tip

I've now been using Drupal on 6by9.net for a year. The flexibility and variety of add-on modules has been great, but there is a definite learning curve. I would not expect casual users to have any fun at all, and the management interface is fairly daunting. Once you dive below the user interface, adding/modifying/updating modules or Drupal itself, the headaches can really begin.

So, even though I'm a highly technical user/administrator, I'm quite ambivalent. Using Drupal has been great. Administering Drupal has been demanding.

Updating modules is a painless process. You unpack the new tar and run an update script. I haven't had any serious bugs, although the last update did raise a couple errors I had to double check (just to make sure they weren't critical).

Updating to new versions of Drupal is serious work. You have to replace the entire site directory with the new version and then pull in the changes you have made (modules, themes, files, settings file, etc). I haven't found a great way to automate this, yet, although I certainly would if my site were larger.   read more >>

I've loved R since the first time I used it in statistics class. I went several years without using it, but I probably should have pulled it out a few times. It's incredibly powerful and ends up being quite fun for data visualization geeks. Unfortunately, it's not intuitive to a lot of users.

Further, even those of us comfortable with it seem to quickly forget exactly how we displayed the data just the way we wanted last time. I'm going to post the tricks/scripts I write whenever I use R - both for others and myself to re-use. Just click on the tag "R".

There are a lot of user interface inefficiencies that we've all been forced to get used to. Moving and resizing windows is definitely one of them, as you have to carefully position the mouse cursor over a tiny section of a window.

However, there's no need for Linux users to do this. X-Windows supports moving and resizing windows by clicking and dragging on any portion of a window - the mouse cursor can be over any portion of the window, no matter what's underneath.

Here's how:

• To move: Hold down ALT while clicking and dragging with the left mouse button
• To resize: Hold down ALT while clicking and dragging with the right mouse button

You'll find that even though it's a small tip, your work will be just a little more efficient.