Wow, the XKCD webcomic made me sad today: it's fairly uncommon !

Want an Opportunity to shed a tear too and feel you're not a mean Spirit ? http://xkcd.com/695

Most of the time, when working on some piece of code, I'll resort to the configured debugger in my current Zend Studio configuration. And you probably do too :-)

However, I often have to access debug-type information on live sites where installing a debugger is out of the question, and I find myself often resorting to parameter dumps like the following:
<?php
// lazy version for simple cases
function foo_bar($x, $y, $z) {
dsm(func_get_args());
// [...]

// less lazy version for more hairy cases
function foo_baz($x, $y, $z) {
dsm(array('in foo_baz, x' => $x, 'y' => $y, 'z' => $z));
// ...
?>

You've probably being using it too and, of course, after the first few dozen times, it becomes a bit used. So here's a tiny snippet that makes such dumps simpler to type and use :

Sometimes, you want to delete a whole bunch of users, terms, or nodes, say to cleanup a site while developing and still keep its configuration, so reinstalling is not really an option, and the normal content- or user-administration pages get in your way because they only show a limited number of entries, meaning you have to delete page after page of entries.

If you haven't been able to attend DrupalCon Paris, or missed the session I led on Views for developers there, you can find its first part on archive.org:

In case you've found Jeff Miccolis' post about the Extendr module for Flickr great, but have been bothered by the fact that the link on the blog was broken and that comments on that article were closed, the good news is that he made his code available on drupal.org too, at:

http://devseed.svn.cvsdude.com/sandbox/drupal-6/extendr/

In case you've been living under a rock, DrupalCon Paris is happening next week, and features, not one, but two Views Sessions, in addition to merlinofchaos' own CTools sessions on Panels 3 and CTools. One of them being, of course, by yours truly :-)

2011-08-06: UPDATE: now available from my drupal.org sandbox

Just in case you've been living under a rock (but then how did you find this post ?), we will be doing a code sprint next week to bring RDF fields in core for Drupal 7.

Thanks Scor for organizing this.

Misc news this week: the latest site I've been called to work on, for the Etats Généraux de l'Outre Mer, is now online in a heated political context. Good to see our government choose Drupal in such emergency situations.

Also, I've finally updated the blog to Drupal 6. Remaining on D5 was starting to feel weird while I was busy on D6 sites for customers, and the site-specific module is even shorter than it used to be on D5. Yay!

The big news for OSInet, though, is that we're hiring again.