blogs

Drupal 7 has been released, and I decided that the occasion warranted an update of the website. I was running (a woefully out of date) version 5, so the update wasn't entirely pain free, as I had to go via Drupal 6 first. That being said, it was less painful than it could have been, I'm sure.

Everything should be up and running ok now, but there is the occasional glitch here and there that I'll look at when I get a chance:

Recently I bought a new CPU, motherboard and RAM, and as I've been doing for some time set about trying to overclock it. I already knew that it should do well, many of the recent Intel CPUs, including the Q6600, are known for being good clockers.

In the end I settled on 3.5GHz, which is very good for a 2.4GHz processor on air cooling. I could probably push it a bit further, but 3.6GHz on air got a bit too hot so the cooling would need to be improved in that case.

A while ago I bought an Icy Dock MB-559 external enclosure (which lets you swap drives by means of attaching a tray/carrier to the drive and slot it into the enclosure, but that's an aside), and connected this to the eSATA connector on the back of my motherboard (by today's standards, a slightly aging ASUS A8N32-SLi).

Spurred by Neil's recent tinkerings over at QPRToday, I went and did something I've been meaning to do for ages: Do a slight face lift.

This one, in a programming and geeky kind of way, is very funny.

I just completed an upgrade of the site from Drupal 4.6 to the newest 5.1 release. The upgrade went fine and without any problems, and everything seems to be working as before. Because the theme I used (Manji) has not been ported to Drupal 5.x, I've had to change the theme. Some minor adjustments to be done, probably, but all in all very good.

It does exactly what it says on the tin. Look at the hello world example, for instance. You have to appreciate pure beauty when you see it. I particularly like the screenshot of whitespace with syntax highlighting.

If you ever wondered how to, here's a page that, despite being old, is still quite funny. In a geeky way, of course.

If you haven't yet been to Uncyclopedia, it's well worth spending a bit of time reading some of their articles. For example, there are many facts about Sauron that are generally not known that may be worth knowing. One of them is that he's a member of the Homeless Insane terrorist organisation.

A wiki can be a very nifty little thing in some situations. We've recently started using this at work in an attempt at encouraging employees to create content (in general documentation, design document) and to discuss areas we're curently.. well, discussing. It's working, too.

In doing a quick search for the (programming) language Squirrel, I stumbled across this article about another squirrel language. A secret one, apparently. Looks like it hasn't been cracked yet, although the article is a year old by now. Oh well, happy squirrelling!

As a developer you regularly run into code that just boggles the mind. It's when you scratch your head and the brain goes "eh?". Sometimes it goes "eeeh eeeh eeeh" like Ann in Little Britain.

Then a colleague pointed me towards a site that is dedicated to such WTF moments. Without further ado, pop over to The Daily WTF and be amused.

I suppose it was only a matter of time until the spam robots found out that anonymous comments were enabled. So I had to disable them - and I truncated the comments MySQL table.

Fuckers.

After a rather tedious job of moving the content across to the new site and content management system, it's all finally done - all the series and stories.

While continuing the Drupal Experiment and trying out various nice themes, I ran into a bit of a problem with some themes appearing for an instant in a very basic and unstyled format before the CSS kicks in and lays out the page the way it's meant to be shown.

After some trial and error, these problems manifested itself across various themes and across various theme engines in Drupal, so the initial suspicion that PHPTemplate might be at fault proved to be wrong.

I just realised that my web space provider has the mod_rewrite module of Apache enabled, so this combined with a little editing of the htaccess rules for the Drupal folder, enabling the Clean URL option in Drupal itself and using Drupal's Path (URL Alias) module the links actually look fairly sane.

Wahey! Can you believe it? After nearly two years (one year and eleven months, to be roughly exact) in limbo, I've finally gotten around to updating my website. At the same time I've experimented a bit with Drupal, a content management system that so far appears to be not only powerful but incredibly flexible and modular.

The old site is still available at boah.boah.us.