Bearfruit

I’m getting ready to replace my Dell Latitude D420 laptop. I love it. It’s very light, very portable, has an extended battery that gets 3-5 hours of life. If I could change only two things it would be a slightly larger screen (or more specifically, a slightly lower DPI) and a standard dual core cpu rather than the ultra-low voltage (ULV) dual core cpu. Dell and Apple both offer a computer that meets my requirements but to my surprise, the Apple is cheaper almost identical (corrected, see below) .

My brother is applying for a jr. web-dev position so I was thinking about what tips to give him. That thought process lead from one thing to another and I realized that two of the most influential web-dev books I’ve read are not ones that would normally jump out at you. These are not replacements for a good HTML or JavaScript book, these are a bit more high-level. No matter what your development expertise (front-end, java, php, ruby, etc) these books will each take you up a significant notch in your web-dev skills and will set your web-applications way above the norm.

I’ve invested a non-trivial amount of thought and research into the optimal way to cut a pizza for a small family and have come to the firm conclusion that in most cases cutting asymmetrically is the best.

By this I mean that I now deliberately try to cut the pieces so that they are not the same size. There are some instances where this is not the best route but for a typical family dinner it works out ideally.

OK, the previous blog post was on site credibility, lets continue on that theme for another post. This may seem off-key but follow with me. If you see a woman join a group of attractive women you will formulate an opinion of her. If you see a man join a group of other men who look like they are of ill repute you will probably hold him in a similar low regard.

We have a tendency to make assumptions based on association. I’m no psychologist but I’ve seen enough sitcoms to know that it’s true. The saying is that birds of a feather flock together, right? But how does this relate to your website and what does it have to do with ads? I’m glad you asked.

Have you ever mis-typed a domain name and been taken to one of these parked sites filled with links? It only takes you a fraction of a second to tell you’re in the wrong place. I’m not talking about porn, gambling or pop-up laden websites, just these squatter-style parked domain web pages with tons of links. Sometimes I’ve come across sites that are legitimate sites but my first thought is, uh-oh, I mis-typed, I hit a parked domain site. This is because something intangible about the site’s homepage is communicating that the site doesn’t really contain any information.

Finding awesome images to use for your website can be a challenge. However with this little trick it’s quite easy to find exciting, fresh images that have creative commons licenses allowing you to publish photos on your blog or website (as long as you give attribution to the artist and don’t use them for commercial purposes - see the image’s license for details, but the trick I’m demonstrating here only includes CC licensed images that allow derivative works). Total time to find and add an exciting image to your blog post is 2 - 3 minutes.

“The Scoble Show” by Thomas hawk

The Beagle Board is getting a lot of attention lately. It should, it’s an awesome platform. How does it compare to the Tin Can Tools Hammer (discussed in a previous blog post here)? Well, the Beagle is faster and cheaper for one thing, it also has excellent video and audio output capabilities. But that doesn’t necessarily make it better. It all depends on the application.

My seven year old son doesn’t know it yet but he’s getting an MP3 player for Christmas. This is cool and I’m glad he’s enjoying music. We’re listening to all kinds of music together, from Chopin and “Hiding” (Haydn) to Beastie Boys and Daft Punk to Alicia Keys and Brian Setzer to Rich Mullins and Barlow Girl. (Basically we’re getting a variety)

Now we have a difficult issue to address: fair use. While he has a CD player on his computer that kind of defeats the purpose of having a portable music player. Therefore it makes most sense for him to use his computer to download songs onto his player. We have a variety of CDs in our personal collection (most already ripped and ready) but what about when he wants to go looking for other music? I envision three scenarios:

Please let me know if you find errors in this document or if you’d like me to add clarification. These notes are based on my hearing of the conference sessions and it’s entirely possible I mis-understood the speakers or in the heat of the moment a slight error was communicated.

Drupal is the software we use to manage our main websites. Last week while UDS was happening I was able to attend a training seminar in New Orleans, Louisiana called Do it with Drupal to learn how to better make use of this platform. It was a powerful training program and I came away with a wealth of information that will help us in the future.

This report is quite long because I know that a number of people will be interested in the various parts, so I’ll start with a one-page summary:

My Goals for This Seminar:

1. Make it easier to delegate tasks to others
2. Simplify common tasks for users creating content
3. Evaluate the process of upgrading to Drupal 6
4. Learn about Acquia, a professionally supported version of Drupal created by the Drupal founder and various other core developers

Nutshell:

• Drupal 6 is a major improvement, in large part because a significant amount of time was spent re-architecting key add-on modules such as views and CCK.
• Future Drupal upgrades will not be as challenging because the key modules will not go through this same upheaval in the foreseeable future (I go this from the mouths of the CCK, Views and other modules developers)
• My observation is that Drupal developers are focused on the needs of integrators more than end users - this makes it a powerful tool with a wealth of APIs and add-ons, but it is still a challenge to use it as an end user CMS
• There are some major sites doing some cool stuff with Drupal - Sony/BMG, Warner Brothers and a few newspapers were demoed
• We at Canonical are using only a tiny subset of the most basic features - I can see some great benefits for us if we adopt some of the more advanced Drupal functionality. Potentially this could allow us to have fewer websites, manage content more efficiently and do some things we can’t do now.

(by the way, this last week the BIS team at Canonical released an open source plugin that allows drupal websites to authenticate and get group information from Launchpad)

Key Modules:

Some of the powerful applications demoed relied on a few key modules, namely:

• Views 2
• CCK (aka Content Construction Kit)
• Flag
• Advanced Help
• Image Cache (powerful image uploading/resizing)
• Numerous CCK related fields
• Panels (Currently still relies on Drupal 5, same author as Views and Views2, he is now focusing his efforts on updating this powerful module)

Other interesting modules were:

• Organic Groups
• Workflow
• Revision Moderation (combined with workflow eliminates the need for a staging server)
• Date and Calendar (to replace event)
• Admin Menus (when logged in gives quick access to admin function)
• Markdown (wiki syntax for drupal)
• Developer Module
• Boost - big performance boost for sites with mostly anonymous traffic

Also, someone said I should check out “Selenium macro recorder” to record web-browser interaction and then re-play it later. Sounds slick.

/end one page summary

OK, I’m making my own meme, though I’ve not googled it, someone may have come up with it before me.

1. Click in your firefox address bar,
2. delete what’s there,
3. type the letter “w” and list the first four or five entries that firefox suggests

(feel free to use whatever web browser you like if they offer the same functionality)

Mine are:

1. Google Analytics - www.google.com/analytics
2. Canonical Homepage - www.canonical.com
3. Netbook Redirect Page - www.canonical.com/netbooks
4. Bearfruit.org comments moderation page - hidden page on this site
5. Ubuntu.com homepage - www.ubuntu.com

Post yours in the comments or a link to your blog post that continues the meme.