Guus Bosman

I installed the second beta release of Drupal 7 on my OpenBSD server. Over-all, the beta looks very solid. This morning I spent some time testing and porting modules from version 6 to 7.

One thing I ran into is that Drupal 7 now requires PDO extension to be installed on your server. During the installation I saw this error message (I'm running OpenBSD 4.5):

"Your web server does not appear to support any common PDO database extensions. Check with your hosting provider to see if they support PDO (PHP Data Objects) and offer any databases that Drupal supports."

Here are the steps I took to install these PDO database extensions on my OpenBSD server:

As root, run this:

pkg_add ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.5/packages/i386/php5-pdo_mysql-5.2.8.tgz

To complete the installation add the following two extension to your php.ini (for me, /var/www/conf/php.ini).

extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so

Restart Apache and you're good to go.

This morning I ran the Cannonball Half Marathon in Greensboro, NC. It was my first half marathon in 18 months, and given my lack of training while we were traveling earlier this year, I wasn't sure how this would go.

I'm so happy with the result! My time was 2:06, only a few minutes short of my P.R. and I felt great. I really should do this more often.

In fact, I only decided on Thursday to sign up for this race. I hadn't ran since last weekend -- lots of obligations this week made running in the evening impossible -- and I decided to take advantage of this unplanned tapering.

Early in Greensboro

Greensboro is an hour driving due west of Durham, and I got up at 5.00 am to make it to the start line. The race was well organized, and I liked the fact that they had mile markers on every mile. It was great weather for a run -- at the start it was 45 degrees, two hours later about 58 degrees. After the race there was a band playing Blues Brothers music.

Negative splits

I really tried to control my pacing this race. Usually, I start a little too fast in the first two miles, for which I'd pay the price later on. I set myself the goal to finish within 2:15, which is pretty much a 10 minutes per mile, but with the understanding that if I felt strong half-way the race I could speed up. It has been 18 months since my last race, so I didn't want to start too fast.

Almost all my chervil plants died this week when I forgot to water them.

It is safe to say that growing herbs has been unsuccessful for me, and for the herbs.

Perhaps I'll find chervil soup when I'm in the Netherlands for a week at the end of November.

We had a good and productive weekend. Yesterday we went for a walk near Falls Lake, a little north of Durham. We had never been there before and it was beautiful, but we stopped early because of a sign that warned that we were now entering a hunting area. "Reflecting clothes are recommended." Hunting season has recently started. Until October 1st hunting was limited to the use of bow-and-arrow, now other weapons may be used as well.

We left and walked the safe and enjoyable Al Buehler trail instead.

Today I visited the International Festival in Raleigh to take pictures for the other website. In the afternoon we went for a walk together, the Al Buehler trail again. We also reorganized the 2nd bedroom/office and finally put away the luggage and boxes from New Jersey and Washington, DC. Now we have a usable office again.