The release of Drupal 5 today comes at a time of the year where one makes wishes, and obviously I wish the best for Drupal, be it for our new production workhorse Drupal 5, or its hardly conceived descendant Drupal 6.

So while there's still time for wishes in Drupal 6, here is a selection of three grand wishes :

A few days ago, it was brought to my attention that something had been broken on the PHP-GTK community site during the 5.0 RC2 upgrade. The problem was easily identified as being codefilter.module having been removed during the upgrade and not reinstalled. Of course, not being at my office, I did not have access to the FTP passwords, but just to my admin account, and I did not want to leave the community members in the cold, so I used this small trick.

While attending the Muse concert in Paris Bercy on 2006-12-14, I took particular notice of something rather specific in the sound of the band: their ability to bring out a mix of major and minor chords with full distortion on the bass or guitar, sometimes even superimposed with crystal clear keyboards.

Now, if you've ever tried to play a minor chord with half the distortion Muse actually uses, you've certainly noticed how awful this can sound. I sure did, and hearing this sound great at the distortion and amplification levels of Muse was intriguing. What was going on ?

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.

The PHP-GTK community site has been running on Drupal 5 betas since its creation one month ago, and I thought it really needed a live chart of statistics to match its glorious Garland dress, and GD would allow it. But how does one go about creating charts within Drupal ?

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This table shows which operations are actually documented, used, and implemented, by the e-commerce ProductAPI, hook_productapi().

Browsing the referers leading to my blog, I just noticed one of my recent posts about PHP-GTK2 Console encoding had been noticed by PHPDeveloper, where the reviewers apparently take time to actually read feed to which they point to, instead of merely aggregating them, which allows them to sum up content for their own readers. Now that's what one can call a press review.

The Paradox form system has an interesting peculiarity: any field which happens to be constrained by a foreign key within a native .DB Paradox data model automatically gets lookup values available for the user, but this is not available other database formats, whether they be natively supported within the BDE, or accessed using ODBC, so lookups have to be added in code.

A few days ago, I was glad to learn that this blog had been included in the Planet PHP blogroll. And today, when checking the news, what did I see ?

The problem: while coding PHP-GTK apps, the most elementary debugging method is to use echo or print statements. These are fine and dandy for english or usonian coders, but may be a problem for coders elsewhere around the globe, since PHP scripts are typically stored under UTF-8 encoding to limit i18n headaches, while the console in which their output will be displayed is normally configured to some regional encoding, like IBM850 in Windows/XP French.

So we need a workaround...