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

Copying a LOT of files

Submitted by nk on Fri, 2008-09-19 19:16

I am currently backing up the media server of NowPublic.com. We are talking millions of files, and terabytes of data. This a rather interesting task. If you try to "tar" the files together and then copy, that wont lead to anything good, just tarring up is days. Not to mention total lack of feedback... strace -p pid where pid is of the tarring process does not count as feedback in my books. Starting rsync to copy to somewhere else eats all physical RAM, then the swap then crashes and this was just the building the file list part (and yes I tried both latest 2.x and 3.x versions).

Lemon juice

Submitted by nk on Sun, 2008-09-14 05:35

When I was in New York earlier this year and got a bit sick, I bought lemon juice in the Duane Reade shop where the walk in clinic was. Alas, I left the little container in the fridge... and then in Boston, I could only find lemon juice at Whole Foods, in a glass which is totally non transportable. I did not realize that there was a shortage on lemons that's why it was so hard to come by lemon juice. Now I am here in Vancouver, and bought one lemon for 99c last week. Today, it's not the recently bought mountain of clothes but the fact that I dared to buy two lemons (still 99c a piece) that makes me feel all this is somewhat real and I am here to stay for a good long time...

Putting a CDN in front of Drupal

Submitted by nk on Wed, 2008-08-20 16:16

We are planning to put a CDN in front of our Drupal install. This CDN is not fancy and is not able to deal with cookies (but it's very cheap). So every anon visitor is going to be served from ANON DOMAIN (the CDN) and every logged in visitor is going to be served from LOGGEDIN DOMAIN (our servers).

This surfaces some questions, such us:

  • what will happen to those visitors who are visiting the wrong domains? For example: an anon visitor visits a url from the LOGGEDIN DOMAIN or vice versa, a logged in user visits a url from the ANON DOMAIN.

But there are remedies

Submitted by nk on Tue, 2008-08-19 10:20

This is more a comment to Nedjo's recent post than anything else. Currently http://drupal.org/node/271216 blocks a lot of work -- it is indented to lessen the hardwiredness mentioned in the article and also further testing.drupal.org . It'd be great if people would help with testing the patch -- I admit, not easy but the Drupal.org Testing profile helps you. As the functionalit is mostly API, we need code reviews and coders to write some PHP and see whether they can indeed change the various properties of an issue with a single function call as the patch purports.

DrupalCon Szeged: Awesome testing party

Submitted by nk on Sun, 2008-08-17 09:56

If you are coming to Szeged then please don't forget to bring a bar of chocolate for the Awesome Testing Party. Two, do attend the testing party if you can write PHP code. Catch, cwgordon7 and myself have already filed a "couple" issues so noone will be bored... and I will try to hard to make sure there will be pancakes :)

Vancouver: here I come

Submitted by nk on Fri, 2008-08-08 09:54

As already mentioned on my twitter, I have sold my apartment in Budapest, threw out or gave away most of my possesions and on September 1 I join the Vancouver Drupal user group for good :)

Apache cookie auth for your dev sites

Submitted by nk on Mon, 2008-08-04 07:39

If you have a development only website then you probably have basic auth over it, just to keep the prying eyes away. It is, however, quite daunting to always OK the many password dialogues. A little rewrite magic helps:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} "^Basic dGVzdDp0ZXN0"
RewriteRule ^ - [co=test:test:.development.example.com:1440000:/] [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} "!^Basic dGVzdDp0ZXN0"
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !(^|\ |;)test=test;
RewriteRule ^ - [R=401,L]
Header always set WWW-Authenticate "Basic realm='development'"

PHP is also moving

Submitted by nk on Mon, 2008-08-04 07:19

As Drupal, PHP is also moving -- and it moves fast. On June 16 Christian Seiler suggested adding lambda and closures to the language and on August 1 the first alpha of PHP 5.3 containing this and more is out. And we thought the language will never get them...there are other niceties -- just one question remains, how long before Drupal can use this?

So many kinds of contributions possible

Submitted by nk on Sat, 2008-07-12 22:00

So, Moonshine discovered that Drupal 6 supports #pre_render and even #post_render which was so obscure that even I did not remember it off head. So, he documented them in the Monster Form API table. And then went on and blasted the <font> tags too. w00t, w00t! No lines of PHP written -- but still such an awesome contribution. Thanks!

Help the Druplicon conquer the world

Submitted by nk on Sat, 2008-07-05 19:38

I have no idea how could this slip for three years. Dries said

Can't we cool up the throbber a bit? (Make it a rotating Druplicon or something. ;))

in this comment. If you can, please make a throbbing Druplicon (I think that's better than a rotating one) and submit to the issue please. It's very important -- it would make a number of developers very happy :D