The concept of the ecological footprint has been launched by the Swiss professor Wackernagel. It is expressed in hectares (1 hectare = 2471 acres). An individual's ecological footprint represents the amount of earth surface one needs, or uses, to live, work, eat, generate energy, dispose domestic waste, ...

Given the fact that only 18% of the surface of the earth can be used by humans (as the rest is desert, ice, ...), every human on the planet can only use 1.8 hectares on average to sustain himself without compromising the rest of the world population. If we want to leave some space for our fauna and flora as well, every human's share is even lower than that. The average ecological footprint per individual - worldwide - in 2001 was 2.2 hectares - or 21% more than what is available. Sounds bad, but not too bad, does it?

Unfortunately (as we all know), the use of land is not distributed equally among all people of the world. Among other things, the hunger for energy and fossile fuels and the immense production of waste in our beloved industrialized countries dramatically increases the ecological footprint of its inhabitants. The ecological footprint of an average Belgian citizen is 5.6 hectares, or over 3 times more than what's available. The ecological footprint of an average North American is almost 10 hectares (source: WWF.) Imagine what would happen when all developing countries start living according to American or European standards...

Yesterday, I calculated my own ecological footprint at iedereeneco.be (see image below, the yellow bars are the Belgian averages). It seems that the efforts we have been doing as a family during the last few years pay off, as my ecological footprint is "only" 2.8 hectares, about 50% of the Belgian average. In our household, we have quite stringent waste management control rules, we pay higher energy bills for having green electricity (I guess the additional cost is something like an iPod a year), ...

We perform relatively poorly in the food department, mainly because we don't pay too much attention to where our food comes from. A lot of fruit and vegetables are imported from the other side of the world, which leads to high energy consumption for transport. So our 2008 goal is to increase the amount of locally produced foods in our shopping basket. I won't get the Nobel prize for doing so, but I think it's worth it nonetheless :)

The fly agaric (Amanita muscaria, not as toxic as commonly thought by the way) is found near birch trees, and to a lesser extent near pines and other conifers.

This fungus closely associates with the tree's root system, thereby enhancing mineral uptake for the tree. In return, the beautiful mushroom gets carbohydrates that are produced by the tree.

More images can be found here.

A decent WYSIWYG-editor shipped with Drupal core is a much requested feature. Until that happens, there are other interesting ways around. For example, a lot of people, including myself, are using Google Docs to manage documents online. It is really easy to publish these documents to your Drupal website using blogapi module, which is part of Drupal core.

Using Google Docs to post to your website has a lot of advantages:

• you can write your content using an easy to use rich text editor
• you can easily share your documents for editing/reviewing with other people before publising them
• a spell checker is automatically available in more than 30 languages
• you can easily upload images from your computer, and insert, rescale and position them in your document: when you publish the document to your website, Google Docs automatically creates an image tag pointing to the image at the Google servers
• when your document has been changed (or you want to roll back to a previous revision), you can update the content on your website with one simple click

The only problem with this approach is that on a lot of Drupal websites, the default input format is set to filtered HTML. Especially if comments are enabled on your site, you don't want to allow everyone to use the full HTML format. However, Google Docs obviously produces a lot more complex HTML than what is generally allowed by the filtered HTML format, and when it publishes your document to your website this will result in a really messy post. The solution to this problem is to install default filter module, which allows you to assign a different default input format to different roles. Since Google Docs authenticates using your own user account, you can set the full HTML format as the default for your role, and all will be good.

The following short tutorial shows you how you can set this up (Drupal 5.x). An example of a post published using Google Docs can be found here.

Argus is a Belgian non-profit organisation which works to improve the quality of our environment by informing the general public about environmental issues, promoting scientific research, reviewing existing scientific knowledge and by writing guidelines for nature conservation policy makers, ...

A couple of years ago, they started a nature photography contest to bring nature to the general public. Over the last four years, this contest has grown into the largest of its kind in Belgium.

This year, 12,214 images were submitted by 1,424 nature photographers. A jury of professional photographers selected 63 finalists.

I participated during the very first year (I believe it was 2003). This year, I decided to give it a go again, and I submitted 5 images. The one below (an extreme close-up of a dandelion) made it into the final selection!

I don't know yet whether I won a prize, but you can help me win the Audience Award by voting on my image (don't forget to click the link in the confirmation e-mail)!

The Dutch online IT magazine webwereld.nl reports that hosting providers such as Digitalus and D-hosting are increasingly being confronted with all sorts of problems caused by security vulnerabilities in the content management systems used by their clients.

Joomla, Drupal and Mambo are the three cms's mentioned in the article as the main culprits (or at least, the users of these systems not updating their software). The hosting providers were able to solve part of the issues by changing some PHP settings, but also continuously urge their customers to apply security updates as soon as they become available.

Luckily, the update module, which notifies the user as soon as there's a new version available of a module that is currently in use, will ship with Drupal 6. Hopefully this will ease the pain a bit.

On the other hand, the GPL states that anyone is free to modify or extend the software to their liking, so security issues will always exist and are often beyond the control of the software community itself.

On a side note, the article mentions that 10% to 20% of D-hosting's clients use Joomla. No statistics were given for Drupal though.