Having to use Trac instead of our usual Drupal Project* setup for a new Drupal project, I just found out a problem which perplexed me for a moment: after following the instructions from the Trac site for a very basic setup, without SVN integration, all seems to work well, up to the point where I started the server.

# tracd --port 8000 /var/www/trac/proj1

The problem

... and went to my browser to http://www.example.com:8000/ only to receive an almost empty page, just saying "Available Projects" and nothing else. No error during trac-admin initenv. And the page was well-formed, showing it was likely not an actual bug.

Googling around the problem showed the issue to be already known, but offered no hint about the solution. What could be wrong ?

I've been keeping track of various technical stats for OSInet's sites for as long as they've been existing (and that means well over 10 years, mind you !), and the June figures show a long expected landmark has been reached : for the first time since the creation of these sites, the operating systems declared as being Unix-ish by user agents (browsers) visiting our sites in June 2008 has broken the 10% barrier (10,08% to be accurate).

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...