Racing Minis at Zandvoort
Photo: Copyright © 2019 Eelke Blok

What happens to your data when your computer floods/catches fire/explodes?

So, what did you answer to that question? If it was, "Meh, that's not going to happen to me", think again. If it is, "I'm making backups", good for you. But how safe are your backups? Some say, one backup is no backup. This is especially true if you're just backing up to an external drive connected to your computer. Yes, it will safe your hide when the hard disk in your computer dies, but what if a bigger disaster happens? Of course, I wish no one to have their hard disks crash on them, let alone worse. However, what if your upstairs neighbour has a leak and it is right above your computer...

Growl + Bark + DummyGrowl = Notification Center goodness

DummyGrowl stops Growl 2.0 with Bark from displaying both a Notification Center notification and a standard Growl notification (right, the Notification Center notification can be seen through the Smoke-style Growl notification). At this point, it is still unclear to me whether this is a bug or a feature of either Bark or Growl.

Update 28/12/2013: It looks like DummyGrowl has served its purpose and that it is no longer needed with the latest versions of Growl.

Everything is a remix

I heard about it, but had never watched the videos before (or even knew it was a series of four). Very interesting documentary explaining how "original work" is usually only a combination of existing ideas, "remixed" in a certain way (which doesn't make the invention or creation any less impressive, it's just that attributing something to a single inventor or creator doesn't exactly reflect reality). There are nice references to pop culture and it ends with an explanation why the current US patent system is a monstrosity that does not help its original intent at all. Below are the videos,...

Debugging Drush with Eclipse and XDebug

Update 15/4/2017: This is a fairly old post, by now. I've done a more recent post on debugging drush on a setup with PhpStorm and Vagrant.

Drush is a command line tool to interact with the Drupal Open Source CMS (Get it? DRUpal SHell). It is an invaluable tool that many Drupal developers love once they start using it. Another tool I personally love greatly is the XDebug PHP debugger. I use it almost daily to quickly find out what is going on in a PHP website I am working on. It can be a pain to set up, but once you have it, firing up a debugging session is as easy as hitting a...