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 »

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 »

Sometimes an afterthought, sometimes the only good-looking page on a site: registration pages are the heart and soul of user participation. Maximizing the completion rate and minimizing abandonment of your signup form is a crucial part of getting users talking, especially if you don't allow anonymously posted content on your site (an increasingly common thing as spam continues to flourish).

Web 2.0 ushered in a lot of changes to registration pages, the most notable concept being simplicity. This is the executive summary:  read more »