Computers

Drupal 4.6.2

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I had to disable comments yesterday to work around a security bug of Drupal 4.6.1. I just installed the upgrade to 4.6.2, and restored the previous settings, so everything should work normally again.

S5

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Tired of using Powerpoint or OpenOffice Impress just to make a presentation ? Sometimes I just want to create a slideshow which 'just looks good', without having to find out all hidden options in a presentation software. If you have the same opinion, you might want to try out S5, a webbased slideshow format, consisting of one html file, and some CSS markups. Very interesting if you have to give presentations on computers other than your own.

Drupal 4.6.1

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I just upgraded the Drupal engine to version 4.6.1. The upgrade process was cumbersome, awkward, non-trivial and difficult to say at least. It seems that Drupal suffers from the same upgrade disease as PostNuke does : the first time, the upgrade died on the database upgrade. Luckily, I did had a backup of the database and the website, so reverting the upgrade was no problem. I performed the upgrade then on a local copy, which learned me how to upgrade properly. There are some problems left, especially with the taxonomy_image module, but that's for later.

Font size

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Last week, Veroniek, my most avid reader of this weblog, noticed me that the font size on Internet Explorer really was way too big to be enjoyable. So I took a look, and had to admit that it was a bit over the top. Fonts are now expressed in pixel size instead of the 'em' metric, so hopefully this scales well in all browsers out there. (Getting things like this right really sucks)

Taxonomy_image

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I have enabled the taxonomy_image module, which places a topic image next to the story, just like my previous Postnuke based weblog and other sites a la Slashdot. The most difficult part was to find out where I had to make the changes to display the image. Jony.net has a patch for the $DRUPAL_HOME/themes/engines/xtemplate/xtemplate.engine file, which is the one to modify.

Only thing left to do : adding a link to the image to display all stories from that topic.

403

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It seemed that the installation of Drupal 'secretly' placed a .htaccess file in the root directory of this website, which created a misconfiguration for DarkChannels, the RSS aggregator I wrote in Perl. I first thought that my hosting provider might have changed the global Apache settings, but that turned out to be false. Anyway, I hope this was the last upgrade problem for this site.

Goodbye PostNuke

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I've never been satisfied with the upgrade to PostNuke 0.75, and for a while I have been looking for alternatives. I guess I've just spotted a worthy competitor in the form of Drupal; just a matter of checking if the PN database can easily be migrated to Drupal, and if that succeeds, this website's engine will be powered by
Drupal. If all goes well, expect to see this site change significantly within the next month.

All software sucks

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Upgrading Postnuke sucks. It sucked 4 years ago with PHPNuke, and it still sucks with Postnuke. The upgrade failed with an error on the upgrade on a database table, so here am I. Wondering whether to start freshly from a new install, or choosing some other CMS who knows how to get its shit together. Both options mean loosing 4 years of posts, or re-enter all of them. Reverting to the old version of Postnuke isn't an option, as there were some critical security errors discovered last week.
Update : I finally chose for upgrading to the latest PostNuke version, as importing the stories went smoother than expected. There may be things that break the next couple of days, but I hope the main engine holds. Now just find a new theme to replace this butt-ugly default one...

E.com CDs are rubbish

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I had it up to here with those 'el-cheapo' CDs from E.com. They are absolutely rubbish : from all the CDs I wrote, I guess I had to dispose some 60% because they were not readable after the burning process. I even feared my CD writer was broken ! But a test with some new Sony CDs proved the opposite : a CD successfully burned from the first time. So I dumped the rest of the spindle pack from E.com in the dust bin. Good riddance !