September 2008

Google earth to increase mapping detail

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Google's mapping systems (Google Maps, Google Earth, plus anything else in the skunworks) will soon have extra detail down to the half-meter / 1.5 feet mark thanks to an exclusive deal with the company launching a new geo-imagery satellite later this week:

This will be good for me trying to map out my favorite haunts back home. What's your take?

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Patch for wp2drupal for Drupal 6

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I'm trying to migrate one of my personal sites from Wordpress to Drupal and needed a way to migrate the existing data. Well, it turned out to be a little tricky as I'm using Drupal 6 while the only really useful converter, wp2drupal, was written for Drupal 5. Luckily someone converted wp2drupal to D6, so away I went.

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Stop MySQL giving up on Drupal

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With Drupal, if you have a content type with lots of records you can run into a problem where you start getting lots of "server has gone away" errors from MySQL. This stems from queries getting too long and MySQL giving up before the query has finished loading. So, to fix it, just edit your my.ini or my.cnf file to add the following line to the [mysqld] section:

  • max_allowed_packet=24M

There are other settings that can make a difference too, but this seems to be a good starting point.

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Optimizing Drupal 6 for massive sites

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A developer by the name of Wesley Tanaka worked on a Drupal 6 site that involved millions of content records, presumably imported from another CMS. During the development he discovered a few issues which hampered Drupal's search maintenance speed and wrote up a wonderful article explaining how to boost performance.

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Drupal makes "An illegal choice"

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Here's a weird one. Have a content type with about forty fields. When I click Preview on an empty form it gives the error "An illegal choice has been detected. Please contact the site administrator." which you're sure to agree is not terribly useful. I took a look at the watchdog logs and saw that the field throwing the error is a required integer checkbox that had no items selected. So instead of saying "You must select one of the items" it says "sir you are a smeghead" - not very useful, Drupal.

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