Blogs

My mother's in from out of town visiting, and we've been having a lot of fun. One of the most satisfactory things we've done together is what we did on Thursday, going to the first full day of the "Just Between Friends" consignment sale here in Denver. (If you're a parent, these things are magic - cheap used items (or cheap unused items) all in one place.)

Yeah, this is amusing.

Several folks in my livejournal feed post the same picture of the front of Orwell's house with a security camera mounted outside. Naturally, I immediately search online for the string "orwell camera hoax" and get many hits - as I expected. Here's a good one: http://reason.com/blog/2012/02/07/orwellian-irony-in-the-extreme

It's a fake, ha ha. Of course, I can't comment on this without either having my comment marked as spam or having to sign up to yet another blogging service, so I'll just slip it into my friends feed and hope folks aren't so open minded they miss it. :)

Why do people believe photos on the internet?

So, I'm currently working on a book-related project where I'm processing a bunch of book data, and for some reason the isbn13 values are missing, where the isbn10 values are still there.

So, I went out and found this useful mysql function for converting the values:

So, I'm setting up a solr server (version 4.1), using Tomcat6, for development. Not a problem, until I try including the DataImportHandler, where everything just breaks.

If you're not familiar with the DataImportHandler, you should have a look. It's a very nice looking piece of code that helps you import data into Solr easily, keeping track of changed data and all. I'm looking forward to using it for a project which doesn't use the usual apache solr Drupal modules.

Alright, so the problem had to do with including the jar files, which for me means including solr-dataimporthandler-4.1.0.jar. The obvious way from looking at the solrconfig.xml is <lib dir="../../../dist/" regex="solr-dataimporthandler-.*\.jar" />. Looking at my setup, I saw that the solrconfig.xml was two directories below the directory containing dist, so I shortened the dir path to ../../dist/, and it failed. And it kept failing.

The problem I was handled at work was pretty simple - we're putting together a multi-language site, with English and Spanish data. However, if you search on something that's part of a proper name which shows on both English and Spanish data, then you were getting a mix of English and Spanish nodes. What we wanted was a way to automatically filter the search by the current language, something that I couldn't find anywhere. So, I rolled up my sleeves and created this:

These may not be useful to anyone else, but who knows.

If you're getting the error "s3fs: could not determine how to establish security credentials", make sure the password file is named passwd-s3fs, and not password-s3fs.

If you're getting the error "s3fs: unable to access MOUNTPOINT No such file or directory", try setting the mountpoint directory to 777.

These are what solved my problems today, at least!

I just read this, and I wish I could go back in time and shove it in my younger face: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-per.... I just read through it and really enjoyed it.

You don't have to like it, I just wanted to save the link.

Here's something that just bit me:

When you're using google maps api, you may find that the map controls don't show up, or worse, show up only partially. This is what happened to me. Happily, this seems to be a side-effect of using reset.css of some sort - it sets up images to display in a way that google maps doesn't like. Assuming that the div you're writing the map to is #map_canvas, then what you want to add to your css is:

#map_canvas img {
max-width: inherit;
}


And then the controls appear!

A month and a half ago I switched to a new job at SpireMedia as the 'Director of PHP Development', which so far has largely meant 'Drupal Guru', a position that I'm quite enjoying.

However, an interesting addition to Drupal is that we're starting up on Magento projects, starting with a website for a company that sells items with legal restrictions on how items are sold and shipped, and which already has a computer system for fulfillment of orders. This means that we need to not only set up a Magento site, but we need to add new rules for these legal restrictions and we're going to need to be able to talk to the existing system to pass data back and forth.

So, I'm originally from Maryland, so when I started reading a thread on Christmas and came across someone talking about the Maryland state song, I was amused to find out that it uses the tune from 'Oh Christmas Tree' but has lyrics about resisting the Northern Oppressor.

Apparently a few decades ago some thought was put to change this, and naturally the folks at All Things Considered decided to 'help' with their own lyrics:

1.

We've got some hills, we've got some trees,
We sing in four-part harmonies.
There's shopping malls and city halls
And cats and dogs and ponds with frogs.

But none of us has ever meant
To overthrow the government.
From Baltimore to Hagerstown,
Just take your car and drive around.

2.

We touch four states and several bays,
The highways mostly run two ways,
We hope you come and say hello
And maybe stop and spend some dough.