Father's Day on Toronto Island

The Tyee: Bricolage and Drupal Integration

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...

Refactoring My Backup Process

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...

drupal, engagement, mailing lists, email

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...

The kernel of my home office

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