David Herron .com

In the wake of a major security flaw found in Java, a petition is circulating demanding that Oracle stop bundling a payola toolbar with the Java runtime. This practice was begun by Sun Microsystems, during the time period I was a Java SE team-member, and is being continued by Oracle. It is to bundle a toolbar, the "Ask Toolbar," with the Java download, such as what's available through the java.com website. Sun, and now Oracle, earns a little bit of money per download.

In January 2010 I attended a launch party for Drupal 7, and was real excited at the new features etc. But I started to look into upgrading my sites, and found a bunch of modules had not been ported to Drupal 7 yet. Eleven months ago, eleven months after that launch party, I posted an inventory of module readiness for upgrading my sites to Drupal 7, and still found a number were not ready, though in most cases I was feeling shy of modules marked "beta".

One of the things Drupal does is generate emails for a variety of reasons. For example new account registrations include a step to validate the account, by sending an email containing a validation link. On the large online community website I run, a long-running problem has been that the validation email does not always get delivered. This shows up as a user registration that never gets validated.

I've been hosting my Drupal sites on Dreamhost for quite awhile, but it's time to move on. They're a decent web hosting provider that offers a combination that suits me well, but if you peruse http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ you see a lot of customers complaining bitterly about downtime and slow service. I'm one of those customers, but do not want to focus on this part of the story, and instead want to focus on seeking a proper useful home to house my websites.

This project just popped up on my radar - Canonical Entity Representation (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/197588 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/197583). The description of this sounds like it would resolve one of the key critiques I have against Drupal. Namely the lack of a import/export format that's part of Drupal Core. I'd like to call some attention to this and hopefully, as the two posts above suggests, this can be a standard part of Drupal starting with v8.

I remember attending a Drupal7 release party several months ago, 11 months ago actually. It was an exciting time, all this new stuff had gotten into core. I was hoping and looking forward to using the new functionality. But then I started evaluating the status of the contributed modules and realized it wasn't going to be possible. The main blocker at that time was that Views was in a massive rewrite mode leading to Views3, and that this was causing attendant delays in other modules who were depending on Views.

Over the course of time you might add nodes that you later delete, and end up with taxonomy terms that have no nodes. These empty terms add overhead to your site, and add empty taxonomy listing pages. It's best to remove the empty terms.

I said "Overhead".. I don't know all the instances but have seen a couple places where all terms are loaded into memory. If your vocabulary includes empty terms (no nodes for the term) each empty vocabulary term makes for a bigger array that is loaded into memory.

The following are for Drupal 6.. haven't looked at how to do this with Drupal 7.

The season 6 finale, the Wedding of River Song, was an amazing story but within five minutes of finishing the first watching I an anger over the episode erupted. I recorded some of that anger in audio feedback for The Doctor Who Podcast, hopefully they'll play it. Anyway... it was an excellent story with lots of depth, as we've come to expect from Stephen Moffatt, but there's a bit at the end that is just griping me out to no end.

The "Path Redirect" module for Drupal 6 (http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect) is an excellent way to set up redirects from one URL to another. This module can be used for any purpose where you want the HTTP request for URL's on a Drupal website to automatically redirect to another URL. For example :-

• you might want to have a nice URL to promote for some excellent product (example.com/excellent-camera) that lands on a merchant website while hiding the complexity of the merchant URL (making sure to include the affiliate link).

Hilarious retrospective of the entirety of Doctor Who from 1963 up until late 2011 Matt Smith.