The long-awaited and much-anticipated version 7 of Drupal ("D7") was formally released this week. This open-source software package is known as a Content Management System ("CMS") and has been used to run this and other websites hosted by Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") for much of the past six years. We have known that this code was under a long development cycle for quite some time and have tested various components along the way. It appears to be quite promising and should enable the TCM team to do even more with this great software.

Hence, late last week we decided to bite the proverbial bullet and start the rather involved upgrade process of bringing "everything" current. As a result, this website, its sibling websites and the supporting servers all currently are under-going a massive maintenance upgrade. This means that the performance and availability of the website will be more spotty has been the case recently. (In particular, the image software is not working as desired.)

This upgrade includes finally switching the Ubuntu flavor of Linux software on the server from what was 8.04 (Hardy) to 10.4 (Lucid Lynx). Ubuntu 10.4 is the most current Long-Term Support (LTS) release and should be stable for the next several years (like Hardy has been). As is the case with practically any server upgrade, there are numerous packages that also either need to be or can be upgraded to work with the more current version of the software. We currently are in the midst of checking, confirming and installing the associated package changes.

One of the biggest packages that changed with the Ubuntu 10.4 was the programming language PHP. It switched from version 5.2 to version 5.3. Normally that would not be very much of a change. However, the Drupal 6 software was written prior to some of the changes that were introduced with 5.3. In particular, PHP 5.3 is much more strict about the issue of how it passes variables and also has some deprecated functions that were used quite a bit in the Drupal 6 core. Drupal 7 supposedly clears up these particular issues, but may well introduce others that need to be tested for before the final switch to Drupal 7 is completed.

Where we are at the moment is running the most current version of Drupal 6 and Ubuntu 10.4. In the log files, there are a number of errors being posted about problems with pass variable by value instead of by reference. These need to be corrected one by one to get Drupal, Ubuntu and our custom software all peacefully co-existing with one another. We are aware that hidden in this mess is the something that is preventing the correct display of images with their associated content. We are not sure where exactly the problem is, but hope to have the issue eradicated shortly this weekend.

Thanks for bearing with us!

This is being cross-posted to both the Toomre Capital Markets website and to Lars Toomre's personal website.

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Earlier this week, Lars Toomre broke up an LT post about Adding Images to Lars Toomre Website. Previously, buried at the bottom of that post, there was a hand-crafted HTML table summarizing what information currently was in Google Image Search for various combinations of site domain restrictions, safe search parameters and some typical search terms. That table is now presented in the LT post Sample Summary of Google Image Search Results and repeated here for easier reference.

The public presentation of these search results has already resulted in several stimulating conversations heading off in numerous different directions. Let me try to summarize some of the issues that have been raised thus far and the broad categories that they might be grouped into. Each of these categories probably will receive additional attention in the coming days. They include:

IP address 95.108.240.252 maps to a spider computer hosted on the Yandex Enterprise Network. About every minute and a half or so, a spider process on that computer (still) attempts to retrieve yet another piece of content from the Toomre Capital Markets ("TCM") website. Many of the pages this spider requests either do not exist or are part of the no-follow rule section in the robots.txt file. This spider certainly is aggressive and ignores the rules that many other bots seem to respect.

A few months ago, after watching this particular malformed spider consume more five percent of the total hosting bandwidth used that month, we had had enough. Hence, some modifications were made to a custom Drupal module running on the TCM website concerning visitor information (including various bots) and what specific information was being sought. Now as a result, when this Yandex spider come looking for a page like "search/node/facebook", it somehow ends up redirected to a page from a third-party website.

One would think that the person(s) controlling the spider would get the message after some fifty thousand plus attempts to get information from the TCM website. Somehow a human user might wonder why attempts to retrieve information on structured finance products, risk management and/or MATLAB topics always results in a page full of "gay anal porn" or other similar material. Until then, the TCM website might well become a frequent referrer to certain pornographic websites.

Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") uses the open-source Content Management System ("CMS") system called Drupal to generate the web pages that are served up on this website. As part-time technology "geeks", we at TCM are big fans of the flexibility that this technology offers. That flexibility comes at a cost though. Whereas as some other popular CMS software like WordPress are much easier to use "right out of the box" so to speak, Drupal requires considerable effort in setting various parameters and even some programming to get a website to look and work as desired.

The current version of the TCM website has remained basically unchanged for the past two plus years. During the summer of 2010, we will be making some changes both to address the resolution of some long-known issues and to prepare for a move both to a new version of Drupal (Drupal 7) and the adoption of the HTML5 language. Hence, there may be some temporary hick-ups as these changes are incorporated into the production website.

If there are annoyances about the current presentation and/or operation of this website that bother the reader, please let us know. We will try to incorporate such changes before we are distracted by the upgrades to HTML5 and Drupal 7. Thanks!

The Microsoft Internet Explorer browser in its various implementations is so frustrating to deal with, especially in its various non-standard ways of rendering XHTML elements and CSS mark-up. Working with Internet Explorer version 7 during the past few days, I am reminded well why we here at Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") fled first to Firefox and then more recently to Google's Chrome as our web browser of choice. Unfortunately, though, slightly more than sixty percent of this site's visitors still use Microsoft IE for browsing content here. Hence, website changes still need to be correctly rendered with IE as well.

Over the past few weeks, we have been doing quite a bit of working on the plumbing so to speak that enables this website to function. At its core, the public side of this website relies on the excellent Content Management System known as Drupal. The core software was upgraded to the most recent Drupal release 6.12 and all of the more than sixty or so modules were upgraded as well. We also have begun implementing a number of new features like the ability to print content in a printer friendly format, an ability to e-mail content to professional contacts and the ability to share content with various social network sites.

As part of that overhaul, we also have rewritten the core Drupal theme that will be used to display various website pages to the user. That new theme is working really well in both the Chrome and Firefox browsers. However, of course, the Microsoft IE browser has other thoughts. It appears not to recognize some CSS selectors or maybe not implement them at all. Other CSS selectors seem to have padding and/or margin issues that are throwing neat rows of graphical elements out of whack.

Hopefully, it will only take a short while to track down solutions to each of these Microsoft IE specific issues. Until then, we will hold off on putting the new theme into daily production. Thank you for bearing with us during this upgrade and redesign process. We are off to find some tools that might assist with the debugging of what is going on with the IE rendering engine.