The kernel of my home office

I've been working through various optimization issues today and thought i'd share them with my future self and anyone else who reads this. mod_deflate I'd heard that getting apache to gzip your non-compressed data was a good idea and thought I was probably already doing that with my default apache2 setup on CentOS 4.4. What I learned was that: For apache2, the relevant module is mod_deflate (it used to be mod_gzip) My CentOS included the apache module by default, but didn't enable it. I did that according to the excellent documentation on the apache web site. I found a test site, which says that the html is now about 25% of what it was, saving me bandwidth and increasing the apparent response of my sites. wim leers I found a great article about drupal optimization here: improving drupal's page loading performance . He refers to a firefox plug-in developed by Yahoo that looks like a great tool, as well as a list of key issues to analyse for any site, and h...

Update, Nov 2009: I've just discovered and fixed a bug I introduced in the 2.2 branch for the IATS plugin. The bug was introduced when i updated the API files from IATS and failed to notice that the legacy method for C$ one-time donations was no longer supported. If you're using a version greater than or equal to 2.2.7, and are using IATS for C$, non-recurring donations, then you're affected . To fix it edit the file : CRM/Core/Payment/IATS.php, and remove the line that looks like this: $canDollar = ($params['currencyID'] == 'CAD'); //define currency type The full fix removes a conditional branch based on that value a little further on, but by removing this line, it'll never actually use that branch. Drop me a line if you have any questions. Update, May 2009: This post is still getting quite a bit of traffic, which is great. Here are a few important things to note: The IATS plugin code is in CiviCRM, you don't need to add any code. Y...

I'm hosting the Ontario Green Party's site , and am also the Drupal developer for it. There's currently an Ontario election campaign taking place, so I'm keeping busy. Someone sent me a dead link on the Ontario NDP site, so I started looking at the other party's sites. It reminded me of a discussion we had at the Toronto Penguin day a couple of years ago about the relationship between open source software (and Drupal in particular) and politics. I think there's something there - for example: the Toronto Drupal Users' Group's (supposed?) left-leaning politics the Howard Dean campaign (which was the beginning of the civicspace distribution of drupal) Richard Stallman's involvement in Venezuela I'll let you use google to confirm or deny any of the above ...but also to be noted, there's nothing that prevents any cause from making use of open source technology for nefarious and/or right-wing causes (oops, my bias is showing!). So, I tho...

I lived, worked and studied in Costa Rica from 1984 to 1989. Ostensibly, I was there to study Mathematics at the University, and indeed I graduated with an MSc. in Mathematics supervised by Ricardo Estrada (check that page, he even advertises me as one of his past students). And yes, I do have a nine page thesis that I wrote and defended in Spanish somewhere in my files, on a proof and extension of one of Ramanujan's theories. But mathematics is a pretty lonely endeavour, and what drew me back to Central America (after the first visit, which was more of an accident), was the life and politics. The time I lived there was extremely interesting (for me as an outsider, though also painful and tragic for it's inhabitants) because of the various wars that were largely fuelled by US regional hegemonic interests (of the usual corporate suspects and individuals) and neglect (of the politicians and public) - the Contra war in Nicaragua, the full-scale guerrilla wars in El Salvador and...

For about 8 years, I worked with Peace Brigades International . You can still find some of my writings from those days by doing a google search (actually, there are 4 pages of links there and I think they're all me). I was recently approached by PBI in Canada to help with their website which had been hacked some time ago, so I've just done that and you can see the nice results here . Does this seem like a shameless plug? Kind of, but it's also an example of how tools have evolved so much that if you know what you're doing, you can get a nice website up with surprisingly little work. This one uses Drupal of course, and when you visit it you'll see just how much time the office is putting into keeping the content up to date, which is what really matters anyway.

Looks like there will be another Drupal camp again this year in Toronto - visit the drupalcamptoronto site for details. While I'm at it, here's a short update on a few of my projects: I finished the intranet portion of SHARE 's website, which included a neat custom module that mashes up the signup module with CiviCRM and organic groups. I'm almost finished with The Tyee , an excellent alternative on-line news source in Vancouver. My work with them began with a module, still to be released, that integrates bricolage and drupal. That work went live in January and shortly after we migrated the site to a new server at Gossamer Threads who I can't recommend too highly. My latest task has been to finish off a module that allows for comment rating, it should be live by mid-April. I developed a custom Drupal module Peek which allows a drupal site user to provide sneek peeks to content on a drupal site that is otherwise protected. I mashed up gmaps and Civicrm as ...

  I've been rebuilding my old garage for the past two weeks. When we bought our house a year ago, it was described as a "tear-down", and after a year of living here I finally understood why. I kind of liked the falling down look, and it didn't seem to interfere with it's functionality (i.e., keep the car safe, store lots of junk). But then I noticed it was leaning a lot, and it turned out it had been built without a foundation, just the two by fours sitting on dirt. It was probably at least 50 years old (maybe as old as the house, which was built in 1915), and about 20 years ago an electric garage door had been installed, and at that time a few extra 2 x 4's had been nailed in so that the opener didn't bring the whole thing down... Anyway, it was a small garage, very dark, falling down, and there was about 2 feet on either side of it to the neighbours fences that was just a nice little habitat for rats and weed trees. Aidan went to a camp this summer at ...

Funnily enough, I live within an hour and a half of one of the 7 wonders of the world and I haven't visited since I was 10. Not wanting to deprive our son of the experience, Kelly and I decided to visit on the day of the world cup final. This photo was taken by Kelly, but Aidan's pretty good with the camera and you can see a whole album of photos that he took, including a visit to the butterfly conservatory.

  It's true, I don't work on weekends. 

You can learn more about Drupal, my favourite CMS (content management system) by coming to Toronto's Drupal Day . So what is Drupal ? It's bunch of computer code written in a language called PHP, that lives on a web server (a computer that serves web pages) and delivers websites that are interactive, complex, interesting and/or just plain geeky. For example the federal NDP website uses Drupal, as does The Onion . While I'm at it, I'll also plug a site I was responsible for: SHARE , an organization worth learning about aside from the coolness of their website. Note that I'm a web development contractor, not a designer - for SHARE, the designer was the fine folks at RaisedEyebrow . I wish that all sites using Drupal were also of reputable content, or at least not nasty, but there's no technology that can guarantee that.