drupal

Today is exactly one week before I leave for San Francisco for Drupalcon, and so I decided I needed to go by MicroCenter and pick up a few supplies.

For one, when I'd been typing up some notes in Open Atrium the other day, my house's power blinked, and my computer shut down, and restarted. I almost had a heart attack, and the waited on the edge of my seat to see if the browser (Google Chrome) would somehow magically remember what I'd been typing. Happily it had, and I quickly saved the entry before finishing it up. But that really taught me that I need to have a UPS if I"m working from home.

For two, my KVM switch had been dying slowly recently and this morning it had taken three successive restarts of my computer for the switch to work. That was pretty much the end of the line for me - I suspect that's why it wasn't working with my Mac recently either.

When I first started working in Drupal, I was astonished to hear that the logging function that Drupal provides is called - of all things - watchdog(). I complained that it was a bad name, but continued using it, along with the dblog module, happily throwing things into the watchdog table and looking them up there.

So, last night here in Denver was the original ie6Funeral party, and I showed up. There was a lot of booze, a lot of really tasty snacks - Forest Room 5 did a fine job there - and finally, there were remembrances. And here's the one I came up with:

Now, there's a bunch of others that my friend Matthew Saunders posted on his blog, so if you want to see more about the funeral, and see a picture of the deceased, I suggest heading there. It was a lot of fun.

A mixture of short items I thought I should mention.

• My friends and I have started up a coop of developers and web designers, called Vintage Digital, and now we've got a website and you can see a picture of me from when I was visiting Boston for Drupalcon there. I also posted a huge blog post going over how to update Ubercart so it can handle multi-currency. If you're interested, have a look.

Firehouse.com, the last major project I worked on with pingVision, has now been officially launched! I worked as lead developer on this project with the able assistance of Matthew Saunders & Elizabeth Hause on the web producing side; and Ben Jeavons, Matt Tucker, Al Stephen, Kevin Bridges and Zach Meyer on the development and theming side.

Firehouse is a large site which includes articles of fires and fire-handling topics, pages for each fire station who wants to be hosted there, photographs of stations and fire equipment submitted by users, editorial cartoons on the firefighting life, Webinars, an online store for buying subscriptions to the magazine, and even A digital copy of their magazine, month by month, and probably some other stuff I'm not even remembering. Oh, and some blogging, too.

I'll probably work up more of a 'this is how we done it' post later, right now I'm basking in the glow of success.

A little over three weeks ago i set into motion my big gamble - stepping away from pingVision, and starting life as a freelance consultant. I'm not really able to go into all of the reasons, but partially it's a test - can I go out on my own and find my own way, without a company supporting what I do?

And, so far it's launched very nicely. My first client has been SpireMedia, here in downtown Denver, where I've been assisting them with an ubercart site with a large number of customizations, starting with working in three currencies and custom shipping costs, moving all the way to some interesting ways of presenting and offering discounts... which have already lead to one patch for uc_discounts_alt, and probably leading to more later.

After a bit of twisting and forcing, I've got the new http://www.dasfa.com/ up and running under Drupal, a feat which makes me feel rather happy. DASFA stands for the 'Denver Area Science Fiction Association', and I've been slowly taking over the webmaster duties for a while now.

I still need to get dasfa.org migrated as well, but there's some email forwarding accounts that I need to get sorted out first. But it shouldn't take too long.

Also, I've set up a new twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/denver_sf to keep track of local Denver SF happenings.

Here's the talk we gave at Drupalcampcolorado.

Presentation at http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dxmgvdn_4c2mfkkdj

(If you're seeing this on livejournal, there's files to download on www.jcfiala.net)

Hm, seems like Twitter's Down.

I'm having some fun setting up a Drupal 5 install just so I can test that a patch fixes a problem with upgrading to 6 while using the link module.

A couple of quite notes for those of you trying to use drupal_add_tabledrag() on your sites, that may prevent you suffering through the same pain as myself... but I'll hide it after the break for those of you who don't care and want to get on to the next bit.