Willy Dobbe - This Blog should have been an instrumental, but the words got in the way. [Blog of Bert Boerland]

Hackers, Painters, Drupal and Freedom

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 20:48:28 +0200

During my vacation I reread the excellen book "Hackers and Painters. Big ideas from the computer age".

The book is so great since it makes explicit hat we take for granted, names that we have forgot. For example from the preface:

"The fact is, hackers [1] are obsessed with free speech. Slashdot, the New York times of hacking, has a whole section about it. I think most Slashdot readers take this for granted. But "Plane & Pilot" doesn't have a section about free speech."

[1] Note that the author uses "hackers" as "hackers" would; those knowledgeable in an technology and curious about investigating how this technology works.

With the great momentum of the latestandgreatest release Drupal 7 we should not forget that Open Source -and hence Drupal- is about three thing:

Code
Community
Freedom (license)

The cheesy slogan "Come for the code, stay for the community" doesn't -IMHO- do justice to the third important aspect of Open Source; freedom! Many proprietary software projects have excellent code and many proprietary software projects have great community that helps new members in fora and documents best practises. But they do not have freedom.

I studied in a small town up north in the Netherlands and one of the stores there I use often as a metaphor about why choosing Drupal -or generic open source- is better than a closed source solution.

One could enter the second floor of the store with an escalator. Then shop all you like and when you wanted to go down with all your bags... you had to use the stairs.

It is an excellent example of what proprietary software is; it is easy to step and but hard to get out. And most selection processes for choosing a new CMS do not take in account that at one day they will be wanting to step out. And it that case they have to climb down the stairs with all their new bags in their hands, migrate all their content towards their new CMS.

It does not matter where you are going to; your car or a new shop. What matters is where you came from; the second floor. The second floor is what defines the exit costs, not the ground floor, the location new shop or your car.

There are many CMS hosted solutions as well that are great products, have a cool community and are easy to get it; "no creditcard needed". Yes you heared it right, your first shot is free.

In Drupal / Open Source, freedom is broader defined. You are free to use or change the code under the GPL, free to help others by documenting under an CC license and free to use the main site d.o within the Terms and Conditions.

The Drupal community ("We, the Drupalistas") have an excellent reputation when it comes down to enforcing the GPLicense. And we should keep this focus to make sure we will never suffer from the Joomladisation. We even make sure that the CC license is enforced when people use our handbook on other sites.

But we have been a bit sloppy when it comes down to the Terms and Conditions of drupal.org itself. Typical, this is something the legal department of most sites about proprietary software start with.

So you can help with the Terms & Conditions by helping out in this issue and define freedom. That is, unless you are reading "Plane & Pilot" ... and this blog. And let the first words be: "We, the Drupalistas..." :-)

Drupal Marketshare

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:04:58 +0200

For some time, Drupal has a marketshare above 1% of all the sites onlne. Now there are numerous ways of counting and presenting data and if you know a bit about measuring and statistics, you know there are a zillion ways to lie.

The fact that Drupal has a big marketshare is something all can agree on. According to the way Dries has measured this is by visiting and fingerprinting the top 1 miljon websites (in hits) and see what percentage is being served with Drupal, as presented during DrupalCon SF.

According to builtwith.com Drupal now has 1.7% marketshare of all the sites entered at buildwith:

Drupal 1.69% vBulletin 0.69% Joomla! 0.32%

And Drupal is growing fast, see this (flash) graph. Is it relevant how many sites are using Drupal? Well, in open source it is all about eyeballs. Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow. Yet, eyeballs without installs means nothing. So yes, marketshare is important. More installs means more eyeballs and better code. Or if you are not a developer, more installs means bigger market and more money :-)

Please replace the LAMP

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:07:13 +0200

I always think it is funny to see a "a A /|" (bigger text selections) on a website. The decision to use this is always made by people who are not visually handicapped and think adding this to a website has anything to do with accessibility.

Blind people are blind on every website and use a braille browser, people with bad eyes are handicapped on every website and have a [control][plus] key combination in their browser. Mirroring browser functionality in the site is in fact a bad thing. Adding the "bigger text" buttons in a website does nothing for accessibility.

I always think it is funny to see a discussion about adding ZIP files on a website instead of a tarball. The decision to add this fileformat is always made by people who do not have a windows machine and and think adding this to a website has anything to do with gaining market-share.

Developers using windows are developers on all projects they work on and have a third party tool to unpack a tarball, people with interest in Drupal but no able to unpack a tarball can be pointed to a simple helptext. Solving problems with technology when it can be dealt with procedures is always a bad thing. Adding a zip distribution does nothing for marketshare but a lot for maintance costs.

Not that I consider windows users to be handicapped... Not at all... :-)

Espresso in de UK

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:37:39 +0200

Engeland. Mooie land, Geweldige landschap. Eeuwenoude gewoonte. Sterke cultuur. Maar van koffie hebben ze geen verstand.

Toen ik een espresso bestelde, keken ze al moeilijk. Ik kreeg de twee slokken koffie in een soepkom. En om de grap compleet te maken, vroegen ze of ik er melk bij wou...

Nope, geweldig land maar geen van koffie geen kaas gegeten.

Brecht, werelddominantie

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:17:40 +0200

Donderdag 22 juli 2011, Lymes Regis, United Kingdom

Aart (3) loopt uit het zomerhuisje naar de veranda waar Brecht (6) op het trappetje zit.

Aart: "Wat doe je Brecht?"
Brecht : "De wereld veroveren!"

Goed te weten dat ze later open source software developer wordt :-)

Drupal Dev Days, a retrospective

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 16:49:57 +0200

Last week we held the “Drupal Dev Days" at the HQ of dop.nu. This post reflects some thoughts on why we organised this camp, what we did and what we learned.

We started the smaller unconference Dev camp because we want to facilitate smaller groups to come together and work on targeted items. In the Netherlands we also have the DrupalJam’s. The last Jam had nearly 300 attendees and with the growing demand of Drupal services, this conference will grow for some time, 400 attendees in half a year is realistic.

Robert Douglass’ keynote during last DrupalJam, (c) Wessel Zwiers

To put this in perspective, a DrupalJam now is as big as a European DrupalCon only 4 years ago. And while having a big local conference is a good thing for networking and promotion, there is a growing need to get smaller more focussed “unofficial" camps to get better communication and more interaction. So DOP decided to facilitate a smaller camp with only developers, laptops, wifi, a nice location, tents, a BBQ, some beer and water-pistols. All the ingredients for having a good Drupal camp!

360 panorama of the place where DDD was held

And we did have a good time, the weather was very nice, lots of people brought local beer and while there was no program, we actually did a lot. That is, some just wanted to site and discuss, other wanted to learn and share and some just wanted to code.

For an impression of the camp, see this collection.

So what did we do during these three days apart from throwing buckets of water?

Marc van Gend and Erik Stielstra started a module codenamed “turn me on" that enables the current site of a state to be saved. The idea is to have multiple states of a site for staging and production so one can easy turn on and off modules or settings that you want in a preproduction environment but not on a production site. This module will be released once completed.

10 people discussed on how to get a better User Interface for Hansel “breadcrumbs done right!" by co-worker Maurits Lawende. Hansel is a very powerful way of providing very flexible breadcrumbs on all pages and views yet with this power is currently hidden in a sub optimal interface. Hansel will never be as popular as the direct “competitors" (such as custom breadcrumbs) since you need to understand arguments and rules, yet we cam up with an easier interface that will hit d.o in the next release.

Coworkers Maarten Verbaarschot and Sietse de ruiter did some work on the base theme Ink Ribbon

Karten Frohwein gave a good presentation on simpletest

The best part IMHO was kicked of by Clemens Tolboom, a session about helping develops -and users- to clean up their issue queue by using a system called Triage. Triage is a way to of prioritising patients based on the severity of their condition by relatively unskilled personal. This so professionals (doctors, maintainers) have a better queue where they can focus on musts and shoulds and users are forced to give better input to them. This system is in use at Gnome and seems to work fine there. For example, bigger modules like views have more then 1000 issues open, unworkable for those wanting to help out and the maintainer(s). If we would have a system where anyone could help by classifying bugs and by asking for more information or closing old bugs related to 4.x version, all benefit. If you want to help out in this prococes, please read 838682 and work from there.

Maurits also worked on the Rate module. A module build on voting API that has a broader range then for example 5star with more value types. See a screenshot below:

and

Morten -lead organiser of the upcoming DrupalCon in Copenhagen, skyped in to promote in his special way this event and was shown on the beamer. Nearly all of the attendees were already planning on visiting the DrupalCon Copenhagen, yet spreading the word always helps!

So what did we learn? The number of no shows is always high on these events. Sending out mails to the attendees on a regular basis is a good way to get feedback and ask if people are really coming. It is also a good thing to have some kind of program as a backup even if it is an unconference.

It was fun co-organising this with Rolf van de Krol and we will be doing this again next year!

Drupal data visualisation

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:46:59 +0200

Via PBS.org I found dataviz.org A website funded by Knight with a data visualization toolkit called VIDI.

I love good visualisations of data. And while most of the modules that are available are not that shocking, but the fact that one can use this as SAAS or download the modules and drop them on your own site, gives the power of data visualization to the masses.

Great work and I expect to see a lot more data and presentation of data on the web. Many small eyes for a better vision :-)

ooh, and please put these modules on d.o

How to mount an EXT2 or EXT3 (linux) disk under Mac OS-X

Mon, 03 May 2010 20:37:29 +0200

Mac OSX. A powerful open Unix with a cool interface and a very closed philosophy behind it. If Steve thought it was not needed, it is not in the system. So mounting an external harddisk formatted with EXT2 or EXT3 (journaling mostly Linux filesystem) on a Mac is not an option... By default. Because a couple of mouseclicks and a Unix command made it possible or me to mount my external EXT3 formatted harddisk on my iMac.

Start with MacFuse and download it. Macfuse is a very powerfull framework that makes it possible to mount all kind of drives; from amazon S3 to SSH (scp) mounted disk. And it is also plugable so once you have installed it, download fuse-ext2. Do not be fooled by the name, it can mount ext3 disk as well.

Once you have both installed, open a terminal and type for example:

mkdir /Volumes/temp1TB

This is needed to make a volume that is mounted. In my case I wanted temporary to mount a 1 TByte external USB disk, hence the name.

I only needed to get data off the disk , so to be sure I mounted it Read Only. To find what device name your disk is using, best to power of the disk and press [tab] twices to see what devices are in /dev/. Now power the disk, wait and redo to see what drives have been added. IN my case it was disk2s1

fuse-ext2 /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/temp1TB/ -o ro

And you now have mounted a EXT2 or EXT3 formatted disk under /Volumes/temp1TB

Note that Macfuse can do lots of other stuff as well, see the video! Happy hacking.

This is Drupal's next version!

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:04:51 +0200

You are looking at Drupal's next release, with the internal name D7A4. It was found lost in a bar in Antwerp, Belgium. Camouflaged to look like an ordinary Drupal 6 on an USB stick. We got it. We disassembled it. It's the real thing, and here are all the details.

While Drupal may tinker with the final packaging and design of the award winning CMS, it's clear that the features in this lost-and-found next-generation Drupal version is drastically new and drastically different from what came before. Here's the detailed list of our findings:
What's new

Better security
Usability enhancements
database abstraction layer
Better Documentation in core
Several Performance Improvements Implemented
Beter themes
Better file handeling
Better image handling
Custom fields

What's changed

Color module now usable by themes other than Garland.
Usability improvements including re-weightable roles and saner Forum module defaults.
A variety of optimizations made to data import-related functions to make migrations faster.
Lots of previously missing documentation for hooks has now been documented. Hooray!
Increased test coverage, particularly core Tokens.
Lots of smaller bug fixes, security patches, and improvements.

How it was lost

Dries Buytaert—a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering graduate of the University of Ghent and talented amateur photographer—is a Drupal Software Engineer working on the core Drupal Software, the little program that enables communities to florish. A dream job for a talented engineer like Buytaert, a PHP fan who always wanted to meet Rasmus Lerdorf.
On the night of April 27, he was enjoying the fine local ales at a pub, a nice Belgian beer garden, in Antwerp. He was happy. The place was great. The beer was excellent. "I underestimated how good Belgian beer is," he blogged on his next-generation CMS he was testing on the field, cleverly disguised. It was his last blog post update on the secret Drupal version. It was the last time he ever saw the USB stick, right before he abandoned it on bar stool, leaving to go home.

The Aftermath

Weeks later, Boerland.com got it for $5,000 in cash. At the time, we didn't know if it was the real thing or not. It didn't even get past the Druplicon installer screen. Once we saw it inside and out, however, there was no doubt about it. It was the real thing, so we started to work on documenting it before returning it to Buytaert. We had the software, but we didn't know the owner. Later, we learnt about this story, but we didn't know for sure it was Buytaert's USB stick until today, when we contacted him via his phone.

Dries Buytaert: Hello?
Bert Boerland: Is this Dries?
Dries Buytaert: Yeah.
B: Hi, this is Bert Boerland from boerland.com.
D: Hey!
B: You work at Drupal software, right?
D: Um, I mean I can't really talk too much right now.
B: I understand. We have a device, and we think that maybe you misplaced it at a bar, and we would like to give it back.
D: Yeah, I forwarded your email [asking him if it was his USB stick], someone should be contacting you.
B: OK.
D: Can I send this phone number along?
B: [Contact information]

He sounded tired and broken. But at least he's alive, and apparently may still be working with Drupal software—as he should be. After all, it's just a stupid USB stick and mistakes can happen to everyone. The only real mistake would be to fire Dries in the name of Drupal's legendary impenetrable security, breached by the power of Belgian beer and one single human error.

What does it mean for you

After consulting our lawyers, we decided to test the next version o this Drupal CMS and to offer a free download link so you can enjoy the works of this Drupal engineer as well. This so you can get familiar with the new slick industrial interface and the new API's. We higly encourage you to download the software and help test drive it.

And for those not getting satire, please read this bad checkbook journalism

Drup dot al

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 22:12:57 +0200

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.

Opera on iPhone proxies all request (privacy fail)

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 21:08:58 +0200

Yes, the very fast Opera browser on the iPhone proxies all request! In normal language, every webpage you visit from your iPhone with the opera browser is send towards Opera. Thereby, they get al the information from you. If you submit a form, it is send to Opera. If you search in Google, it is send to opera. If you login to a website, your password is send to Opera!

They wil claim the need to do this because of the prorpietary way they handle images and HTML to speed up a website. And it is a speedy browser:

I think part of the speed comes form the fact that they proxy all traffic and some funky stuff with preloading images. However, it is absurd that a browser gets /all/ the data I send, all the websites I visit, all the passwords I submit, all the search queries I do. It might not be spyware but sure gets close to this.

How did I found out?

I visitied Facebook on Opera and got this message from facebook:

Then I visited Facebook form my iMac and saw:

Then I did a test on my own host and grepped the logging:

Ans here is the code:
pimsbb2@newborn:~$ sudo tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep -i test [sudo] password for pimsbb2: 94.246.126.161 - - [17/Apr/2010:21:05:24 +0200] "GET /test HTTP/1.1" 404 500 "-" "Opera/9.80 (iPhone; Opera Mini/5.0.0176/764; U; en) Presto/2.4.15" ^C pimsbb2@newborn:~$ whois 94.246.126.161 % This is the RIPE Database query service. % The objects are in RPSL format. % % The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions. % See http://www.ripe.net/db/support/db-terms-conditions.pdf

% Note: This output has been filtered. % To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag. % Information related to '94.246.126.0 - 94.246.127.255'

inetnum: 94.246.126.0 - 94.246.127.255 netname: IPO-OPERA descr: Opera Software ASA

I am not the first person to finds out about it, see for example pcworld.com. But I am the person to tell you that you should be aware that you send all your data cleartext towards Opera when using the app (https is fine however). And I am the person to tell you I will not use the app anymore. Bad Opera! Bad! No cookie.

"Denk aan het milieu voordat u dit bericht print!"

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 12:20:02 +0200

Ik heb een paar klanten die in hun (HTML!) mail signature een opmerking hebben staan als "Denk aan het milieu voordat u dit bericht print!" of "Denkt u aub aan het milieu voor u deze e-mail afdrukt". Vaak in groene letters en met een grote groene "P" of een huisje er bij als op deze site.

Ik gebruik mail meer dan 20 jaar. En ben een echte mail junk, verslind er paar honderd per dag. En ik kan me niet voor de geest halen dat ik in die twintig jaar dat ik mail /ooit/ ook maar een mail heb geprint. Zie nut totaal niet in van niet bewerkbare versie op papier te hebben van iets dat ik digitaal heb. Het opnemen van een dergelijk statement zegt denk ik ook meer over de zender dan noodzakelijkerwijs over de ontvanger. Mensen die dit in hun signature opnemen printen zelf waarschijnlijk wel mail en filen dit in een mapje.

Van mij mogen ze. Maar zendt me geen HTML mail! Geen smileys, fonts, plaatjes, logos of groene "Denkt u aub aan het milieu voor u deze e-mail afdrukt". Want HTML mail verbruikt meer bandbreedte dan plaintext, en meer kleuren op een LCD scherm. En is dus slecht voor het milieu.

Ik denk dat ik maar een actie start "Denk aan het milieu voordat u HTML verstuurd" :-)

Mac's "System was unable to start the program because of a -10810 error" solved

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:12:14 +0200

Apple. You got to love the company for bringing one of the best user interfaces to Unix and for bringing Unix to one of the best user interfaces. But I also hate Aplle every now and then for doing this in a non Unixy way; closed, not transparant and complex.

The other day I could not start any new programs on my mac. All applications I started gave me an error
system was unable to start the program because of a -10810 error.
True, I do not reboot my Macs unless needed and have many many applications (and tabs in browsers) open. I do know a bit about Unixes so I am not the kind of type that will reboot his machine to get it “working” again since I do like to dig in a bit deeper.

But how do you troubleshoot if you can not type a command (any command) in a terminal? I started with googling (remember, having enough browsers and tabs open cab be a good thing :-) ) and found this blog post. When I closed a couple of less needed (okay, non needed) programs I could use the command line again. Tailing my system.log gave me lots of
Kernel[0]: proc: table is full messages.

It turned out that the process list was full. I did have some spotlight issues earlier that I solved but most likely in a way that caused this problem.

All you have to do when you get this message is open up a terminal (quit some programs if you can not open a terminal) and type
sudo service bootps stop

Since it is a deamon with the noHUP flag, it will restart itself and will clear the process list. Solved.

Oss closed source

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:24:44 +0200

Opvallend dat juist een gemeente met de naam "Oss" haar website draait op een ouderwets closed source systeem in plaats van op OSS :-)

DrupalJam Twitter / Flickr Fountain

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:23:14 +0100

Voor de komende DrupalJam, hier alvast een voorproefje dat als backchannel kan dienen gedurende de dag zelf. Embed op je eigen site en spreidt het woord voort.