I've been giving talks and demos recently of Drupal. There is a best practices guide on the Drupal website but it does not cover some of the things I'd like to figure out.

I've come up with a very nice setup that uses DNS wildcards to send all traffic for a domain (and any sub-domain) to a given server. Apache is then configured to pass it all to Drupal. The enhanced sites functionality in 4.6 is great. Almost. It allows a great deal of flexibility, but there is a database sync issue. I want to give a blank database to each person who signs up for a site. But, I want to give more than the skeleton modules. This isn't too bad to setup one "skeleton" database and copy it each time a new request is made.

Until it comes to updates. Now I've got 100 databases with content in them and an upgrade comes along. Now it is time to upgrade all the databases. Or a new module comes out and we want to use it. So either each database has to be updated or the installation has to be frozen for long periods of time.

Another area I'm working on, in part because of the lousy satellite internet, is synching multiple Drupal installations. For speed and sanity reasons I want to do the editing of templates and most content locally and then have it sync to the central installation(s) of Drupal. No sleep for the weary!

Apple announced Final Cut Studio this morning at an event at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. The promo session by Apple is a lead-off event to this week's National Association of Broadcasters convention in Sin City.

Among the outstanding presentations was the real-time use of iChat AV by the folks over at Scrubs to show how they can review video remotely and collaboratively edit with remote locations. The whole world of live remotes for local TV and other real-time production work.

Included in Apple's announcement were lots of cool features but none that top Final Cut Pro 5's emergence as a multi-camera editing platform. Not only does the new revision of Final Cut do multi-camera but it does so in an incredibly slick way. Watch your feeds in a 4x4 to 16x16 viewer window and select from amongst as many high definition feeds as you would like.

The name Network Solutions might lead you to believe the company is in the business of providing solutions for networking issues. It seems they are instead in the business of providing excuses.

Following several hours in which their account manager login returned an error I called customer service. The form says to "please try again". I did. Many times. A call to customer support led to a few minutes on hold listening to a very poor rendition of the Cannon in D.

Speaking to Chris PHADEUS001 (no last names please), I learned that the problem is an unscheduled maintenance window where they are either incapable or too lazy to put anything on the web. This is more akin to the service expected from Ma Bell in 1960, where their lack of posting to a website could be understood. Even beyond that what sort of call center cannot put a message on their menu explaining the problem.

Evidently Network Solutions discovered a problem that would have caused the information entered to not propagate properly.

Hopefully somebody in the trade press will pick this up and explore how the coincidence occurs that an unscheduled outage occurs late on a Friday evening when seemingly few would notice. I guess the domain registrar migration may come sooner rather than later.