Varesano.net

With this 2 minutes blog post I would like to remind Apple that HTML5 is (actually will be) a web standard. This means that, quoting an old draft of the HTML5 W3C specification, the goal of the HTML5 web standard is to

"define an openly-produced, vendor-neutral language, to be implemented in a broad range of competing products, across a wide range of platforms and devices. This enables developers to write applications that are not limited to one vendor's implementation or language."

That's why I've been pretty disappointed while visiting Apple's brand new HTML5 advertising web page. The following is what you get when you visit it with a perfectly HTML5 compatible web browser, such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Crome or Opera.

Wait.. isn't the whole point of a web standard to be vendor lock-in free??? Ok, let's make it clear.

Dear Apple, we already know embrace, extend and extinguish .. you won't be able to do that for HTML5.

Even if you have been able to produce a wide mass of brainwashed Apple fans which unfortunately counts a lot of web developers and designers among them, we FLOSS and open standards supporters won't let you do so.

HTML5 is and will be a vendor-neutral language and such exploitations are unacceptable.

Arduino is a rapid electronic prototyping platform composed by the Arduino board and the Arduino IDE.

I'll use it in my Master of Science project to create some kind of tangible interaction prototype.

So, let's have a look at it!

After some years of really hard studying (and actually some great fun :-) ) I finally completed all the exams in my Master of Science in Computer Science! That's great, isn't it?

So, I spent the month after my last exam meeting professors from my university in order to find a great final project and a thesis to work on.

Drupal is great. That's unquestionable.

I started using Drupal back in 2004 for work and as well for my websites. It became and still becomes better every day. Personally, I consider Drupal one of the best success story for the FLOSS development/business model.

That's why I decided to became a Drupal Association Individual Member. With a small donation I've been able to support Drupal development and help the people working on it to provide more and more great things for it.

During the years I already donated to Drupal and some of its related projects. I consider myself one of those FLOSS supporters who thinks that great code doesn't come free. I know that if we like the FLOSS products we use we should contribute to them. This doesn't always mean giving money, other ways might be help the developers coding, translating, testing.

I'll continue to contribute to Drupal in the future, with money, code and everything else I can. Let's keep on Drupling!

I'm working on a Drupal 6 based website. One of the goals of this website is to be very usable. That's why a couple of weeks ago we run a detailed usability test on the website.

We had 5 users using the website by proposing them 3 different scenarios and some tasks on those scenarios. I plan to write a more detailed post on how we tested that website in next days, so keep an eye on my website if you are interested.

The website we tested is a photographer portfolio which contains also a blog. So, one of the tasks proposed to our users was adding a comment on a blog node. This could seems like a super easy task but our users were pretty confused by standard Drupal labels and messages of Drupal's comment form.

Seems that Dries, project lead of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia and Mollom, appreciated my last efforts in debugging a bad bug of Mollom's Drupal module.

That's probably why they sent me a very cool Mollom t-shirt with bonus stickers! That's pretty cool! Thanks Dries!

Sorry for the bad picture!

For a website I'm working on I had the need to display an Heading saying something like "User Comments" just before the user comments list and after the node comments. This can help the website user clearly understand where the node content ends and where the visitors contributions starts.

Something like the following image (In italian):

How to do it

I though it would have been a complex task: I thought it would have required to override some theming function and hacking deeply into Drupal.

Fortunately it wasn't complex at all. In Drupal 6 there are template files already available to be overriden for a lot of Drupal output.

In this case there is a file called comment-wrapper.tpl.php which we can override in our theme. This file is a wrapper for all the content generated by the comment module (comment lists, comment adding form, etc.).

So we can just place in a file called comment-wrapper.tpl.php within our theme directory the following code:

<?php
// from $Id: comment-wrapper.tpl.php,v 1.2 2007/08/07 08:39:35 goba Exp $
// modified by Fabio Varesano for ermannofalco.com

/**
 * @file comment-wrapper.tpl.php
 * Default theme implementation to wrap comments.
 *
 * Available variables:
 * - $content: All comments for a given page. Also contains sorting controls
 *   and comment forms if the site is configured for it.
 *
 * The following variables are provided for contextual information.
 * - $node: Node object the comments are attached to.
 * The constants below the variables show the possible values and should be
 * used for comparison.
 * - $display_mode
 *   - COMMENT_MODE_FLAT_COLLAPSED
 *   - COMMENT_MODE_FLAT_EXPANDED
 *   - COMMENT_MODE_THREADED_COLLAPSED
 *   - COMMENT_MODE_THREADED_EXPANDED
 * - $display_order
 *   - COMMENT_ORDER_NEWEST_FIRST
 *   - COMMENT_ORDER_OLDEST_FIRST
 * - $comment_controls_state
 *   - COMMENT_CONTROLS_ABOVE
 *   - COMMENT_CONTROLS_BELOW
 *   - COMMENT_CONTROLS_ABOVE_BELOW
 *   - COMMENT_CONTROLS_HIDDEN
 *
 * @see template_preprocess_comment_wrapper()
 * @see theme_comment_wrapper()
 */
?>
<div id="comments">
  <?php if($node->comment_count){ print '<h3 class="comments-intro">' . t("User Comments") . "</h3>"; } ?>
  <?php print $content; ?>
</div>

With the same approach we could add a link to the comment creation form (just adding a link to #comment-form) or adding a disclaimer. Actually with this approach there are lot of possible usage of modifying comment output.

What do you think about my approach? Did you find it useful? Do you have problems implementing it? Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know!

Some days ago I updated the mollom Drupal module version 1.10 installed on this site with the new version 1.11.

For those unfamiliar with Drupal, Mollom is a service which analize comments, posts, etc to check for spam and blocks suspicious content. Mollom has been founded by Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen. Dries is the project lead of Drupal and CTO at Acquia. So, yes: Mollom is high quality stuff created and maintained by top people on the Drupal ecosystem.

Unfortunately, as soon as I updated the mollom module I noticed that something was wrong: the configurations of the protected forms where missing after the update. All my forms where unprotected.

As soon as I noticed this I opened a bug report, but today I had the time to have a deep look on this and I found that it's due to a bad bug in the update path from 1.10 to 1.11. I reported it to Dries and Dave and they agreed on the gravity of this bug.

This is pretty bad as it looses the protected forms configuration of 1.10: this results in leaving all the forms unprotected against spam. As Mollom is installed in high profile Drupal websites (Sony, Adobe, LinuxJournal, Warner Bros Records, Netlog, NBC, etc) the consequences of this bug can be pretty bad.

So, if you are a Drupal and Mollom user stay away from 1.11 and wait till 1.12 which will fix this issue. Patches are already available and a new release should came soon.

The Free Software Foundation Europe started a new campaign called I ♥ Free Software - Valentine's Day 2010.

I think this is a pretty cool way to promote free software so, as I do ♥ Free Software and I do hate proprietary software, I'm giving the campaign visibility here on my blog.

Unfortunately the campaign landing page fails to explain what is free software, so if you are interested you might want to read the What is free software page at fsf.org.

If you already support Free Software you might want to get some of the banners available on the campaign page and put them on your blog or personal website.

If you use the GNU/Linux operating system intensely as development environment or as a server you'll probably find yourself in need of running a determinate command or script every X seconds forever.

This could be useful for example to check that a service you run on your server is working correctly (e.g. your Apache httpd server), to clear some cache your system is using or to periodically check for software updates. Personally I needed this to periodically update the DNS entry of my home server with its current IP (my ISP gives dynamic IP, not static ones).