Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

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For one of my sites I used the Flickr module that now seems to be outdated, the book pointed me to the Embedded Media Module , so the book was well worth the time spent with it and I`ll have all of my Drupal Hacking friends read it,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 .. :)

Found in a local bakery ...

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 :)

There is a really easy way to figure out ...

Look at the size of of the devrooms , if at all , a project gets at Fosdem
It's really interresting to see the Embedded room move to a 500 seat room which it really needed when the first openMoko talk was held there in a previous edition.

The FDO , Drupal, Mozilla, Centos/Fedora and Suse rooms stay in similar size rooms as last year.. But it seems lik the BSD and PostgreSQL room which was pretty crowded moved to a bigger location.

The Ruby room also seems to move to a bigger room. Fosdem has a couple of new rooms too it seems this freed up room for new groups such as the MySQL Crowd

Obviously these sizes aren't a real match to the size of a community, as the new rooms might need (and probably will need) a reshuffle for next year ;)

Different schedules for the devrooms are online .. you'll probably find me in the Debian , Fedora+CentOS, MySQL or Drupal rooms :)

Did I mention that :

and I`ll actually be speaking there again about Monitoring MySQL

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 !

Pascal tweeted me te following link.

From the site :

I had written some code to take wikipedia articles and summarise them. I wanted to offer this for use in various places, now the obvious way to offer it is just a web service (via REST, SOAP, etc), but that's boring and I had a cunning plan. Why not offer it over DNS - it is basically a huge associative array and DNS is designed for this stuff.

Some people send way to much stuff over a TXT record .. and then one wonders why DNS is a problem.. it's being abused for all the things wasn't designed in the first place. And people also trust it too much while it never was desgined for that either.

Oh well.. at least IP over DNS is usefull :)

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 . ?

Nils has a good writeup of what Dan Kaminsky talked about at 25C3 Interesting read as after al.. Everything is a funky DNS problem.

Should send him a T-Shirt one day .. he seems to appreciate my site slogan :)

When your favourite ex yahoo employee and mysql guru blogs about a "dns problem" and how he solved it using Twitter you can only smile ;) At last some useful use for Twitter .. when it's up at least ..