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Virtual Debian

I have been trying to get old versions of Debian to run as virtual machines. Most of it works without trouble, but there are some things you should be aware of, if you want to try it yourself.

My host is a Debian Wheezy machine running Linux kernel 3.11 and Qemu/KVM 1.1.2, using Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) 0.9.1.

Releasing old software

After a long, long time, I decided to release a new version of psiconv. That is tooling I wrote between ten and fifteen year ago. In those days I owned a Psion 5 (and later the upgraded model, the Psion 5MX), a small PDA with keyboard running EPOC (also known as EPOC32, a precursor of Symbian).

Images are just files

Just a quick one this time: in Drupal, the image field type is based on the file field type. That means that if you are looking for a way to use IMCE to upload images, the IMCE for File Field module will just do the job.

Creating a poor man's blog

Sometimes you have to write your own Drupal modules. Sometimes you need some heavy weight module. But often, you can fit several smaller modules together to get what you want.

Things I did not know about MySQL

Did you know that MySQL can join at most 61 tables in one query?

Did you know that table data is by default stored as latin1 with the  latin1_swedish_ci collation?

Things I did not know but should have - as I encountered both issues the same day.

Drupal profile_permissions

Sometimes you encounter a bug which makes you... not so happy.

On the Unquendor site, which is still Drupal 6, I use profile fields extensively. These are basically attributes of users. Not only names and addresses, but also things like visits to events and even a member's payment status is kept in this way. Of course, not everyone is allowed to see all fields, let alone edit them. The profile permissions module should enforce the proper policies.

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by Dr. Radut