The kernel of my home office

I've been banging my head against a distracted cabal of developers who seem to think that a particular CiviCRM core design, which I'm invested in via my contributed code, is bad, and that it's okay to break it. This post is my attempt to explain why it was a good idea in the first place. The design in question is the use of a hash function  to populate a field called 'invoice_id' in CiviCRM's contribution table. The complaint was that this string is illegible to humans, and not necessary. So a few years ago some code was added to core, that ignores the current value of invoice_id and will overwrite it, when a human-readable invoice is generated. The complaint about human-readability of course is valid, and the label on the field is misleading, but the solution is terrible for several reasons I've already written about. In this post, I'd like to explain why the use of the hash value in the invoice_id field is actually a brilliant idea and should b...

Well, that's the question of the day. If you're part of an organization that does advocacy work, rather than waiting to see what happens first, might as well get yourself ready, even if the details are sketchy still. Here's one opportunity that's ready for you now, message courtesy of Steve Anderson of OpenMedia. OpenMedia , David Suzuki Foundation , SumOfUs and a range of other organizations are supporting a new shared set of civic engagement tools. Vancity Community Foundation is providing some support to subsidize some of the cost of the tools to select values-aligned organizations that sign up before February 28th. Interested? You can learn more or book a demo from here:  http://tools.newmode.net/ Here's some live examples of the tools you can take a look at: 1. Click to Call : http://www.davidsuzuki.org/blogs/healthy-oceans-blog/2016/11/to-help-protect-canadas-oceans-weve-made-it-easy-to-call-your-mp/#newmode-embed-4-266 Check out this video of Dav...

I've had a varnish installation protecting http://www.fairvote.ca -- a wordpress site hosted at webhosting canada (whc.ca) -- for about a year. Last Friday in the evening, it started spitting out 503 errors, for no obvious reason. I spent a few hours yesterday in vain trying to get the hosts to tell me what, if anything might have changed at their end. What I eventually figured out is that they changed how their servers respond to http requests without a domain - previously it was a 200, and it became something else (a redirect, I believe). That's not unreasonable (though relatively pointless to change at this stage, I would imagine), except that, by default, varnish probes its backends with requests that don't have a domain. What that meant is that varnish started thinking that the backend was broken, so stopped talking to it (even though it was perfectly capable of doing so). The fix was just to add a customized probe that included a valid domain to the request.

Four and half years ago, I wrote a blog post about Varnish , a 'front-end proxy' for webservers. My best description of it then was as a protective bubble, analogous to how it's namesake is used to protect furniture. I've been using it happily ever since. But last week, I got to really put Varnish through a test when the picture here, posted by Fair Vote Canada (one of my clients), went viral on Facebook. And Varnish saved the server and the client in ways I didn't even expect. 1. Throughput Varnish prides itself on efficiently delivering http requests. As the picture went viral, the number of requests was up to about 1000 per minute, which Varnish had no trouble delivering - the load was still below 1, and I saw only a small increase in memory and disk usage. Of course, delivering a single file is exactly what Varnish does best. 2. Emergency! Unfortunately, Varnish was not able to solve a more fundamental limitation, which was the 100Mb/s network connec...

Do one thing each day that scares you? How about, watch your toddler ...

My cousin Vikki has been helping us for the past month and is leaving to head back home in a couple of days. We had her over for dinner last night and she brought Lily a new hat!

My normal configuration of a public site on my servers involves using varnish for the page cache and setting expire page to 1 day. This mostly works quite well (the varnish module in Drupal takes care of clearing the varnish cache when you're creating/editing content). We recently launched a new Drupal version of the Calgary French & International School  (okay, I was just along for the tail end to help with the launch, Karin and Rob get the credit for all the work), which includes an ical feed for parents (generated from views of course). That's an excellent thing - parents can subscribe to the feed and have all the upcoming events on their mobile device (or google calendar, or both). But we discovered that although it works great on the Mac desktop, it wasn't working well for iOS (i.e. the iPhone). It would poll frequently enough, but only actually update once a day. It turned out that these two devices are interpreting the http header 'cache-control' di...