Skip to main content

Circling Around Again

I've just finished "Three Day Road" by Joseph Boyden, an appropriate novel for this time of year when death is in the air, in a "circle of life" kind of way.

It's also just over 5 years since I started out working on my own, and a year since I started working again with a couple of old friends. One of those (Reema) has just found herself a real job so she'll be leaving us and I wish her well. Starting new things is usually harder and slower than I imagine, which is good, since I'd probably not bother otherwise.

At the machine level: we've just brought online a new server and moved all the services left on my oldest server in preparation to shut it down. Shutting down old servers is rarely worth it from a time/finances point of view, but it seemed like the right thing to do in this case, in spite of the backlog in client work I've now accumulated.

And of course, in the global scheme of things, death has the excellent function of making space for new things, and that's very true in this case. My new server is using pressflow and varnish to be super scalable for a couple of new big sites, one of which is already humming along on it (http://socialinnovation.ca). Rob Ellis has also installed apache solr on it, and it's a huge relief to be able to use it on my larger sites: compared to stock Drupal search, it gives better results, it's faster, and the site database backups are about half the size (having the search database being backed up always seemed ridiculous anyway).

Popular posts from this blog

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