I've written in the past about finding high quality Drupal modules and the advice that I gave there is still mostly valid. And if you want to improve the quality of data about Drupal modules you should consider Improving Drupal without any work.

Today I revisited a topic that Killes introduced (at least to me) in his post about seeing results of code checker on Drupal modules. This can provide yet another data point about the quality of a drupal module.

The Drupal Code Checker

The Code Checker itself is a php script which lives in CVS. It takes a pass at the code and runs some basic checks. It's validation of SQL queries only works if the queries fit onto one line, it expects SQL keywords (like SELECT and UPDATE to be uppercase). It has problems, but, it is also better than nothing! And, if you see a way to improve it you can edit the file and provide a patch (or patch it yourself if you have CVS access).

The check is run after a commit to CVS during the next run of the packaging script (which happens 3 times a day every 8 hours, 1AM, 9AM, and 17 GMT).

Drupal Code Style

In the scripts/ directory of every Drupal download is a file code-style.pl. This code style check is another validation that is probably not perfect and which is not run in an automated fasion, but it does provide valuable information about the quality of code. Usage examples include:


$ ./code-style.pl ../path/to/myfile.module
$ ./code-style.pl ../modules/path.module


You'll need a perl environment to run the script, but even on Windows that's easy to get with Cygwin.

I want a personal injury lawyer for spam. For a variety of reasons I have to keep various email addresses that I use public. Some of these are used for work related to my neighborhood in Denver. We consistently get spam on those addresses from all sorts of places, and yeah, I want to sue those folks. But that's pretty hard. They hide and do all sorts of shady stuff that would prevent finding them.

Rikki Tikki Backstory

So, this morning I found Rikki Tikki Tavi's Garden a reference to the childrens book where a mongoose defeats an evil pair of snakes. The name is well chosen: this user is attempting to defang a group of employees from the Center for American Progress, one of whom uses a snake username on some social bookmarking sites. And it is the involvment in the social bookmarking that is pissing off this particular mongoose.

He (or she...) doesn't have comments enabled on that blog, which pissed me off, so I wrote a lot more than I probably should have on the subject.

How Social Bookmarking Works

People who like a story will bookmark and "vote up" that story. You may not agree with them, but that's how it works.

Digg has an uneasy relationship with self-promotion that comes from the community. The Digg FAQ doesn't say how to handle it so instead we get community opinion on the matter. And therefore we get dissent from that opinion. That's how the real world works - deal with it.

Reddit saw that problem with Digg and set the ground rules off the bat. Right in the Reddiquette it says:

Post links directly to interesting things. Old content and self-promotion are okay, because Reddit is a meritocracy.

So let me repeat: People who like a story will bookmark and "vote up" that story. This is not a case of people being shills. It's reality.

How American Non-Partisan "Political" Nonprofits Work

Much as I hate to see it, the reality is that American law currently allows an organization to be a nonprofit think tank (gaining all sorts of tax and social benefits) but only if they are "non partisan". The IRS test for "non partisan" has to do with advocating for a specific politician. Most people just assume it's the appearance of a bias, which is not true. However, both the popularly accepted idea of "non partisan" as being "unbiased" and the IRS test of "not advocating for a person" are crossed every day!

I made a squidoo lens about FON.

Leave a comment and point me towards resources to add and I'll be sure to do it.

Squidoo is basically a personal take on resources someone thinks are valuable. There's tons more interesting information on the subject, I know it, but I've only found a handful of places to read.

This is a little concerning to see details of how to execute sniffing of FON username/passwords. I imagine that as a Bill it would be dangerous to lose this information because it would probably be possible to take your money from the shared revenue.

Other than that, while it's never good to lose a username/password I'm not sure if it's such a big deal.

Today I got an email from the folks at FON alerting me to a "surprise" that's coming related to the new Fonera:

Today we are launching La Fonera, the FON Community's new Social Router. You will soon be receiving a new special offer to take it home. We wish to thank you for always believing in FON, so we will send you another e-mail to offer you La Fonera in a very special promotion (including a surprise). Just wait and you'll be able to enjoy all the privileges you deserve!

What I hope the surprise contains?