Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

Upgrading Drupal Sites: Two Case Studies and a Spreadsheet

Richard — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:05:22 +0000

Upgrading Drupal sites between major versions can be tricky. The community of developers that numbers in the thousands has taken great care to maintain upgrade path between adjacent versions of the content management system. This is especially true of Drupal's core, though one must go through each version to get to the destination. (An example: going from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 requires passing through Drupal 6.) Contributed module upgrades take place with a very slight degree of peril, though typically a developer will include upgrade paths between major versions. Though incredibly rare, some modules will not upgrade their database to the new version of the module, and even then someone will flag it as an issue and it will get resolved.

Official Documentation

If you came here looking for guidance on upgrading your Drupal site, please consider visiting the official documentation at Drupal.org. The following only deals with two specific cases that may not apply to your site.

Review: Samsung Focus with Windows Phone 7

Richard — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 02:00:31 +0000

As part of WOMWorld Nokia, my friend and mobile technology aficionado Roland Tanglao offered to lend me a Samsung Focus with Microsoft's mobile operating system on it for a weekend. I took it around Vancouver, installed apps, took photos, tracked a walk on Commercial St., and, breaking with tradition, actually made a phone call.

Introducing the Readability Button Module for Drupal

Richard — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 01:00:51 +0000

Readability represents a new way for publishers, writers and readers to support each other. I've written a module that integrates Readability into Drupal sites.

A fan's proposal for a new stadium in Toronto would have it outdoor and baseball-only

Richard — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 07:12:07 +0000

I missed this back in 2009 when it first came out. The linked PDF contains the proposal in full, written by Jeffrey A. Citron and David Steinhauer. It came out before the new outdoor park — Target Field — in Minneapolis (which has similar weather to Toronto) was completed. [link]

Where Things Disappear Into Pure Functionality

Richard — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:24:58 +0000

Lars Svendsen: “Anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom, and when anthropomorphism was replaced by technocentrism, boredom became even more profound. Technology involves the dematerialization of the world, where things disappear into pure functionality. We have long since passed a stage where we could keep track of technology. We scurry along behind, as is perhaps particularly clear in IT, where hardware and software have always become obsolete before most of the users have learned how to use them.”

That "Everything" Is Somehow Trivialized

Richard — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 03:42:27 +0000

From a review of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle: “Turkle points out, when we have no privacy we lose the ability to privilege some thoughts and actions over others. She quotes Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who says that "if you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Like many others, he ignores the possibility that there might be privacy without shame or crime. We might want to keep things to ourselves for any number of reasons; when we "put everything out there," that "everything" is somehow trivialized. Turkle quotes a girl who claims there's nothing much to know about her; "I'm kind of boring." Will the loss of privacy lead more people to dismiss themselves as boring?”

The Concomitant Penetration of Every Moment By the Potential to Create

Richard — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 23:46:36 +0000

The somewhat recent release of the Situationist iPhone app, which encourages nearby strangers to playfully interact, sparked a revisiting of Social Acupuncture by Darren O'Donnell. And there it is, on page 79, my first introduction to the Situationism movement. Here's the paragraph in question from Social Acupuncture: “Art's drift out of the field of representation and its move into relational forms, as well as the ever-increasing economic expediency of culture in the so-called creative economies described by [Richard] Florida and others, have created a proliferation of avenues through which to distribute artistry. The Situationists may have had some fantasies about the liberating potential of art as an everyday lived experience, where all moments of one's life become a creative opportunity; now we have the concomitant penetration of every moment by the potential to create, and in turn, to work. Hardt and Negri point out that capitalism is always innovating in response to resistance against it. The freeing of labour from the Fordist regime of the factory floor was imagined, at first, to be a positive movement, but capitalism easily incorporated these innovations. The idea of working from home was once an appealing notion, but now it brings with it the opportunity to never escape work, to field emails at all hours, to be lured to the humming for just another minute or two of labour.”

Some Wins

Richard — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:48:11 +0000

Early last year, around the time of DrupalCon San Francisco, Packt Publishing approached me to serve as technical reviewer for a book. Several Microsoft Word documents and 7 months later, the dead trees edition of Drupal Theming Cookbook by Karthik Kumar, arrived at my doorstep, complete with an acknowledgement of my work inside the front cover. In the hopes of branching out a little, I also received a complimentary copy of Django 1.0 Website Development by Ayman Hourieh. Over the course of a month in December 2010 it served as an excellent guide to completing one's first app, with little or no Python knowledge required, but taking the 'dive right in' approach. (Anything that didn't work with Django 1.2 was a quick Google search away. I have sticky notes at every point at which it differs from the current version as of this writing.) I hope to ship an app based on the example sometime this year.

At the end of last November, I helped instruct at a community-based clinic teaching a basic-level introduction to the Drupal CMS. Based on notes from the Seattle Drupal Clinic held in 2009, several members of the Drupal community and people new to Drupal converged at the FCV office in downtown Vancouver. We covered modules, content types, image manipulation, and for my session at the end, the Views and Block modules. We the trainers learned a lot from that first session, and it seems like the same can be said about the participants. My thanks go to everybody involved. It's an initiative I'd like to participate in again.

A third win involves getting back into the Drupal support game. You can find me on the #drupal-support IRC channel when things slow down at work, and recently on Stack Overflow's Drupal-related questions. While having reservations about not tracking the Drupal.org forums for support, I will go where the people are.

Since some people have asked, since June of last year, I've been working for OpenRoad Communications, a web services company based in Gastown. They're technology-agnostic, and when they had a couple of Drupal projects come their way, it made sense to have me on full-time. Separately from web services, they created a product called ThoughtFarmer, which they bill as a social intranet. (It might be tempting to make a connection between Drupal and ThoughtFarmer, but other than my sitting next to the development team, rest assured the two are not related.) Since months can go by between my mentioning my employer, it's probably best to refer to LinkedIn or my resume for my latest professional status.

Minor League Baseball: Investing in the Future

Richard — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 07:58:39 +0000

[M]ost players at the minor league level who haven’t reached minor league free agency are lucky to make $10,000 over the course of a season; a survey of players revealed that those in rookie ball make $1,250-1,300 a month while players in Triple-A, the highest level of the minors, can make roughly $1,000 more per month while under the contracted amount. [link]

Illustrated Vancouver catalogs the city of Vancouver, British Columbia represented in art

Richard — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:47:08 +0000

[link]