Blarchive

Bloaargh Refresh

Posted by cafuego on Sunday 25 November 2012. In categories &bootstrap &blog &theme

In 2007 I moved my blog from my own bespoke CMS into Drupal. Back then, Drupal 6 was the state of the art and so that's what I used.

Drupal 7 came out just under two years ago, but for many and varied reasons there was a significant lag before contributed modules were updated to work with the newer Drupal core. I happily kept working mainly with Drupal 6 until I got a job developing new sites using Drupal 7 at the start of this year.

Telescope cam debugging

Posted by cafuego on Saturday 17 November 2012. In categories &open source &webcam &telescope

I was reminded the other day that if you want to do planetary astrophotography, hacking up a webcam is a cheap and easy way to computerise image capture. Better still, software exists to process videof rames into a single higher quality still image.

A spot of researching which webcams are best suited for this found a page explaining how to hack a Logictech Webcam Pro 9000. Better still, my corner discount computer parts shop actually still stocks these for all of $35 a piece.

Testing times

Posted by cafuego on Thursday 15 November 2012. In categories &profile &drupal &simpletest

Over the past week or two I've spent my time working on a Drupal install profile. It uses a custom theme, a bunch of features and a set of modules that allows us to use Aegir to quickly provision a standard website for research centres and projects and associated with our university faculty.

To make sure this install profile keeps working as we make incremental improvements to it, I decided it would be nice to have some tests. For instance, to check that the correct theme is enabled, that the various roles defined in the features we use have the correct level of access to the nodes defined there as well and that blocks are placed in the correct regions with the correct visibility settings.

Unfortunately, the default DrupalWebTestCase class doesn't run profile install tasks, so my tests all failed horribly no matter what I did.