There I was, searching a way to migrate content from Nucleus (version 3.3x) to Drupal 6.
Some ‘migrate’, ‘import’ or ‘xxx2drupal’ modules for Drupal could be found, but none of them were suitable for Nucleus source data. It also seemed like some HTML fiddling was required to really make the content ready for publication on Drupal.

I decided to learn some Ruby and a bit of Drupal’s database scheme by processing exported Nucleus tables and transforming them into INSERT statements for Drupal’s tables. Countless hours were wasted learning how to preserve articles, comments, authors, categories and more…

The little Ruby script eventually did the trick. Now that it’s practically too late to be of any use (it’s been almost two years!), I’m nonetheless enticed to release nucleus2drupal.rb v0.1 onto the pipes.

If you want to try, here’s how it goes:

• Unpack nucleus2drupal.
• Export your Nucleus tables (category, comment, item, member) using phpMyAdmin into the queries-source directory (nucleus_category.sql, etc).
• Modify the query templates in the queries-insert/ directory so that they’ll work for your Drupal database.
• Take a look at nucleus2drupal.rb itself and the settings (and warnings) therein.
• Execute ./nucleus2drupal.rb.
• If the resulting SQL files (directory queries-insert/) look okay, then execute them against your (test!) Drupal database.

I’ve tried to clean up most hard-coded specifics, but your mileage may vary. Remember to pay close attention to text encodings along the way if your content is beyond plain ASCII.

Should you eventually fail, let me know how you’re liking that Migrate module instead

However, this input format is very complex and not very flexible.

An existing ‘link component’ patch to flexifilter is much more compact and easier to configure.

In my view, that’s the nice thing about flexifilters: you don’t need to dabble in code if you want to change or configure an input format. Instead all parts are small and self-contained, configurable units.

In this case, a dip in the code was unavoidable because of a known bug. While at it, I also built in support for clean URLs trough the pathauto module. The result is in the issue queue.

For easy installation, you can download the filter here as an installable module: flexifilter_wiki_url.tar.gz. Feedback is welcome…

• koli900: ku je mor shtet
• me: broa dog flimpets
• koli0900: fol shqip mor kar
• me: alli harvod dobeng
• koli0900: ma ha karin
• me: bollem pratka ovordeks
• koli0900: pidhi satam

I’ll be attending FOSDEM this weekend (albeit not the full weekend).

Unlike previous editions I was hardly involved in the speaker interviews — the very capable K.V. handled those this year. I did contribute to the questions in Brion Vibber’s interview though.

The organizers are once again making a nice leap in quality. Case in point: the cloakroom, the sunday bus home, and of course BDA v3.1.

I discovered that choosing a new bike is a lot harder than buying a new computer. Instead of only taking into account price, performance, reliability, silence and looks, you also have to think about weight, targeted use, and much more.

Most components are also very difficult to compare and a quick look on the internet usually only complicates matters.

I always thought that there were two kind of bikes: race bikes and ‘normal’ ones.
It appears I was wrong.
Today one has to choose between folding-, race-, trekking-, city-, fitness-bikes or hybrid combinations of any of these.

After some research, I came up with the following requirements:

• Comfortable enough for everyday usage.
• Light enough to accommodate longer trips.
• Suitable to be fully packed on a short bike holiday.
• Able to be stripped of some unnecessary components for ’sporty’ rides.
• No front, rear or saddle suspension.
• Not too ugly (expensive stuff should be well-designed).
• Equipped with lights and luggage carrier.
• Available in a bike shop not too far away (not having a car to transport it there).

The above requirements, together with a limited budget, narrowed my search to the lighter ‘trekking’ models. In the end I chose the Trek X500. After riding it for three weeks, these are my experiences:

• Riding a decent bike is a true pleasure.
• The X500 comes with a lot of extras as one should expect in this price range: kick stand, pump, wheel lock with extension cable, luggage carrier with binder and even a lowrider in front.
• The riding position is fairly upwards; this is very comfortable and can be tweaked a bit by adjusting the handlebar.
• A chain guard is not a necessity for me. I’m curious how long it’ll last.
• I wouldn’t mind a hub dynamo instead of the battery-powered LED lights, but anything is better than a flaky wheel dynamo.

A small share of bad luck the pas few weeks, but in the end I can consider myself lucky:

• The broken frame caused no accidents.
• My new bike is quite okay now and the chain is holding well.
• I found the on/auto/off button on the rear light. Just search harder!
• After ten minits, a passer-by in the basement opened the door for me from the other side. Even then, cell phone reception was remarkably good for a basement.

To me, it scored bad points for its awfully long subtitle (Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries — Microsoft .NET Development Series). We’ll refer to it as FDGCIPRNL as a form of silent protest hereafter.

Luckily all is more than made up for having “Krzysztof Cwalina” as one of the author’s names. Can’t do better than that myself.

On to the content.

The book is based on internal documentation used by the creators of the .NET framework (which is better designed than other similar frameworks that I know). It gives great insight in the design process and the many trade offs involved.

Even though the reader might never implement a large framework himself (a framework is designed to be extended, while a library is not), FDGCIPRNLMDS still is valuable in helping better understand the framework that you program against.

The book is also stuffed with generic advice about programming .NET: which classes to avoid, how to name fields, how to deal with exceptions, etcetera.

From time to time, a contributing author comments on the topic at hand in a small blurb, which gives may of the sections a nice personal touch.

Contrary to most technical books, FDGCIPRNLMDS was actually a pretty quick read. All in all, a recommended book for .NET programmers but not so much for practitioners of other platforms. For them, the advice and insight is too biased towards the .NET framework only.

The book I’m reading next seems a much tougher nut to crack, but I’m making progress.

• Firefox bookmark keywords / keyword searches
• Alt+F2 mini-shell command widget on Linux
• Launchy on Windows
• A text replacement tool like Texter

I really liked it because it ‘just works’, and has a lot of potential for extensions. In a way, it’s more of a platform that a tool. However, since platforms tend to get ignored if they have few users, I felt Enso could use some freeing up (of both price and source code) to get the ball rolling.

Seeing it just disable itself after the trial period was a real disappointment, also from a usability point of view.

Luckily, the Humanized team has been thinking in the same direction. From now on, Enso is free (the source code is still closed but this could change in the future).

What’s more, Humanized is joining forces with Mozilla. In terms of building a platform and reaching lots of users, this is a major announcement.

I was thinking about comparing Enso with KDE’s extensible krunner, Katapult or (the Quicksilver-like) Gnome Do, but this announcement indicates that Mozilla might be planning something even broader in scope. I’m looking forward to Firefox 4