In recent years I have switched from PHP to using Python for most of my programming. That's not because PHP is particularly bad, because having worked with Drupal for most of seven years now, I dismiss that frequent criticism as a mixture of outdated complaints, inexperience and personal taste. PHP doesn't suck, but Python is incredibly awesome. It has lambda expressions! Array slicing! List comprehensions! Lazily-evaluated iterators! In Python, once an algorithm is written down in pseudocode, its implementation is trivial.

Yesterday, the entire Ermarian Network was migrated to a different server. After spending the past four years on millhouse, an AMD Opteron machine with two 2GHz cores and 2GB RAM, it is now hosted on carvin a brand new Intel Xeon with four 2.5GHz cores (hyperthreaded to eight virtual cores) and 16GB RAM. These impressive numbers are of course slightly misleading, since I'm one of a great number of users sharing the server.

This is my first post with the new, custom-created article content type. There is very little to outwardly distinguish it from the blog content type provided by Drupal's blog.module, except that the latter does not have a link to "Arancaytar's blog" below each entry (which is superfluous seeing as I am the only author on this site, and my blog is equivalent to the front page).

Half a year has passed since the last theme change, so tradition dictates I pick a new one again. Actually, this time I wanted to change because Agregado lacks fluid-width support. Seeing your website on a 2000px monitor, all alone in a narrow vertical beam in the center, really makes you question your web skills.

I've toiled on a few more features for the Proxy DB module (described in the past few posts).

Changes include:

After my last post on testing proxy servers, I spent the past 10 or so hours on what inevitably happens whenever I develop even the simplest web application: A Drupal module.

I'm trying to get my Drupal blog to submit every update to my Twitter account. Let's see if it works - I've definitely seen this in action among some Drupalers, so it shouldn't require any tweaking like the Drivel/Taxonomy thing did.

... update, some hours later... well, the Twitter part was easy; it was, predictably, the Drivel/Twitter part that was such horror.

Whoops, a bit of a bug in my code. Let's test it now...

Update: Apparently, not only do I not know how to use str_replace, I'm also clueless about escaping characters in regular expressions.

As a webmaster who uses open source web applications, you frequently have to download software updates. Web software is susceptible to security flaws that must be patched quickly, and even when bug-free it is improved constantly.

If you operate a lot of sites on the same software, you run into a very annoying problem: Every site needs its own codebase. For five MediaWiki sites, you will unzip the same MediaWiki package five times, update it five times, possibly hack your own modifications in it five times, and need five times the diskspace.