The drop is always movingYou know that saying about standing on the shoulders of giants? Drupal is standing on a huge pile of midgetsAll content management systems suck, Drupal just happens to suck less.Popular open source software is more secure than unpopular open source software, because insecure software becomes unpopular fast. [That doesn't happen for proprietary software.]Drupal makes sandwiches happen.There is a module for that

One hundred twenty six million five hundred sixteen thousand three hundred seventy one

Submitted by nk on Sun, 2008-11-23 06:19

This is how many seconds passed between me committing my first attempt of an SQLite driver and webchick committing a working version to Drupal 7. Yes, Drupal supports SQLite now. It took more than four years, several Drupal, SQLite and PHP versions but we are at the point where the three can work together finally.

Open source: when words abandon me

Submitted by nk on Tue, 2008-11-18 02:16

If you sit down with another member of the Drupal community in a cafe to hash out something, then you are with... a friend (hardly, you might barely know each other)? a colleague (doesnt that mean that we are working at the same place)? associate? I am afraid that an open source community being such a new thing it needs a new word. Fellow Drupaler -- sure, try to say that to the average Joe and watch the glassy eyes :) And how do you explain to the average border guard that you are traveling to a code sprint...? A GSoC mentor summit?

The PDO SQLite challenge

Submitted by nk on Sun, 2008-11-09 18:27

I am willing to give 10 US dollars to the first ten people each who can point out a real webhost (you know, appearing in Google and relevant forums for some time -- nominating the webhost that you run is not nice!) which

  1. Has PHP 5.2.
  2. Has PDO.
  3. Does not have the PDO SQLite driver on. ( Run print_r(PDO::getAvailableDrivers()); to see the drivers available.)
  4. Unwilling to switch it on after a polite request explaining that the award winning Drupal CMS would like to make pdo-sqlite a requirement in its next release.

How to cachegrind a tested Drupal

Submitted by nk on Sat, 2008-11-01 18:50

Just add

zend_extension="/usr/local/php/modules/xdebug.so"
xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger = on

to php.ini and then add this line to drupal_web_test_case curlExec just after the second line, where $url is assigned: $curl_options[CURLOPT_URL] = $url . (strpos($url, '?') === FALSE ? '?' : '&') . 'XDEBUG_PROFILE=1'; is the trigger for the profiler.

We have usage statistics

Submitted by nk on Fri, 2008-10-24 03:01

Drupal modules and themes usage statistics! YAY! Kudos go to dww and drewish.

The Web is a mess

Submitted by nk on Thu, 2008-10-16 17:09

Opera inspected a few million webpages. 4.13% passed validation, 70% had a DIV tag, 80% had a TABLE tag. A healthy number of those divs are not for positioning either, while border made it to the top ten CSS properties, margin and padding are the 11th and 12th, position is the 17th. More pages had JS than DIVs -- 74.58%. While Flash is used on the third of pages, XMLHttpRequest is used a magnitude less, 3.2% of pages.

The Grand unification Theory of Callbacks

Submitted by nk on Wed, 2008-10-08 22:02

After reading Merlin's thoughts on how we need to remove menu_rebuild and replace it with a more straightforward approach, reading the hook_blocks issue, discussing page rendering with pwolanin, pondering on my own thoughts for pipes, liking the canvas-PAC concept that Crell described, here is something big.

Or not

Submitted by nk on Fri, 2008-09-26 19:29

To honor webchick's efforts, I resume work.

Pause

Submitted by nk on Fri, 2008-09-26 08:55

I am taking a break from the core issue queue until http://drupal.org/node/125315 is committed.

Let the developer do the work

Submitted by nk on Sun, 2008-09-21 06:30

If you are a restaurant owner you do not begin wtih serving a huge variation of food so that the guest does not need to work the menu. That'd be rather wasteful. This rather simple truth somewhere got lost and now we all pay for it. PHP's magic_quotes and register_global features did a lot to help... the "PHP is insecure" articles. A healthy number of MySQLisms made it harder to develop clean apps and now these all do not run when strict mode is on. I wonder whether node_load falls in this category...