Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Last Wednesday after the LSec event with Bruce Schneier and the R ans S from RSA , we already had a mini AdHoc GeekDinner in Leuven, one that pretty would have matched Philips requirements for having it called Geek dinner

Philip has been ranting this week about different events titled "Geek" not attrackting real geeks. that know hex and binary is but merely atrackting the Startup/Web crowd, now there's nothing wrong with both crowds, and I happen to be part of both but it can cause strange situations
Geekdinner.beTom K arranged a nice deal with De Troubadour so foodwise it promises to be great.

And with the list currently showing a variety of
Linux and BSD geeks, (both on Kernel and System Level it seems) the Apache geeks , some Ruby geeks, some Legal geeks, some Java geeks, etc that part should be covered ..

So I`m pretty sure that the majority of Geeks at the upcoming Geekdinner will realize there are only 10 kind of people

Still missing however from that list are the Drupal and PHP folks, the Django crowd, some Distribution geeks, some Gnome Geeks and some KDE geeks. Heck you all know I`m talking about you .. so go and subscribe here

I hope we aren't scaring away too much folks with this really Open Source oriented GeekDinner :)

PS. And yes I think it's time for Elise to organise a Real Belgian Girl Geek Dinner :)

Unless you are doing it wrong.

And sadly I`m seeing more and more people doing it wrong.
To a lot of people Open Source means that they have a piece of software that does almost what they want and which they can modify to their best wishes and use internally.

So they fork locally,, they don't redistribute their code , but they aren't contributing their changes back upstream, chances are these changes wouldn't be accepted upstream anyhow as they are really customizing the code for their specific cases. At first sight this doesn't look so bad , at second sight ..

When weeks or months later the upstream project releases an urgent security fix, the local fork has deviated soo much that it can't upgrade anymore and stays with an insecure version.
Often it's worse.. a feature that could have been accepted upstream has been implemented slightly different in the local fork, the result being that newer features depending on the first one also can't be integrated anymore

Some projects are prepared for local contributions, they have a modular framework that allows you to build on top of the project while not having to touch the core of a project, Drupal and openQRM are great examples of those, but not all projects are that smart. Needless to say that when you have such a modular framework you really shouldn't be modifying the core part of the platform, unless you are fixing a real bug.

But the general rule of thumb is that when you fix bugs, make sure they are inserted upstream , or implement new features.

Now sometimes there is no easy way to get your code accepted upstream, in which case you should announce clearly that you want to contribute but you are blocked and publish the patches somewhere else ...

Don't let the community work for you, but work with the community !

Larry, I`m glad you asked ..

With the risk of receiving a flood of comments pointing me to already existing tools here's my go at what I as a sysadmin of often large deployments am looking for in Drupalland .

You suggest LDAP and syslog integration .. guess we already have that don't we ?

But what I haven't found yet ..
An rpm/deb repository of Drupal modules So we can do an apt-get install drupal-package , yes I know about Drush, but I want the files on my system to be in a package and clearly identified, it helps me keeping my system uncluttered.

apt-get update drupal-package , or yum install drupal-package would be a luxury, same for themes btw.

It would be lovely if the postinstalls of those package also trigger a database upgrade if needed.

Which brings me to the next issue. If I have a multisite setup and I update a module in sites/all/modules, I usually have to go trough each and every site hosted there to update the databases. No really something I like to do for 10+ euh 3+ sites.

Also think big, don't waste your time on desktop apps or guis .since as long as you only have 1 site to manage point an click is fine, for you , Think in terms of what if you have 10 sites, 100 sites, or more .. do you really want to do that kind of administration via a browser or gui ? Some wise man once said If your computer can't install it the installer is broken. A script should or automation tool should be able to interact with the sites, not a human operating a mouse ;) It's not just the RSI , but also the fact that to err is human, and if the computer fails a script you can patch it :)

If you read this blog, you should probably sign the petition !

After reviewing the Zenoss book , Packt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing one of their fresh Drupal books, they first suggested a book on Theming but but I opted for the MultiMedia by Aaron Winborn one as Theming really isn't my cup of tee

It took me a while to get the book finished , mostly because of other priorities that kept popping up and being ill for the first week of the year .. but I finally managed

The Drupal Multimedia book , gives a good overview of both Images, Audio and Video and dares to think beyond current MultiMedia. With a zillion possible modules to choose from when starting to build a Drupal site it is often difficult too find the best module for a task, different modules have similar functionalities and features. Aaron saves you the trouble of figuring out which modules are suited best for what task by discussing. For each media type he discusses which module fits best. However , sometimes he opted to discuss a Drupal 5 module that wasn't ported yet to Drupal 6, so you might have to seek for alternatives depending on your Drupal version.

For one of my sites I used the Flickr module that now seems to be outdated, the book pointed me to the Embedded Media Module , so the book was well worth the time spent with it and I`ll have all of my Drupal Hacking friends read it, as it will save them time figuring out which modules to use.

Next up , the Learning Nagios book , but guess I won't be starting to read it before Fosdem .. :)

As I don't really use twitter apart to microblog but rather as an Instatn Messaging tool (why those people don't use IRC or Jabber remains a mistery to me wheel.reinvent :( )

I figured I could abuse it to announce posts on my blog, lots of people seem to be doing this so there had to be an easy way to auto publish them ..

The wonderful Drupal community seemed to have the same idea and therefore created the Twitter Module

A big fat warning however when you start using it.
The default values the module proposes for a tweet is :

New post: !title (!url)

Which results in something tinyurl doesn't really translate well..
(As you can see in this tweet)

So remove the brackets , or have some broken links to deal with :)

A while ago Dries wondered about Contributing back to Drupal .

Now Inuits is not a Webshop, we are an Open Source shop, so you won't see a zillion Drupal modules being contributed by us in the near future (albeit there are a couple) , we are company assisting other organisations in their adoption of Open Source, and Drupal is amongst the projects we care for. You'll notice code from us in the different other Open Source projects, including the Linux Kernel and other core infrastructure. And not all of it was code, there is a lot of published documentation, methodologies, bughunting and also spreading the words, or talking about our experiences around different topics such as MySQL Cluster and Drupal, or different alternatives to Monitor , or to Monitor MySQL etc ..

But we've been contributing in different other ways to open source and we have always been benefiting from that. And we try to convince our customers to do so too.
So Dries is right in all his reasons why one should contribute back to open source, specially as an organisation that uses OpenSource for it's customers you just have to.

The lack of contributions however might have different reasons
I can imagine however that the moment a commercial Open Source company starts backing or distributing people start looking at that project in a different way.

The amount of contributions to a pure open source project has been traditionally lower than the amount of code contributed to an open core project.

And I`m pretty sure that most of the braindead box moving RedHat and other so called Value Added Resellers aren't contributing a single line of code and my fear is that with the current growth of open source adoption that more of those traditional IT shops will just resell support subscriptions as if it were just another software product.

Now the Drupal community is one with a lot of developers so things might be different there compared to a group of system integrators that are installing operating systems and don't know the difference between python and php.

I think we'll see more and more open source users that aren't planning to contribute back, (although it is easy ) , But do we honestly think te group of developers is infinite ? However the more Open Source users the more chance we have these users turn into developers, I just don't think the current percentages will stay the same.

Anyway .. we'll continue to contribute.. and we hope you do the same ...

As asked long time ago by different users I finally ported the Shareomatic module to Drupal6 .

Bug reports are welcome. as is an affordable bigger house.

Anyhow Enjoy !

Dear LazyWeb

Buddylist is aimed at Drupal 5, so when porting to a site to Drupal 6, you need Buddylist2. However the BuddyList page mentions one should look at FriendList as that project is supposed finished ..

At first sight it seems like FriendList indeed most advanced in its efforts
As I was also using Invite, which also is still under development for 6,
I was assuming that upon installing it the dependencies would tell me which one to use.. however it seems none of them already hooks into Invite

Am I overlooking a module that solves my needs . ?

planet.grep.be today has a lot of active open source users and contributors.
The weird thing is that we never meet apart from Fosdem.
Yes, we occasionally run into eachother at other events but there's not enough beer involved.

I've had different people ask me what and where are the Open Source gatherings in Belgium, and we must admit that apart
from Fosdem there isn't that much in our little country.

There were a couple of MySQL User Group events, some Drupal ones, some LUG had meetings altough I have the idea most of them have dried out :(

So I have this crazy idea of inviting you all to grab a beer, maybe even free beer :) on december 29 some in a pub in Antwerp

I`m open for suggestions on good locations.

Oh and everybody is welcome, both readers and writers :)

PS. Yes I know that some of you will be drinking in Berlin at that time .. we'll drink an extra one for you.