/home/lipcpro

Great post about Unix and a little history lesson here.

Just read a post that the CentOS project may be in trouble. Read more at http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry4597.html. This would be a blow to many businesses, mostly small, that rely on it for a RedHat compatible distro. I know a lot of people are gonna scream "why not use Debian" or some other linux. Good question, but I believe we have to support our favorite distros, and I'm sure some shops are trying to keep their costs down by having just a few of their servers running RedHat and others running a clone like CentOS, so they're only having to pay the support fees on those few running RH.

Ellie (my daughter) is doing blogathon again this year. It's for a worthy cause, Diabetes Research and Wellness Foundation. Ellie did quite a bit of research to make sure that a large percentage of the money donated to this foundation is actually used for research, whereas others had lower percentages.

I've just released a new Drupal module that uses an idea that I heard about a short time ago. The idea is to add a field to a form and hide it with css. If a bot fills in the field, reject the form without any notice (do bots really check for success?), without impacting the user experience. Other devices require extra user interaction.

DrupalCon DC 2009 here we come. Hope this snow clears up some time before we leave tomorrow morning. I'm disappointed I was unable to attend DrupalCampNYC this past Saturday. It got a pretty decent write up in the NY Times yesterday though.

All I can say is WOW. The New York City Drupal community is large, healthy, inquisitive and growing. I enjoyed the first day immensely. What's amazing is that I actually found myself answering a lot more questions than I got to even ask. This significantly helped me get over the "suck factor" hump, now maybe if I actually blogged more about my experiences I could feel I've accomplished more and help others more. Drupal is really a very robust, flexible, modular content management system. Some would argue this point and say it's much more than that. I couldn't agree more.

Its been debated which CMS is best. I've done some work in Mambo/Joomla, MediaWiki and Zen-Cart, had a little experience Wordpress, but I've decided that Drupal may be most complex most flexible system available to todays webmasters, so its off to Providence RI. to attend a Lullabot.com Drupal training seminar for a week. Then I start a new contract position at MYU Medical Center, this should be exciting.

Well, it's official, I'm no longer unemployed. Got my first paycheck. Pretty cool company. They were a combination Java and .NET shop up until now, but they started having clients ask about open source software, so they hired me and another guy (I think he's on contract?) as Php/Lamp developers.

Wow, started my new job today. It's been exactly 1 year since I last wrote anything in my blog, and almost exactly 2 years since I held a steady job. Today was mostly mad install day, loading Eclipse and Php Development Tool, web developer toolbar for both IE7 and FF2 + Firebug, MySQL GUI tools, Xampp, Cygwin. Have to get the key to install Dreamweaver 8. Probably install UltraEdit tomorrow. Nice big display, little pc (one of those shuttle boxes). Now I'll have to explore midtown Manhattan, find some nice places to eat. Had sushi today with my new boss in Bryant Park, not bad.

Ok, so I'm set to use CentOS 4.3 for my server needs and I'm fairly sure it will work out well. However, now I need a distro to work well on my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60p. Since the wireless bits for the Intel ipw3945 chipset call for a 2.6.13 kernel or higher, CentOS won't do for this laptop, at the moment CentOS repos only have up to 2.6.9-39 for the kernel.