It's not even my birthday yet, but I was given an early present anyway. My friend Jam made this totally awesome hand-sewn laptop sleeve for my MacBook Pro. It's got the Kölner Dom on it, red-on-white on the front and white-on-red on the back. The material is very thick felt which is sure to provide nice protection. The laptop slides in and out quite nicely, and the cover flap has velcro on it to close. This is easily the best laptop sleeve ever. Thanks, Jam!

(see all the pics)

This very useful Drupal partly Drupal site is also a good place to go if you are a Drupal freelancer looking for work or a Drupal contractor looking to hire. It isn't limited to Drupal, but there are lots of listings for Drupal jobs and Drupal service providers.

UPDATE: Looks like only the community section is running Drupal.

Here is the second part of the interview with Jay and Dries of Acquia. The first episode can be seen here.

Yesterday I made this screencast to demonstrate three awesome new themes for Drupal 6. Of course I was excited to share it with people, so today I embarked to do something I had not yet done: upload video to the Internet. Yeah, I know, everyone is doing it, am I behind the moon or something? Not anymore. In fact, my inaugural "first time" provided a great opportunity to test as many video sharing sites as I could find. The best is Blip.tv. Aside from the great quality I especially liked how I could customize the embed code to fit any size I wanted. Here is the video, served by Blip.tv, and below are links to all the other copies, 13 in total (assuming Revver gets their act together and actually publishes it), so you can compare the quality on each of them.

• YouTube
• MetaCafe
• Vimeo
• Veoh
• Crackle
• Eyespot
• JumpCut
• Blip.tv
• Google video
• Daily Motion
• MyVideo.de
• Break.com
• Revver

Spike.com Spike.com rejected the video as spam. A HOWTO screencast about open source softare. So Spike, you want to compete with YouTube? How's that workin' for ya?

For those of you who might be wondering about my new job at Acquia, and what the company is up to.

All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the colour of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.

Some images of seal hunting. More information.

Some of the things I’d like to achieve:

• The steps that are taken during indexing (and later during query parsing) should be made atomic and chained, similar to input formats and filters. This would combine the preprocess hook with text transformations that already happen (stripping punctuation, lowercase, etc.) I’ve considered building a prototype with the current filter system.
• hook_search(‘name’) needs to return more metadata. Ideally modules could provide multiple searches and allow themselves to be configured (such as adding elements to the search form, or defining their own search form). Perhaps other $ops are needed.
• The type column in all search tables should be removed and each type should maintain its own tables.
• The keywords should not persist throughout the request in the form of a string, but rather an object that handles adding fields, removing fields, cloning etc. I have such an object that is very near general purpose use in the ApacheSolr module.

Drupal has been used on several popular and professional sites. One of the most notable is The Onion, the satirical news publication, as well as MTV's Web site in the United Kingdom. In its latest iteration, version 6, it has added support for drag-and-drop, OpenID logins, and an editor that can be tuned to suit both left, and right viewing cultures.

Add this Digg widget to your posts about Drupal's Webware 100 award:

1. refactor search node_rank with hook_node_rank scoring factors: Node module’s content search allows four different runtime scoring factors, including keyword relevance, recency and number of comments. This patch replaces the hardcoded scoring factors with a hook that lets any module inject similar scoring factors.
2. Path module should add URL alias to update index in nodapi.: Currently, the URL alias of nodes doesn’t play any role in the keyword relevancy of Drupal search. This might be the #1 reason Google still beats us at searching Drupal.org.
3. Add spelling suggestions to the “no search results found” page.: When no search results are found, this patch looks at the query, looks at the words in its index, and uses the Levenshtein algorithm to make a spelling suggestion that might be what you intended to search for.
4. Patch To Add User Profile Search: User search is useless in its current form. Being able to search user profiles would be a huge step forward in making search/user into something special.
5. search_index hardcodes boosts to html elements. Should be configurable.: <h1> gets 25 points, <a> gets 10, and <em> tags get 3; wouldn’t it be nice if this were configurable?
6. Exclude node types from search index: Sometimes you don’t want certain content types to be indexed. This adds an administration configuration for that case.
7. Optional Exclusion of Taxonomy Vocabulary from Advanced Search: For those of you with HUGE taxonomy vocabularies, this will make the advanced search form usable again.
8. Indexing options for taxonomy: Administrator gains the ability to say how strongly taxonomy terms should weigh in the indexing process. Synonym support included.
9. Add scoring factor controls to advanced search form
   The administrator can adjust runtime scoring factors on the site configuration -> search page. Why not let the end user decide how important each scoring factor should be by using the advanced search form?
10. Fix search index link handling for non-existent nodes
    Esoteric bug with an RTBC patch (waiting for just one more review) that fixes the case when someone links to a not-yet-created node.
11. Showing result count and result range in search results: This is really a feature request for the pager. Why don’t we have something like “Showing 10-20 from 500 results” on our search pages?
12. Replace “blue smurf” in no search results message: The quintessential bike shed argument. What two words should replace “blue smurf”?

Please help review and refine these patches. All of them need SimpleTest cases written as well.