Technology

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:

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.

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)

A few weeks ago I discovered Bitbucket, online hosting for DVCS code. This is what they tell about their service:

As so many, I became a proud iPhone 4 user back in March. I really enjoy this smartphone instead of a normal phone. There's so much more you can do, and the device works well.

Then iOS5 was released on the 12th of October. As I couldn't wait to get my hands on it, to see all those new features, I installed it that evening. I was lucky not to encounter any problem during the upgrade process. The OS was upgraded and everything got recovered without a single error. So far, so good.

When working on a site, there was a feature that enabled a new content type with certain fields. Apparently there was no need for a body field on the content type. I recreated the feature, but when deploying this feature, it will not remove the body field, as this could mean a loss of data.

I had to make use of hook_update to remove the field. Since it was a drupal 7 site, this means using the Field API. But in order to do this programmatically, you first need to understand the terminology.

For a client I needed to make an RSS feed with the latest item of three content types. The feed needed to contain three items: one for each of the three chosen content types.

I was first thinking about using views, to make a selection and then make a feed display. But it's impossible to make union queries in views 2. I was able to make a display containing the three content types, limiting it to three items and sort the list on post date descending. But that didn't guarantee me to have an item for each content type.

On Sunday February 6, 2011, I talked about custom formatters at Drupal Developer Days Brussels. The information about the talk and recording of this talk can be found here: http://bxl2011.drupaldays.org/bxl2011.drupaldays.org/node/303.html
 
I also uploaded the slides on slideshare. Those can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/nicolasleroy/drupal-developer-days-2011-custom...

On a multi-site stack at a client, we were not able to run update.php anymore. The result was a WSOD (white screen of death). I tried to increase the php memory limit and disable my APC. But it didn't help.

When looking at the logs, the apache log didn't contain any error. But when looking at the php error log I found this error: