Archive 8/2006

Seems like at least some music companies are thinking about new delivery methods. So happened with Universal Music which according to various news sites out there are going to offer in cooperation with SpiralFrog.com free music downloads while showing you ads during the download process. The Guardian has a very detailed article about this new offer which will launch this year in the US and somewhen next year also in Europe.

Another book of the Star Trek: Vanguard series finished "Summon the Thunder" is the second book after Harbinger and also continues only a few months after the end of the first book of the series and also integrates the Romulans into the story line.

For the last couple of days I've been playing around a little bit with Django, a RubyOnRails like webframework written in Python. Sure, you can compare it to RoR if you want, but in my opinion it has enough unique features to set it apart from the Ruby framework. One thing I'm so far missing though from Django is some of the caching functionality from RoR.

Django offers 3 types of caching (from what I've learned so far):

1. Caching of a whole site
2. Caching of single views
3. Caching of single variables

All nice and good, and I really like how this seems to be done, but I'm somehow missing a way, to explicitly expire a cached view. Think about following scenario: You have a weblog with posts on it, your frontpage holds a list of the latest posts in a teaser-like view which also includes the number of comments made to each post. This count at the end of the day isn't really all that important, so you simply cache the whole page for let's say 10 minutes.

Seems like Dell wasn't Sony's only customer. Yesterday Apple too started an exchange program for batteries sold between October 2003 and August 2006 ... and guess who has one of the affected batteries

After noticing this yesterday night thanks to this article on Golem I went right away to order a replacement, but somehow the form didn't accept my battery's serial number. Well, seems like the server had just too much load because now it finally seems to work Let's see, how long it will take Apple this time to ship the new battery.

Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez has published another tool for downloading videos from YouTube. youtube-dl is written in Python and a commandline script (day of the commandline tools today, ey?) (Thanks William Pramana for that link). Besides actually downloading the video, it also has an option for only printing the video's real URL on YouTube, so that you can start the download process with whatever download manager you like. The only disadvantage here is, that the script also prints some text alongside the actual URL, so it's not you usable for some piping action. Not all that hard to patch that.

First of all, I'm a wget junkie. I think I haven't used the download manager in Firefox for quite some time now simply because with wget everything is simply "better". Ok, the major advantage is that it allows to resume downloads So since I'm now a quite pleased IGN reader, I also wanted to use wget there to download all these nice videos.

If you've visited this blog 2 weeks or so before the transition to Drupal, you've probably noticed a neat little WordPress plugin back then that allows guests to subscribe to posts to get new comments via e-mail.

As far as I know, such a module for some reason was never made for Drupal. This has changed now thanks to Christoph C. Cemper who gave a nice rundown of what he wants and what he's got so far here.

Let's see how this project evolves and esp. how big the patch for the core comment.module will become, but hopefully not that large to pose a problem for core updates (although I doubt it if only some get a better positioning).

Thanks D'Arcy Norman for this link

I really don't understand my PC anymore. Last Saturday the fan for its northbridge cooler died. Today finally stores were open again and I could go shopping and found something nice: Klagenfurt finally has a hardware store (not pots ore something like that ) that also has good stuff There I found a nice little passive cooler for around 4EUR and some other things I was looking for ... after having been in 3 other stores before without success.

Seems like a big release day for Google. First they announced, that Google Analytics is now open to the public (so no invitation required anymore) and this morning I then receive a mail from Writely saying, that I can now finally get an account there Writely still seems to be invite only, but at least it appears that they are finally giving them out again

I guess I will now finally give Google Analytics a try and see how it hold up against Performancing Metrics. I still think it's strange, though, that Google has set some limitations for the free Analytics accounts ...

How do you determine what version of Drupal you've installed? Especially with older versions this might become a little bit problematic since the VERSION constant in the system.module was only introduced with Drupal 4.7.x.

A classic method is to simply look at the changelog of your installation ... if you still have it around. If not, you will have to start with some tricks.
iedude asked what to do in this case on the Drupal board and I started digging around a little bit.