These Things Matter to Me

These Drupal links matter to you 20080909

2008-09-09T15:45:00.001-07:00

Drupal consultancy Lullabot has a new podcast out. It mostly recaps last week's Drupalcon Szeged, and is good as always.

Oh yeah, Lullabot is the primary organizer behind a big Drupal conference, Do it with Drupal. 3 days in New Orleans in December. No BarCamp or Drupalcon, it looks to be a highly curated event, with major speakers from within and outside the Drupal community, 1000-2000 attendees (?). I'm super excited that Drupal is getting a major event like this. The Drupalcons and Drupalcamps are great, but I think this kind of context for Drupal can legitmize in some corporate environments.
I swear I don't work for Lullabot, but another announcement related to them: There are some Lullabot Drupal workshops next week in Portland.
BTW, Drupalcon Szeged was very well documented, often with full videos and slides from the talks. Check out the full session page with links to files and descriptions for the Drupalcon Szeged talks. Bravo to the group who ran it. I've heard only good things from those who attended, that it was a great atmosphere. Also, as somebody viewing from afar, the speed with which they've uploaded videos after the event is quite fast!

This is interesting. Web-learning mainstay Lynda.com has Drupal training videos. As with most Lynda.com content, there are some free samples on the course page. It's great that they have some Drupal training, but it's confusing that they cover MAMP and WAMP installation, but neglect what is by far the most prominent Drupal hosting environment (or any web hosting environment): LAMP (Linux). Maybe the context is proof of concept?
Also, Lynda.com has WordPress coursework up, so Drupal is not the first open source tool to make the cut, but it's still significant that a site mostly known for teaching HTML and Final Cut Pro has Drupal videos.
LA People, DrupalCamp LA is next week, September 13th, 14th

(Very cool Drupal knitting chart by ejhogbin)

How to install the Python prerequisites for the Memetracker Drupal module

2008-09-08T07:12:00.000-07:00

How to install the Python prerequisites for the Memetracker Drupal module.

Usually the installation of Drupal modules is pretty straightforward:

Download module to modules/
Uncompress
Enable
Configure
Profit

But the Memetracker module is a bit different, requiring a bunch of Python stuff, and ideally, "root" on your server. It's not that hard to set up, but if you're not used to installing stuff outside of the Druapl-verse, these notes might help you.

(These instructions are for Ubuntu Hardy Heron. The steps are likely very similar on other Debian-based distributions, including earlier versions of Ubuntu.

I've also successfully installed Memetracker on Centos 5.x/Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.x. I have a document for that coming soon, though the packages and steps are very similar, and you could extrapolate these notes and apply to other Linux versions.)

Most of you should skip to step 2, as you probably already have Drupal running..

1. Make sure you have all "normal" LAMP and Linux utilities installed for your typical Drupal install.

1a. Install the LAMP stuff, mail server stuff that Drupal requires.

# apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql mysql-server php5-gd postfix

(Note: Though Drupal core can run on PHP4, the Memetracker module *requires* PHP5, so that's what we're using here. You don't have to go out of your way to get this on Hardy Heron, but there is a small possibility some of you went out of your way to get PHP4, so I'm steering you towards PHP5 here.)

1b. Though not required to run Drupal, these additional packages make life much easier, and it's just a matter of time before you miss them:

# apt-get install openssh-server wget build-essential groff-base man-db unzip

2. Unlike most Drupal setups, you also need to have some Python resources handy to run Memetracker.

2a. The first bunch of Python tools already have nice Ubuntu packages already made up for you.

# apt-get install python-numpy python-numeric python-dev python

2b. Pyclust doesn't have an Ubuntu package made for it. We need to compile it from source (There will be a python-cluster package in the next Ubuntu version, Intrepid Ibex.)

Get the source:

# wget http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon/software/cluster/cluster-1.41.tar.gz

(Note, this is the newest version as of 20080908. Please check http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon/software/cluster/software.htm for newest version.)

Uncompress the source:

# tar -xvzf cluster-1.41.tar.gz

Now install it:

# cd cluster-1.41

# python setup.py install

You now have all your Python stuff installed.

Let's verify it works:

# python

>> from Pycluster import *

(You will get your Python prompt back if you have your Python stuff installed correctly.)

That's it. You now have your environment ready for Memetracker. There's lots of other stuff you can do to optimize your system for Memetracker, and I have some additional Memetracker documentation coming up. However I noticed an immediate need for this Python stuff to be written down in a step-by-step manner, as many Drupal folks don't usually have to do so much Python/Linux stuff.

When Chrome crashes

2008-09-03T18:05:00.003-07:00

You're almost pleased.

When a page bombs out, it only kills that one tab/window.

Notice only one unhappy tab. The rest go on living.

Monitoring Chrome's Ascent

2008-09-03T12:31:00.000-07:00

In the 24 hours since Google released Chrome, its browser share has reached 2.6%, at least amongst the 45,000 sites tracked by browser stats tool GetClicky.

Do with that information what you like.

(via Techcrunch)

Second big day for Opentape. Community + Policy.

2008-08-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

If you know anything about licensing, and would like to help a great free software project out, considering talking with Opentape. It looks like they need guidance choosing a license, and would prefer to package up some stuff made of disparate permissive licenses (MIT, GPL, etc) along with their own code.
Opentape now has forums! This is great. People are submitting bugs, requesting features... all that good stuff.

New open source music software I'm excited about: Opentape, a muxtape-inspired tool.

2008-08-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

Opentape is an extremely easy-to-install, open source implementation of Muxtape. You unzip it, upload songs, and you're done. No database to set up, no need to edit php files in vi. It looks like Muxtape, except with an unlimited number of songs.

(For those that don't know about about Muxtape, Muxtape is a web-based tool for sharing and listening to music. Like much social software, it benefits from a network effect, getting better and more useful the more people use it, and being hard to explain to people who don't. (Explaining social software to people who don't use it can be frustrating. "It plays music? With your friends?" That's it? Le sigh.)

Muxtape is also basically gone. It became unavailable last week. In their redirect they confirmed some issues with the RIAA. But since the day they went dark, they've made no more public statements about the situation, which is a bit confusing and unfortunate. I don't feel wronged, after all, they were giving us a great free service. But I wish they could communicate a bit more, especially when their software has so many non-infringing uses and passionate users.)

But let's get back to Opentape.

What an opentape looks like for the listener/ visitor (via screenshots from the Opentape live demo):

An administrative view of rearranging songs:
How do you set it up?

Get the Opentape source code to your server, ideally in a place that's in your web's root/user's public area, often this will be "public_html."
Unzip it.
Browse to the Opentape directory on your server, probably something like, "http://yourdomain.com/opentape"
You'll find a fully functioning website awaiting a password of your choosing.
You're done! No database to set up!

Once additional cool thing about Opentape running on your server, rather than on a central service provider's, is that you can actually upload your songs via ftp/sftp, in addition to the normal web-based upload method.

There's also mention of a future ability to federate with other Opentape users across other servers' installations of Opentape.

Let's bring social bookmarking into the enterprise, with Magnolia (and without IBM)

2008-08-24T23:15:00.001-07:00

Last week Magnolia announced plans to open source their social bookmarking software. I haven't been a big Magnolia user (I use the similiarly-purposed delicious), but not for lack of interest or quality. In fact, two of their biggest cheerleaders, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina have always tempted me to port my delicious data in there, by their association alone, but I never got around to it.

But with the recent announcement that Magnolia will go open source, I'm interested not just as a consumer, but as an administrator/ service developer.

I don't really feel like I've had the ability to bring social bookmarking inside the enterprise as a service. For many organizations to feel comfortable going into "the cloud," the service needs to have hooks into SAML -> Active Directory/LDAP, a la Salesforce.com/Google Apps.
OR
I need to have the ability to run things locally on my own server. Until now, neither delicious nor Magnolia had this ability, and now Magnolia will have the ability to do the latter. Let's hope they have a plugin architecture, so somebody can LDAP it.

I'm currently using Drupal and Deki-Wiki in my web/collaboration stack. I could easily see adding Magnolia into that mix. Ideally they could all share user and session information.

The first code for Magnolia (codenamed "M2") is scheduled to drop in September 2008. I'll be watching.

Custom boot messages for your Redhat Linux or CentOS-based virtual appliance

2008-07-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

Upon boot, many virtual appliances automagically start services, log users in, or display helpful messages beyond what a normal OS would.
After all, a primary use-case of virtual appliances is to act more like an application than a full OS, and ideally would like the user to feel like they're only interacting with an application.

One virtual appliance that I use is MindTouch's open source Dekiwiki appliance (btw, I fully recommend Dekiwiki, my favorite wiki software at the moment.).

The DekiWiki appliance, upon boot, without any user interaction or required login, will display something like this:
This is extremely handy. No login to Linux necessary. Just go to any web browser on your network, and go.

How to recreate the magic in CentOS/Redhat/(probably) Fedora

I'm currently making two virtual appliances based on CentOS Linux (A clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux ). I pretty much copied DekiWiki's rc.local, to identify and print out the current IP, whatever it may be, and direct the user to browse there, without having to login. This was partially successful. But after printing the URL and instruction to the user, the console tty was cleared prior to login prompt appeared, making it so all the helpful info was removed.

Where'd my helpful message go? It was cleared by mgetty.

I had no idea why this was working fine in the Debian-based DekiWiki appliance, and less so in my CentOS-based (Piwik, coming soon!) appliance. After a bit of side-by-side comparison, I noticed that Debian's /etc/inittab calls up /sbin/getty, but CentOS (and Redhat)'s /etc/inittab calls up /sbin/mingetty. mingetty apparently clears the screen, and getty does not.

By adding the --noclear option to mingetty, CentOS will stop clearing the screen, and allow your custom boot message to live on.

Notes.

Here's what to edit in /etc/inittab:

BEFORE

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

AFTER

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear tty6

Original rc.local that finds and prints IP in helpful message (thanks Mindtouch!):

IP=`ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr"|awk -F ' ' '{print $2}' | awk -F ':' '{print $2}'`
echo
echo -e "\033[1mTo access Deki Wiki, please launch a web browser and go to:"
echo
echo " http://$IP"
echo -e "\033[0m"

exit 0

Managing feeds. The doghouse and the kennel.

2008-07-03T00:05:00.000-07:00

Like many of you, I have a love/hate relationship with my feeds. (Remind me one day to tell you about my feed: bottomless popcorn theory).

But today I'm here to tell you about two helpful strategies I use with my feeds.

The Doghouse.

Invented by a friend of mine, the Doghouse is feed probation. Basically you're marking a feed, by tag, or folder, as "in the Doghouse." You're disappointed in this feed. It's not living up to expectations. There are many reasons why a feed may get sent to the Doghouse. Maybe all of a sudden it went "partial," maybe images stopped working, maybe the past 30 items have been about a topic you're not interested in and you suspect the shift is permanent. Maybe somebody just got an iphone, and ever since it's gone downhill. You don't want these feeds to get mixed in with the good feeds, but you don't want to totally fire the feed quite yet. Send it to the Doghouse.

The Kennel.

The Kennel is just a vacation for feeds. For me, the Kennel is usually when there's nothing wrong with the feed, but I need to edit stuff down either for time or focus reasons. If you have a major project due, and can't deal with distraction, you may want to move all feeds unrelated to your project, to the Kennel.

Maybe it's the week before Macworld, and you just don't feel like reading 12 posts a day about iphone video camera rumors. Maybe you're on a budget, and reading about luxury hotels hurts right now. Maybe you have a Drupal deadline, and only want to read about Drupal and Linux for two weeks.

There are plenty of reasons to drop your feeds of at the Kennel, it doesn't mean you love them any less.

YouTube is still magic

2008-06-29T23:55:00.000-07:00

(A quick thought about YouTube that was too long for twitter.)

The sweet spot in a YouTuber's creative life is right after they feel the power, access, and infinite potential of YouTube, but before they get bummed by the haters. You know, that phase when he/she's making 4 videos a day.

"I said I wasn't going to make another video today, but I just wanted to respond to desi64. Desi64 (I hope I'm saying your name right), I agree with you..."

I know people get impatient with YouTube, and I agree it's a petri dish for many community "don'ts," but I don't think its diversity,activity, and pulse is matched by anything else on the Internet.

Google Reader lets you add notes now!

2008-05-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

Maybe my friends and I just have too high of an opinion of how amusing our commentary is, but we've long-awaited the ability to leave notes on our Google Reader Shared Items. And now, perhaps responding to services like FriendFeed where you can comment on anything, Google Reader lets you leaves notes!

Here's how it looks:

Video: Drupal vs. WordPress. Presentation given at LUGRadio Live USA, 2008. San Francisco, CA

2008-04-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

This weekend Selena and I spoke at the charming and hospitable LUG Radio Live USA, in San Francisco, CA. The topic was Choosing between Drupal and WordPress. It was very civil. A few people have asked for the video of our presentation, so I've uploaded it above with a Flash embed. More ambitious full-on video file to come later.

So much dramz. Choosing between WordPress and Drupal.

2008-04-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Selz and I are giving a presentation on choosing between WordPress and Drupal at LUG Radio Live in San Francisco this weekend. She and I agree to disagree.

Preview screencast of Wordpress 2.5's gallery feature

2008-03-26T09:47:00.000-07:00

Wordpress's Matt Mullenweg previews a very cool feature of the soon-to-be-released Wordpress, small photo galleries in a post without painful manual layout. (And yes, there are plenty of shots of the cool new dashboard.)

Help artists be artists. A defense of drupalmodules.com

2008-03-19T23:56:00.001-07:00

The myth of centralization, the reality of distributed information.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it's that that:

authoritativeness is subjective
information is distributed
if anything ever seems centralized, it's only because giant pockets of activity are hidden, and once surfaced, we can see, "oh yeah, information is distributed!, better to have it available, than invisible!"

This applies to all sorts of activities and information, but today I'm talking about software reference material, in specific, Drupal reference material.

Drupal is an incredibly popular content management system framework. You can call it other things. Drupal helps you make websites.

Drupal's fight to centralize

I'm relatively new to Drupal, quite like it, and recommend it frequently. That said, I have some issues with it, and among them what seems like peer pressure in the Drupal community to not create, or feel self-conscious about creating, Drupal resources outside of Drupal.org. There is a surprising lack of websites about Drupal given how popular it is. This is thoroughly confusing as everybody knows that with both proprietary and open source software, bands, artists, etc... having a breadth of resources/fan sites/ forums is a sign of a healthy, thriving community/market/mindshare. There's a time and a place for "many eyes" and joining large group efforts (like Drupal.org) and there's a time and a place for shirking mass-meetings, votes, digging in by yourself or a few collaborators, and making something totally fresh, especially for "proof of concept." Neither approach is better or worse, but they each have their time and place, and nobody should feel guilty or self-conscious for working hard on their own and making something.

Recently a non-Drupal.org resource was created, drupalmodules.com. This has been mildly controversial within the Drupal community. Drupalmodules.com is too new for me to honestly judge on utility alone, but without a doubt, it's purpose is undeniable: navigating the world of Drupal modules is very challenging, for many different reasons. While many within the Drupal community agree there needs to be a way to sift through modules by "quality" (there are wildly varying degrees of quality), the problem is bigger than just that. Quality aside, it's challenging just to know if you're picking the module that mostly closely scratches your itch... Anyway, Drupal modules: tough to navigate, agreed! Not agreed? That making drupalmodules.com was the right thing to do. Crazy, right?

Apparently there have been discussions for ages on a rating system for modules on Drupal.org, let alone a general redesign of the site, and its sub-sites. Maybe people think drupalmodules.com undermines those efforts?

Really people, there's no downside to having another Drupal resource. In bizarro-land, the downside is that people who believe in centralizing everything, think the cost of keeping track of things and managing quality is not worth the benefit of having constantly-created resources, failing-fast, iterating often, and innovating often. In that reality, people should stop creating things, unless it's a thing inside the heavily formalized, but tracked, "system."

But on my planet, planet Internet, we're enjoying the abundance! (and we have RSS readers) John, thanks so much for working on drupalmodules.com! I hope it doesn't cause you too much grief. I hope you get lots of donations, and don't feel self-conscious about putting ads up on your site (unless you don't like them :D ). Do not feel self-conscious about the success or failure of your site! I hope more Drupal websites get born. I highly dig Drupal, and think it will get better faster not just with an ever-growing gigantic body of Drupal.org community members, but with highly-motivated independent visionaries who use Drupal as a canvas to express their vision.

Don't control artists.

We all know the expression "design by committee," and how it's a derisive term used to describe the dynamic of when the lack of a cohesive vision dilutes quality. And it's no secret that user experience and design is one of the most common criticisms of Drupal. So it's extra discouraging when the very thing that will lead to improved experience and design in Drupal, escape from design by committee, is frowned upon. Big groups are great for fixing bugs, raising money, and lot of other stuff. I don't want the awesome Drupal.org community to go anywhere. I just want it to recognize and appreciate that lots of cool Drupal stuff might not come from Drupal.org, but can still help Drupal.org.

VMWare Linux anti-patterns. How VMware is kind of neglecting the Linux experience

2008-03-17T23:22:00.000-07:00

I like VMware stuff a lot, and write about them regularly, usually in a positive way, so I write this list of VMware Linux anti-patterns with only good intentions.

Lately I've been feeling a bit bummed by VMware's deprecated Linux experience, and Windows-centric mentality. If VMware gets too Windows-centric, it'll only be competing with Microsoft. I want VMware to do well against Microsoft! And I believe that to do so, it needs to deliver an experience that doesn't marginalaize Linux users.

Here's how VMWare can improve the Linux experience:

Improve the vmware-tools install on Linux guests. (All VMware products, all host OS's)
On a Windows guest, you run a binary (by clicking it!), and you're done. On the Linux side, you run a binary (most likely via command-line), and then visually, you'd think you were done. but you're not. You installed it, now you configure it. Seriously, whenever I train or help users with this part, I feel guilty/embarrassed about how idiosyncratic it feels. The output of the rpm/install script never tells you "now you configure it." Sure the docs do. But on Windows you don't have to do all that. VMware, I won't hold you responsible for the command-line parts, that's (mostly) in Linux's hands. But you could longterm do away with the configure, and short-term, announce at the end of the install that, "Now it's time to configure."
Make a Virtual Infrastructure client for Linux.
You made one for Windows. I think you love Windows more than you love Linux. (And yes, I am aware of the web client. I'll pretend you didn't suggest that.)
VMware Converter is way more difficult with Linux than Windows.
- The VMware Converter program itself only runs on Windows
- Converting Linux physical-to-virtual VM's is a more burdensome process for Linux guests, with more rules and hoops than Windows guests have.
I feel like you're slowly taking away ssh/ "service console"/ file system access to your ESX-based products. You've only done this to 3i so far. And there is a workaround. But the vibe I get (I hope I'm wrong) is that you're trying to wean us off of standards communications and file-system access to this stuff.
Give VMWare Server 2.0 a Linux client.
I know you took away the non-web client from both Windows and Linux, but since Windows people can use the new VI client to access VMWare Server, I'm still counting this as a ding against Linux users.

Real talk.

Drupal "on rails." One of the ways Acquia's commercial Drupal will work

2008-03-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

One of the challenges of Drupal is there is always more than module to scratch any itch, including some included modules (especially easy to reach for). And more than once I've chosen a module or approach to solve a problem, only to find out later about a superior solution I wish I would have known about earlier.

So it's a great relief to hear that Acquia will help guide us down the road of module selection by including a bunch on their to-be-released Drupal distro, code-named Carbon.

Modules currently under consideration:

(via a friend, this could be changed later, go here for freshest info (login required))

What’s Included

Carbon will include the latest release of Drupal 6 core along with a carefully selected set of modules. We are selecting modules based on their relevance to common social publishing use cases for both public-facing web sites and intranet team collaboration sites. The module set is still under review. Currently, it includes:

Page layout: Panels 2
Custom content: CCK, Date, Imagefield, File
Views: Views 2
Lightweight markup: Marksmarty
WYSIWYG: Kupu
Scheduled publishing: Workflow, Actions
Image management: As fields - Imagefield, Imagecache; As nodes - Image, Image assist
Events: Calendar
Forums: Forum
Comment spam filter: Mollom
Social bookmarks: TBD
Content rating: Voting API, Fivestar
Search: in core, Solr
Categorization: in core
RSS: in core
Content aggregation: tbd
Workflow: Workflow
Content versioning: Core, Diff
Tag clouds: Tagadelic
SEO URLs: Path Auto
Utilities: Primary Tag, Custom pager, JS Tools, Google Maps, Google Analytics, Wiki freelinks
Import / migration: tbd
Authentication: Persistent login, Securesite, LDAP, OpenID
User Groups: Organic groups
Email gateway: tbd
Email notification: Subscriptions

Two Dudes, One Drupe: Drupalmao, new Drupal videocast

2008-02-20T01:01:00.000-08:00

New Drupal show alert! Drupal enthusiasts probably already know about Lullabot's excellent podcast/videocast. And now they have some company. Drupalmao has just launched, which is a casual, DIY show, not unlike Diggnation, where two friends in NYC/NJ just talk about stuff they'd probably talk about even without the camera there, and it's fun and super informative.

One of the critical skills for any Drupal developer/ administrator is constantly adjusting and tweaking your approach to your site(s) with an awareness of fading/emerging modules and how they're best used. In my first night with Drupalmao, I already learned about one module I hadn't heard of at all, and another one whose name I recognized, but whose purpose I was unclear on.

Keep up the good work guys!

Sun buying Virtualbox-maker Innotek

2008-02-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

(Screenshot of a Windows guest in a Mac OS X host, using VirtualBox)

Most Ubuntu users have long known about Virtualbox, the confusingly-versioned (they have an "open source" version, and a "full" (their word, not fine) version ) VMware Workstation-like tool. It's been in Ubuntu repositories for a while, and I like it quite a bit, though it's never displaced VMware Workstation in my life.

I've been especially excited about the fact that they have a beta version of VirtualBox for the Mac, making it so users on all major platforms can have a similar experience and trade virtual machines around.(Yeah, I know that VMware Fusion virtual machines are pretty much interchangeable with VMware Workstation/ VMware Player machines, but there is no free VMware product for Mac users, so I hate having to check ahead/download trials for users, etc).

In any case, Sun is buying Innotek, and I think it's great. Let's hope they don't pour Java into it! (just kidding. kind of.) One thing that I think has hurt Sun is that it doens't make consumer products. Something Microsoft benefits from, and now VMware, is that consumer behaviors drive corporate decisions. People achieve consumer comfort with a product, and extend the relationship at work. Sun's Scott McNealy would just rail against Microsoft quality. It's not always about quality! It's about not wanting to venture into the unknown. Sun having an easy to use desktop product like VirtualBox is actually pretty unique for them, and a really great change. (Apologies if they make all sorts of other consumer apps I don't know about.)

The latest fashions

2008-01-15T23:07:00.001-08:00

Look at that dude. He got a MacBook Air!
You can barely see it, she got a iPod Nano.

(photo via Funtasticus)

Active Window. A poem.

2007-12-19T01:47:00.000-08:00

something happened!

i will pulse orange

until you pay attention

with a click.

(on Windows or Linux)

early draft here.

Drupal Therapy. Introduction: Drupal is like the Holodeck

2007-12-11T01:29:00.000-08:00

(So, BTW, Amnesty.org just relaunched, using Drupal. via Dries.)

Last year I started using Drupal. I made it into a blog server. It is a fine blog server. For hosting multiple blogs by multiple authors, it might even be my favorite. But because I had previous exposure to Wordpress and its elegant admin panel, I couldn't help but be majorly disappointed by the administrative interface of Drupal. What made it worse was how little anybody talked about its horrible interface. The only people who seemed willing to talk about it were the people who tried Drupal and left.

I stuck with Drupal. I love Drupal. I think it's the best tool for building many types of web applications, but many parts of the administrative experience are ridiculous. I think many people in the Drupal community know this, and are working to change this, but we are likely a few versions away from any of the major turn-offs being healed.

In the meantime, I'm going to give back to Drupal. Not by beating it up about its shortcomings, but by acknowledging them, and working around them. By guiding people through them. People who have poked around Drupal and wrinkled your nose: You are not crazy. You are not stupid. Drupal doesn't make sense at first. But if you walk away, you are turning away from an amazing, amazing tool that likely does anything you were thinking of doing, but more!

Drupal is like a beautiful mansion. No. It's like a the holodeck. No. Drupal is like a holodeck mansion. If you want a loft, it can be an urban loft for you. If you want a beachfront property, bam! It's beachfront property. Drupal can adapt to your desires. But there's one problem. Drupal is a holodeck mansion without a door. There's a little doggy door. You have to get on your hands and knees and crawl. You're going to get very dirty. You might even scrape yourself. But once you've made it inside, there's nothing like it.

Stay tuned for Lesson One in Drupal Therapy: The beginning's not a good place to start.
It will help if you have the ability to use a virtual machine.

Some VMware Server 2.0 Beta screenshots

2007-11-15T00:34:00.000-08:00

...wanted to upload a couple of screenshots from VMware Server 2.0. As I mentioned yesterday, VMware Server 2.0 beta update 1 only has a web-gui.
As you can see below, in a "read-only" way, this doesn't interfere too much. When you actually start to interact with the page, it gets a little more annoying, and you can feel the chug of the thinking and the rendering. I'll repeat that I appreciate that it isn't a draining Java applet doing all of this on the client side. But it's still pretty slow and painful. Aside from performance, the interface and navigation is inconsistent and confusing. I'll try to post about that tomorrow.

Now below you can see the web-ui get even more inconvenient when you want "console." By default, when you select a console view of a guest, you get only a partial view of it, ensconced in scrolly bars. You do have a fullscreen option, but nothing in between, let alone the "fit to screen" option available in the VMWare Server 1.x console client.

To be continued!

1 night with VMware Server 2.0 beta: It sure is web-based.

2007-11-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

VMware Server 2.0 beta came out today, and I've had a couple of hours to play with it tonight. As suggested at VMworld, this is a really different product from VMware Server 1.x. Some changes good, some bad. I don't have the same opinion that virtualization.info, that VMware Server is becoming a less relevant product, but I do agree that there's something lackluster here.

VMware Server 1.x felt whole, right off the bat. With VMware Server 2.0, I have this "well, this is just the beta, surely there will be radical improvements" vibe.

While there are a million good and bad features here, what will save us both a lot of time is for you to know that as of now, VMware Server 2.x administration is totally web-based, and that is almost all you can think about or notice when you're working with this tool. I will give to credit to VMware, they've enabled a lot of functionality (rebooting, creating VM's, etc) on a web-client that somehow doesn't involve a giant, slow Java applet. That said, there are many situations when you feel the web pain. The web page has to "think" and rebuild itself a lot. Console access requires a plugin in your browser (which kinda kills the whole "all-you-need-is-a-web-browser" spirit). People in the forums are missing the fit-to-screen feature you got with the "regular" console in VMware Server 1.x, as am I.

VMware is taking a big risk here. The next version of the (regular) VI client will be able to manage VMware Server guests, somewhat softening the blow of not otherwise having one. But this will only help people who have the (not free) VI. I see the "strategy" here... entice VMware Server users to jump up to VI. However I don't believe it will work, and will actually turn people off of VMware.

Despite supporting more OS's and architectures, I feel VMware Server 2.0 is "less" of a product than VMware Server 1.x.

To be continued.

Oracle VM: Missing in Action

2007-11-14T08:41:00.000-08:00

The Oracle VM FAQ says it will be available for download today. It's not.

Oracle VM is free, and will be available for download starting Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2007, at oracle.com/virtualization. Both Linux and Windows guests are supported.

It's not on the Oracle software downloads page, either.
[update: It later showed up sometime by late-afternoon. At least there was a download button. When I went to download it, it made me give a page of registration info, and then said it'd take up to two days to "process" my info in compliance with "U.S. Export Administration Regulations and applicable export laws." BTW, I'm American, downloading from the U.S. I've never had this happen before.]