Restricted Search 1.1 Released

I just released Restricted Search 1.1. This is a module for the Drupal Content Management System which allows individual nodes or entire content types to be excluded from the search engine. This is very useful in systems where nodes may need to be able to be accessed by users, but clutter up the search results due to their volume. For more information, see the project page.

Google Kills Lively

It looks like Google is pulling the plug on Lively. After our experiences with Second Life, it would be intersting to find out why they're shutting it down. My guess is that it was more cumbersome to their user base than other methods of communicating, such as IM, email, or social networking sites. I think in many ways it's one of the fallicies of virtual worlds. When you interact with a mouse and keyboard, the very method of interaction is broken away from our real-world skills. If physical actions could be translated into a virtual world, then users would be able to take advantage of those skills to interact in a more effective manner. Until such technology is possible, I think abstract user interfaces will continue to dominate.

Drupal as a FileMaker replacement?

I had an interesting thought: FileMaker is often used as a simple way to create forms for different types of data and methods to display all of the records. I wonder if a custom distribution of Drupal could be built to cater to this audience, by providing a local all-in-one install of Drupal, preconfigured with CCK, Views, or perhaps Simple Views. The biggest challenge would be to deal with custom presentations (FileMaker makes it pretty simple to do both layout and style, whereas with Drupal you have to do custom theming).

Nepomuk: Advanced Meta-Data as an Open Standard

I noticed that there was this strangely named daemon running during my KDE 4 session:

andrew    6275  0.0  0.2  71748  5072 ?        Sl   Nov09   0:00 /usr/bin/nepomukserver
andrew    6288  0.0  0.4  45640  7708 ?        S    Nov09   0:03 /usr/bin/nepomukservicestub nepomukstorage
andrew    6289  0.0  0.2  31464  4092 ?        S    Nov09   0:00 /usr/bin/nepomukservicestub nepomukontologyloader
andrew    6290  0.0  0.2  31328  4344 ?        S    Nov09   0:00 /usr/bin/nepomukservicestub nepomukfilewatch

Tip: Use NFS instead of Samba for Time Machine Backups

I recently converted my Time Machine backup to use NFS instead of Samba. All in all, it was a pretty simple procedure. By using NFS, I dropped userspace CPU usage from a maximum of 40% with Samba to no more than 7-8% with NFS. This is on an AMD 4800+ X2, so the performance gains will be even bigger on slower machines. This means that my media server can now play HDTV h264 files without lagging during backups - a huge win for the elusive "WAF"!

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