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Hanging out with Evan

Evan and I went for a nice winterish walk today. Picnic at a local playground, then down to the neighbourhood Starbuck’s™ for something warm. He sure does like the hot chocolate with decadent whipped cream on top. I brought the camera along, Just In Case™ and let Evan take some shots while we were warming up.

He composed, focused and shot the photo of myself completely on his own (granted, in autofocus, but it was on center-single-point-autofocus, so he could have easily focused on the Petro Canada station in the background). Personally, I think it’s one of the better photos of myself that I’ve seen. Not bad for a 4-year old. I should start saving up for a Hasselbad for The Boy™.

Lexi.net Online Identity Conference

I headed downtown this morning (waaaaay earlier than I’d have liked) to attend the Lexi.net Online Identity Conference. I was curious to see what an internet-related conference would look like in Calgary, having been involved in others elsewhere. I wore my NV ‘05 t-shirt, of course :-)

I got downtown too early - the buses out of Tuscany go straight downtown, but the last one passes my house at 6:45. So, I had some time to kill before and after registration. What to do… I know! A photo walk down Stephen Avenue Mall!

More MySQL Woes

The database gods are laughing at me. This time, the mysql database for my blog fell over. Died. Unresponsive. It was an ex-database. Pining, as it were, for the fjords.

The blog dropped offline for an hour or so, and when it eventually came back, there were all kinds of scary database error messages being spewed into the log. I took a closer look, and the Drupal “cache” table was wedged and corrupted. Thankfully, it’s just a cache, so I nuked the table and recreated it fresh. Easy peasy. I’ve got lots of backup snapshots, so it would have been almost as easy to restore any other table, but with the potential of lost content (posts and/or comments).

I don't get Second Life

I’ve been following the activities of educators and ed-tech folks in Second Life. It seems like it could be a really compelling virtual environment to help enhance online learning, by providing a shared quasi-physical face to face venue for distributed groups that wouldn’t otherwise have one.

The amount of effort and care being put into these virtual places is stunning. The architecture is impressive, and the potential to create your own regions is compelling. 

Help - Slow MySQL Insert?

I’ve been struggling with this for what feels like months. On a project, we’re using a third party hosting provider, who offers us space on a managed server, complete with everything we need to run Drupal in a shared hosting environment. We’re running a copy of Provisionator on the server to help us deploy lots of Drupal sites easily.

Here’s where it gets messy. We can create new databases just fine, but importing a .sql file takes for freaking ever. Imports that take 3 seconds on my Powerbook can take 90 - 300 seconds on this server. Running the import on a dual G5 XServe with the same version of MySQL finishes the job in about a second.

My Photo on a Magazine Cover

Last month, while on vacation at a lakeside cabin in BC, I received an email asking permission to use one of my photos on Flickr for a magazine cover. “uh, sure? it’s creative commons, so have at ’er. Can I have a copy?”

I got my copy today. Is that ever cool. It’s for a petroleum industry magazine “The Negotiator” (sounds like a movie starring Clive Owen or the like), and lo and behold, right on the front cover, is my photograph:

Provisionator on Drupal CVS

I’ve just moved the Provisionator module onto Drupal.org’s CVS server. The current version of the module is far from complete, but it does function. Specifically, it does:

• create database for new site
• populate database with selected mysqldump template file
• copy template site directory (with settings.php, files, modules, themes)
• modify settings.php as needed
• create symlink to expose Drupal via Apache for the new site (as a subdirectory of a server, currently)
• add a new record to the database, describing the site
• list all records in the Provisionator database table

It’s got a lot of room for improvement, and more than likely needs some tightening down for security and Doing It The Right Way, but it works. It also currently assumes MySQL, and a very specific shared hosting pattern where Drupal isn’t in wwwroot itself, but is exposed by adding multiple symlinks within the wwwroot directory.

Canon Canada's Rebate Program Sucks

I bought my Canon Digital Rebel XT back in June, with the timing of the purchase a direct result of Canon Canada’s $100 rebate offer. I bought the camera at that time specifically because of the additional rebate. Otherwise, I would have likely held off a month or two, probably waiting for the release of the XTi. (an aside on the timing - I actually jumped the gun, buying the camera 2 weeks too early to be eligible for $400 back from work, so actually lost $500 in rebates and benefits because of the timing - that’s almost half the price of the camera)

Lest we forget

I don’t have a long, deep post for this Remembrance Day, other than wanting to say how grateful I am to the men and women serving in the forces.

To my grandfather for fighting in WWI.

To my uncle for fighting in WWII.

To my cousins, for acting as peacekeepers, and paying the ultimate price.

This world would have been radically different without their contributions.

RSS on TLC Website

Since we switched to Drupal to power the department website recently, we’re able to have RSS feeds to keep up to date on stuff as it gets added to the site. It hadn’t been exposed previously, but I just took a few minutes to expose 3 of the “main” feeds for the site.

I also used my blog within the site to describe what I’d done. My first non-hello-world blog post on our site (although only marginally non-hello-world, but still, it counts).

Provisionator - Easy site creation in a shared Drupal environment

I’ve been involved with a shared Drupal hosting project with BCIT and BCCampus. Part of it is based on an easy way to create new Drupal sites via a web interface, complete with database creation and population, Drupal site directory creation and settings modification, symlink creation to make the site visible to Apache, and management of a Drupal Sites Manifest table to keep track of sites.

At first blush, it seems rather similar to both sympal_scripts and the Drupal 5 installer, except for the management of a sites manifest table, and creation of the symlink to expose the site to Apache in a shared setting.