About

Online home for Valery Lourie a.k.a valthebald
Web developer, systems analyst and happy father of two.

Year results

This day, exactly one year ago, I was forced to stay at home after losing family's only revenue source. In expensive apartments for rent, no hope to buy anything reasonable in foreseeable future. At the Israel North, place not overloaded with well paid jobs.

MiniHOWTO: nginx + php-fpm, Drupal 7.20 and Image module

As it is mentioned in it's release notes, Drupal 7.20 introduces additional security precaution against DoS attack using derivative images:

Backwards compatibility - the fight plan

It's 2013 out there. And hopefully, in about 8 months or so, we'll see another major Drupal release: Drupal 8. <woot> !

That also means (</woot> ) the end of the life cycle for the first massively popular Drupal series - Drupal 6.

Drupal Association elections - why do I participate

So, for the second time in its history, Drupal Association elects "at large" board members. If you still don't know what this thing is all about, you can learn more about elections at https://association.drupal.org/nominations.
This time, I'm one of the nominees (so you are more than welcome to drop some warm words about myself on the nominees page).
Nominee list is full of people I respect, and would be glad if they will end up in the board instead of myself. So why at all am I in?

The open source pyramid

Why should one bother to contribute to the open source project? Because it pays!

MiniHOWTO: modify views query with hook_views_pre_execute

Views is a great tool for any drupal developer. And even if you feel that it's powerful Views UI is not flexible enough for your queries, you can tweak view behavior with the hook_views_pre_execute()

MiniHOWTO: GnuPG PECL extension and PHP 5.4

Fresh-n-hot PHP 5.4, released a little bit less than a month ago (March 01, 2012, to be precise), has started it's way to our computers. Since I use Debian testing (wheezy) on my laptop, I've got 5.4.0 yesterday... and here is the first problem. gnupg extension (wrapper for the GnuPG encryption utilities) stopped working.

Pitfalls of the growing community

Drupal veterans had a long time to bring their technical, social and cultural values to more or less the same level. Nobody can guarantee, that new community members will share the same culture.

Drupal backwards compatibility

I know that this topic was discussed before, and not once. Yet if I would raise core initiative, it will be about backwards compatibility.
We love Drupal for the cool new stuff. Regretfully, this cool new stuff automatically marks old stuff, which we believed to be cool just yesterday, as outdated. This happens again and again, and there are already signs that Drupal 8 will not be an exception.

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