I had to debug our TLC website this morning, as it was pointed out to me that parts were misbehaving, and that some content hadn't survived the upgrade from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5.2. The missing content was easy, for the most part. It's just a matter of renaming the tables to use the content_TABLE format expected by the current CCK module. The exact table names that are expected are listed in the node_type table, under the "orig_type" field - just prepend "content_" to the "orig_type" value for the table name, and CCK should find everything just fine.

I've been trying a workflow to stick to a GTD plan. Now that I've got my email inbox mostly wrestled under control, I'm working more with 2 other apps that have really helped me keep on top of things. Is the plan perfect? Well... I'm writing a blog post instead of Getting Things Done, so I appear to be the weak link in the chain, but at least it's not a software problem.

This week, at the North American Leaders Summit in Montebello, Quebec, 3 undercover police officers pretended to be protesters in an attempt to provoke violent incidents. The entire series of events was captured on video, and shared via YouTube. The cops are the three goons with bandanas over their faces. None of the real protesters wore disguises. One of the cops is carrying a rock.

Watching Merlin Mann's "Inbox Zero" presentation at Google. I got inspired to stop saving emails for CYA purposes. I just deleted over 1600 messages that were accumulating in my inbox. I saved less than 100, into a "Deadmail" archive folder.

This is the cleanest my inbox has looked since I got the account in 1987. Yes. The account is now 20 years old. Actually, this is probably even cleaner than that, since it came with a "Welcome" message, IIRC.

Another silly quiz, claiming to calculate one's blog addiction score. pfff. it's waaaaay off.

85%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Definitely skewed low. Some MySpacers are probably blowing the curve. Good thing they didn't include Twitter and Flickr. I'd be in the triple digits easily...

This BikeCam slideshow is the other way, both in direction and technique. I stuck the camera on the handlebars for the ride home, and used QuickTime Pro's "Open Image Sequence..." feature to build a movie at 2fps automagically. That took maybe 5 minutes, including the resized export of all images from Aperture. That was muuuuch easier/quicker than the way I built the last one (using iMovie - that was pretty easy, but this was just pointing QuickTime at a directory and exporting the result). Easy peasy.

This morning, I strapped a camera to my handlebars, and took 106 shots during the 30-minute morning commute. Here's the outcome:

[flv:https://darcynorman.net/video/BikeCam_480_270.flv 480 270]

Soundtrack: Pedal Pushing, by MC Abdominal

In the Teaching & Learning Centre, we run a couple of servers, each with a dozen or so Drupal sites installed in a multisite configuration (one copy of Drupal, using the sites directory to respond to various URLs). With every update to core or modules, the update.php file needs to be called for each site. That's not too onerous, but is a bit of a PITA.

Our central IT shop at the University of Calgary has a whole 'nother problem. Their Drupal server is currently running well over 400 sites. So, calling update.php on each one effectively means having a bunch of folks (students? interns?) clicking through the update.php screens for each site. Say it takes maybe 5 minutes per site, that's over 30 hours of labour to update all sites. And new sites are added every day.

It's been awhile since I've posted one of these. My head is pretty obviously still on Maui. If only there was a demand for lowly edtech geeks on Maui...

All but 3 of these shots are from Hawaii, and most of them are from Maui. 10 points to the first person to identify all 3 non-Hawaii photos in this set of Faves...

Our main Teaching & Learning Centre website runs on Drupal, with extensive use of CCK, Views, Events and Signup modules. The site had been running on the Drupal 4.7, with only security patches applied. But it was starting to act up (content was suddenly not showing up), so I decided to pull everything up to the current 5.2 line, with updated modules. It's an easy enough upgrade. When it works.

The CCK update appears to have really botched things. As in, most of our custom content types are now missing data for several of their fields. The data's safe - I can see it in the database - but it's not showing up when viewing or editing the nodes. Annoying.

I got an email saying there was something wrong with my feed, as it's apparently borking in Sage. I can't seem to reproduce the error here (Sage is borking in general for me, and the feed validates and renders in the aggregators I've tested).

Anyone else having problems? Something I should be worried about? Maybe just something intermittent? Something related to Feedburner?

Also, this is posted using the new ecto 3 alpha - I haven't used a standalone blogging app in years, but if this works, it's about as close to the perfect app as I can figure. Even offers searching and sorting of Categories, and resizing/uploading of images...

I should preface this with a reminder that I am not a lawyer. I don't play one on TV, nor the internets. But as someone who creates and publishes a fair amount of content under an unrestrictive Creative Commons license, I have some thoughts on the topic.

I read David's post on the proposed new Open Education License, and I've been struggling to understand why a new license is needed. Here's the comment I left on David's post: