On the off chance that anybody else was using this site and saw the offline maintenance message for the ten minutes or so that it was up, I upgraded Drupal since the latest release fixes a couple of security holes.

Fun story: I accidentally locked myself out of the site after upgrading it. You can't call AAA for that. To get the site out of maintenance mode, you have to go into MySQL and turn off the site_offline Drupal variable:

update variable set value='s:1:"0"' where name = 'site_offline';
delete from cache where cid='variables';

's:1:"0"' is how Drupal stores its variables as strings; that's not SQL syntax, in case anyone was wondering. The second line clears the variable cache or else Drupal is still going to think the variable is set.

I created a Help page to serve as a main hub for the site documentation. This stuff used to be stuck at the bottom of the About page, but I didn't think it really fit there.

I also disabled the Gallery link until we get it working again. Roger says the libraries we need won't compile.

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I fixed a couple of Advanced Forum bugs while I had the time -- it's nice to have the 351 lab finished a week early. See the modifications page for details.

I added the IT department and portal to the secondary links since they might be places that people would want to go to from here.

Made links to both forums in the main menu. Added a block for new forum topics. Moved the most recent poll to the right sidebar.

New modules:

• Comment closer - configured to close comments on nodes older than three months. This saves the hassle of worrying about spammers posting to old threads.
• Fastoggle - Adds a few AJAXified administration functions to the site.
• Advanced Forums - Makes the forums purtier.

The forums look better than I expected. I put up a poll to see if anyone wants to migrate back to Drupal.   [Read more...]

In-joke: This link is for CrazyJoe

Most of these are via Slashdot.

• How to create a BGP man in the middle attack [PDF]
• A description of the DNS system and the Kaminsky DNS vulnerability
• A description of the GMail session ID theft vulnerability
• The MicroID email hashing used by many Web session management systems can be broken
• A series on commercial cybercrime support websites from the Washington Post's Security Fix blog:
  • Cloaking Connections
  • Validating Stolen Goods
  • Digital Forgeries
  • Distributing Malware
  • Thwarting CAPTCHAs
• What it looks like to be infected by a rootkit
• "Tracing optimization" makes Javascript run faster
• CIO Magazine on the current state of scripting languages
• Compile C to Java bytecode with NestedVM [PDF]
• How the Portal portaling code works
• A description of Intel's upcoming Nehalem architecture
• Giving Linux the features of Microsoft's Genuine Advantage
  

Disabled two modules.

* The ContentProfile module looked ugly and did not seem to add any features that we can't get by adding a regular textbox to the user profiles, so I just added a textbox.
* The SwitchTheme module is no longer necessary since users can
switch their theme on their My Account page after giving them the "select different themes" permission.

We have many new modules but before getting to that, I have added two new Taxonomy Vocabularies (sets of tags). [EDIT: I got rid of the new Section taxonomy because my ideas about it were just too complicated. Since it wasn't used for anything, it is being renamed and repurposed.]

The two new Vocabularies are:

• Event Type - To describe the type of event that an event is. Examples: meeting, table, speaker (it's easier to spell than colloquium), lan party, and so on. In the far, far future it might become possible to color-coordinate the calendar based on this information.
• Security - For creating pages that will not be visible to the average user, using the Taxonomy Access Control Module.

I also considered re-enabling the Book module to put Pages into Sections, but we can probably handle sectioning through the tags taxonomy.

The current Tags taxonomy will continue to be used for listing what a post is about. Go nuts with it. Now for the new modules:   [Read more...]

I knew something was missing after the upgrade (besides the users since it's summer), but I couldn't quite tell what it was. This was it: the "add a comment" links were not there because comments were disabled on new posts. Looking back, they were disabled on a lot of old posts, too. I have enabled comments by default for new blog entries so this should not be a problem now.

Settings set in comment settings of admin/content/node-type/ for all the node types

• Default comment setting to Read/Write instead of Read Only.
• Comment Controls display above the blog instead of "do not display"
• Comment submission form display below post or comments instead of separate page
• Display order: oldest first.

I also discovered the comments queue in admin/content/comment and approved a few comments that had been waiting for several months.   [Read more...]