For the last few months I’ve been working on a project that is part website and part data processing.

In theory the website is the bulk of the project, but in practice processing the data has taken a disproportionate amount of resources.

Data exchange with another organisation is always tricky - and in this case we have incoming data that doesn’t conform to specification, business rules that change, and a daily data import to run.

The code I’ve been working on has been through a couple of versions, and now I have in mind a third

Drupal allows you to create multiple sites sharing some or all of the same code and optionally sharing some database tables.

The documentation for the Drupal settings file http://api.drupal.org/api/file/sites/default/settings.php/5/source

includes the following

One of the things that is confusing about Drupal is the use of the word node.

Going to the dictionary doesn’t help much:

• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/node
• http://www.answers.com/topic/node

In my opinion “node” is just the wrong word.

It seems there is a bug in MySQL which is causing restores to run very slowly (hours instead of minutes)

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=33057

The bug is fixed in http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/releasenotes-cs-5-0-67.html

But Ubuntu hasn’t updated yet….

Comments in code are widely used and generally (but not universally) accepted as a good thing.

Databases can also accommodate comments - but these seem to be very rarely used.

I’m of the opinion that database comments are very useful.

PracticalWeb Ltd today joined the Drupal Association

The membership fee helps support the drupal.org infrastructure and marketing costs.

Unit testing Drupal can be pretty challenging as it’s hard to isolate parts of the code.

One of the surprising things about Drupal is that it doesn’t use object oriented coding.

There’s a good page in the Drupal documentation about this

http://api.drupal.org/api/file/developer/topics/oop.html

It makes a good case for the design of Drupal, and goes a long way to explain why Drupal feels more OO than the code looks at first glance.

Drupal 6 has been out for a while now, Drupal 7 is in the works, and yet most sites still seem to be using Drupal 5. Is it time to upgrade yet?

If it was just the core features the answer would be simple, Drupal 6 is better and is fully stable.

The problem is that many (maybe most) of the features of a Drupal website are powered by contributed modules, and modules written for Drupal 5 don’t work with Drupal 6.

One of the few things that Linux hasn’t done well is allowing the user to add or change monitors.

It looks like this is changing with the new utility xrandr.

I haven’t fine tuned this yet (or even tested it much) but I do have a dual head display - with the virtual screen spanning two displays.

I’ll come back and document this properly - but for now here’s what I did.