This weekend will see hundreds of Drupalers swam into New York City to attend it’s 8th Drupal Camp. We’re excited to be attending the Camp, and are super stoked that we have three speakers from WorkHabit running sessions: Joshua Jabbour is going to take us on a discovery of GIT http://groups.drupal.org/node/71058 Eric Duran is going to show us HTML5 and Drupal playing together Wes Roepken is planning on taking a BOF session on why Apple is near to the best dev platform for Drupal So let’s hope if you’re planning to be in NYC this weekend, you stop by and come play with us!

Prerequisites:

We’ll be doing some git-retrieval, meaning we need git installed. Being a sysadmin by trade, I’m naturally lazy, so I’m happy to just pull the git package from EPEL.

As for the rest, we’re doing some compiling - so, it’s necessary to make sure gcc-c++/etc. are available.  read more »

In a recent discovery credited to Aaron Stewart here at WorkHabit, it was found that there is an issue converting the cache_router and / or semaphore tables from MyISAM to InnoDB on a Pressflow database.  read more »

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 »

Drupal as a framework doesn’t lend itself well to detailed specifications — and many projects try very hard to do them to “contain risk” and get “a clear and exact” deliverable.  read more »

The agile approach is one a lot of people are becoming familiar with. For one of our larger clients, we were doing 1 week sprints, and well, Im not entirely sure how it got started, but when a story was complete, someone would ring the gong sound, when a story wasn't complete, we could get the sad trombone :(.

Anyways, I threw together this little app which when opened, allows you to shake your laptop to make the noise

You can toggle the happy or sad sound by hitting Option + Command + T.  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 »