The kernel of my home office

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 ...