The kernel of my home office

For the Mozilla Service Week , I'll be at the Centre for Social Innovation on Wednesday morning, to provide 1-1 coaching for anyone interested in using CiviCRM . Yes, that's now tomorrow, Wednesday September 16, 2009, starting at 10 am, I hope you can come. You're supposed to sign up, as early as 9:30 for 15 minute sessions, but if you want to just drop by, you can join whoever's there. Details about where and more details about what are here.

I'm sad to say that Toronto's Drupal Camp [which I helped organize for it's first 3 years] is happening while I'm out of town. It's kind of a good thing, since I had decided to take a little sabbatical from the organizing anyway. But in case you're breathlessly wondering, check out the 2009 toronto drupal camp site . It's not ready yet, but hopefully will be by the time you read this. The dates are set for the weekend of Aug 15.

The Tyee is a site I've been involved with since 2006 when I wrote the first, 4.7 version of a Drupal module to integrate Drupal content into a static site that was being generated from bricolage. About a year ago, I met with Dawn Buie and Phillip Smith and we mapped out a number of ways to improve the Drupal integration on the site, including upgrading the Drupal to version 5 from 4.7. Various parts of that grand plan have been slowly incorporated into the site, but as of next week, there'll be a big leap forward that coincides with a new design [implemented in Bricolage by David Wheeler who wrote and maintains Bricolage] as well as a new Drupal release of the Bricolage integration module . Plans Application integration is tricky, and my first time round had quite a few issues. Here's a list of the improvements in the latest version: File space separation. Before, Drupal was installed in the apache document root, which is where bricolage was publishing it's co...

With the new year, a new resolution to upgrade some sites to the new CiviCRM 2.1. CiviCRM 2.1 is particularly special because it requires Drupal 6 and it's the first version that supports Drupal 6. So upgrades of existing Drupal 5 sites are difficult, particularly if any custom modules or themes involved. As it turned out, my procrastination was justified. I asked my friend Rob Ellis to help with Maquila Solidarity Network , who I've been working with for a few months , and who decided that the new features in 2.1 were too good to postpone any longer. Rob did the upgrade and discovered two issues on my CentOS 4 server: The CiviCRM installer insists on PHP 5.2.x CiviCRM requires a version of PCRE with unicode None of this sounds very interesting, and I wouldn't post about it, except that I would have thought it wouldn't be as hard to fix as it was. So here's what I did, in case there's someone else out there with CentOS4 (or RHEL4) trying to run CiviCRM 2.1...

I was carrying home a bag of dog food recently for my dogs when the neighbour made jokes about eating dog food and the coming recession. I think recessions are like winter - you know it'll come eventually, but it's hard to imagine in the depths of summer. But my point is really about dog food, and eating it. The woman who sells me Nutromax claims the salespeople eat it to prove it's good. As a computer-geeky guy, I'm familiar with the expression "eating your own dog food" to mean, using your own software. I just looked it up on wikipedia and discover that the original idea did indeed come from an advertisement about dog food, and that it's now used mainly about software. Here's what wikipedia says about the idea: Using one's own products has four primary benefits: 1. The product's developers are familiar with using the products they develop. 2. The company's members have direct knowledge and experience with its products. 3....

I've been running my own server for a year and a half now, and have been surprised at how trouble free it's been. I attribute this to: luck good planning a decent upstream provider the maturity of linux distribution maintenance tools (e.g. yum) In this case, good planning means: keeping it as simple as possible doing things one at a time i'm the only one mucking about on it And so this month, inspired by some Drupal camp sessions, I decided to take some time to make a good thing better. My goals were: Optimizing my web servicing for more traffic. Simplifying my Drupal maintenance. Automating my backups. And here's the results ... Web Servicing Optimizations This was relatively easy - I just finished off the work from here: http://homeofficekernel.blogspot.com/2008/02/drupal-centos-optimization.html Specifically, i discovered that I hadn't actually setup a mysql query cache, so I did that. And then I discovered that it was pretty easy an...

I thought I'd have some time for some house renovations before Drupal Camp this year, but planning Drupal projects is always harder than you'd think. In any case, I'm also helping plan Drupal Camp, and I've even got a couple of session proposals that have to do with planning Drupal websites. So come find out what all the fuss is about.