I’ve been using version control for a long time, but I haven’t used CVS much since the first day I tried Subversion.

(Git seems great but isn’t the same kind of drop-in upgrade that CVS to Subversion was)

Things I forgot

Drupal has a fairly easy to meet set of requirements http://drupal.org/node/502452

But Drupal projects are free to set their own rules in this area and Drush has used functions only available in PHP 5.2 - as far as I can see this is just the json functions.

It’s great that Amazon actually offer a version of their MP3 downloader for Linux - just a shame that it doesn’t work for many distributions.

Fortunately clamz is available

It’s a great little command line utility with a very forgettable name.

Test the hard drive with

smartctl -t long /dev/hd?

This may take hours to run and will do so as a background process.

I recently bought a Sony e-reader, the main Linux package to support this is calibre but I found that it wouldn’t automatically sync my ebooks.

http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/user_manual/faq.html#what-devices-does-app-support The FAQ says

The linux kernel can export two version of SYSFS, one of which is deprecated.

I seem to be progressively going Google, it started with search but for a long time I resisted the lure of Google’s other treats.

However since I got an Android phone I’ve been getting slowly sucked in with accounts on Gmail, Picassa, Google, Calender, and now Google Apps

One thing I found out is that you can’t upgrade from a Gmail account to a Google Apps one what you have to do is create a new account and do a lot of exporting/importing.

Drupal has a lot of great strengths and some weaknesses

The following are the key areas of Drupal that (as a programmer) I would like to see improved.

I’ve had an account with O’Reilly’s Safari books on and off for years

I’ve cancelled it before because of design issues that rendered it unworkable for me.

This time they have “upgraded” the site from an AJAX based layout which allowed me to choose between “print fidelity” and “HTML view”.

Drupal is a very flexible CMS which can be extended to provide the functionality needed for may different types of website.

I’ve worked on a few projects where I was brought in for my Drupal expertise, but in the end felt that Drupal wasn’t a good solution in these particular circumstances. So I’ve been pondering what sorts of projects is Drupal best suited to.

I’ve been working in the CMS arena for 10 years, and the whole time I’ve been expecting one or more “industry standard” CMS’s to come along, but instead we’ve seen thousands of competing products with almost every web agency claiming to have CMS product.

While development costs have come down a long way due to greater experience and code re-use they still haven’t come down anywhere close to the level that people are used to from purchasing shrink-wrapped mass market software.

Clients have been getting fed up of high costs and vendor lock-in.

In this context I’ve seen many clients specifying Drupal as a requirement when putting projects out to tender – in the hope of saving cost and avoiding lock in.