Over the course of our search for new developers for WorkHabit, I’ve often gotten a letter or message from Drupal Zealots large and small — Drupal developers that were born and indoctrinated into the community and believe it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

And rightfully so. Drupal satisfies the technical requirements for a vast number of problems surrounding social software. There is, however, a delineating line between where Drupal leaves off and where other applications or programming languages may do things better.  read more »

We’ve been getting reports of intermittent issues with transcoding on our CDN2 service.

After digging around for a while, we’ve found an issue where messages are not getting delivered through Amazon SQS to our transcode nodes.

The good news is that as of tomorrow morning, we’ll be deploying CDN2 to a new scaleable infrastructure that removes the Amazon dependencies. This move will improve performance and stabillity of video uploads and transcoding.  read more »

Like so many of us out there, I took the plunge last week and installed Snow Leopard. It purported many advancements, such as a completely rewritten finder and many other apps that take advantage of a better threading model and full 64 bit support.

With any OS upgrade comes some challenges, and I'd been prepared for a few of them. Some apps simply aren't going to be compatible, others required upgrades to react to changes in Apple's API, others required some creative thinking. Here's the breakdown:  read more »

Applications

During one of our recent projects, we ran into the classic deadlock between having non-blocking database updates with the ability to perform fulltext searches against our MySQL database.

Let me back up and explain a bit better what I mean. In other words, "let me explain.. no, there is too much. Let me sum up."  read more »

Whenever a group of us WorkHabit folks are sitting around the virtual watercooler reviewing upcoming projects, one of the first questions we need to answer is about the quality of the code we're starting with.

The big question we always want to know is this: Is core hacked? And how badly?

After doing this manually several times, I decided to cut to the chase and write a script for it.

The bash script to do this is at the bottom of this post. Just save it as iscorehacked.sh, mark it executable, and have at it.  read more »

Today marks the first beta version of our Drupal AutoTagging module.

This has been a long time in the works, and included several conversations between myself and Frank Febbraro, the creator of the original autotagging project and maintainer on the OpenCalais module, which this initiative is designed to facilitate.

The goal of this project:

Provide a pluggable framework for fetching taxonomy (tag) information from third party services.

The initial release of the project supports three different tagging services:  read more »

Inspired by an experience merging a rather large branch into trunk on a client project (which went surprisingly well, actually), as well as the now-famous Languages: Shooting Yourself in the Foot we present to you a rather comical view of the developer's best and worst friend: The revision control system.  read more »

So during a routine project setup, we had a need to move a SVN repository hosted on Unfuddle to another provider (in this case, Beanstalk).

We'd had a lot of complaints from our developers that the hosted svn service on Unfuddle was extremely slow at times, and our tests of beanstalk showed markedly improved numbers. As a result, we've been regularly recommending that our clients move there as well. We've contacted the Unfuddle support team in hopes that they'll improve their performance, but until then, we've moved.  read more »

So a mild annoyance I found once switching over to Ubuntu. When in insert or replace mode, your arrow keys will stop working. Hitting an arrow key will move you to the line above the one you’re on and start adding “D” letters on new lines, causing undue headache while trying to clean up the mess.  read more »

I submitted a patch to the activitystream module to allow it to hook into views properly. In this case the patch allows you to specify a specific source type (e.g. Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, etc.) and display only that source in a view.

This is particularly useful for things like showing your twitter status in a block ala facebook.

Hopefully it comes in handy.

You can review the patch here.