The kernel of my home office

Why is CiviCRM so ugly? Out of the box, a CiviCRM public contribution page is surprisingly ugly.  Worse, if you ask your designer to make it look better, they are likely to take a long time, grumble loudly, and then maybe a year later it starts looking ugly again. It's a bit tragic that this is sometimes the first experience of people with CiviCRM, and since it's not likely to get fixed any time soon, here's a post explaining a bit of why, and how to remediate the issue. Why is CiviCRM so ugly? My first answer to this question is technical, but I'll try to make it accessible to the casual reader. A visitor's "objective" visual experience of a web page, is a product of: a. their device and browser (an iphone using safari, a desktop using chrome, a tablet using firefox, etc.) b. the html of the page c. the css (cascading stylesheets) d. the page's javascript When you're looking at a CiviCRM page, then you're looking at collection of html+css+js t...

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to spend a few hours on a Friday afternoon improving my backup process for my Blackfly managed hosting service . Two weeks later, I've published my ongoing work as an update to my backup-rsync project and have decided to share it with you. You might think I'm trying to compete for "least click-bait like title ever", but I'm going to claim this topic and project might be of interest to anyone who likes to think about refactoring , or who is implementing backups for container-based hosting (like mine ). Definition "Backup" is one of those overloaded words in both vernacular and computer-specific use, so I want to start with definitions. Since "a backup" is amongst the least interesting objects (unless it contains what you absolutely need in that moment), I think it's more interesting and useful to define backups functionally, i.e. A "backup process" is a process that 1. provides a degree of insuranc...

Four years ago, I started a github project to share my Drupal + CiviCRM container hosting solutions/ideas. It’s called “ Simuliidae ”, because that’s the family name of the species we know as black flies. What’s Happened Like so many open source projects, it was ambitious. I claimed four goals. Four years later, here’s my evaluation of those goals: 1. A simple way for evaluators to launch their own local Drupal/CiviCRM installation. This was my priority and relatively successful, at least for a while. I’d say it was successful as a technology demonstration, but of limited value for a potential CiviCRM evaluator because of weak support for Docker on Windows and Mac projects. It was also a lot of work to keep it up to date, and I didn’t. 2. A standard for generating testing and development copies of production sites. This was not particularly successful as a goal. Although I used some of the ideas here with my hosting services, I never moved beyond an idea stage for trying to come up wit...

I'm not a computer security expert, but it's been part of my work for many years, in different forms.  A very long time ago, a friend hired me to write up a primer for internet security, and ever since then it's been a theme that's sat in the background and pops up every now and then . But lately, it's started to feel like more than a theme, and but indeed a passion. You may consider computer and internet security to be a dry subject, or maybe you imagine feelings of smugness or righteousness, but "passion" is the right word for what I'm feeling. Here's google's definition: Passion: 1. a strong and barely controllable emotion. 2. the suffering and death of Jesus. Okay, let's just go with number 1. for now. If you followed my link above to other posts about security, you'll notice one from eight years ago where I mused on the possibility of the discovery of a flaw in how https works. Weirdly enough, a flaw in https was discovered shortly...

 I consider myself a rational person. By that, I mean that I make important decisions in my life based on weighing pros and cons, similar to a chess game. So what to make of my decision to confront Koodoo over their exorbitant charges for my spouse's mobile phone use? This one .  It would be reasonable to look at the legalities, and the likelihood of them caring what I think, and decide that the work of trying to hold them to account is a pointless waste of time. Certainly, the replies I've had in the forum here: https://community.koodomobile.com/billing-66726/will-anyone-at-koodo-take-responsibility-for-their-services-7804585 have mostly been of the "sucks to be you" variety. So let me describe in detail what it's like to try and get someone at Koodoo to reverse the charges of a blatantly egregious overuse charge. To talk to someone at Koodoo, you have to talk to a bot for a while to convince them that you need to talk to a person. It's pretty entertaining on...

Do you trust your service provider? What does that even mean? For an individual with a relationship with a corporation, trust is not the same as trust with a person. Particularly with a complex service model, you have to have some trust in your service provider, even if you are reluctant about that, because you don't have a choice. For example, you don't have a much of a choice about what kind of service plan you get for your mobile phone in Canada, and those plans are constantly being changed by the providers, so trying to keep up with what the best plan for you is, is difficult. But aside from the aspect of "buyer beware" that covers all consumer relationships in Canada, mobile phone service is complicated by the fact that those mobile phone providers are using public resources that they make use of within a regulated system. In other words, they're selling us a package that includes resources that are only leased to them (i.e. the radio spectrum) from us, under...