Day in, day out

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.

A simple "directory" module, which I did at FOSDEM for Kineta Systems as a tutoring demo, is available in my Sandbox on Drupal.org.

This is a smallish demo module to explain the basics of building such code, and possibly work on it. For deployment purposes, though, you should rather use the existing Directory module by Augustin (aka "beginner").

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).

If you are coming to Szeged too, we'll probably meet there !

With OSInet focusing more heavily now on Drupal services, the company is now offering internships for students interested in working on Drupal.

First things first, I've offered to mentor for the Google Summer of Code, and would be specifically interested if a student picked up the live Drupal backup project if it came to be approved.

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.

After almost six months without abuse following the installation of the captcha module, a spammer found its way through it, to promote a ringtones site.

Not that it did him/her much good, since comments are premoderated anyway, but still...

Sheer luck, of astute pattern matching and module workaround ? Oh well, it's still six months of peace gained. Well worth the almost nonexistent hassle, it seems.

In just one drawing, Randall Munroe sums up why you want to think twice or more before giving in to the blanket EULAs you have to agree to when choosing DRM-laden HD content. So why haven't you clicked to see that drawing yet ?

"Approved content". Oh my !

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...