In fact, this very site you are visiting is hosted by Hostmonster.
Plan