User Blogs

One of my favorite features of modern filesystems is the sparse file, where "empty" portions of files are unallocated, so they don't consume any space. This allows oversubscription of disk blocks, so long as you never actually complete fill all of the files at once. But one common problem of sparse files is that they tend to grow, and there is often no way to solve this problem in place. But there is, with ZFS.

This site, my glorified blog, started out on Drupal 4. It wasn't until Drupal 8 that there was finally a single official way to handle putting media into nodes, with a media reference field and a media embed filter. Between then and now I used first the venerable img_assist and then the image_filter module, both of which fell by the wayside after D7. I replaced them both using php custom filters, but php in the database is now deprecated for security reasons.

...as soon as I can get hosting... because my host is still stuck on PHP 7.4. This means that I'm still stuck with D7. But this blog is about converting my site from D7 to D9. I was able to preserve everything, it seems, down to text formats — but all of them were refusing to display because they had references to missing filters, so it made it look like none of my content was present.

Since we got a bus to convert into an RV, I have been doing quite a bit of research into them, and gathering information which I might find useful. One question which came up was how fast one can and should drive their bus. There is a lot of variation, and many factors which come into play, but given freely available resources on the internet today it's actually not that difficult to figure out.