doquesnet

Putting recipes here about how I have configured my openSUSE 11.3 on Macbook Pro 5.5 so I won't forget the steps.

Ability to change backlight brightness of MacBook Pro 5.5 (Summer 2009) is broken in default openSUSE 11.2 installation. To have it working we need to compile nvidia_bl kernel module and install it.

At the team with which I work we have lots of own old deprecated PHP functions that are used through out the project. We can rewrite old code to use new API but it requires a lot of time and effort and it doesn't fit in our current priorities. The best we can do now is to mark such functions as deprecated to prevent developers to use them in new code.

Recently we have discussed Data URI schemes previously and were trying to develop a patch for Drupal 6 that will create optimized CSS automatically. The latter solution break IE 6/7 and probably other browsers that do not support data URI schemes. Today I have a better patch that just provides a workaround for IE 6/7 (yes, these browsers won't gain any performance improvement using this patch).

We have discussed Data URI schemes previously and how they help reducing number of HTTP requests for CSS images.

Today I have developed a patch to Drupal 6.x core that will inject images into CSS file when Optimize CSS files option is turned on. This patch embeds only images less then 1K in size. Follow the comments for more information:

Sometimes when developing custom Drupal modules it becomes useful to test only one hook_update_N() implementation but there are already many others added after that. This simple patch will force Drupal to perform only selected update for specified module:

Long time ago in early 2006 I have developed my Drupal's cache.inc shared memory based implementation. APC implementation was done after some time. But these contributions to Drupal 4.7 (or was it 4.6) were never published.

Years passed. Things happened. I realized open-source to be one of the greatest things happening to me. Now I can't imagine writing Drupal module on my free time and not to share it with community.

So today I would like to present my new Drupal 6.x contribution - Cache module.

Drupal 6.x core adds ability to change cache handler implementation by specifying another $conf['cache_inc'] in settings.php:

    case DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_EARLY_PAGE_CACHE:
      // Allow specifying special cache handlers in settings.php, like
      // using memcached or files for storing cache information.
      require_once variable_get('cache_inc', './includes/cache.inc');

or specifying another $conf['session_inc'] session handler implementation:

    case DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_SESSION:
      require_once variable_get('session_inc', './includes/session.inc');

My idea was to add ability to change path.inc implementation by specifying $conf['path_inc'] setting in site's settings.php file.

Recently I was constructing Drupal 6 web-site using Hierarchical Select and Ubercart.

New vocabulary with some terms was added for product node type. Hierarchical select was configured to render it.

Then go try creating new product at node/add/product page. Select some term from vocabulary. Works fine in Firefox but JavaScript alert is shown in IE6/7:

Received an invalid response from the server.

Let's discuss what's the problem is.

Data URI scheme can be used to include images in HTML document or CSS file. This gives you ability to save several HTTP requests for image files thus making your HTML pages open faster. Data URI scheme feature works mostly in all modern browsers except IE6 / 7 (special MHTML protocol can be used for IE instead but is not discussed in this article).