Code

The Views Bulk Operations module (a.k.a. VBO), is a godsend for busy Drupal site administrators. Don't just take my word for it - Lullabot wrote a chapter about it in O'Reilly's Using Drupal, it's included in the Open Atrium Drupal distribution, and it's even used on Drupal.org! Out of the box, VBO does a lot to streamline the things you do everyday, so that you spend less time doing them. A perfect example is bulk content moderation - with a few clicks of the mouse, you can mark a huge amount of comments as spam. You can even enable batch processing with a single click of a mouse so that you can literally do thousands of these without timing out.

VBO was attractive enough that we decided to offload the bulk/batch operations of Node Gallery to VBO. Integration for the most part was surprisingly easy - VBO "speaks" in Drupal Actions, so by writing actions, we were writing integration with VBO.

There's one undocumented case where VBO can be used that was critical for us. Most VBO actions you will find perform one action to a set of nodes, one at a time. Often times, that one action is to set a value of some sort on said nodes. In the case of Node Gallery, we wanted to be able to assign different weight values (used for sorting) to a bunch of nodes. The key here is that we aren't assigning a value of '2' to all selected node's weight, we want to assign a weight of 2 to node #1, 3 to node #2, 8 to node #3, and so on. While not straightforward, it's definitely achievable.

There's a nasty upstream bug in GTK present in Ubuntu 9.10 that makes Eclipse Galileo all but unusable -- specifically it makes clicking many buttons with the mouse just stop working. You can use tab and spacebar to make it work, but that's not much of a workaround. All you need to do is set an environment variable before starting Eclipse:

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true

Say you need a quick random 8 character alpha-numeric password. In sh, there isn't a $RANDOM variable and tr can give different results on different OS's. More than likely you have perl available - use it!

perl -le 'print map { (a..z,A..Z,0..9)[rand 62] } 0..pop' 8

Thanks to Chris Angell's Perl One-Liner page for this one. Do you have a better cross-platform way of doing it? Let me know!

Like many of you other sysadmins, I run a lot of ad-hoc, long running jobs. Also like many of you, I have a full plate and can't stand to sit around watching things run. Often times, I will start such a job and forget to come back to it until the end of the day. I needed a way to find out quickly about how long these tasks would take to run so that I could make a mental note or set a reminder to check the task later.