To you know about Drupal? Here's a question...

I want to be able to track changes to Drupal sites like I can track changes to code using Subversion or CVS.

As I create a Drupal site, Drupal modifies tables and changes table data to reflect the new site structure. If I make a mistake, or someone else makes a mistake, I would like to be able to "revert" the whole site back to its original structure.

Apart from taking snapshots of the database after every change, is there any way to accomplish this?

There must be a way. This would be useful for any CMS project that stores site structure in the database rather than in a code file.

You may ask "Why?" so I'm going to tell you straight out.

When I first started working at Kruse, I mentioned in my interview that I had used more than one monitor hooked to a computer. And I had.

I used my main monitor for the computer, and I hooked a Wyse terminal to my serial port. The serial port, used with vt100 output, would output debug information while I used the computer to write programs. A pretty sweet setup for the time.

Since then, I've had two monitors at various points. Early second monitors have been TV output from a video card that supports TV-out in addition to the main display. The resolution was always kind of lousy, but useful if I wanted to playback video while I was coding.

A month or two ago, I put a new video card in my PC, an ATI All-In-Wonder X800. This card had everything my older video card had, with one additional feature - dual head VGA/DVI output. Finally, real 2-monitor output. This was in addition to the existing All-In-Wonder support for video-in that my old card had.

I took advantage of some of the cheap, cheap prices on decent LCD monitors these days, and voila! Two-monitors on my desktop.

But the addiction to more PC desktop space was only beginning...

I recently decided that the two screens was just not enough. I needed another screen. I looked around on the net and found pretty lousy resources for information on how to make three monitors work. But here's what I did.

I bought a new Radeon 9250 PCI card to add to my existing X800 AGP (hey, not PCI-e on my good old PC). I installed the new card, and added just the updated drivers for the card (and NOT that card's Catalyst application, which ended up with me rolling back the system using some special softwre I have installed). With that installed, the existing Catalyst application noticed the new card, and everything worked fine.

I spent some time looking for three-screen wallpaper and a three-screen screensaver and installed those. The other truly essential software is UltraMon, which among other things, puts a task bar on each screen with just that screen's applications, controls wallpaper and screensaver settings, and adds extra buttons to every window to easily swap them to a different screen or maximize them over all three screens. Pretty cool.

The only trouble I had was trying to use the TV application to display the TV-in from the X800. After I had the cards configured to work with their monitors, I couldn't get the video from the satellite receiver to play into the computer. The ATI TV application kept reporting errors with the card configuration, and no matter what I tried, I couldn't convince it that everything was ok.

So then I stumbled upon this excellent little piece of software, Chris TV. Chris TV supports the video-in on my X800, and it correctly handles the line-in on my sound card for volume control (since the sound comes in through my sound card, and not the video card, which sounds weird, and it is). It has built-in PVR features that are better than the ATI application - it's just an all-around better app. ATI would do well to license it for distribution with their cards.

I can still only play live video on one of the two monitors hooked to the X800 where the TV-in is. I can drag the video window onto the third monitor, but the video stalls until I drag it back. I'm not sure why this is - it's supposed to be outputting the video from a buffer, not using the overlay.

Also weird is that DVD playback only works on the two X800 screens through Windows Media Player. If I try playback on the third screen, the application complains about analog copy protection not being available there, and that it won't play. Of course, this is all circumvented by playing back the DVD with VLC.

Finlly, I threw a Belkin Flip into the mix. The Flip is a KVM switch that allows me to hook a single Keyboard, Monitor ("V" for Video), and Mouse to more than one computer. I've hooked my right-most monitor to my regular desktop computer and my "server" system, an old P2-350 with Windows XP relegated to use as a file server. (Yes, yes, it could be running Linux, but being that it's an old desktop, there is quite a bit of stuff there that I don't want to remove just yet.)

When I push a little button on my desk, the right screen flips to the server display, and my mouse and keyboard control that PC. Push it again, and it switches back to the right monitor on my main desktop PC.

So. Is the setup more productive? I think so. I don't find myself lookin for space to open windows like before. I tend to run a lot of programs at once when I work. I can keep things I use often open larger than before, saving a lot of dragging and resizing. I really do think it's an improvement.

Ok, it's a little crazy, but it looks darn impressive.

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we'll be discontinuing the old email-based
Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will
have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

Having been a paying member of Flickr for longer than many people, I enjoy the fact that my login name is the same login that I use for most sites. Apparently, that advantage is now being taken away from me due to Yahoo's purchase of Flickr.

You know, I have a Yahoo account, but it's an ugly, ugly screen name. When Flickr introduced custom photosite URLs back in the day, they made a mistake by letting people register URLs that were being used by other people as screen names. Why would I not want my screen name as my URL? There should have been some way to automatically reserve these, because some dude who doesn't even use his Flickr account is using the URL at my screen name. And now here I am getting screwed out of my screen name again.

And for what? Nothing. Flickr hasn't added a feature in a year, as has been useful to me. The fancy little new menus don't do much for me to rave about that a real upgraded desktop Uploadr would. But how old is that piece of crap software? It doesn't even re-orient photos as well as my poor shipped-with-XP tools do, and that's sad. You can't tag before you upload, or assign photos to batches before you upload unless all of the photos are the same. What a crappy application.

Flickr was the poster child of the Web 2.0 interface with its snazzy edit-in-place captions and descriptions. What happened to the innovation after that? Apparently, they sold it to Yahoo and Yahoo burned it.

I've heard a million stories about how Yahoo locked someone out of their account, thus barring them from their own photos on Flickr forever. Yahoo "support" is completly unavailable or unable to help any of them. This may be the kind of thing that you do with a throwaway email address like fluffin4tor@yahoo.com, but is not the kind of thing that you do to photos of people and their families and their priceless vacation photos. People trusted you with that stuff, Flickr. You were safe, but Yahoo is not, and now you have sold trustworthiness off.

Plus, "migrating" (which is totally the wrong word) my ID doesn't enhance my available services. The only reason I have a Yahoo ID in the first place is to get API keys for their REST developer services. I use it for nothing else. What benefit does forcing me to switch my ID offer me? None. You could have at least given me a cookie.

Well, fine. It's too late for me now to do anything but assent to this. I'll link my crappy Yahoo ID to your service. But as soon as the next Flickr service rises (which will have as it's best first feature -- a "Flickr Importr"), I'm outta here.

And we weren't supposed to worry that Flickr was selling out.

In late November, seeing a need for portable computing capability, I placed an order for a new notebook.

Basically, work was ramping up. Working at home is great, but sometimes you've just got to get out of the house. If you put in enough hours working and then don't go out in the evening, you can run a whole week without stepping foot out of the house. As a matter of fact, I haven't put gas in my car in a month. (Although I will admit that we usually take Berta's car out when we go out for family trips.)

In any case, my desire was to take a PC to the Starbucks or some other WiFi-enabled location, turn on, and work for an hour or two in a different locale. I looked over my notebook options.

Notebook number one was an older, but ahead of its age, Fujitsu P2120. The reason I bought it was, in my opinon, very forward-thinking. It was small - about as small as you could get at the time and still have an internal removable optical drive. It also had excellent battery life, using the relatively new Crusoe processor. And this was really the issue with the P2120.

The long battery life was at the cost of a significant amount of computing power. The battery may last twice as long as anything else, but it would actually take twice as long to do anything that really required some processing power. I don't mean to completely disparage the P2120 - it still is an amazing machine, but even for the "lightweight" development I was planning on doing, it wasn't enough power.

The second notebook was an iBook G3 that I got from eBay. It was a good price for a large monitor on a notebook. I bought it with the express purpose of testing web development in Safari. It seemed like I was always asking someone to look at something, or paying Browsercam for access. With all of the single-day passes I paid them for, I probably could have bought a much better G3. I probably should have, really.

Once again, a significant factor in deciding against the iBook was the power of the machine. It's a couple of generations behind, and with most things I do on it, you can watch them happen. I paid for a system with some upgrades - more RAM, more CPU - and I'm sure it made a difference, but not that much of a diference. Plus, it's a Mac, so I would have to get replacements for all of my Windows-based development tools. I'm not yet convinced that Mac development tools are everythin I would need, and I doubt that I could be convinced.

Should I even mention the old x486 I have sitting around? So it was time to buy a new notebook.

I decided straight away, as I did with my other notebook purchases, that this would not be a "skimp for price" system. I don't want to upgrade, and I don't want to buy a new system in a year because the one I just bought became suddenly outdated. After poking at some of the options, I decided to narrow down my options significantly by buying a tablet.

Why a tablet? Well, I can't really tell you. I've always thought that tablets were cool. I like the idea of drawing web design sketches directly on the screen. Plus, the tablet form factor means a couple of interesting things about the size and content of the notebook.

One thing that tablets require is that it be small. Gateway builds a pretty big machine in their "convertable" notebook, but that's about as big as it gets. Being a tablet also implies that the machine isn't going to be sitting in a clean desktop environment every time it is used.

Let's face it - people have been buying these monster "laptops" these days that are designed to supplant a desktop PC. I don't really see the point in that. If you want desktop power, you should also want desktop upgradeability. Powerful PCs are expensive; you should be able to exend the life of your investment with upgrades. This is so much harder to do with a notebook. And then you end up with a monolithic slab of heavyweight PC, monitor affixed and unmovable unless you spend another chunk of change and hook up a port replicator. It's just not what I'm into.

A tablet implies mobility. Not just that you want to move the PC from desk to desk, but from a desk to a car to a Starbucks to some open field somewhere. A bit of ruggedness is required.

I spent a lot of time ogling the Gateway Convertable. It's a pretty slick machine. I think there were a few other small details that had be decide against it, but the primary reason I didn't decide on it was because I went back to look at Fujitsu's latest offerings.

I didn't give a great impression of my P2120 above, but it really is a great little machine. It was perfect for what I wanted it for at the time, and I simply grew out of it, as I suppose I might have with any other notebook of that time. I feel bad that I didn't even consider Fujitsu until well into my search.

In any case, that's how I ended up at the Fujitsu T4215. The specs of my machine are pretty crazy of a notebook of its size. It sports an Intel Core 2 Duo 2Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a modest 80GB hard drive. I opted for the high-resolution screen at 1600x1200 pixels, which is not supposed to work well outdoors, but I haven't really had a need to test it.

It has crazy connection options, with both 802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth wireless (which I can use with my Treo to get a connection virtually anywhere) along with the standard modem and ethernet jacks. A handful of USB ports are nice, but the really neat expansion port is the full-sized PC Card slot, which is hard to find in a notebook these days (since most opt for the PC Express card slot), but is the only size that wireless modems come in these days.

Of course, there is a removable dual-layer CD/DVD+/-R drive, but I ordered a bay battery with it, which is primarily how I have been using the machine. With the bay battery installed and charged, I get 5-6 hours of life while on the road.

And the tablet features themselves are pretty handy. It's nice to be able to take some written notes with drawings instead of having to describe everything completely in text. The handwriting recognition features are pretty slick and accurate. I haven't trained the dictation enough to get decent accuracy from it, but there's this whole noise-reducing microphone array built in.

The security on this thing is crazy, too. There is a built-in fingerprint scanner and smartcard reader. There's even a BIOS-based setting that allows you to lock the PC until you dial a certain combination of button presses using the quick-access keys on the monitor panel. There are a few other security features in there that I don't even understand.

And it has stupid little niceties, like a multi-card reader for the camera cards. The touchpad is pretty snazzy. There is a slot that holds the stylus so you don't have to wonder where it got to in the case. The latch that holds the cae closed or the screen down (it flips around backwards in tablet mode) is pretty crafty.

I'm very happy with my notebook choice. Everything in it seems to be working quite well, too. I've only been using it to write blog entries, do some design sketches, and playback movies so far, but I'm anxious to load some real software on here and get some development done out of the house. That should be very liberating.

It's pretty late, but I'm riled about Thunderbird. There are oh, so many annoyances that I just can't take it any more. I'm about ready to try anything.

I am tired of Thunderbird marking just anything that comes in as spam. The "adaptive filters" are a joke. I reset the filters, and in three days it's marking everything as spam. It can't tell the difference between incoming mail from mailing lists that I'm on and the ones that look like they're from a mailing list but are just an embedded gif advertising Vi4gr4.

I am tired of it ignoring the SpamAssassin headers that come from my email server even though I have toggled the option to honor them. These controls need to be more fine-grained. I should be able to say "Use SpamAssassin Rules ONLY" and have it do nothing but obey the SpamAssassin headers.

I am tired of having to retrieve email from the junk folder and manually figure out where it's supposed to go. When I toggle off the junk setting for a message when it's in the junk folder, Thunderbird should put the message back where it's supposed to be - in my inbox or one of the folders into which that email should be sorted.

I am tired of Thunderbird marking email that I have already sorted into the junk bin. I keep a folder with software and site registration details that have been emailed to me in IMAP. It's handy when I am on the road and need access to a service. One time, when Thunderbird was loading my IMAP folders on a new machine, it marked 3/4 of these messages as spam and moved them to the delete folder. I spent the rest of the day sorting my registration emails out from the regular spam that my mail server had correctly detected.

If I put it into a folder, it's off limits, Thunderbird. Ok?

When I mark a message as spam manually, it should move the message into the junk folder. I should be able to do this even if the automatic detection of spam is disabled. Check out the options in Thunderbird. You can set up the software to let you mark email manually as spam, but then it doesn't so anything automatically to it. It's just flagged as "spam". Useless?

I should also be able to tell thunderbird somehow, "Email is no longer welcome from this sender." This seems like a really simple thing to do. Right-click, select the Junk submenu "Add sender to blacklist". This submenu should also contain a few other options, like "Add destination to blacklist", since I would absolutely love to block email from my per-use throwaway addresses as soon as I discover they've been abused. And while you're at it, add a couple of easy whitelist options, too.

If a message is part of a thread that I have not already marked as junk, it's not junk, you stupid two-bit freeware program. Stop marking my mailing list messages as junk!

It's almost worth it to hand-filter the spam. The server does most of it, so it's no big deal. But there's enough that gets through to make it annoying that the junk controls don't work as well as they should.

Perhaps Eudora is the way to go. They're going open-source, did you know?