I was profiling one of my favorite large PHP applications today using APD. I kept getting what seemed to be strange results -- it was telling me that bunch of defines statements (30+ of them) were responsible for an inordinately large percentage of the page generation time. On minimal pages it was as much as 37%. Even on the well-known largest of pages, they were still clocking in at a not insignificant 5%.

That just didn't seem possible.

Or how to get what you want without cutting code...

I have a Drupal 5-based website for use by my extended family and friends to keep up with my own family while we are overseas. Most of them are far from being sophisticated web users, and seem to be having a challenging time remembering how to log into my site. So what I needed was a way to get them onto the site once and then persist their sessions for a period of time.

Back in July I wrote about a development meeting I attended with a bunch of really smart guys. One of those guys was Arto Bendiken.

In the past couple of months, he's added at least 4* new cool Drupal modules to the contrib repository, of which I'm aware (there may be more gems to find -- I didn't even look!). In just the past few days, he added an absolutely amazing module called Trace which is developer's and maintainer's dream come true.