Blogs

For a while now I've been getting a Chinese piece of spam every day, supposedly sent by people like 魏碈, which is encoded as

From: =?utf-8?B?6a2P56KI?=

These pages have helped make sense of this:
BASE64 Decode and Encode
Wikipedia: Base64
UTF-8 encoding table and Unicode characters
RFC 2044 (UTF-8)

Internet Explorer's High Privacy setting "blocks all cookies from websites that do not have a compact privacy policy." This includes out-of-the-box installations of Drupal 7.

Here's a work-around:

Add

header('P3P: CP="We do not have a P3P policy"');

to your settings.php file. Tested with IE9.

I'm a Swiss citizen and the continuous fall of the US Dollar and rise of the Swiss Franc has me worried.

These links drive it home:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tables_of_historical_exchange_rates_to_the_United_States_dollar

Everyone has got their list of favorite extensions — here's mine...

This is work in progress...

I like working in Eclipse, and I've gotten used to having one project for each major Drupal version. This allows me to put the corresponding contribs inside the respective sites/all/modules directory and to just .gitignore them. That way I can let my local webserver serve each Drupal version without having to switch branches.

Set Up a Cache

Setting up msysGit on my Win7 box has been a bit of a pain.

Here's a step by step guide:

1. I don't quite understand what the Portable version is all about, but I went with the other one.

2. If you're not running as Administrator, then the Installer fails. So, run it as Admin. I had also installed TortoiseGit, and the Installer made me choose from
( ) Use OpenSSH
( ) Use (Tortoise)Plink
The former ultimately lead to success.

Enlightening post: Why I stopped traveling to the US and I largely stopped doing business in the US.

daemon.log:

mod_delay/0.6: unable to open DelayTable '/var/run/proftpd/proftpd.delay': No such file or directory

Fix: create the directory.

Possibly related: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/543506 ("runlevel unknown", #81, #94)

auth.log:

pam_env(sshd:setcred): Unable to open env file: /etc/default/locale: No such file or directory

Fix: create the file.

I like putting my servers under subversion control, i.e. treating the entire file system as a "local working copy." That way I can safely try things and be sure that I can go back to a previous configuration. Also, whenever I do some configuration changes (either manually or through a control panel), I can review all the changes, and when I'm satisfied I add a dated entry to a history file and commit / (root).

Workflow

Here's a typical workflow:

1. Make some changes.
2. Verify the intended behavior.

PLA Restaurant
Bellafila, 5
http://www.pla-repla.com/
93 412 65 52

Pl. Sant Jaume -> Ciutat -> Bellafila