The Perils of Copying Code from the Web
Thursday, October 30th, 2008<aspStick out tonguelaceHolder runat=”server” ID=”m_errorPlaceHolder”>
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Author Archive
Mail Goggles
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008I am not sure if April came early or someone is just having fun but this is a great idea. Goggles for Google Mail:
When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?
Read the details on the Official Google Blog.
Windows on EC2!
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008Finally Windows developers will have the same opportunity that the Open Source side has had for quite some time – the ability to deploy their beloved applications to the Cloud. I received this email today:
Dear Amazon Web Services Developer,
We are excited to let you know that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server starting later this Fall. Today, you can choose from a variety of Unix-based operating systems, and soon you will be able to configure your instances to run the Windows Server operating system. In addition, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases.
Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazons proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services.
Our goal is to support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform. The ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability. We are currently operating a private beta of Amazon EC2 running Windows Server and SQL Server. Please go to aws.amazon.com/windows if you are interested in being notified later this Fall when the offering is released broadly.
Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team
It will be interesting to see what the pricing model looks like.
10 Useful Drupal Modules
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008David Herrold asks - “Mike, I’d be interested in knowing what you think the top 10 Drupal modules are for any site? And why?”.
- CCK – It slices, dices, and makes gravy. Well not quite but it does make short work of adding new fielded content into your site. Stories and Pages can only get you so far so when you to quickly add things like contact forms, surveys, press releases, news stories, multimedia content, and the list goes on – turn to CCK. My single complaint with CCK is that there does not appear to be away to export Custom Content Type to a file and subsequently deploy to additional environments through a good old fashioned, versioned, file based module.
- Views – Select fields, filter, sort, and join all through an interface so friendly even a Microsoftie could use it. The default view tables include sortable headers and can be easily and quickly styled.
Thinking in Drupal
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008Our Drupal portfolio is growing rapidly and we have three very interesting sites in progress currently. One integrates video content using Amazon S3 as the storage engine and another is a significantly complex portal site in which integrated search across tens of thousands of content nodes will be the major technical challenge. In May we also built out the Denver Botanic Gardens site in Drupal.
My travels back to Michigan this weekend provided a nice opportunity to catch up on my Drupal reading and podcasts. I recently ordered a great book, “Learning Drupal 6 Module Development“, written by Matt Butcher. It was one of the rare technical books that I actually read chapter to chapter as opposed to skimming and keeping nearby for reference. Some things I took away from the book:
- A solid understanding and example of how to use jQuery and AJAX/JSON to retrieve and present additional content.
- How to wire in custom Administration Pages and functionality through the hook_menu function().
- A nice overview of how we can use custom installation profiles to automate the initial configuration and setup of Drupal sites that our customers will host.
I also listened to over 12 hours of Drupal Podcasts from Lullabot. Lullabot provides consulting and training for Drupal. Many members of the team have also contributed to both the core implementation as well as several contributed modules. The real strength of many Open Source projects is the community that develops around the various projects. Listening to the podcasts provided some nice insight into who these people are and just how brilliant they are.
My favorite Podcast was No. 58, Earl Miles Interview. Earl Miles is the author of arguably two of the three most important Drupal contributed modules – Views and Panels. CCK being the third. He also wrote Node Queue. After listening the podcast, I can see many potential implementations for Node Queue.
Podcasts are not great for learning how to do things but they can do a great job of providing insight into the fundamentals and the “why”. I have a much deeper appreciation for the importance of CCK and Views in addition to a deeper understanding of the overall Drupal architecture, framework strengths, and limitations.
