Extremely geeky

Ok, I mentioned this in twitter a few weeks ago, I created an issue about it in D7’s issue queue, and there are 2 small print notes in the D6 theme guide, but I don’t think my message was visible enough. So let me just say for the record (again)…

Never, never, ever, ever use phptemplate_ as the prefix for your theme’s preprocess functions. Don’t do it! phptemplate_ prefix should talk to the hand! Expunge it from your memory. It’s an ex-prefix. Seriously, cut it out! So, let me re-phrase:

Every time you use phptemplate_ prefix,
God adds a pointless issue to Drupal’s issue queue.
Please, think of the issue queue!

Drupal 4.7.4 has a bug in it regarding story previews. The teaser preferences allowed you to set the maximum length of a teaser, but the underlying code treated it as the minimum length of a teaser.

So, say you wanted a teaser that was 400 characters or less; what you would get was a teaser that was always 400 character or more. Ouch.

Information on how to create a firewall using ipfw is hard to come by. I’ve found bits and pieces of useful information in various places. I’m working on creating a tutorial on how to configure ipfw for Mac OS X, but in the mean time, here’s some information on the extremely low-level internet packet, ICMP.