Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

• Drupal turned 6, got the 5.0 release and some cookies as birthday present.
• Wikipedia turned 6, now contains more than 1,500,000 articles...

Interesting day.

I have upgraded my website/blog/podcast/photoblog/linkblog/whatever to Drupal 5.0-rc1 today (I'll skip 5.0-rc2 for now and wait for the final release of 5.0 for the next upgrade).

The upgrade went quite nice, even though I had to upgrade several modules and port quite a bunch of custom hacks I had on my old (Drupal 4.6) site. I first upgraded to 4.7, then to 5.0 (as is the recommended procedure) on a test-site, and after figuring out how to fix or work-around all the issues that appeared, I upgraded the live site.

I password-protected the site during the upgrade, that's why it wasn't available for a while today (and caused some problems on Planet Debian it seems, sorry for that!).

New features you might enjoy:

• Every blog post, podcast entry, and photo/image has an AJAX-enabled voting/rating box now, thanks to the nice jRating module. Feel free to rate any content over here, I'm eager to know what you think.
• The Service links module provides those tiny images in each post, which allow you to submit the post to del.icio.us, Digg, etc. etc. with a single click.
• I now use the great new standard Drupal-Theme Garland with a custom color map. I really like it.
• Tons of small changes here and there, removing custom hacks which are now obsoleted with the new Drupal release, shuffling some menus around etc. etc.

If you notice any bugs or problems with the site, please let me know.

Thanks to the great work of Matthias we now have a great new logo for the Unmaintained Free Software wiki.

Thats' all.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's new book Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is now available in stores, as well as for download on his website.

To quote O'Reilly:

Written by a leading developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel, Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is a comprehensive overview of kernel configuration and building, a critical task for Linux users and administrators.

No distribution can provide a Linux kernel that meets all users' needs. Computers big and small have special requirements that require reconfiguring and rebuilding the kernel. Whether you are trying to get sound, wireless support, and power management working on a laptop or incorporating enterprise features such as logical volume management on a large server, you can benefit from the insights in this book.

Linux Kernel in a Nutshell covers the entire range of kernel tasks, starting with downloading the source and making sure that the kernel is in sync with the versions of the tools you need. In addition to configuration and installation steps, the book offers reference material and discussions of related topics such as control of kernel options at runtime.

A key benefit of the book is a chapter on determining exactly what drivers are needed for your hardware. Also included are recipes that list what you need to do to accomplish a wide range of popular tasks.

It's yet another great book licensed under a Creative Commons license. It's good to see that more and more books are now being freely licensed...

Interesting paper from the PacSec 2006 security conference: OpenOffice / OpenDocument and MS Office 2007 / Open XML security (PDF)

Not too surprising when you come to think of it, there are tons of possibilities to embed various kinds of malware in the new office document formats. Also, you always have the risk of leaving sensitive metadata in there... If you publish stuff, you better convert to PDF before. But even that might leave sensitive data in the PDF, mind you!

Oh, and one nice detail you might enjoy:

• OpenDocument specification: 700 pages
• Microsoft's Open XML specification (final draft): 6036 pages!

And that doesn't even describe all of the format (e.g. VBA macros are missing)! No further comment required...