I just found out a very strange PHP feature by browsing the PHP-GTK2 API with the Reflection classes : spaces can be used in some alien places, like variable names.

But the doc says you can't !

Well, try this in PHP 5.2.5, for instance:

I was working on an existing site today, and after installing the e-commerce 3.4 suite (EC), noticed something was very weird: product type modules were enabled, all basic EC modules were there too, and yet, when I created products by hand, the "Anonymous purchase" fieldset appeared, but nothing else from EC.

Worse, when saving the new products, they were properly created in the {node} table, but never appeared in the {ec_product} table, which caused them never to appear as products in the admin products list of the product view available to users. What could be going on ?

The OSInet team recently attended Solutions Linux, a trade fair focused on FLOSS, and while chatting with a sales engineer from a company specialized in Typo3, got asked which CMS we used, and of course answered "Drupal".

At that point, that person flinched somehow, acknowledging that Drupal was indeed one of the "Big 3" in the CMS space, along with Typo3 and Joomla, but was plagued with security issues making it rather unfit for professional deployment, as opposed to Typo3, which took security issues seriously. Continuing the discussion, it appeared that company has indeed at least acquired some Drupal knowhow too, due to customer request, but the person doing the criticizing was not directly familiar with Drupal.

A few months ago, I discovered the Lilypond music typesetting system, and thought I had stumbled upon some sort of holy grail: here was an open source system which, at last, allowed me to write music much like program code, and did not jump me through the hoops of a UI in order to create scores and the MIDI files representing them.

2007-08-23: site updated to Newsflash 0.12 : the Helvetica selector is gone, which means some of the content of this post no longer applies.

I've just given this blog a facelist using the Roople NewsFlash theme, and I'm somehow dubitative about it:

• on the plus side
  • the 3 "user" blocks above content and the 3 other ones below content are a neat feature
  • the color balance feels good to me, in either of the 3 predefined colors
  • overall, it works way better than my "nested" theme a few months ago
• on the minus side
  • although I tried various content layouts using the 3 user blocks, I couldn't get anything fit properly in them: it seems these will be specifically useful when a site has snippets of equivalent size to fill in them. This could probably be news (the theme isn't called Newsflash for nothing) or ads
  • on my screen at least, the text appears blurry, especially in Firefox
  • generally speaking, it seems bold font is used too much, with essentially the same character sizes for title, tags, and various links. I think some more gradation in font effects would be welcome
  • the site slogan is incorrectly positioned in MSIE
  • in Opera and Firefox, the site slogan ascenders collides with the site name descenders
  • the logo display code is wrong (relative URLs); I had to tweak it in page.tpl.php to accomodate the site folder structure
  • the logo setting doesn't apply properly

The google_gadget module is now available directly from my sandbox on drupal.org, at http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/sandbox/fgm/google_gadget/.

It should make it simpler to use than having to gather the pieces from my post explaining the module.

It's 2007, people ! Rejecting Opera for its lack of standards compliance and advocating MSIE and Netscape Navigator instead is just ... well, you know what.

Can't but wonder whether they heard about the Acid test, or about that small, relatively unknown browser named Firefox.

Earlier today, I just happened to go check an article on the PHP-GTK community site using MSIE, which is a fairly infrequent occurrence considering how I spend most of the day in Opera, and noticed the PageRank green bar, which had until now remained at zero as the site was still too recent to be ranked, now had an alluring value...

After drowning my faithful old keyboard with my morning coffee, I had to replace it and, after taking some time to find a corded keyboard without a zillion useless keys, without shiny platic, with cursor keys in their standard location, and a reasonable touch feeling, I bought an OEM version of the Logitech Internet Keyboard 350 USB and am indeed quite satisfied with the keyboard look and touch.

No driver

Now, minimal though that keyboard is, it still has these small multimedia keys on top, and under XP they're handled by default. Most choices were just fine, but the media player defaulting to RealPlayer didn't fit my wishes: I'd rather run VLC in these cases to show FreeTV. But the keyboard isn't supplied with a driver, and installing Logitech's setpoint™ actually removes functionality to these keys when compared with the XP default driver. So exit SetPoint and back to the default driver.