The Dark Doodad

Dark Doodad

It's been a while since I did a blog, so after twiddling the way the front page of the site displays, it's time to post a new one.

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The Dark Doodad

Testing times

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

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. 

Cheesy open source

Posted by cafuego on Wednesday 24 October 2012. In categories &open source  &cheese
Mmmm, delicious!

What's better than cheese? Nothing, surely.

Actually, there is: open source cheese. And stop calling me Shirley.

Last saturday I finally cashed in on last year's birthday present, a one-day cheese making course at the William Angliss instutute of TAFE taught by Giorgio Linguanti of La Latteria fame. The course teaches how to make fresh mozzarella and a basic pecorino style cheese called primosale.

Over the course of the day, Giorgio explained that he thinks the australian cheese industry is quite closed and not many producers are happy to share ideas and recipes with each other. That's as opposed to the part of Italy he's from, where people are forever talking with each other about how to make better and more interesting cheeses.

So in the spirit of open source cheese, here is Giorgio's mozzarella recipe, which makes a delicious cheese.

Date ordinals: An ugly solution to an ugly problem

Posted by cafuego on Tuesday 14 August 2012. In categories &php5  &drupal  &runkit  &pecl  &international
Root out the unilingualist oppression!

A friend bumped into what appears to be a very irritating problem yesterday with the PHP date_format() function, which is used by format_date() to show date and time strings on Drupal. This function uses the "S" format character, which returns the english ordinal number suffix for the current day of the month. E.g: "st" on the first day, "nd" on the second day, and so on. (And the date() function does too, coincidentally)

The problem is that when you're working in a non-english locale, the ordinal suffixes returned remain the english ones. Oops.

Drupal Groups Email Filtering

Posted by cafuego on Sunday 10 June 2012. In categories &drupal  &mail  &filter  &header  &gdo
You've got way too much mail

Many Drupal users and developers are members of groups.drupal.org and will be getting email from the site when people post new messages and replies to threads. Of these people, many probably also like to organise their email in folders, for easy reference in the future.

A common way to do this is by creating email filter rules that look at email subject lines or other headers and perform an action based on what these headers contain.

SecureBoot Database

Posted by cafuego on Thursday 7 June 2012. In categories &linux  &secureboot  &good idea  &bad implementation

Since I can see which way the wind is blowing with SecureBoot, I thought it prudent to create a database much reminiscent of the Linux hardware compatibility lists of yesteryear.

After some pointing and clicking in Drupal, the site is ready, for "beta" values of ready. You can access it at http://secureboot.osda.asn.au/

If you have a moment, please sign up and add your hardware to the system.

Value Added Tax?

Posted by cafuego on Saturday 12 May 2012. In categories &open source  &drupal  &proprietary  &subsidy
Could it be? No! Never!

A few weeks ago I saw a tweet by the Drupal Assciation asking for feedback on, amongst other things, how it could make being a DA member more attractive. The survey appears to still be open, so if nothing else please go fill it out.

However, before you do so I would draw your attention to question 15:

How much would the following benefits interest you in becoming a Member (or renewing your Membership)?

and in particular one of the options listed there:

Sensible API Calls Initiative

Posted by cafuego on Sunday 1 April 2012. In categories &drupal  &happy april 1
Frightened and confused

More than once I've had people ask for help because the concept and naming of hooks in Drupal both frightens and confuses them. FRIGHTENS and CONFUSES. Sadly, this is a very common occurrence.

In order to address this problem, the SAC (Sensible API Calls) Initiative has been formed. Our first task has been to clarify and simplify alter hooks throughout Drupal. We've opened issue #1510984 on drupal.og and posted an initial patch, which addresses how the alter API is called.

Drupal Downunder Video

Posted by cafuego on Thursday 23 February 2012. In categories &conference  &drupal  &video

Update: Internode have graciously offered to host all videos on their mirror server, please check http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/drupaldownunder/

It's been a while since Drupal Downunder and unfortunately some hardware problems (which will be resolved in the next two weeks or so) have prevented us from posting the conference videos in an easy to download format.

As a work-around, we've decided to make all the videos available for download via bittorrent. The torrent files for the 7.7GB Ogg Theora format and 18GB H264 (MP4) format downloads are attached below. To help seed (please do!) the torrents, please check the instructions on the Drupal Downunder 2012 site. 

... and last but not least, a huge thankyou to Brian Gilbert for pushing the Ogg files to the high bandwidth server, so I don't have to seed them via my poor ADSL connection only :-)

Amateurish Astronomy

Posted by cafuego on Thursday 26 January 2012. In categories &astronomy  &lca2012  &skyeballing

... in which I log my astronomickal adventures around linux.conf.au in Ballaarat. Verily.

Monday 16 January 2012

On monday evening I was invited to a property about an hour north of Ballarat to do some observing from a hill-top in an area without (much) light pollution. The evening was perfect and much was to be seen even without any optical augmentation. M45, the milky way, the coal sack & magellanic clouds were perfectly visible with the naked eye. Sadly the southern cross was pretty low on the horizon.