This content was initially published on the Phase2 blog.

At Treehouse Agency, we often work with internal development teams, and enterprise software being what it is, they often run Windows. This has been the primary driver behind some of our technology choices (using Mercurial rather than Git on these sorts of projects) and it also occasionally necessitates some extra debugging when something doesn’t quite work right on Windows.

In work on a recent project, the client developers were using WampServer, but upon the site reaching a certain size, developers on Windows noted that their Apache processes were quitting after a cache clear. We debugged and tracked the errors down to occuring during CSS preprocessing. The Apache processes were segmentation faulting, resulting in an error dialog.

In an initial assessment of the problem, it appeared that others were having the same problem, such as in http://drupal.org/node/424136. We advised the developers to add a line to their settings.php to disable css preprocessing, like so:

This content was initially published on the Phase2 blog.

In case you haven’t heard: the Bartik theme is now in core and, after some refinement, will be the default theme for Drupal 7. This is thanks to the phenomenal effort of many contributors from around the world.

I’ve been happy to help out on Bartik over the past several months and have worked quite a bit on improving the core color module’s usefulness to themers who want recolorable themes. Tonight I gave an impromptu talk to the NYC Drupal user group about D7’s color.module and Bartik.

I’ve started writing some Scala applications (including one atop the Lift web framework) to access Unfuddle’s API recently. I’ve mainly been building daily burndown reports for my team at Treehouse Agency. I’ve run into a few issues with API methods not working as advertised, and Unfuddle’s been pretty good about fixing most of them.

The problem I’ve been experiencing as of January 5th is that Unfuddle has subtly broken authentication for client libraries that (wisely) wait for a 401 error with an accompanying WWW-Authenticate: Basic header before sending credentials. (Namely, Unfuddle’s API stopped sending a WWW-Authenticate header altogether.) If need be, you can force most HTTP client libraries to send authentication on every request in one way or another, and that’s what I had to do tonight with the excellent Databinder Dispatch library.

Last time out, I talked about the benefits of Scala, and why I’m looking at Scala and Lift.

In that spirit, I spent some time last weekend converting Peter Norvig’s simple Python spell-checker to Scala. I didn’t do this conversion alone; I got some great answers from Daniel Sobral, Daniel Spiewak and finally David Winslow on Stack Overflow. David provided the answer I needed for the best way to implement the matching function in Scala 2.7.

I’ve been spending a decent amount of my after-hours time investigating a combination that I think will be part of the future of web programming: the Scala programming language, and the Lift web framework on top of it.

It’s time for my quarterly blogging drive, and to start, here’s some information on my ever-increasing need to try out cool web technologies.

This content was initially published on the Phase2 blog.

The fine folks at ComputerMinds recently posted a modified SimpleTest run-tests.sh script for running SimpleTests from the command line. Their script added an –xml option to allow the script to run tests and output results in JUnit’s XML format so that Hudson can automatically run all SimpleTests in your project.

I’ve been doing some pretty exciting things recently with website performance. I always disliked doing IT work in the past, but the challenge of setting a server up to be able to withstand crushing traffic is now quite intriguing to me.

Now that I’m back from my month-long blog hiatus and from DrupalCon DC 2009, I thought I’d throw up a little post in the same vein as walkah’s brilliant Why I Hate Drupal talk.