Computing

So DrupalCon Europe is out for 2018. But that does not mean a EU-level event does not exist, to bind the community beyond the specialization of DevDays, FrontEnd United, CxO, GovDays, and all the DrupalCamps. Drupal Europe is that event, and to support the community who wants to prove a large Drupal conference can reasonably happen after all the trouble the Drupal Association had with it, the best way it to register for the conference.

ASAP.

So join me there :-)

While exporting a project from Unfuddle in order to import its issues to Jira, I took a look at the other files beyond backup.xml and the media/ directory. Turns out that when Unfuddle provides you with a project backup, it includes the repositories in an undocumented (on their site, at least) format, under the dmp file extension. Let's find out how to actually use these.

When auditing or reviewing an unknown code base, I often have to decide which files to examine in priority. Beyond the usual heuristics for Drupal projects (hint: look at templates in D7), how can one find the parts most likely to contain problems ? This simple command set can help pinpoint troublemaking files quickly.

I've long been receiving quite high volumes of comment spam on this blog, which is why comments have always been pre-moderated. And, of course, there is usually not much to think of it. Not so with one of the spam messages posted today, which unwittingly provided an unexpected insight into the current mechanisms uses by spammers.

Just noticed this little gem on a 10Gen course, about the respective names of the CRUD operations in common practice, versus the equivalent operations in SQL and in MongoDB. Links point to Wikipedia for SQL and the relevant MongoDB documentation page for the MongoDB column.

mysql -BNe 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TABLES' information_schema

The symptoms

While browsing my servers Munin reports, I recently noticed how used disk space was constantly increasing on a filesystem which should not have been seeing such growth. After a bit of digging, it appeared the /usr/local/var/varnish/(host) directory was filled with dozens of sparse files all named varnish.??????. What could have been happening ?

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 ?