jcfiala's blog

So, I'm at what call 'between jobs' right now. I've got some contract stuff I can do on the side to bring in some money, and some savings, so I'm not hurting. Earlier this week, when the folks at Bonfils called me up and asked me to do a platelet donation, I realized I didn't have any strong reason not to say 'Yes'. I could set it up for Friday when I had some free time and it wouldn't interfere with any weekend plans with my wife, so why not?

Naturally today I ended up having bookending phone calls with potential employers. Life's funny that way.

Things are going really well with the baby. Wednesday, Tammy went in for another ultrasound, where they determined that everything they could see is definitely a-ok, and that in another three months we'll have a baby girl to enjoy. Since she had to take the afternoon off to go to the doctor, she headed up to Boulder, where I'd been working for almost two months, to join me.

Something useful sounding from #drupal-colorado:

<cyberswat> drush php-eval '_field_info_collate_fields(TRUE); _field_info_collate_fields()' ... arrrrrggggghhhh /me curses loudly
<cyberswat> should never have to run that
<cyberswat> c4rl: if you ever have an instance where your installing new fields and instances and every piece of code tells you that everything worked from the update hook but you still don't see the instance then run the above
<cyberswat> that took between 4:00am and now to figure out

<cyberswat> for some reason field_cache_clear(); in field_create_instance() didn't do the above as it should have
<cyberswat> field_read_instances() reads from the db not cache
<cyberswat> so when your drush_print_r ing away you'll see wrong information telling you everything is golden

This sounds like an important thing to remember.

It's very near the end of the second Trimester here at Chez Fiala, and so before the moratorium on flight began with the third, Tammy and I decided we wanted to get out of the house for our last big vacation before the little one is born. Apparently, this somewhat common practice has gotten the name 'babymoon'. We talked it over, and having been in San Fransisco a year earlier for Drupalcon, we decided to fly out there. We decided to keep it small and intimate - just the pair of us wandering the city as whim took us.

Naturally, this meant our flight out was an hour late.

Which meant we got into SF even later, and so instead of saving money and trying to take the Bart, we ended up taking an airport shuttle to the hotel, which was the Marriott Marquis downtown. It's a nice hotel, although the pillows are a bit of a pain. But I was so exhausted we didn't much care. Into bed!

So, this past weekend was Starfest, the media sf convention that is put on in Denver every Spring. It includes a HorrorFest and a ComicFest at the same time, which is nice, but unfortunately makes things a little crowded at the moment. I wasn't able to attend last time because Drupalcon in San Francisco was the same weekend, but this year we dropped by.

I was mainly interested in seeing Marc Gunn, a celtic singer and song writer who I've been following since he was half of the Brobdingnagian Bards, who I first met in person at an earlier convention where I managed to be the entire audience. It was great seeing him in person, although his short stint in the Atrium suffered from a terrible audio speaker. I also got some other CDs from a group called Pandora Celtica.

Well, it's now two full weeks since I started on this diet, and so far things are going fairly well.

For the first week or so I was staying between 2000-3000 calories, but for the last week I've been able to stay around 2000 each day, which is great, considering that Fatsecret wants me at 3100 and other sites suggest about 2800. I'm a little astonished at how easy it's been to keep my calorie intake so low this time. Will I get bored and backslide later? I don't know, maybe.

Exercise is really the thing I need to start working on now, and I'm hoping that with the arrival of warmer weather here in Denver, it'll be possible to get out during lunch and after work and get some walking in. I'm still huge, so heavy exercise isn't a good thing (especially for my knees), but if I can get in some walking every day that'll help push up my calorie requirements a little. We'll have to see.

It's hardly a secret among people I know personally, but I've fallen out of the habit of blogging, so I haven't posted it here. After being married for nearly eleven years, my wife Tammy is finally pregnant! We've been terribly happy for months now as the news has sunk in - first keeping it to ourselves through the first trimester (which we were told was the most iffy part of the pregnancy), and then slowly starting to tell others - first our parents on Christmas, then friends, and now Tammy's been posting to facebook with updates.

To answer the question that usually comes up at this point - yes, we do know, and it's a Girl.

This is probably one of the biggest changes in my life. Getting married wasn't this much of a change - at the time we were living together anyway, and were pretty effectively married in thought even if we hadn't gone through the ceremony yet. But this... this is going to change everything.

Well, I'm finally home after a week-long trip to Drupalcon Chicago, where it was revealed that the next North American Drupalcon will be right here in Denver!

I had a great trip, making some contacts with various companies and keeping my hand in on what's going on in Drupal. Coming home got a little funky with a missed flight, but even that was overcome and I'm finally back at home.

So, I like working on Drupal in virtual machines, and my favorite is to use Ubuntu 8.04, because it's got PHP 5.2.x, which Drupal 6 works with better than it does PHP 5.3.x. Unfortunately, the git that Ubuntu provides us with is from 1.5.x, which doesn't allow use of git clone --branch. And the git
instructions seem to require those. What to do? Happily, you can compile git yourself:

1. First, get rid of git if you've already installed it - sudo apt-get remove git-core should do that.
2. apt-get install build-essential
3. Download the latest version of git. http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.7.4.1.tar.bz2 works currently.
4. sudo apt-get build-dep git-core
5. tar xjf git-1.7.4.1.tar.bz2 (or whichever version you downloaded)
6. Change directive into the new directory.
7. ./configure
8. make

I continue my work with the Migrate Module, and recently ran into needing to migrate a value to the Link Module. If you haven't gotten into it yet, Migrate generally expects other modules to handle migrating special bits for nodes, except for the CCK module, and that's included both (I think) because it's in D7 core and because it's so bloody common. Field-specific handling is dealt with by implementing a MigrateFieldHandler, which basically sets up the arrays properly. Again, migrate comes with a number of MigrateFieldHandler classes for the core cck fields, but not for custom CCK fields, like Link.

So, having recently run into a link field I needed to migrate, this is a first swing attempt at handling it. Do note that any module that includes this class will need the Migrate api hook that I discussed in my last post, and also note that I intend on including this fix in the next release of the Link module.