Blog Posts

Flickr Faves 2006/12/23

I give up. I’m turning this blog into a Flickr Fave Stream. It’s pretty easy to tell where my head’s been lately.

Well, ok. Maybe I’ll be posting more actual, non-Flickr-Fave posts after the Christmas break…

5 Things Tag

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…

1. 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…
2. 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?
3. 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…
4. 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.
5. 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.

CRUD in Drupal

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.

Flickr Faves 2006/12/18

Man, am I a sucker for a beach photo. Or a sunset. Or a sunset on a beach.

Portable Camera Storage on the cheap?

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.

Custom Fields in Drupal Event Signups

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.”

TED Talks are changing how I think

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.

The CogDogBlog Will Be Back Soon

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.

Flickr: Public Artwork Hacks

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!

Flickr Faves 2006/12/09

Dreamtube

Dreamhost rocks. I mean, they just keep piling on awesome new features into their hosting package. Recently, it was essentially infinite bandwidth and storage. Yesterday, they added an automatic Flash video transcoder and presenter, ala YouTube. But, within any Dreamhost site.

All I have to do is upload a video file (.avi, .mov, .mp4) to my site, tell Dreamhost I want it converted to Flash video (using the panel.dreamhost.com site that’s used for managing everything else as well), and their magic elves do their work and email me a javascript snippet to embed a flash player in any web page (or blog post). Like, for instance, this one:

EduGlu = Drupal + Leech.module?

Thanks to a tip from Bill Fitzgerald, I checked out a copy of the Leech module for Drupal. Despite the rather bad name, it sounds like it is (or eventually will be) perfect for what I need.

It lets users add their own feeds, and can associate said feeds and subsequently aggregated items wit any of the user’s Organic Groups. That takes care of the Class/Cohort/etc… concepts. Users just create or join the appropriate Organic Groups within the Drupal site, and add whatever feeds they want to whatever Organic Groups they want. They could add subfeeds of a blog to different OGs (say myfancyblog.com/tags/bio680/feed to the Biology 680 OG, and myfancyblog.com/tags/poli544 to the Political Science 544 OG…)