The kernel of my home office

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 ...