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Thursday night I went to my first Brisbane Drupal Meetup. It was great. There were 8 or 9 people there so most of the time was actually spend learning a little about each other (and kidding Mark about coding on reel tapes).

Jeff and Sheree and Josh from Marmalade Soul organised it. I also picked up cards from Mark, Chris, and Tony. Nick from Our Brisbane who I had already met because I am hosting and maintaining www.studybrisbane.com.au was there too. He is a real funny guy!

I had decided to present a summary of the tools and methodologies we employ here at Jethro in looking after something like 30 Drupal websites. As promised I have listed below the major tools and their uses below. This is a much bigger subject than the 10 minutes I gave to it on Thursday and I am really interested in seeing what others are doing.

Disclaimer: Yes I live in a Microsoft world. No I do not hate Macs or open source. and yes, sometimes Microsoft products are not the best products to use. On their own. But; most of the Microsoft tools that we do use are either because they are awesome or because of their integration and synchronisation with other MS tools. They are also generally easy for new staff to learn to use.

Microsoft released an extraordinary security patch yesterday.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical

Vulnerability in Server Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (958644)

Published: October 23, 2008

Seeing as Microsoft only release patches once a month, this is totally unexpected, and indicates the critical nature of the flaw. One surmises that there are already hackers and other criminals already exploiting this flaw.

There are lots of details in the MS08-067 bulletin and there is starting to be a fair bit of chatter on the tubes about it – see this from Nick MacKechnie for example where he points to the Security Vulnerability Research and Defense blog.

We emailed all our clients and suggested they patch immediately, or invite us to remotely connect to them and manage that for them.

Today (yesterday now) I wrote a real nice application for a client. It did exactly what they asked it do, though not what they wanted!. Its funny – no matter how much you coach the client through the specifications, and get them to agree to it in writing they always manage to come out afterwards and say “what I really wanted was…”

I found this cool cartoon that summarises how we don’t actually work, but how it feels sometimes.

You lot start coding...
...I'll go and see what they want.

Courtesy of http://www.abberley.co.uk/asap/index.htm

We had a thunderstorm last night. I was driving home watching it advance from the west and wishing I had my camera as there were awesome lightning strikes going off every 2-3 seconds. I got home just as it came overhead of our place and rushed out the back to sit under the patio with the camera on a tripod. I got a few good shots but as we were in the middle of it it wasn't as good a looking picture.

Here is one shot. the rest are up on flickr. Some of them have blurry spots where there was water on the lens of the camera.

I am getting better at taking them and hope to get some really good ones some day.