After 15.5 hours of travelling (1.5 hours on the train, 8.5 hours of flying, 20 minutes of bus, 30 minutes in the metro and the rest spent waiting or walking), I arrived at the Harrington Hotel in Washington D.C. Immediately afterwards, I left for the pre-con registration, at which already about 400 people registered themselves.

Volunteering

The next day I got up at 6:08 AM since I couldn’t sleep due to the heat in the hotel room and because I was volunteering at the DrupalCon registration booth. With about 10 volunteers, we registered about 800 people in 2 hours (registering consists of giving them their lanyard, personalized name card, swag bag and redirecting them to the t-shirt booth). It worked pretty efficiently :)

Thanks, Drupal community! {#thank-you-bonnie}

I’d like to thank Bonnie Bogle once more for her Herculean organizing efforts. And of course a thank you to all attendees whom all partially paid for my travel expenses and Drupalcon ticket (I won a scholarship). I hope you’ll all benefit from my work in the end!

I went to FOSDEM on Sunday. I got up at 6 AM but went to bed at 2 AM (because I still had to review my presentation) … so I only had 4 hours of sleep! I met up with Jo Vermeulen and Tim Dupont at 7 AM in Hasselt’s station. Jo is a PhD student and Tim is a teaching assistant at Hasselt University.
I hesitated at first because both of them have teached me a course either this year or last year, so it’d be a bit weird. But getting to know people is virtually always more fun than pain, so what the heck, I traveled with them anyway!

I’ve got so much exciting good news that I don’t even know where to begin!

I was asked to review a Drupal book, was chosen to speak at FOSDEM, my bachelor thesis proposal will be published as part of a technical communications book, I turned 21 and was selected for a DrupalCon DC sponsorship! If only all of this happened while I wasn’t in the middle of my exam period…

Reviewing a Drupal book

Packt Publishing contacted me on January 7, asking if I was interested in reviewing Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions. It’ll be my first book review, but I’ve always had eye for detail, consistency and clarity in books (I have yet to see the first U.S. college text book that is well written), so I hope it’ll be of use to somebody :)
You can expect the review towards the end of February. What interests me is that it’s targeted at business owners instead of developers, so I’ll do a practical test with my dad, who’s not technically adept.

I keep all my Drupal sites up-to-date by updating a single Drupal core instance and one install profile. And I keep Drupal core and all modules in this install profile updated through CVS. But then a problem poses: what if a file was added to or removed from CVS? Until now, you’d have to manually svn add or svn rm the file. And in the case of some modules (e.g. Views), that’s a lot of files you’ll have to check.

The solution: syncvsvn {#solution}

I’m aware that this probably isn’t the best name, but it gets the job done :).

Suppose you’ve just updated the xmlsitemap module:

It has bothered me since day one at university that I can only use the university’s SMTP server. I got by, by just letting sent messages fail, because then I’d get a pop-up which would let me pick another SMTP server. This was of course far from perfect: sometimes I thought a message was sent while it really wasn’t … so it would sit in my outbox for a day.

Possible solutions {#possible-solutions}

The only real solution is for the university’s network to be improved: they should find a way to limit network traffic and abuse in ways that don’t affect the user so severely. (On the bright side: the wireless network was incredibly unreliable the first 2 years but is superb since this year!)
Until that happy day, I needed an interim solution. The best solution would involve an SSH tunnel to keep using the correct SMTP server. It also requires you to have a server somewhere with SSH access. I don’t want to maintain that too, so I chose for a simpler solution.

For several courses at the university, we’ve got projects going on (actually, 5 simultaneously…) and for most of them, we have to write fairly large documents. We also have to work in groups of 2, 3 or 5. So collaborative writing becomes a necessity. Finally, in the group of 5, we work on 4 different operating systems. So whichever solution we pick, it must seamlessly work on any platform as well.

We chose LyX.

• LyX is a WYSIWYM GUI to write LaTeX documents.
• LyX is written in Qt, a cross-platform GUI toolkit (the most awesome one, if you ask me!), which makes it possible to use it on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
• To make LyX collaborative, we use the SVN version control system (which is also cross-platform).

This is how we started. But some problems emerged:

I’ve alluded to it before, but now it’s also been officially approved: I’ll be doing my bachelor thesis on Drupal! I will focus on integrating Drupal with CDNs. Yay! :)

Don’t know what a CDN is? It’s short for Content Delivery Network; a network of (static file or streaming media) servers that are located around the globe. These servers all mirror each others’ files. When a user requests a certain file from the CDN, the server that is the closest to the user will serve the file.
By using a CDN to serve the static components on your web site (CSS, JS, images, fonts), your web site will load much faster: the latency will be lower and the throughput will be greater.

So, university has started again. We have to pick “broadening courses”, I chose economy courses (macroeconomics and operational research). In this semester, I’ve got 6 courses, all of which — except for one — come with their own project. The one that doesn’t have a project (macroeconomics) overlaps with other courses, because it’s a trimester course. Painful.

I’m also trying to convince my professors to be able to do my bachelor thesis on Drupal. By that I mean: develop something that can make Drupal shine in a certain area. (More on that in a later blog post!) That costs its fair share of time as well

So — I’m extremely busy for school; pulling late-nighters 7/7.

Next, I’m involved in too many projects outside of school: maintaining my Drupal modules (or at least trying to), table tennis, working for Mollom, working in the local AIESEC committee, maintaining DriverPacks.net, and more.

It’s over. My second DrupalCon. DrupalCon Szeged 2008. I’m posting 2 weeks after date because I had another awesome vacation 2 days after the DrupalCon, to the south of France (in Brandonnet), with friends of the table tennis club.

And it was AWESOME. I met so many new people. I had lots of interesting conversations. Had lots of fun. Saw a different way of life.

I met people I’d been talking to for so long via IRC:

AHAH-powered forms were virtually impossible in Drupal 5 (see the note though). In Drupal 6, this is much easier, thanks to the #ahah property. However, it still is really painful to actually use it.

The flaw {#flaw}

You have to write a menu callback for each AHAH-enabled form item of your form. You have to repeat small variations of this piece of code for each callback: