Every day or so I try to browse so modules that might be of use for customers. Not that my team is afraid of building own modules. Not at all as the Hansel module for example shows. A rather cool module for developers to make better breadcrumbs that we build for the NCRV.nl and was donated by them. Not afraid to make own modules that make "awesomeness happen". But using Open Source means building on the shoulders of giants and no matter how tall you are, there is always someone taller then you. So despite being 2 meters tall, I always look for smarter people writing interesting code/functionality.

So the other day I came across the Drupal anywhere module that uses twitters anywhere service. Anyway, clicking the demo link brought me to... drup.al!

And this is what I wrote about that domain-name back in 2006:

If Drupal would have started in 2005 and Albania would have had a real NIC, we wouldnt have claimed drupal.org but drup.al.


But we arent followers, not here to be hip and we were twodotooo before Tim could spell it out. So we are Drupal.org, rocking without being Beta Two Dot Oooh!

And I still think it is true today. Even if Time gave an excellent keynote at DrupalCon SF. Drup.al is a funny domain-name. Demoing a nice module, that is all it is. And when the Albanian NIC was any more open back in 2001 when I registered drupal.org I am sure I would have looked at drup.al as well. Nice domain name, but search engines are the new DNS, Google is the new Bind. Funny name, drup.al. But most outsiders already think that the name Drupal by itself is funny enough.

I finnaly moved this website from my 15 year old pentium 166 with a load over 20 to some better iron, some decent 3 year old hardware. The new machine had a newer PHP version and my /ancient/ Drupal install was fine with that. However, I was unable to log in. Took me some time to see if this was caching or Cookie related but found it, adding
register_shutdown_function('session_write_close');
to the sessions.inc did the trick

So this website should be more stable now, and faster. I will get a new ADSL line in a couple of week upgrading to 20Mb so should be even faster in some time. With some downtime however, I will get a new IP address as well and need to change my zones when I know what this address will be.

Thank you bas for giving me "havenmeester" (aka tug) 5 years ago. Even at that time dated hardware but served me well. It is just that the fan of the CPU makes an enormous amount of noise now.

shutdown -h now.

We salute you Tug, the oldest webserver on the net :-)

Heerlijk. Met de kinderen veel sneeuw pret gehad in het begin van het nieuwe jaar. En omdat ik me heb voor genomen meer te bloggen dit jaar (200 postings per jaar moet weer eenvoudig mogelijk te zijn, dan maar wat minder getwitter (35k tweets! :-) ) as if).

Brecht is trouwens een gillertje, maar het ging dan ook echt hard.

Alle 4 heuvel af from bert boerland on Vimeo.

Since a couple of weeks I have a nice Mac Mini (unboxing) hooked up with EyeTV to my telly so I can record, timeshift, commercial skipping and do all the other PVR stuff from my chair. Yes, I have been using MythTV the couple of years, but the box was more under maintenance then in production. So I went the easy way and went Apple, like I will do for all my client computers (still using Linux for servers!). The Mac mini is cool and I use other standard apps as well, especially Plex. I like easy and it integrates with my iPhone so I can watch recorded and live shows on my iPhone as well (picture).

Plex, iTunes, iPhoto and EyeTV make up 99% of the programs I use on my mini. And in fact, since iTunes can be access from Plex, as well as iPhoto can, I should only use EyeTV and Plex. If you do not know about Plex as a Apple user, shame on you. It is the best thing since sliced bread, including an appstore, modules, themes and a /beautiful/ user interface. And free as in open source as well.

Still, watching TV and switching between applications does not give the right usability to my girly (and to lesser extend :-), my kids). So I would really like to see EyeTV and Plex integrated. There has been lots of talk about integration, for over a year or so. But no code was ever made available. Up to a couple of weeks ago!

Yes, there is actual Open Source code that you can use to access your EyeTV recording and live TV within Plex! Read this thread at the plexapp forums!

Not that the code is very alpha and does not have any EPG integration yet. But still, this is so cool!

Here is a short install howto from the forum pages (not complete

1) Ensure Snow leopard is up-to-date - 10.6.2

2) Ensure Plex is up-to-date - 0.8.5

3) Ensure EyeTV is up-to-date - 3.3

4) Ensure Xcode is up to date -3.1

5) Ensure iPhone streaming is enabled under EyeTV>Preferences

6) Install MacPorts from http://www.macports.org/

7) Once Installed -normall diskimage- , run Terminal from Utilities>Terminal.app

8 ) At the prompt "sudo port install ffmpeg" (without quotes)

9) Typ your password

10) ffmpeg takes long to install about 30 minutes to d/l and install each component.

11) Install Imagemagick from Macports using similar command in the same Terminal "sudo port install imagemagick" (without quotes)

12) This can take another 15 minutes to install after supplying system password

13) Installed the EyeTV/Plex Plugin 0.2 (se link above) OR LATER!

14) when the plugin is installed, a cytv.app(a modification) should be opened together with eyetv. in the dock click on cytv to have this app active. then in menubar click on "EyeTV - CyTV-Install Plugin".

15) Right click (ctrl+click) on cytv in the dock, and choose "show in finder". then right click on the app and choose "Show Package Contents". navigate to Contents - Resources and rename ffmepg_custom to ffmpeg_custom_old and ffmpeg_custom_0.5 to ffmpeg_custom.

16) Unable to rename these files? Pressed Apple+I, in the Info screen at the bottom of this window is the Permissions option, change the permissions of my user on these files to read+write, I was then able to rename both files.

17) change rights with the following 2 lines in terminal (use your username instead of $USER):

chmod a+x /Users/$USER/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Plug-ins/EyeTV.bundle/Contents/Helpers/*

chmod a+x /Users/$USER/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Plug-ins/EyeTV.bundle/Contents/Helpers/CyTV.app/Contents/MacOS/*

This should do the trick. But if you are not that good with Unix best to wait until this is beta or production code. All I need now is an asterisk integration and I will never leave my TV :-)

A someone who has been "active" in the Drupal community for over 8 years, it is shocking to see that only in the last 3 years Drupal was really picked up by the mainstream press. This is not due to the quality of the code of Drupal of the community, as much as it has to do with building momentum and a shake out in the CMS landscape. So this story about Drupal being in the "Top 10 coolest Open Source products" (yes, it is that time of the year again) comes as no surprise to anyone how knows the code or the community.

The real power of Drupal however is that 5 (!) other Open Source projectsof the top 10 products use Drupal as a platform to deliver their tools, empower their community. That is the real power of Drupal. 6 (including Drupal self) of the top 10 Open Source tools according to CRN.com use Drupal:

1. Ledger SMB (a fork of SQL ledger)
2. DoJo (they hacked Drupal core to get the DoJo in and JQuery out :-) )
3. Ubuntu (Linux for humans, with their famous bug 1)
4. Firefox, the best browser chrome :-) )
5. OO.org, word!

Drupal power. "We, the Drupal community" are proud :-)