The warning module for Drupal that I blogged about earlier is now available from the drupal.org website at:

http://drupal.org/project/warning

Try it out, it helped to decrease my comment spam without needing any drastic actions (like closing comments on older articles) and early feedback from testers proofs promising.

Let me know what you would improve !

Next up is adding the comment_moderation module as well so it becomes easier to manage your comments on moderated sites.

In an alternative universe, perhaps ? :-)

Go Dries !

A second module I wrote this weekend makes it easier to moderate your comments. This was another item high on my wishlist. I didn't found anything that comes close, so please let me know if I missed another module that scratches the same itch.

The comment_moderation module simplifies the work-flow of moderating comments. If you receive a lot of comment spam, the current approval queue is very limiting:

• It forces you to click through to the comment. If you want to publish the comment you need to edit, change it to published and submit
  

One of the first things requested from a Drupal developer before contributing a module is to check whether the functionality is already implemented in another module. Because I couldn't find something similar but I do not feel confident that my search was conclusive let me explain what my Drupal warning module does.

You think Firefox restores your tabs when you close and open it (with Tab Mix Plus or the session saver). Don't bet on it, try the following sequence:

1. Open the Download window
2. Open a few tabs
3. Close the main firefox windows
4. Open a new firefox instance (only the homepage is opened)

You have now lost all your tabs. If those contained any resident information or things you wanted to read/follow up they've been lost :-/

So if you didn't know the Download page was still open somewhere, starting a new firefox will loose your collection of tabs.

You may have heard it by now, RHEL 5.3 has been released.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 confirms Red Hat's commitment to Xen with a lot of virtualization enhancements, desktop enhancements, new hardware support, kernel improvements, includes openjdk and much more from the release notes.

In the early days of NetworkManager I was not a fan. Fortunately it improved a lot and now it mostly does what I need (easier than anything else).

However there are a few things I don't like about NetworkManager and I hope the developers could look at these:

Tested on CentOS 5.2 with NetworkManager 0.7.0 from RHEL5.3. But same issues are reproducible with F10.

People that have met me in real life may know that I have a nasal voice, suffer from more-than-average sneezing and it often looks as if I have a chronic sinusitis. This started slowly 10 years ago, but never got really problematic. 8 years ago I went to a specialist who did not find anything unusual (sinuses were clean) and declared that I must be allergic to something.

For those impacted by this problem, it helped to remove and reinstall the VMware Infrastructure Client in my case.

I think I caused this problem because I first installed VI Client 2.5 before removing VI Client 2.0. It worked without a problem directly after the VI Client 2.5 installation, so I noticed only the next day that it suddenly stopped working with the error:

Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG))

We are still looking for people to help out at the CentOS booth and CentOS devroom at FOSDEM 2009.

Also we have still some slots available for CentOS-related presentations, so if you have an interesting story to tell wrt. CentOS, or you know how to entertain a crowd, talk to Fabian Arrotin (or send a mail to the CentOS promotion mailinglist).

See you at FOSDEM 2009 at the CentOS booth !

One thing that really disturbs me in professional documents is the use of authentification (or in Dutch: authentificatie). This word does not exist in English or in Dutch, it is a mix up of authentication and identification, but still this mistake is made all over the IT world in Europe.

Although the rule is very easy:

• when the verb is to authenticate it becomes authentication
• when the verb is to identify/to certify it becomes identification/certification

The verb to authentify or to authentificate simply do not exist in English....

So don't use it :-)

When I installed CentOS 5.2 on my Thinkpad X200s only to discover that neither my onboard ethernet (e1000e), nor my onboard wireless (iwlagn) was supported by CentOS 5.2's 2.6.18 kernel, I managed to manually configure my Bluetooth UMTS connection to my cellphone to fix my connectivity problems and get back in business in no time.

Funny how the newest technology (UMTS) apparently is better supported by older kernels than ethernet or wireless (ieee 802.11) technologies.

After my blog article 2 weeks ago, I am pleased to discover that Red Hat's bugtracker is now being indexed by Google. According to their robots.txt they started offering an index (sitemap) of bug reports to spiders since 23 december 2008.

So we can now search google for common problems and find Fedora, RHEL and CentOS specific bug reports (and solutions) just by using Google.

Kudos to Red Hat for making it possible !

Dear Interweb, please explain me this:

If I have 80 tabs open in Firefox and I have 2GB of physical memory and I then restart my browser. It eats up 1GB easily and then slowly grows until it hits 1.5GB of memory (almost all available).

If I have the same 80 tabs open in Firefox and I add 2Gb of physical memory (total being 4GB) to exactly the same machine and I then restart that same browser. It eats up only 300MB of memory and never really grows much beyond 400MB.

What am I missing here ?

Tested on a CentOS 5.2 with Firefox 3.0.5.

My christmas present arrived early this year. Unfortunately, this one I had to buy myself but given the price-tag that is not a surprise.

I didn't need a new laptop per se, but the weight I was carrying sometimes (my own Thinkpad T43 and the customer Thinkpad T60) caused some neck pains. It probably is not completely related to that, but every excuse to buy a newer laptop is fine by me.

So what laptop was under the hypothetical christmas tree ? Well, the title gave it away already ;-)