nicolas's blog

On Tuesday, 13th of December Apple released OS X 10.12.2, as a security update. If you want to read more on the security problems with filevault that got fixed, read this article.

Since updating my computer, I was having problems with my ssh connections. Every time I connected, I had to fill in my passphrase. Very annoying, indeed. After some googling and trial and error, I found a solutiion.

Since a year, I am not so fond of setting up a development stack directly on my laptop (MAMP, direct install, XAMPP,...). Instead I use vagrant, it will run a headless virtual machine that I can configure as I wish. And the good thing is, I can have as much of these boxes as I want.

But even with this setup you can run into problems from time to time. As I never had this problem before, I want to document it here.

Today while starting a vagrant box, I ran into the following error:

After the win against Rotterdam, KHC Dragon player Manu Stockbroeckx was doing a strange dance. Another good reason to make an animated gif.

Watch, enjoy and learn from the master!

At the EHL (European Hockey League) KO16, I was making some pictures. At home I noticed I shot some pictures in burst mode. Putting them one after the other, they make a tiny stop motion movie. That's when it crossed my mind to try and make an animated gif.

Here's an animated gif of Florent Van Aubel entertaining the D-side.

Entity registration module

The Entity Registration module is a nice module for allowing and tracking user registrations on any entity. It even has some nice extras: you can restrict the number of people that can sign up, integrate with drupal commerce for fee-based signups,...

Extra requirements

As part of a project I was asked to deliver an event signup system. A lot of the functionality was already provided by the entity registration module, but some parts were missing:

I was working on a site, and suddenly saw that the urls were a bit funky. At the end of each url I found some hash, like this:

#.UMBYwJPjnMA

At first I wanted to know what was causing this. I googled it, but couldn't find anything drupal related. So I started looking into the drupal modules. I searched for hook_init. But this didn't help me. Then I googled again and finally came across this post.

Today I stumbled across a comic, I saw before and that still made me laugh. It's one of those great XKCD jokes:

It also reminded me of the drupal security book "Cracking Drupal"

So the thought of today: please write secure code. Do this by taking advantage of the Drupal API, and be sure to sanitize your database inputs.

Introduction

While working for a client I needed to make a connection to Microsoft SQL Server. After investigating I found out there are two options: connecting with a PDO driver (only possible on the windows platform for now) or via an ODBC connection. Today I would like to explain the first option, as I needed some time to find out how to do it and combine all the small pieces.

Since my previous pair of drupal shoes were a bit worn out (normal after wearing them for a year non-stop). I started designing a new pair: another model, a different accent color.

Yesterday I was installing a server. I needed a stack to run drupal on top of Ubuntu. Lately I have been playing with NGINX, php-fpm and MariaDB. And since Oracle took over mysql, I wanted to use the more "opensource" version of it, being MariaDB.(By the way, drupal.org is also using MariaDB)