For a long time everyone has suffered shocking TV reception at the units where I live. Sometimes it's crystal clear, then channels randomly disappear for a week or so. We've put it down to being in a black spot, the antenna being crap, the wiring being crap, trams and various other causes (maybe the piano interferes...!?)
linux.conf.au in Wellington, New Zealand is now easier to visit than ever. The recent earthquake has moved New Zealand nearly 30 cm closer to Australia!
For details, check the PYGR GPS data.
Josh Hesketh (you may know him from such conferences as lca2009) suggested I start a blog meme based on food. The idea is that I post a recipe. The first person to try it and take a photo of the result can then post a recipe of their own, which can be cooked by others, a photo taken, and so on.
The reason for this suggestion was that I made a second attempt at cooking an interpretation of a dish I saw on an episode of River Cottage years ago. The original is a moroccan inspired pigeon pie, which Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall cooks after taking out some of his new landlords pigeons with a rifle.
My (rather loose) interpretation of this dish takes the form of large sausage rolls - or sausage logs if you will - and involves no firearms. So, here is the first post in the geek food blog meme :-)
Virtually all of my Drupals are hosted on a single server, running Apache with mod_php5. Apache is by no means light-weight, so the server is starting to creak a bit under the combined load of all these sites.
I've been meaning to have a go at configuring nginx with php5 in fastcgi mode, to check the difference this would make on system load.
I was pointed at an article about a report on Open Source adoption and use in the dutch government, which reminded me of an interview my co-authors and me gave to SearchEnterpriseLinux.com. Specifially, we were asked why organisations should use open source in preference to closed source software.
Many moons ago I needed a way of storing documents online, so they could be shared between users and easily accessed from many locations. Thus, Simple Document Management System was born. SDMS is a PHP based front-end to a MySQL database that allows users to upload and download files into and from virtual directories using only a web browser.
It was my second ever PHP project and I wrote it in (bad) php3, with only some informal C coding as experience. Needless to say the code was not great, it used globals and had SQL injection problems. Though I did fix these two particular issues, the code is still old and tired and I've not really maintained it for years. Bringing it up to date would probably involve more effort than just scrapping it and rewriting it from scratch.
I've been doing a lot of work with Drupal over the past year and I had been vaguely considering reimplementing SDMS as a Drupal module, thus removing the need for me to also maintain code to handle users, passwords, commenting and permissions.
As I got more familiar with some 3rd party Drupal modules, it struck me that it should be completely possible to implement a document management system similar to SDMS in Drupal. Without doing any coding whatsoever. Thus, SDDMS was born.