Unless you've been living under a rock these last few weeks, you are aware of the fork of OpenOffice.org created by The Document Foundation (TDF), called LibreOffice (LO), and wondering whether some code was already usable.

Well, I happened to have a mostly unencumbered Saturday, so I took it to try my hand at building the latest LO dev build from TDF...

The second Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) will be held on saturday 9th and sunday 10th, October 2010 at "Carrefour Numérique de la Cité des Sciences", in Paris. OSDC is a cross-language event, set up by multiple french language-specific non-profits:

• PERL: Mongueurs de Perl
• Python: AFPy (Association Francophone Python)
• Ruby: Ruby France
• SmallTalk: European Smalltalk User Group

Much like many Drupal devs, I happen to make fairly intensive use of Dropbox, and even use a "pro50" account to sync my always increasing set of "current" source folders, including checkouts of all major Drupal versions and lots of contrib.

Which means that, beyond the number of gigabytes of data Dropbox has to sync, the number of the files making up these gigabytes has also been increasing, currently to around 100k files. After I started playing with checkouts of the Drupy project in preparation for the Drupyx experiment, I noticed that, when I created some new files under the Drupy directories, their creations and subsequent changes would not be tracked by Dropbox, but they would correctly sync if I renamed the Drupy directory itself or a directory above it. Something like this:

And all this while operations on a PC running Windows tied to the same account did not experience any similar problem. What could be going wrong ?

So we Drupalistas were supposed to gather for some sort of social event at a concept bar (more below), and I bid my time walking the subway corridors, among the incredible crowd one can find out in Munich any Saturday evening around 8pm, as shown below.

So I'm in Münich for the Drupal Dev Days since the beginning of the afternoon, (and no concert suggestion for this weekend, tsk, tsk !), and as always when visiting a neighbour country, I find the little differences more revealing of deeper cultural ravines than the obvious language difference

If you like Opera Dragonfly, as I do, you may have stumbled upon a small annoyance: if Opera is configured to start with the previous window, if you use Dragonfly in a separate window - maybe because you use a dual screen config - if you happen to close the main Opera window with Dragonfly still open, and close Dragonfly afterwards, then you will notice that Opera complies with your choices: when you restart it, it restarts with the main browsing window closed and Dragonfly opened.

At this stage, closing Dragonfly won't help, because Opera will faithfully restore it at every launch. Annoying. Luckily, there is a very simple workaround if you find yourself in that situation...

Every so often, I get asked about whether it is really worth it to chase double quotes and constructs like print "foo $bar baz", and replace them with something like echo 'foo', $bar, 'baz', or even to remove all those big heredoc strings so convenient for large texts.

Of course, most of the time, spending hours to fine comb code in search of this will result in less of a speedup than rethinking just one SQL query, but the answer is still that, yes, in the infinitesimal scale, there is something to be gained. Even with string reformatting ? Yes, even that. But only if you are not using an optimizer.

Just don't take my word for it, Sara Golemon explained it years ago with her "How long is a piece of string" post, in 2006.

That's a no-brainer sort of question, is it not ? Or... is it ?

I noticed today that one of my sites returned 403 Access denied on various pages with URLs like format/<foo>, although it was an alias for a taxonomy/term/<tid> taxonomy path which was actually available when not aliased. What could be going on ?

Like any VCS, CVS is able to show the status of the current directory when compared with the repository from which it is checked out.

However, unlike SVN, GIT, or bzr, which by default show only a rather compact set of information, CVS provides already verbose information, with only an option to add even more, and no terse mode.

Luckily, piping its output through a few commands allows one to obtain such a compact cvs status display. I tend to use this, aliased to cvsst.

alias cvsst="cvs st | grep -vE 'revision|Sticky|^$|==|Commit' | sed -r 's/^File: |Status: //g'"