Things one should never do

October 7, 2008

Nick Lewis' post about never naming a module and theme the same thing in the Drupal content management system reminds me of a lesson I learned long ago.

Linux was new and all the rage and I'd just come back from some sort of system administrator training, likely an IBM AIX class. I was liking the whole Linux and UNIX thing and was having a grand old time setting systems up. More than that, though, I was a badass. I could make the system jump, roll over and lie down all with the power of my little finger. This too was in the days of limited disk space and the need to partition file systems for better performance. One night, sometime after midnight, I got this bright idea to make all the file systems separate partitions. It wasn't enough that /usr and /usr/local had their own. After all if two file systems could be mounted on separate disks then why not more things went OK while I moved /home and /opt. On a roll I moved /etc to its own partition. Having carefully copied /etc to the partition and had everything setup it was good to go. Mounted it and everything was good. Well until the next reboot that was. As it turns out it is rather challenging to find the mnt file to know which partitions to mount when it's not mounted as a part of the root filesystem.

It took a while to recover from that one but you can bet it is one "trick" I won't try again.

Meltdown, bailout and aftermath

October 4, 2008

Anyone who is concerned about or affected by the crisis in the US economy (i.e.. anyone who is reading this) should take some time to listen to this week's This American Life. It includes detailed and understandable explanations of what is happening, the options for the bailout and the vastly preferable (for taxpayers) bailout option which was included in the bailout bill as an option and which we all need to make sure is actually used.

The magical hour, Acquia launches Acquia Drupal and Acquia Network

September 29, 2008

Like many in the community my first exposure to Acquia came back in the first part of the year. It was an exciting time for the Drupal community and what we learned at Drupalcon in Boston suggested many great things to come. At the time I was running an independent Drupal development shop. The news that an organization like Acquia was going to come to the Drupal ecosystem was great news. Some had early concerns that Acquia might compete in the site development space. These fears turned out to be ill-founded and the entry of Acquia into the marketspace a great boon for small shops like ours. Now the future held the promise that we could continue to work on the development we were doing and help customers build great sites, while having a solid organization we could hand off day-to-day support on the back end.

Green conference bags

September 27, 2008

One of the popular mainstream media items at the moment is shining some light on the "green" reusable bags that many stores and other places have these days. See it turns out that if you use a bag that is made to be reused just once it is a terrible waste of energy and generates a mountain of additional waste. However in many cases such as Friday's Wall Street Journal article on the matter talk in the same breath about how many conferences are giving these bags away. What is incongruous about this is that it completely misses the point that the conferences would not be giving away the light-weight grocery-store bags but much heavier, more costly and resource intensive bags. And that instead of attendees taking an easily reusable bag away they would have once taken a bag that could only be added to the closet or recycled.

We exist...

September 20, 2008

You wouldn't know it from the dearth of blogging going on here but indeed we do exist. And now, only several years after the house we live in was built, Google Maps thinks we exist too. No more do we have to explain to delivery drivers that they can't use Google Maps or they'll end up on the other side of the park with no way to get here. More soon on life, universe and yes, even Drupal but for now we're enjoying the first rain on this beautiful Saturday morning.

What's Next? Acquia and Drupal social publishing

September 2, 2008

A year ago we were about to set out on our family version of Travels with Charlie. At the time our thinking was that we would be looking to move out of Southern Nevada in a couple of years. On our return to Southern Nevada we talked and chewed on the options. Finding no great reason to wait we packed up and moved north. Along with the move came a change in my focus. I made a great move from the world of running an information technology department to running a small Drupal shop. Along the way I've had many great experiences. From traveling to Drupal camps to having visited Boston for the first time for Drupalcon last spring.

How not to cover a fire... the KTVB example

August 26, 2008

Boise had a devastating fire on Monday evening. When all is said and done a woman died, ten houses were destroyed and many more damaged. The Idaho Statesman has very good coverage. This post is not, however, about the fire but is about the coverage of the fire. Lacking a TiVo in our current setup I wasn't able to do a comparison between the different networks. As such this is then a critique of the coverage done by KTVB. One word sums it up.

Terrible.

However stopping there wouldn't do this story justice. At the same time KTVB is producing content that is embarrassingly bad they are bragging about it not just on the air but on Twitter as well. More about that in a bit.

Breaking News?

Let us start at the beginning, just after the fire raced into a southwest Boise subdivision. Within an hour of the fire hitting the houses KTVB broke into regular programming with the breaking news. I watched the next hour or so of coverage. In that time viewers learned:

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