I just installed the development version of the monotone theme over on my mindfulseeing.com photoblog. What a cool theme. It adapts the colours of the post page based on the colour palette used in the first image on a post. AND, it provides a great archives page with thumbnails from each post. Very cool. This is exactly what I've been looking for in a photoblog theme.

Because it's not an officially released theme (yet) you have to check it out via the subversion repository, but that's a pretty simple call to svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/monotone/

I've been prepping some resources to use during the Faculty Technology Days session on Social Networking tomorrow. How to best show what the Network is? What do the connections between people look like? Then, this morning, I see a post by Clarence Fisher describing Tweetwheel. It's a cool little web application for generating a display of the people in the Twitter Network for a given account. Here's mine:

I'm working on a project that partially involves the development of a website in Drupal to act as a directory of people who have graduated from a given University. Seems easy. I went into the project thinking it would be a trivial application of Taxonomies, or maybe some generic CCK fields.

Nope. Turns out the problem is much more difficult and complex than I initially thought.

Taxonomies won't work, because of the need to tie a number of values together, namely the year the degree was awarded (say, "1992"), the type of degree (say, "BSc"), the specialization of the degree (say, "Zoology"), and the granting institution (say, "University of Calgary").

That could be an easy thing to solve with CCK - just add four text fields. Done.

BUT - people can earn more than one degree. Of different types, in different years, from different institutions.

Taxonomies fail. Generic CCK fields fail.

What I came up with is a new CCK field type, cryptically named "University Degrees", that defines the four values that describe a degree. This solves the problem quite tidily, and supports multiple values, predefined valid sets of values, and can integrate with Views to be used as filters and sorting fields.

In building this module, I leaned heavily on a couple of web pages (CCK Sample and What is the Content Construction Kit?) that describe how parts of the module should work, and provided some sample code. In the spirit of contributing back what I learned, I'm going to document the module to help others needing to do similar things.

It's not a full examination of every technical aspect of RAW vs. JPEG, but I show some of the reasons why I try to shoot RAW almost all the time, as well as some reasons why I sometimes shoot in JPEG instead. Some of the subtle differences didn't really translate into the compressed video files, but hopefully you can get an idea of what the extra data in a RAW file is handy for.

I've been struggling with this problem for some time now, and am a bit stumped. Bits of it are trivial to solve, but when I start hooking things up, there's a pretty big gap and disconnect.

On the surface, it's a simple problem. I'm using Drupal, and am building a website to store things like profiles for individuals. That's easy. I need to add lists of the degrees they've been awarded. Like this:

There. I said it.

Earth day sucks. It's harmful.

It provides a cop-out, marketing-based, feel good way for people and companies to feel good about half-assed lame excuses for making a real sustainable difference.

Every day should be earth day. This one-day-per-year stuff is garbage. This "oh! what did you do for earth day?" feel good crap doesn't help. Frack off. Every fracking day is earth day. What did you do for EVERY OTHER DAY OF THE YEAR earth day?

Walking through campus this morning, I witnessed a red faced, agitated young man. He was ripping posters off of a poster board, and shredding them in his hands. I looked a little closer - wondering what he was doing. He was being quite selective in the posters he was ripping - they all appeared to have been informational posters about "new atheism". I saw him rip two of the posters. I didn't see the information on the posters, aside from the title, but a quick Google turned up this web page describing the movement. Obviously, it must be suppressed.

I should probably clarify a couple of things about what I was trying to say about social networks as sharecropping activities.

First, I am not trying to suggest that hosted services are inherently bad - I think it's great that services like WordPress.com and Edublogs are available - and they are not sharecropping. Hosted services can be great - they let people easily post their content, and a well designed and managed hosted service doesn't infringe on a person's digital identity, nor on their ownership of the content they publish.

Stephen ran a cool line of command line goodness to crunch out a list of the most commonly run commands he runs in Terminal.

The code he ran is:

% history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head

Hey, that's pretty cool. Crunches through the shell history, spits out a list of commands, groups them by uniqueness and sorts them by number of occurrences.

I ran it on the 3 systems I use most often:

Heather posted something this morning that's had me thinking about this pretty much all day.

Occasionally, Tim Bray talks about "sharecropping" as related to the world of open source vs. proprietary software and APIs.

What‘s a Sharecropper?· I found a good definition at InterAction Design:

"A farmer who works a farm owned by someone else. The owner provides the land, seed, and tools exchange for part of the crops and goods produced on the farm."

You can tell it's springtime in Calgary when you wake up to this:

Time for another episode, this time on basic workflow - importing a few photos, deleting the crap, and processing the one(s) that don't get nuked. This time, the dogs were quiet, and The Boyâ„¢ decided not to make an appearance. I might schedule him for a later episode...

Episode 2: Basic Workflow weighs in at 12.1 MB, and clocks in at 10:27. Or, if you want a full HD version, use the second link.