Humor services provider The Onion has moved the back-end of their extensive, and presumably extremely high-traffic, website to Drupal as of August 30th. It’s not clear what they were using before, but I believe it was homebuilt PHP stuff. I’ll miss playing with their old remotely exploitable headline-generating script, but this seems like a good move. One of the developers has posted an interesting overview of the redesign process.

It’s a nice feather in the cap of the Drupal community to have a prominent and busy site adopt their software. My only dig at them is that I figured it out because I saw “/node/” in the URLs!

Massachusetts, where I live, has been quietly leading the way toward freeing state government from proprietary software and document formats. In 2004 there was talk that proprietary software would be out completely, but that didn’t pan out. Instead, they’ve moved forward with plans to require government offices to use only open document formats. Friday’s article in the Boston Globe notes:

The policy change wouldn’t affect only Microsoft. The state uses other programs, such as IBM’s Lotus Notes and the word processing program WordPerfect, that employ proprietary file formats. These products would also have to be replaced, or upgraded to versions that work with the OpenDocument standard.

I stumbled across the Adobe Blogs recently. It looks like the site has been up less than a month, but there is some interesting reading there. I particularly like the posts from Bill McCoy, who describes himself only as being “responsible for platform product management at Adobe, including our desktop and mobile Reader software and associated PDF technologies.” I have no idea what “platform product management” means, but as long as he keeps up the good writing and candor (phrases like “XML configuration spaghetti” and “eBooks are a bit of a sore subject at Adobe right now” come to mind), he’s all right with me.

Recordings from this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention have started showing up over on the excellent ITConversations. First up is Nat Torkington and Tim O’Reilly speaking about O’Reilly Radar.

I’m looking forward to seeing more sessions appear in the coming weeks – especially the ones I didn’t get to!

When I started this blog I pledged it would remain focused on technical topics, but that’s trumped by what’s going on in New Orleans right now. Hundreds of thousands of dislocated people are struggling down there. I don’t need to tell you how to donate to the Red Cross, but here are some less widely circulated links to information and ways to help.

• Habitat for Humanity – lots of houses to rebuild
• Second Harvest – and lots of food needed
• Wikipedia entry on Katrina – dauntingly comprehensive
• NOLA.com – Local news site with lots of up-to-the-minute coverage
• New Orleans Craigslist Katrina Aid Page – excellent list of ways to donate and help
• Paypal is waiving fees for donations made to the United Way. I would be interested in hearing about other places that take Paypal donations as I think many people have a little Paypal “kitty” that they would gladly tap. That’s what I did.

Perhaps Microsoft is gearing up for combat in the web search index size wars. From August stats for e-scribe.com:

 	12.77% 	msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
 	3.61% 	Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
 	3.34% 	Yahoo! Slurp

So 12.77% of the domain’s hits for August came from MSNbot. When I drill down into the detail, it looks like the bot has a particular affinity for RSS feeds.

After invoking Expose, most people use a mouse to choose windows. But it can be controlled by keyboard, too. After invoking Expose for all apps (F9) or the current app (F10), you can use these keys:

• arrow keys to move between windows
• spacebar or return to bring selected window to front and leave Expose
• tab to move to next visible application (and enter current-app mode if you weren’t in it)
• backtick or shift-tab to move to previous visible application
• esc to leave Expose, ignoring window selection but staying in current app even if it has changed since Expose was invoked

Once or twice I’ve definitely confused the window manager this way – ending up with a foreground window with a greyed out title bar, for instance.