What can a Drupal 6 maintainer do, if he would like to gain more confidence that Drupal 6 is indeed fine and ready for a 6.0 stable release? Well, pick a well used site and upgrade. This is what I started to prepare for this Monday night for drupal.hu, the Hungarian Drupal community site. It helped that we readied the Hungarian translation earlier, so that it was complete and ready to import.
Many of you know that I am employed by Acquia to work on Drupal 6 full time right now, but since Drupal 6 is nearing a release, you might have wondered what I am going to work on next.
One of the rules with Drupal.org hosted projects is to not introduce radical API changes (or depending on your understanding even new features) in point releases of stable branches of contributed modules, so you are supposed to open a new branch. The hell starts to break loose however, if you don't have an eye on what is actually happening in your branches. This happened to me and it affected the Drupal 6 translation efforts so it was just the right time yesterday to finally clean it up. Here's the story.
Several people asked me to post about the status of the localization server, so here it goes. This project was started originally by Bruno Massa, then picked up by me as part of Google Summer of Code 2007 aiming to replace the Gettext and CVS based workflow for translators, providing a fully web based translation interface. One of the cool things of working full time on Drupal at Acquia is that I have capacity for spare time developments like this one. That's great.
I still remember the days, when I was working into the late nights (rather early mornings) to translate pages of the PHP documentation, and wondered how I can bare the load, without eye sight problems or pains in my body. Well, years of contributing over-hours and practicing bad posture shows its result after all, and after back pains for some time now, since a few weeks ago, I suffer from RSI in my arms as well. Knowing this will happen, I am going out swimming regularly for some time now, and I tried to set up an environment where I can work with better posture.
Welcoming a MacBook Pro to my work environment this last fall, I worked using the laptop on its own for some time, but then realized I'd rather try to integrate it to a better environment using a bigger and better positioned external monitor and an external keyboard. The Apple aluminum keyboard is great, although it's keys are a bit farther away from each other, compared to traditional keyboards I am used to, it is a great experience. But connecting my MacBook to an external display resulted in unexpected problems.