In Denver – For DrupalCon 2012

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So Myplanet Digital, my new employers as of Nov 2011, have sent me, and a small platoon of Myplaneteers, to Denver, the mile high city, for DrupalCon 2012. This is my first DrupalCon; but hopefully not my last.

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few days poring over the 3 day schedule, trying to decide what sessions I want to attend.

First impressions of DrupalCon

Well, the website is very good. They list everything you could possibly hope to find about the sessions. PLUS: you can even put the sessions in your “shopping cart” to construct your own schedule. Then you can view your own schedule. Unfortunately, they don’t have a Print Schedule view. But hey, Denver wasn’t built in a day.

I had breakfast with our BizDev in Chief, Dustin Walper. I was busy telling him about my attempts at losing weight and getting into shape (Dustin is something of a Greek god), when he jumps out of his seat and says he’ll be right back. After about 10 minutes it became evident he *wasn’t* going to be right back. So I paid the cheque, and went exploring the lobby in search of Dustin. I found him with a bunch of Acquia folk, including (gasp) Dries Buytaert.

OK, I’ll admit it, I was a little star-struck. In my defense, I’ve been working my hind-most parts off for the past 5 months trying to get my head around Drupal. And here was the guy who started it all. In his dorm room. A whole industry. (Did I mention there were going to be 3000 attendees at DrupalCon this year?)

So I had the temerity to ask for a picture. Dries was very accommodating, and even suggested we take a few. A real mensch.

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Also, today, I decided to show my commitment to Drupal:

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More to come.

Alfred’s Notes: Drupal

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I’ve started studying Drupal, the open source content management system (CMS). I’ll use this page to gather interesting links to documentation and articles on the subject. Who knows? I may even sort and organize them some day.

Ajax in Drupal using jQuery

Introduction to AHAH Forms in Drupal (handbook)

Creating Drupal style tables

AHAH in Drupal: may it one day live up to its acronym

Using default views in your module
Where to put your exported Views in code, direct from Earl Miles, aka merlinofchaos, author of Views, among other essential parts of Drupal.

Describing tables to Views
To someone who already knows SQL, and is very comfortable with it, Views is like trying to fiddle with very small dials while wearing large mitts of cotton batting. The main problem is Views doesn’t necessarily know the ins and outs of your data model. Here’s how to tell Views about those ins and outs. And remove at least some of the batting.

Android Startup Kit

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My friend Ian just purchased a Nexus S phone from Wind Mobile. So I thought I’d put together a list of useful apps to get him started on the joy of Android.

There are thousands of apps for the Android platform; so, as if it needed to be said, this is just a personal compilation of apps I find useful and/or fun. I hope you’ll find in it, one or two apps you didn’t know about before, which you decide you can’t live without.

Oh yeah, also should note that these are all free. Continue reading →

Remembrance Day at the Canadian Air and Space Museum

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A few weeks ago I heard that the Canadian Air and Space Museum was embattled, under attack from its landlord, Parc Downsview Park.

David Soknacki, Chair of the Downsview Park Board of Directors has pulled every dirty trick in the book to evict the museum from its current home, the former de Havilland plant, where Tiger Moths and other gems of aviation history were first designed and built. Among his underhanded shenanigans, Soknacki has refused to recognize the historical and heritage significance of the building. Continue reading →

Updating WordPress Plugins Locally, Without FTP

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It’s been the bane of my WordPress life: every time I get a notification of updates available on my local installation (on my MacBook Pro), either for the WordPress core, or one of my installed plugins, I get a request for FTP parameters. This, I’ve learned, is due to WordPress trying to write a small test file to the wp-content directory. When it fails, it reverts to trying to get the files via FTP. But, sadly, I don’t have FTP setup on my local install. Besides, from what I hear, this method seldom works.

Don’t despair, though: there is a solution. And it’s fairly simple. (Don’t be put off if you’re not familiar with the OSX Terminal: it’s not that complicated. Really.) Continue reading →

Importing a Distribution List in Outlook

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So I had to send out a notice to about 700 users. I had the list in the users table of my app’s database. I wanted to create a distribution list in Outlook. It’s not as straightfoward as it may sound.

The first step is to generate the csv file. Small complication: although I had access to the database, I did not have access to the server. So any output files MySQL generates are essentially out of my reach. Therefore, I needed to generate the file locally. No problem: MySQL has an –execute option which allows you to run multiple commands from the command line. It gets long and unwieldy, but it works. Here’s what I used:

mysql -u root -p db01 ^
  -e "select distinct concat(first_name, ' ', last_name, ', ', email) as name from users order by last_name, first_name;" ^
  >users_list.csv

(Yes, you can use the caret to continue a command on the next line. But don’t use a tab to indent your continuation. Spaces are cool though.)

OK, step one done.

Step two is creating a new distribution list in Outlook. You do that under Contacts. Click Select Members, to bring up a dialog box.

See the Members-> button near the bottom? The text field next to it is where you can paste your extracted list. (Now might be a good time to send a shout out to the morons who architected this brilliant bit of user experience. On behalf of users everywhere, I entreat you to find another line of work.)

This is great, but there is a caveat. As I said, my list was about 700 users long. Outlook wouldn’t accept that many records in a single DL: it came back with an error message. So I tried 200. Still no go. It did take 100. So I created 7 separate distribution lists, then one more to rule them all. The last distribution list contained the other 7, so I can just send my email to the one DL.

That’s all I have for now on distribution lists in Outlook. Hope this is useful.