Mc-Kenna.com

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. The suggestions, particularly the first one for boosting reindexing speeds, would not only help sites with massive quantities of data but also sites ran on shared hosts where Drupal can normally be a bit of a resource hog, so I’m hoping they get applied to a future release.

Microsoft’s latest ads, that attempts to Apple’s “I’m a PC” persona in a different light, are not without their irony. I turns out that the ads were actually compiled on a Mac. Go figure.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

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:

• Google signed an exclusivity deal with GeoEye

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

Amusingly the satellite will support data down to 0.41m but the US government only allows the satellite provider to go as far as 0.5m - those 0.09m / 3 inches make all the difference, don’t you know.

I’ve always found that Exchange’s webmail system, aka “Outlook Web Access”, to be extremely buggy regarding remembering who you are. It sets sessions cookies with a pretty far-away timeout but regardless of whether I’m connected via a VPN or from the public internet it always delights in logging me out as quickly as it can. Well, I’ve worked out a work-around for these all too frequent occurrences. Here’s what you do:

• When you are provided with the login prompt, login.
• Click the Back arrow in your browser until it asks if you would like to resubmit the form again.
• Click Cancel.
• Click Back again. This will take you back to the original edit window with the fresh empty (or if it was a reply, the original quote) edit page ready to go.
• Click Forwards. It will say that it needs to resubmit a form in order to proceed.
• Click OK / Accept / Aye Cap’n, whatever is the appropriate response to the affirmative.
• Your message has now been sent, just like when you originally clicked Send.

Hopefully this will help some others who are also loosing their hair over this stupidity.

Good news today via /. as a research team have discovered fundamental flaws in Windows Vista that make its “security” system completely useless and unable to be fixed to stop the flaw. In other words, WIndows Vista is broken and cannot be fixed. Yay :-)

• Windows Vista’s security platform rendered useless

Time for my D&D half-orc persona’s ceremony of choice.

The reason NASA isn’t taken seriously? They take the piss!

Huge thanks to the msysgit team for their hard work, because after some testing I’ve discovered that their git/git-svn port does work, whereas trying to get it working under Cygwin is a quite broken right now. Got git it!

Note: You need to get the Git-1.5.5-preview20080413.exe release if you want to try git-svn, the Git-1.5.6.1-preview20080701.exe release has a broken git-svn.

The greatest system on the market for running Ruby on Rails apps, mod_rails aka Phusion Passenger, has hit v2, their first non-beta / release-candidate release. Great stuff. Go forth and sudo gem install passenger.