For a project I’m involved with, we’re setting up a shiny new server to handle hosting of lots (and lots) of Drupal sites in a shared hosting environment. We were able to pick up a decently speced Dell PowerEdge 2950 at a really good price. Dell wanted a tonne of cash to pre-install RedHat on the box. Um, no thanks. So, our friendly neighbourhood colocation provider installed Ubuntu Server on the box for me (I’m about 1000 km from the server, so couldn’t actually do the physical install myself). The PowerEdge is a 2xdual core Xeon, similarly speced as the new Xeon XServes, but not as nicely packaged. This one requires 2U of rackspace, where the XServe is shoehorned into a single 1U slot.
That’s so freaking awesome. Thank you so much! I would like to also thank all of the little people (you know who you are) who helped me make this milestone possible. It’s things like this that make blogging worth all of the hassles, the paparazzi, the extreme financial burden, and the constant continuous partial attention. Wow.
And, I get to brag about the awesome company I’m keeping on The List. Stephen Downes. Alan Levine. Brian Lamb. Bryan Alexander. George Siemens. And it just goes on and on like that! Wow. Seriously. I’m blushing here.
I just tried to file my GST payment for the quarter, using the GST Netfile website. I figured it’d be the easiest way to do it, with the whole process taking maybe 5 minutes. I’m trying to be a responsible little consultant, filing proper papers and paying The Man to let me do it.
But, the business end of the NetFile website is actually unavailable outside of regular office hours. I don’t think they back the website with a database. It must actually fire off submissions directly to the desk of an overworked civil servant. Probably for security reasons, they don’t even hook the website up to a printer, where the pages could safely stack up in someone’s inbox. Nope. They just flash the numbers at someone in realtime. Maybe there’s a cool Wall Street ticker wrapping around the internet call centre or something.
Dang. I got tagged with the Five Things Meme a couple days ago, but procrastinated on responding. Then, I just got tagged again. Better play before the tags build up…
So, five little-known things about me. Without feeding identity thieves, hopefully…
I’m not a programmer. I suck as a programmer. I’m a total hack. I know just enough to let me get into trouble, but I’m too stubborn to give up until something kinda sorta almost works. potaytoe, potahtoe…
I’m a huge introvert. Is that an oxymoron? I get uncomfortable in crowds. I hate talking on the phone. And yet, I can get in front of a group and give presentations and participate in discussions etc… For some reason, I seem to be much more coherent in group settings (including writing on my blog) than I am normally. wtf?
First job - “fabric folder” at Angel Distributing, the company that provided fabric to all of the Fanny’s fabric stores. Got to work with the reams of fabric, splitting and rolling into the little bundles that get trucked to the stores for scrapbookers and crafty folks to make all kinds of crappy stuff. Got to see all kinds of nice foreign bugs that hitchhiked into Canada along with the fabric…
I still haven’t finished my MSc. Actually, it’s been so long that all of my coursework has expired. I’ll get to start from scratch once someone convinces me it’s worth doing. It’s not very high on my list at the moment.
Met my wife while we were both working at Heritage Park 16 years ago as a summer job. She’s still putting up with me… Who says workplace relationships are a bad idea? We worked together for 3 years.
I guess I should tag a few more folks. If I had to do this, I’m bringing y’all down with me! Alan, Brian, Cole, Paul and Josh.
No. Not crud. CRUD. Create, Read, Update, Delete. The basic operations a web app needs to do on database records.
I’ve been working on the Provisionator module, which helps with institutional-scale deployments of Drupal sites on a shared hosting server. The module began life as a separate PHP application, and evolved into a Drupal module wrapping those functions. It essentially managed a table within a Drupal site’s database, adding rows for each website deployed.
I’m planning a vacation in the spring. The tickets are all in place, and we’re looking forward to it. Can’t say more, because it’s a surprise Christmas present. I’d love to leave the laptop at home, but would currently need to bring it along to dump photos off the camera every day.
Does anyone have any great (and cheap) solution to offload photos from a camera (Canon Digital Rebel xt) without a laptop? I’ve got a 5G iPod (30 Gig), and have looked at the Apple and Belkin media readers - both of which apparently suck the soul out of the battery before finishing the job.
We’re using the Event module to list our workshops at the Teaching & Learning Centre, and the Signup module to let people register to attend workshops (or other events). It’s working really quite well, but we needed to add some extra fields to the registration form so we could track Faculties, Status, etc…
“Sure,” I said, “Drupal’s open source, so we should be able to add any fields we want. Worst case scenario? We’d have to fork Signup.module and maintain our own version with our custom fields in it.”
I’ve been slowly working through the TED Talks video podcasts - making time to watch several sessions each week. I can’t even begin to describe what an impact they’re having on me. I’m starting to think differently about many issues - some I hadn’t even considered before, others I thought were outside of my reach.
I watched Majora Carter’s presentation this morning. She is the founder of Sustainable South Bronx - a grassroots movement she started in her community to try to bring it back from the brink of ecological (and social and economic) devastation.
I got an email from Alan last night mentioning that his blog was actually knocked offline by the overzealous actions of spammers. They were hammering his site so hard that his host had to kill the site. He had been running the CogDogBlog on some graciously donated webspace, so it’s understandable that they weren’t thrilled about the load that spammers can add to a server.
Unfortunately, Alan’s got a Day Job™ which is currently in conference management mode (i.e., traveling and busy) so he’ll be trying to get things back up and running in the few spare milliseconds he can eke out in the next little while.
While browsing the Flickr photos from Calgary, I came across this one by Sherlock77. It prompted a brief discussion, wondering if there was a group for people to put photos of public artwork that had been hacked (or dressed, or modified, or adorned) - legally and non-destructively. I did some searching, but didn’t find anything. So, I created a public group: Public Artwork Hacks.
If you have (or plan to take) photos of public artwork that has been “improved” - here’s the place to share it. Put a Santa hat on The Thinker. Sunglasses on David. Photos that include modifications - without the use of Photoshop to add things - are welcome!
