Technology

I've never used it, but I know a lot of people who do. For years, AVG have offered a free anti-virus product. You have to put up with the fact that it will put a signature on the end of your email messages, letting the recipient know that AVG Free scanned the email for viruses.

They offered a "Pro" version that you had to pay for. It has extra features that the free version does not. It doesn't add a note to your incoming and outgoing email. Anecdotally, it may get virus signature updates faster.

In case you missed it, Drush has evolved recently.

Quick primer for beginners follows. (Although, if you haven't heard of Drush, the chances are this post was not written with you in mind. I blog about many subjects, and there aren't many readers who are interested in all of them!)

Drush stands for Drupal shell - it's a very powerful shell environment for managing Drupal sites using the command-line shell.

I'm a believer in paying for things. "Don't steal" - it's one of the ten commandments.

That means, if I want to use a stock photo on a website, on a flyer, on a poster, it should be with the copyright-holder's permission. It's their photo, and it's up to them to decide if I may use it. If I use it without their permission, it's theft.

Yesterday, Drupal 7.28 was released.

People rush to upgrade, knowing that there will be a tranche of bug-fixes that may resolve longstanding issues.

People hesitate to upgrade, because updating Drupal core is not as simple as we'd like.

Other times, the core update is a security release, and you can't afford to wait.

This does not need to be painful!!

Upgrading core in Drupal 7

You have probably read the official documentation on doing this.

Today is the day that Microsoft's Windows XP reaches "EOL" (End of Life) status. That means they won't be issuing any more updates for it. If security researchers (good guys), or hackers (bad guys), find vulnerabilities with it, Microsoft won't be issuing a fix for them.

This has been widely covered in the media. Apparently, a third of computers worldwide still use XP.

Phew, the heading of this post was a mouthful!

This post is a technical one, that probably won't interest many of my regular readers. However I know there are plenty of people looking for how to do this, so I thought I'd post this in case it helps others later.

Background

mod_security is a free or charge module for the Apache webserver. It allows HTTP requests to be analyzed, using a large number of characteristics. You'd be looking for evidence that someone's request to GET or POST is malicious, and you'd block them if so.

Please Update

Earlier this week, I got several automated e-mails from Drupal sites I manage. The e-mails told me that some of the modules I use had a new version, so I was advised to log in and upgrade.

Puzzling

I was puzzled to see that one of the modules I maintain was in the list of pending upgrades. That was puzzling because I hadn't pushed any changes to that module for a little while, so I wasn't expecting any new releases.

Since 2008, I've been using Opera as my main web browser. There were a few things I couldn't do on it - a few websites checked which browser you were using and stoutly refused to go any further if you were using Opera. For the main, it had a light memory footprint, was fast, had tabs and speeddials (which was relatively novel in 2008), and was high on standards compliance.

Yesterday, the PHP group announced the first stable release of PHP 5.5. This is great news. I shall compile it very shortly so that it can optionally be used on this server. That will allow me to test my various Drupal sites against PHP 5.5, to see if there are any issues.

However the arrival of PHP 5.5 signals the imminent end of PHP 5.3. Back in December 2012, PHP announced that

I just got a call. The caller display showed "international". The accent was foreign.

Operator: "Hello, this is N calling from the technical department of Windows Computer Systems. Could I speak to the main user please."

Me: "I'm sorry, there is no company called Windows Computer Systems."

Operator: {Silence}

Me: "It doesn't exist. Where did you say you were calling from?"

Operator: {Hangs up}