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.

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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... :-)

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

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:

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

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.

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.

( source flickr, copyright faerie)

Next weekend on Sunday, February 7, we'll have a full day of Drupal talks at the 10th edition of FOSDEM, Europe's biggest, free-est and open-est software conference.

FOSDEM, is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The Drupal project was granted a developer room at FOSDEM to do exactly that: to share knowledge about Drupal.

The presentations schedule for the devroom was published a week ago on http://groups.drupal.org/fosdem. It features interesting speakers such as Robert Douglass, Károly Négyesi, Roel de Meester and Kristof van
Tomme and even more interesting subjects as mobile device design, AHAH, eID and Views 3. Everyone is invited to attend the presentations.

On Friday the giantesque beer event kicks off the conference. For Drupalistas there is a sprint on Saturday in Zaventem.

Please join, I have been to a couple of FOSDEM's and if you ever attended an Oreilly or Gartner con, you are in for a surprise :-)

FOSDEM takes place at ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.