I am become as sounding brass

January 6, 2006

Televangilist Pat Robertson suggested Thursday that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was retribution for promoting peace in Israel. While not unusual that I would take issue with the words of Mr. Robertson even this is an amazing new low. In pondering the proper response the only thing appropriate that comes to mind is the following passage from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

Four letter word

January 6, 2006

Stop asking when things will be done and start contributing is one of the messages in Bert Boerland's post Done is a four letter word on the Drupal project. There is a lot of truth in what he says. Open source projects like Drupal are made better with more cooks, not less. This is true. As there usually is, however, there is more to the story.

Backtracking the Drupal project the code freeze for the next release (4.7.0) was scheduled for September 1 and then pushed back to September 15. In the same announcement it was noted that a 4.7.0 release might take "several weeks" after the code freeze. And, now several months later here we sit without a released 4.7 and little progress. Though the latter bit, about little progress, isn't correct. The feeling to many people, namely the many folks implementing Drupal on servers around the world, those folks checking to see if this next great version of this great tool, don't see much progress. November came and went with more hopeful talk and now we're into the new year with Beta 2 aging a few weeks.

While it can be really frustrating watching and waiting, helping out in the forums etc. the frustrating part is feeling like little progress is being made. The truth is that gobs of work are being done each and every day. However, if like many Drupal users you don't get into the nittiy gritty details it seems to be posts every few months, or weeks, that speak optimistically of an upcoming release punctuated by waits that grow ever longer in the mind's eye. While it takes a little digging at least with open development processes you can see proof of progress if you take the time to look for it. On the other hand with closed development processes it's a different deal.

Dealing with malformed atom requests in Drupal

January 4, 2006

Recently a mostly annoying occurrence was filling up my log files with errors. The problem seems to be with some atom news readers. The standard atom feed for this site would get turned into a request that would be "/atom/atom/atom/atom".... and so on. Often longer than Apache knew what to do with it.

So, a single line added to the httpd.conf file solves the problem.

  RewriteRule ^(.*)atom/atom(.*)$ - [G,L]

Now the request is met with a 410 error - resource gone. With a little luck this will lead the coders of the errant software to start picking up on the problem.

The problem with MLS

January 4, 2006

The New York Times had an article on Monday that covers the many ways that traditional real estate commissions are under attack. The article starts with a couple of paragraphs about cousins' Christie Miller, 38, and Mary Clare Murphy, 51, who run FsboMadison.com - a website that takes real estate listings for $150 and makes them available online.

The article notes that the cousins' website draws more traffic than the traditional multiple listing service (MLS) sites controlled by real estate agents. Really? Having recently spent some time on several different MLS-backed sites I can see why. While I don't know the complete justification that folks use to convince themselves, it seems most MLS subscribers are more concerned about trying to acquire customers by trapping them on websites than providing information.

Sucking consumers in like they don't have choices is a very un-web thing to do. I most often want to look at real estate listings late in the evening and want good information. Provide a site with good information and I'll be there. Put hurdles in my path, preventing me from getting to the information I need and I'll go elsewhere until I find somebody who will make the information easy to access - and they'll get my business.

The next digital rights war?

January 3, 2006

A major announcement from the Disney ABC Television Group today lends support to the idea that video over the internet is taking off. The new titles added will include clips from yesterday's games as well as free video podcasts taking clips from popular news and information shows.

How long until we have a war over not just the broadcast rights but the delayed video rights as well? When will the first college turn it's sideline video into a full-blown video podcast of the season? It is quite possible to choose to avoid the score of a game and watch it tomorrow. What will it do to the ESPN model of charging $20 for a weekend's games if I can download the one game I want to see on Sunday for $2. Sure the quality won't be great, but then again I'm as likely to be doing other things while watching anyway.

Updating the Drupal archive module for 2006

January 3, 2006

If you clicked on the calendar archive to the right of the page in the last couple of days you'd notice it didn't allow you to choose "2006" articles.

A quick change to archive.module and all is well. The line in question is this line:

  $years = drupal_map_assoc(range(2000, 2005));

By changing the 2005 to 2006 it again works. However a better solution would include a bit more code that checks for the current year and makes it go through the current year. To save cycles the current year could be specified in a configuration file or stored in the database though each of those has their own issues associated with it.

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