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 »

I've taken a couple of days off to watch the outcome of the Cloud Expo, CloudCamp, and especially, the CCIF meetings. After three days, this posting is my response to everything I learned, and what I think next steps are. I'd like to have an open dialogue about it: but let's get moving.  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 »

For those eagerly awaiting the next member of the Drupal family, WorkHabit is proud to announce Rupal, the CMS designed exclusively for our valued cross-dressing community members.

Core modules include automatic pronoun feminization, rounded corners on everything, and auto-filtering of "it's a trap!" comments. Over 9,000 hours have been put into lovingly crafting the first community release.  read more »

I combed through the Issue queue for Drupal 6 yesterday and have provided a bunch of fixes and updates. I pushed them all into the Dev branch, which seen here, http://drupal.org/node/409912 .

Updates include, Drupal 6 Schema API for the database,
Flowplayer 3,
various JS bugs,
and switched things over to accommodate Drupal Standards.