What's been on my mind

Some very useful updates have been introduced to Chrome's developer tools in Chrome 68.

Amongst them, Eager evaluation, function argument hints and autocompletion:

Riaan Burger from Burtronix spoke on Git workflow and security.

Thanks to him and Amazee for their sponsorship :-)

Riaan's slides available here: http://slides.com/riaan-burger/a-secure-git-development-work-flow

PGP, GPG, GNU.

Trusted communications.

Signing commits.

GPG  

Was looking up some vim shortcuts and came across this excellent vim primer which approaches it in a very logical manner.

Just discovered(!) that moving the cursor to the end of a line and automatically adding the semicolon can be accomplished with the following combination of keys: Cmd + Shift + Enter

Game changer!

The makers of the many of the apps and probably all of the social media websites we use (Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn, YouTube) don't have our best interests at heart, and are designed to keep us within their environments for as long as they can, and to make sure we come back often. This shouldn't come as a surprise, when most of the business models are advertising based, and more time spent = more advertising revenue potential.

The first Drupal Cape Town meetup of 2017 took place at the Bandwidth Barn on the 22nd of February 2017.

One of the sites I maintain recently had a server upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04.4, which included a new version of varnish (version 3.05) which required an update to the Varnish configuration. After setting up a new default.vcl file I was monitoring the headers sent and received to make sure that what was supposed to be cached was in fact being cached by Varnish. While testing I discovered that I was not getting any Cache-Control headers from static files like images.

I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk, the world-changing, South African born pioneer of the consumer electric car and space technology company SpaceX, and was pleased to learn that both the Tesla website, and the SpaceX website are built on Drupal. Both are currently Drupal 7 sites with home pages that use beautiful images and videos (in the case of the Tesla site) to provide high visual impact and engagement.

I recently migrated a Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7 using the migrate and migrate_d2d modules. While testing the new site on my client’s server, every now and again ajax requests were failing, and page resources like images were not loading. The apache error log showed a number of “client denied by server configuration” errors. 

I ran into issues when trying to use drupal's hook_form_alter to change some attributes of cck fields in a node form. It appears that depending on the weight of the module the form_alter is in, it might get called before the actual form element has been processed.

To make sure, you can set a function to be called after the form has been properly created, but before rendering.

In your form alter, add the after build key to the form field's array:

$form['field_course_status']['#after_build'][] = 'course_disable_status_field';