Tech

I wrote the following for a client and thought I should post it.

Broadly speak, drupal is an open source content management platform, writing in PHP and licensed under the GPL.  Most commonly run on Linux with Apache and MySQL, and frequently used with MS SQL and IIS, with support for Oracle being added.

Drupal’s Principles

• Modular and extensible.  Drupal aims to provide a slim, powerful core that can be readily extended through custom modules.
  
  • Meaning you never patch the core modules, making upgrades much more straight forward.
• Quality coding.  High quality, elegant, documented code is a priority over roughed-in functionality.
• Standards-based.  Drupal supports established and emerging standards.  Specific target standards include XHTML and CSS.
• Low resource demands.  To ensure excellent performance, Drupal puts a premium on low-profile coding (for example, minimizing database queries).  Drupal should also have minimal, widely-available server-side software requirements.  Specifically, Drupal should be fully operational on a server with Apache web server, PHP, and either MySQL or Postgresql.
• Open source.  Drupal is based on the open source philosophy of collaborative free software development and is licensed under the GPL.  Drupal is itself open source and builds on and supports other open source projects.  Specifically, Drupal is coded in the open source scripting language PHP and supports as primary data sources the open source database formats MySQL and Postgresql.
• Ease of use.  Drupal aims for a high standard of usability for developers, administrators, and users.
• Collaboration.  Drupal development supports open, collaborative information sharing systems and approaches.

In light of my existing computer having a habit of abruptly power offing, I have been monitoring prices at several local computer stores and for particularly good deals with the various big companies. After several weeks of monitoring I picked a Dell E521 that includes the Pacifica virtualization technology (AMD 64 X2 5000+) which also enough disk space and RAM to allow for a Xen based Windows XP and at least one LAMP for my drupal testing environment.

Now that biohabit.org has been migrated to faster hosting and upgraded to drupal 5.1 the site should be much more responsive and more frequently updated.

A feature that I'll be bringing online here hopefully in the next few days is reviews of books, audio books, films, ... that I have read, watched or listened to.

In my effort to be able to use my cell phone as my PDA I bought a software package from Susteen that claimed to be able to sync a 6820 with OSX. Well that quite simply didn't work and the amount of time I spent dealing the tech support extended me beyond the 30 day return policy so I'm now stuck with software that doesn't work with my phone. The cables might come in handy but not $80 handy.

I remembered a way to sync the 6820 with linux and was googling my way around and stumbled upon that Apple upgraded iSync to support Nokia 6820 via bluetooth. It is slighly annoying that I need to enable bluetooth when I need to sync OSX with my phone and then later disable bluetooth. With all first time syncings there where a few problems but I was importing several hundred contacts and calend

As a note for future upgrades, always remember to see which modules you have active prior to starting the upgrade.  Also if you are going to do some theme upgrades, leave some damn comments.