My copy of Pro Drupal Development arrived in the mail the other day. So far it's very programmer-targeted, but good. I need more time to just sit down and read it. :-)

I did notice one thing that caught my eye, though. In the Acknowledgments, the authors thank

...the members of the #drupal internet relay chat channel, who put up with the constant questioning of how things worked, why things were written a certain way, or whether or not a bit of code was brilliant or made no sense at all.... Among them are... Larry Crell...

Over on the Planet, someone posted a link to a budding Drupal user who was having the usual first-time-user troubles. "I want to do X, Y, Z, but I can't figure out how and no one will tell me, help!" Been there, done that, I suppose. But how can that be if there's so much Drupal documentation? Simple. The questions most people ask are the hardest to answer, because there isn't just one kind of documentation.

Last week this web site developed a completely bizarre bug interacting with the database that affected only blog entries. I blamed the database. My web host insisted the problem was with the PHP code. So I took the opportunity to just upgrade the site to Drupal 5, finally, and see what would happen.

So I'm back from OSCMS 2007, and it was a blast. I'll provide a more complete (and illustrated) writeup later, but for now suffice to say that Drupal developers are by and large totally cool people on top of being very smart cookies.

A lot of people have been blogging about PHP 5, too, and how Drupal needs to move to it or keep PHP 4 compatibility or whatever. One of the most important things to come out of this Drupalcon, as far as I'm concerned, is that I think we really do have a picture of how we can make it happen.

It's a somewhat belated announcement, but I am pleased to report the latest Drupal site on the Net, Washington University, St. Louis' College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

ArtSci is the first major Drupal site for Palantir.net, although we have several more in the pipeline. It is also one of many that Washington University will be launching. The entire Arts and Sciences school has decided to go Drupal. Yay for Open Source!

So I finally gave in and disabled trackbacks on this site. So far there have been two real trackbacks and about 50,000 (no joke) spam ones. It's really not worth the effort. I may bring them back if I come up with a decent way to filter them properly, but the spam module just doesn't have a high enough s/n ratio. Suggestions on a better method are welcome. :-)

Another one of these personality quiz things. Hm, looks like I'm the commanding type...

So February was an interesting month in my world, so interesting that it's now March and I didn't get around to posting a Project of the Month for February. Well, better late than never I suppose. To parallel GBGames' February Project of the Month, here's a big thank you cheer to my favorite Firefox extension and every web developer's best friend, Firebug.

Well, it's official. After being around Drupaldom for a year and a half now, I'll finally be making it to a DrupalCon. Yay! More specifically, the Open Source-CMS Summit, hosted by Yahoo (employer of such people as Rasmus Lerdorf), which will include DrupalCon. Drupal folks, I'll see you there (hopefully)!

I normally don't post random "hey this is cool" posts, but this one really is that cool. The second video isn't all that great, giving more of a business talk, but the first one is slick, cool, insightful, and elegant. (About 5 minutes each.) Web 2.0 explained using Web 2.0. Nice!