brian's blog

I was recently working on something on my web server when I noticed that apache was using an inordinate amount of CPU time. After investigating the log files to look for clues, I found that the traffic was a high volume of login attempts on my website.

One of the website elements i've been very interested in lately is syntax highlighting for programming code, because the main thing that i am interested in using my own website for is to share code in a way that could be useful not only for others, but also as reference for myself later.

I'm taking a break from the frustration of video stuff by fiddling around with my fresh install of ubuntu 10.04 netbook remix on my Acer Aspire One netbook.

I was thinking that the windowing looked a bit choppy and i was wondering i could switch to compiz for some nice smoothing out of the graphical interface. Turns out you can. Here's how i did it...

I just spent about an hour trying to figure out what went wrong with my apache that was causing the process to take up about 90% of the cpu time on my nifty linux server. In the log of one of my drupal instances i found that it was a call to a missing php page, from a module that wasn't quite properly installed. So it turns out that it's quite possible to chew up the bulk of your CPU time if you're not careful with drupal configurations, just as it is with any process capable of infinite loops or recursion.

I'm SO excited that I can finally enable e-mail on my self-hosted drupal sites! This is going to make the whole thing much more fun.

The long and short of this story is that when you set up a drupal powered website on your computer at home you can try to use the built in e-mail systems, but nothing will happen. The reason is that your home server most likely doesn't have email subsystems installed, and even if it did your ISP no doubt blocks outgoing e-mail ports to prevent spam from being sent by home users.

I've created a new theme for my website. I called this theme "terminal" with the idea of making it look like a set of unixy terminal windows or something.

Building a visual theme in Drupal is typically done by starting from a template theme such as clean, 960 or zen. I chose to work from a zen sub-theme. I developed all of the graphics that make up the bits and pieces of the visual style using photoshop.