blog.andrewhuey.com

Happy Birthday Patrick

2012-05-17T21:22:00.001-04:00

Patrick, a photo by andyhuey on Flickr.

Today would have been my brother Pat's 39th birthday. Here's a nice photo of him, from long ago.

Drupal 7 on Windows

2012-05-10T20:19:00.002-04:00

I have a fairly reasonable "WIMP" stack (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) running on my work machine now, and I wanted to document how I got there, for future reference, or for anyone who might stumble across this blog post. My setup has evolved over time, so I'm not 100% sure if these instructions would work exactly right from scratch.

There are some ways to get a Drupal-compatible "WAMP" stack (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) running on Windows pretty quickly, but most of the stuff you really need to do in Drupal works OK in IIS. And I think that the approach I outline below gives you the most flexibility in terms of also using the components for stuff other than Drupal.

In these instructions, I'm creating a Drupal site named "drupal-7-test", but it doesn't really matter what you call it.

Get Web Platform Installer from http://www.microsoft.com/web/platform/.
Use Web Platform Installer to install "IIS 7 Recommended Configuration." You may also need to install URL Rewrite if you don't already have it.
Install MySQL via the MySQL Installer for Windows. (Do not use Web PI.)
Install PHP 5.3.x from http://www.microsoft.com/web/platform/phponwindows.aspx with Web PI. (This will pull in a few other necessary components.) (Do not install the PHP for WebMatrix -- click the link on the above page.)
In IIS Manager, go to "default web site" and click "PHP Manager". Make a note of the location of the config file and the error log. Click "configure error reporting" and select "Development machine". Click Apply.
Get phpMyAdmin from http://www.phpmyadmin.net and unzip it to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\phpmyadmin. Go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin and run through the setup.
In phpMyAdmin, create a user named "drupal_7_test". Click the checkbox to also create a database of the same name, and give that user all rights to it.
Get Drupal 7 from http://drupal.org/download and unzip it to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\drupal-7-test. (The standard Drupal 7 download includes a web.config that enables clean URLs for IIS, given the MS IIS Rewrite module.)
Give IIS_IUSRS modify rights to sites/default/files.
Go to http://localhost/drupal-7-test and run through the setup. Use the MySQL database & user created earlier.
Go to the status report in the Drupal admin and check that everything is working OK.

ASP.NET ListView notes

2012-05-09T20:38:00.000-04:00

I jump around between projects a lot, and I often don't get deep enough into any particular thing to really learn it inside and out. I got a chance to work on a fairly complicated ASP.NET page recently, though, and I picked up a few new things.

The approach I took with this page, since it had a number of independent parts, was to try to keep them isolated and only spin things up when needed. So, in one panel, where I had a ListView, I wanted to get it working without using a declarative data source. This turns out to require a little bit of extra work. I found this article helpful in getting the DataPager working correctly. And this post had the best advice on how to control the visibility of the DataPager.

I think I could probably write up a couple of more posts with hints on the AsyncFileUpload control, but I'll save those for another day.

Reading and Music

2012-04-22T15:00:00.001-04:00

I've been having a bit of a problem at home lately. They play music on Main St. now, for most of the day. They used to just do this around Christmas, but now they're doing it all the time. They've got one set of songs programmed into the thing. It's all basically soft rock, with a little jazz mixed in. Stevie Nicks, Seal, Sting, Sade, that kind of stuff. Lots of artists whose names begin with "S", for some reason.

A few weeks ago, on a Monday night, the timer went wonky on it and it kept playing all night. Even with all the windows closed, and earplugs in my ears, I could still hear the music, and really couldn't sleep at all that night. I (and at least one of my neighbors) called the police, but they didn't know how to turn it off, or have contact info for anyone who could. (Supposedly, that's been fixed if this happens again.)

While the music was bothersome before, this incident has reprogrammed my brain so that the mere hint of "Sweetest Taboo" (for example) starts to make me shiver and feel slightly nauseous.

This isn't much of a bother on weekdays, since I only have to put up with an hour or two of it, between whenever I get home from work, and 8pm, when the timer (hopefully) turns it off. I'm generally watching the previous night's Stewart and Colbert after work, so that drowns it out.

On weekends, though, I often like to sit around and read during the day, so this is a problem. I need to find some music I can listen to that drowns out the Main St muzak, but doesn't distract too much from what I'm reading. I've been reading Zero History by William Gibson over the last week or so. I'm almost done with it. Yesterday, I used Fugazi's Instrument soundtrack to down out the muzak. Today, I'm using turntable.fm, specifically the ambient/chillout and coding soundtrack rooms. I've discovered that I can get pretty good sound out of my iPhone by putting it in an old dock that I friend gave me a few years ago, and connecting that to my receiver via a mini-stereo to RCA cable, into the "tape" input. Previously, I'd just been connecting it by inserting the cable into the headphone jack, but the dock makes a big difference, for some reason.

I've really been digging Turntable.fm lately, by the way. This is one of those things that the internet is great for, but that usually goes wrong after a while. Right now, you can fire up turntable.fm, go into the right room, and there will be a few people with impeccable taste playing great songs for a crowd of maybe 50 or 100 people. No advertisements. No jokers coming in and playing Rick Astley. No spambots coming in and DJ'ing ads for boner pills. I'm not sure why it works, but I'm glad it does.

Also, about Zero History: good book! I've found that a number of things in it, sometimes just minor stuff, has sent me off to the internet to do a little research. Node Magazine and the Zero History blog have some good links. I've also found myself looking into Saharan guitar music and other odd stuff like that.

long walk

2012-04-21T13:32:00.000-04:00

I just want to blog this, since it's the longest walk I've done in quite some time.
Two hours, and almost 7.5 miles.

Reading

2012-04-15T18:33:00.000-04:00

I realized, a few weeks ago, that I hadn't been reading much of anything this year other than Drupal books. When the Harry Potter series was released in ebook format, I took the opportunity to get them all and download them to my Kindle. I started re-reading them a couple of weeks ago, and I've gotten through the first three. The first few are pretty quick reads, and fun. I don't think I've re-read any of them since I first read them, quite some time ago. Knowing how it all ends does bring a bit of a different feel to some things, especially in the first book.

I'm taking a break now, and I just started Zero History by William Gibson. He's one of my favorite authors, and has been since Neuromancer came out. I'm really enjoying it, so far. I've been reading it slowly and carefully. It's the kind of book that rewards careful reading, and attention, I think.

Walking

2012-04-15T18:23:00.000-04:00

It was a great weekend, weather-wise, so I did a couple of nice long walks yesterday and today. I've been using the Runkeeper iPhone app to track my walks. It's kind of cool to see them on a map. Yesterday, I stayed local. Today, I took the train into NYC, then a cab up to the Met. I wandered around the museum for awhile, then walked back down from there to Penn Station.

Harry Potter ebooks

2012-03-28T21:11:00.000-04:00

So Pottermore finally started selling the Harry Potter books in ebook format this week. (And they're selling the audiobooks too.) I signed up for an account there a couple of days ago, and I just went in and bought the bundle of all seven books.

Some things I like about this:

They offer the books in multiple formats, including DRM-free (but watermarked) ePub.
You can link your Pottermore account to your Amazon account, and push the books right out to your Kindle.
You can download the books multiple times.
The audiobooks are in DRM-free MP3 format.

And some things I don't:

Their web site forms are screwy. On most fields, you can't use copy & paste, for some insane reason.
Every time you log in, you need to enter a CAPTCHA. I can understand needing to enter one to create an account, but on every login? Overkill.
It's easy enough to transfer a book over to your Amazon account, but there's no (obvious) way to transfer all your books at once. You have to do them one at a time.
Similarly, when downloading the books in ePub format, you need to download them one at a time, and it takes a few seconds to "prepare" the download. I'm guessing that it's creating a watermarked ePub file on the fly there, but why can't they just have a background process that does that right after purchase, so the files are ready right away?
For the audiobooks, they show both the US (Jim Dale) and UK (Stephen Fry) versions, and even show a price if you select the UK version, but you can only buy the US version. (I was hopeful that I'd be able to buy the Stephen Fry versions.)

So, a few quibbles, but nothing that bothers me that much. I actually haven't read any prose fiction at all yet this year, so I think I'm going to sit down with my Kindle and start into the first book. I haven't re-read any of the Potter books since I first read them, with maybe one exception. I feel a little guilty that I'm going to re-read these relatively easy-to-read "YA" books, when I have plenty of unread "adult" novels lying around, but hey, they're great books!

45th birthday

2012-03-14T22:25:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was my 45th birthday. It was a pretty low-key birthday. I strayed from my diet and had a couple of slices of pizza for dinner, and I allowed myself a buttered roll in the morning, but I didn't go overboard with anything. I had the idea today to look back on what I might have been doing on and around my birthday, since I started this blog. So here's a pretty random list of stuff, assembled by looking back at my Blogger archives.

2003

I went to Comic-Con that year. (I was making reservations in March. I'm going again this year, after skipping it for a few years.)
I was reading Sinfest, which I haven't been following lately, but is apparently still around (and still funny).

2004

I was reading "His Dark Materials", and listening to Rum Diary.
I had just gotten the 90,000 mile service done on my 97 Civic. (I got my 2008 Accord inspected yesterday. It's got about 45k miles on it.)

2005

Windows XP was giving me grief.
I was listening to Warren Ellis' "Superburst Mixtape" podcast. (That's long gone. He has a new one named SPEKTRMODULE now, which I've been listening to recently, and is quite good.)

2006

I was watching Samurai Champloo on Cartoon Network. (I have it on Blu-Ray now, but I haven't gotten around to re-watching it.)

2007

I bought "The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases" at WonderCon. (I still haven't finished reading it. It is really funny though.)

2008

I got my first Kindle. I've since traded that in for a new one, but I still haven't read some of the books I loaded onto that first one (and later transferred to the second).

And that's about where I feel like I should end this. I'm feeling weirder than usual about my birthday this year, for various reasons. But I can't complain. I've been able to spend time with several really good friends over the last couple of weeks, and I think I'll likely enjoy this coming weekend too, so that's all I can really ask for.

another Drupal 7 book

2012-03-08T22:28:00.004-05:00

I just finished reading Drupal 7 Business Solutions, by Trevor James, a Drupal e-book that I got from Packt. I finished another Drupal e-book, titled simply Drupal 7, by David Mercer, about a month ago. The one I just finished goes over a lot of the same ground as the Mercer book, but I think it was still worth reading. The author uses a web site for a bread bakery as an example throughout the book, adding functionality to the site to demonstrate various features of Drupal. It's full of functional, quasi-real-world examples. I think it would be very helpful to anyone looking to get a good grounding in Drupal basics.

I mentioned some time ago that I was working on a new documentation site, in Drupal, for the REST API to my company's product Bullseye. That site is now in production, and you can see it at http://doc.bullseye.electricvine.com/. It's a simple enough site, but I think it turned out well. I'm using the "book" module to organize the content, the CKEditor module to allow me to easily enter nicely-formatted text, and the GeSHi Filter module to format source code examples.

I'm still not great at the theming stuff, so I just created a fairly simple sub-theme of Bartik for this site. The only really major thing I did with it was to change it to use a Google font (Droid Sans, which is what we're using on our new marketing site for the product). I think it looks pretty good.

(And yes, I wrote nearly all of this documentation myself. To a large extent, it's based on the documentation for our old SOAP API, but it's evolved enough that I think it's mostly mine now.)

San Diego 2012

2012-03-03T14:29:00.003-05:00

I haven't been to San Diego Comic-Con since 2008. I was thinking about it, and I may not have even left the NY/NJ area since then. I'm going this year though! I had to buy four single-day tickets, since they were sold out of the full four-day passes by the time I got to the head of the "line", so no preview night.

And I booked a hotel in Mission Valley, so no walking back and forth to the convention center. We'll see how the convention shuttle situation works out. I remember it being a bit of an issue in 2008. It's always inconvenient to stay far enough away that you can't go back to your hotel mid-day to drop stuff off.

But hey, it's Comic-Con! How could it *not* be fun?

Hulu Plus

2012-03-03T11:00:00.003-05:00

I blogged about Hulu Plus a few days ago, and the issues I had getting it run smoothly on my PS3. I e-mailed support about it, and they gave me a few things to double-check, so I did all that and the audio/video sync is still off by a bit, but it's mostly tolerable.
Meanwhile, after not using my Wii for about six months, I decided to turn it on last weekend, and it wouldn't work. I tried a few things, couldn't get it working, and gave up on it. I even offered to give away all my games and peripherals on Facebook. I was going to pack them all up today, and get the main Wii box ready for recycling, but I decided to give it one more try. Long story short, it's working again.
So I decided to try out Hulu Plus on the Wii. It only became available for the Wii recently. It works pretty well though. The video quality is a bit lower than on the PS3, of course, but it's watchable, the audio/video sync is good, and it's pretty consistent (no jaggies). So I may decide to keep the Wii largely for the sake of Hulu Plus.

Hulu Plus

2012-02-29T20:58:00.002-05:00

I signed up for a Hulu Plus account yesterday. The idea was that I'd use it on my PS3 to catch up on a few shows, and maybe watch a few of the Criterion Collection movies that they've got on there now. I've been pretty disappointed with it though. The biggest problem is that the audio isn't quite in sync with the video. It's not too far off, but it's off enough to be a bit of a distraction. And the video gets a bit jaggy sometimes. I've run some speed tests on my internet connection, and it really ought to be good enough to do streaming video. I may cancel the account before my one-week trial is up. Or I might keep it long enough to catch up on Misfits and the last season of Battlestar Galactica, then cancel it.

Linux

2012-02-11T10:59:00.001-05:00

I decided to spend a little time today installing Ubuntu 11.10 on my old Dell Inspiron laptop.

It's been a while since I messed around with Linux. Just for yuks, I went back and looked at some old notes and posts to see if I could piece together my history with Linux. I think the first Linux distro I ever used was this old one, which I think came on two 5 1/4" floppies. That probably would have been in 1993. I had wanted to get some Unix experience, since the company I was working for at the time was being purchased by a company that used some flavor of Unix on the back-end, so I wanted to be prepared for that. (In the end, I didn't stick around for too long, so it didn't matter much anyway.)

Past that, I remember using Red Hat 5, so that would have been 1997, and Corel Linux, probably in 2000. And I used various versions of Fedora at my previous job, for various purposes. And I can see that I was messing around with Ubuntu back in 2007.

The Ubuntu install finished up while I was typing this, and it looks like everything worked. In the past, any Linux install I did on a laptop would usually have at least one minor problem, either with video, audio, or networking. But so far, it looks like this one is fine. Now I need to sit down with this machine and see if I can get Apache, PHP, and MySQL all running, so I can mess around with Drupal in a Linux environment.

Mom & Pat

2012-02-05T19:58:00.001-05:00

Mom & Pat, a photo by andyhuey on Flickr.

I just finished uploading some more of Dad's old photos. The ones I uploaded today were scanned in by ScanCafe back in December 2010. Here's a nice photo of Mom & Pat, from Pat's graduation from TCNJ. I still have one more DVD from ScanCafe to copy to my computer & upload, then I think I'm finally done with this project that I started back in early 2010. (Of course, the next project is to digitize the old Buxton family home movies I found in the attic when I was cleaning it out.)

Mom passed away on Feb 1 2010, and Pat passed away on Feb 2 2004, so I spent some time thinking of them both this past week.

Computer Books

2012-01-28T11:42:00.000-05:00

After finishing the Drupal 7 book I bought a few weeks ago, I decided, for some reason, to get back to a book that I bought back in April 2010 -- Dino Esposito's "Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX." I started reading it not long after I bought it, but I put it down after reading the first few chapters and just never got back to it. It's somewhat out of date now, but it's still got some useful info in it.

I just finished the chapter on the Ajax Control Toolkit. Now, I've been using the ACT a lot at my current job, but it turns out there are several controls and extenders in there that could be pretty useful, and of which I was completely unaware. I've tended towards doing client-side stuff with jQuery, like pretty much every other web developer on the planet, but there are times where I think the ACT could have made things easier.

creating an API documentation site in Drupal

2012-01-25T07:32:00.001-05:00

Part of my job involves maintaining the REST API for a product called Bullseye. It's an evolving API, and we've always kept the documentation in a Word file, which we simply print to PDF and publish to our web site. But, it seems kind of silly not to have a real on-line documentation site, so I started working on one recently. I'm using the book module in Drupal, along with CKEditor and GeSHi. Right now, I'm simply going through the Word doc, and pasting stuff into Drupal nodes using the "paste from Word" function in CKEditor. I've been pleasantly surprised at how well that works. The HTML that results usually looks pretty clean. For code samples, I just decorate them with the GeSHi tags and that does a pretty good job. I want to mess with the font settings in GeSHi a bit, but other than that, I like it.

At some point, I'm going to want to see how I can go in and hyperlink related classes and methods, and stuff like that. I'm hoping I can find a way to do that automatically, rather than having to go in and manually create a bunch of hyperlinks.

Windows backup weirdness

2012-01-22T18:46:00.000-05:00

I hadn't done a backup of my main home desktop PC in a while, so I decided to get one done today. I've previously used the built-in Windows 7 Backup, and, more recently, Crash Plan. I've had problems with both, so I needed to find another backup program. I have a 1 TB drive, about 70% full, and two 500 GB drives that I can use for the backup. So, I need a program that can split the backup across two drives, which turns out to be more of a limiting factor than you'd think it would be. I'm currently running a backup with Macrium Reflect Free, which *should* be able to split the backup between two drives, though I'm not sure if it will or not.

The "weirdness" referenced in the title of this post is with regard to the speed of the backup. This is a desktop PC, and I've never really tweaked the power settings on it. I have the display set to blank after 10 minutes, but my assumption has always been that the PC will keep running at full speed, if it's doing something, like a backup. When I started the backup, it was running at about 300 Mb/sec. That seemed like a good speed, and I expected it to get done fairly quickly. I've noticed, though, that if I check on it after it's been running for awhile, it shows at 100 Mb/s. If I sit in front of it for a few minutes, it gets back up to about 300 Mb/s. But, if I step away for an hour, then come back, it's back down to 100 Mb/s. So, clearly, something is happening to slow it down after a certain period of keyboard/mouse inactivity. So, I've switched the power settings from "recommended" to "high performance", thinking that maybe it's going into a low-power mode or something, but I don't think that's helped. Which could mean that some other background process is kicking in after a few minutes of keyboard/mouse inactivity and slowing things down. All very frustrating. We'll see if I can manage to get a backup done before the NFC Championship game is over.

DrupalCamp NJ

2012-01-19T22:34:00.001-05:00

I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks, so I thought I'd throw a quick post up. I've been busy with some personal stuff, listing my parents' old house with a new real estate agent and lowering the price. I did some cleaning too, but there's still a lot I could do to make the place look nicer and hopefully more attractive to potential buyers. We'll see how much of that I manage to get done.

I'm still working on learning Drupal. I've worked my way through most of the Drupal 7 book that I started a couple of weeks ago. I want to finish that, and then maybe start into learning module development. And I just registered for DrupalCamp NJ, on Feb 4, at Princeton. That should be interesting.

1&1 Linux

2012-01-01T23:00:00.000-05:00

In anticipation of installing Drupal on my 1&1 account soon, I went into my control panel and poked around a bit. First, I found that my account was set to use PHP 4. It was pretty easy to switch it to PHP 5. A call to phpinfo() shows that I'm now at 5.2.17. That's not quite up to date, but it's probably close enough.
I also looked into the MySQL setup. Several years ago, I set up a MySQL database on my account. That database is still there, at MySQL 4, with a 100 MB limit. Just for the heck of it, I created a new database. The new one is MySQL 5, and has a 1 GB limit. So, that's nice. (There doesn't seem to be any way to upgrade the old MySQL 4 db to MySQL 5, but that's fine, since it's empty.)
I even went as far as uploading the Drupal 7 tar.gz file today, but the 1&1 web file browser can't unzip tar.gz files, so I'm going to need to get to a command prompt to do that, and it's a little late to get into that tonight.

Drupal 7

2012-01-01T21:34:00.000-05:00

This is one of the books I bought in ebook format from Packt last week. It's a beginner/intermediate level book on Drupal 7, covering installation, configuration, and administration. It covers all of the basics (as far as I can tell) along with some of the more interesting parts. I'm about halfway through it. I find that I'm skimming over parts of it, since some aspects of Drupal are pretty obvious, if you've ever used a CMS before.
The formatting of the epub file, which I'm reading on my iPad, leaves a bit to be desired. I'm pretty sure that some special characters were lost in translation somewhere. There are a lot of places where there should probably have been an em-dash, and there is no em-dash, for instance. And I just came across a table that got screwed up so the text that should have been in the second column is instead just superimposed over the text that should have been in the first column. (The PDF file for the book looks fine though.)
I think I've been spoiled by O'Reilly's ebooks. They generally have accurate and reasonable formatting for their PDF, epub, and mobi files.

messing around with the blog a bit

2012-01-01T21:17:00.000-05:00

I just spent a little time cleaning up the files on my 1&1 account, moving anything that I think might be referenced by the blog into a ./blogfiles folder, then changing my files.andrewhuey.com address to point there, instead of at the root. I think it worked out OK.
I now have nothing pointing at the root, which frees me up a bit to experiment with setting up different sites in different subdirectories, and not having to worry about them being accessible in unexpected ways. For instance, I'm probably going to be setting up a test Drupal site soon. I can put it in a ./drupal folder, and set drupal.andrewhuey.com to point there.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T10:27:00.000-05:00

I went to bed at 11pm last night, and got up at 6:30 today, so I can't say I had a wild & crazy New Year's Eve. That's OK though.
Early in the year, I often find a few things that I've been putting off for too long, and try to take care of them. This morning's project has been getting redirects in place on this web site, so that links to my old blog entries, from back when I was using Blogger's old FTP publishing, to andrewhuey.org, will do 301 redirects to the appropriate pages at blog.andrewhuey.com, where the pages are now dynamically generated by Blogger.
I switched from FTP to "custom domain" back in Feb 2010, so I've put off the redirect stuff for long enough that it probably doesn't matter anymore. But it seems like a good idea anyway.
I don't know that much about .htaccess files and ModRewrite, but I know just enough to be dangerous. I picked up some hints on what I need to do here and here.
The part of my .htaccess file that handles redirection now looks like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^files\.andrewhuey\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://blog.andrewhuey.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I use files.andrewhuey.com to reference various files on my web server. Everything else should just get redirected to blog.andrewhuey.com. So, pretty simple.

Drupal 7 clean URLs

2011-12-30T14:43:00.001-05:00

I have today off from work, so I've been sitting around at home, messing with Drupal.
I couldn't quite figure out how to get clean URLs to work, until I stumbled across this article. (See the "post-installation tips" section at the end.) Pretty simple really, and I should have been able to figure it out on my own, if I'd read as far as the RewriteBase section of the main clean URLs article on drupal.org.

I also went a bit nuts at www.packtpub.com today. They are running a special, 5 ebooks for $60, so I bought four Drupal books and one PHP book. I'm building up a bit of a library of ebooks that I've bought on sale, mostly from O'Reilly. I never seem to have time to read them though!

Drupal 7

2011-12-29T21:14:00.000-05:00

After staying out too late Tuesday night, then going to bed at 8:30pm last night, I finally had some free time after work tonight to play around with Drupal. I installed Drupal 7 on my MacBook, following these instructions. The only real trouble I had was in making sure that every host reference was set to 127.0.0.1 rather than localhost, or anything else.

Most of the obvious stuff seems to be working. I haven't figured out clean URLs yet though.