We've all seen it, those darn blocks that have to appear in-line in a node body, but we're often left scratching our heads as to how to get it in there.

The problem is that regions are only surfaced to the page template, and the region we need to add is a div inside of a node.

Well, with a couple of simple theme overrides, you can get there, and make it performant as well.  read more »

…Ran into an issue where Backup and Migrate wasn’t cleaning up after itself - mysql dumps were sitting in /tmp, stacking up, and causing disks to fill up.

Even if it were cleaning up after itself, I’m dealing with a clustered site. It’s my understanding that cleanup should occur on cron - but running cron on every webserver is kind of, well, meh.

Since I’m a believer that all problems can be resolved with perl, the following script can be invoked via system cron, and will clean up any backup_migrate_*.mysql files that are older than one day.

Drupal without drush is like a burger without cheese. So when, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to ensure that a specific version of drush is installed on a number of systems in a standard location, falling back to your distribution’s package management system is probably a good idea.

Thus, I’ve hacked together a quick script that’ll grab a version of drush and turn it into a noarch binary RPM, suitable for use on RHEL/CentOS (and probably Fedora, for that matter).  read more »

If you are running Drupal websites locally on your computer using the MAMP / MAMP Pro stack and are experiencing abnormally slow page loads, there are a couple of steps that should be taken to help increase performance.

The obvious approaches are to check your php.ini settings and insure that your allocated PHP memory is sufficient to your local needs. Additionally, making sure that my.cnf has been configured to support database loads and performance is also a must, however MAMP does a fairly good job of giving you what you need out of the box.  read more »

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 »

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 »