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Project Management Chronicles: Be the Expo

by Barrett Olafson, Director of Production

Imagine this scenario at your favorite popular and busy eatery: A diner informs the server that their order has been undercooked and that their side is not what they ordered; the overachieving, overburdened and busy server returns to the kitchen with the dish and requests a re-fire of the dish to more than one of a number of cooks in the kitchen; all of which are told or hear different interpretations of the diner’s original wishes. Confusion ensues amongst the cooks as to who’s cooking the dish, what temperature it should be cooked to, and what side dish the diner actually wanted, etc. All ultimately leading to a frustrated kitchen staff, wasted time & product, and, likely, an unsatisfied diner. Read More…

NTP out of sync?

by Barrett Olafson, Director of Production

Is your unix-based system time out of sync? If it is out of sync by more that 1000 seconds, you will need to manually force it back into sync. Try: # ntpd -q to force a re-sync with the ntp time servers specified in your NTP configuration file. Two issues that may arise: Read More…

Trouble with Drupal, MySQL and non UTF-8 formats

by Barrett Olafson, Director of Production

I just figured out a fix for an annoyingly circuitous, tortuous, and baffling MySQL problem. I am not yet an expert of back-end system configuration, but I can tool around a bit (i.e. I know where the my.cnf, php.ini, etc. files live and when (mostly) to edit them). With that... Read More…

Drupal 6 Theme Test-driver

by Barrett Olafson, Director of Production

Reading through the Weekly Drupal feed, I found a linked site that is pretty rad. Being primarily a developer, I am always interested in exploring the way the designer's side of Drupal. Besides helping me understand Drupal more fully and write more easily extensible code, its fun/cool to make sites look fun/cool. Read More…

A Drupal version of chicken vs. egg: external API content fetching and cron failures

by Barrett Olafson, Director of Production

Recently we had an interesting issue with one of our multi-site Drupal hosting deployments; the cron was not running regularly. Sifting through the logs showed that the cron seemed to be running extraordinarily long. After cron has been running for over an hour, Drupal would kill the 'cron_semaphore' variable, clear the cache and attempt to re-run cron. Cron would hang-up again, and the process would repeat itself into futile perpetuity. Read More…

Drupal/AJAX: Exercise caution when using special foreign characters

by Barrett Olafson, Director of Production

I was recently working on a Brazilian Drupal 6.x site that uses CCK forms and needed some functionality to map a dropdown select list of states to another dropdown of cities in the chosen state, which I accomplished using a combination of the drupal_json function, as well as jQuery and AJAX, hooked into the drupal menu system. I learned how to use this functionality quite easily from Pro Drupal Development Chapter 17 - Using jQuery and have implemented it on a number of sites to date. Pro Drupal Development is definitely worth having as a desktop resource. Read More…

Using PHP/MySQL w/Drupal to update missing Google Geocode data

by Barrett Olafson, Director of Production

We recently needed to fill missing geocode values in a project's database. Using some PHP magic and taking advantage of hook_cron() this is how we filled the missing values: /** * Implementation of hook_cron() * When the cron runs, try to resolve any locations that have a lat or lon = 0 */ function overmap_cron() { Read More…

Autocomplete, clearing form values and Drupal form fields

by Barrett Olafson, Director of Production

Some browsers like to be helpful and help by remembering certain form fields. I was having a problem with Firefox auto-populating my some of my form fields (specifically field type 'password' and 'password_confirm') in a custom module I wrote. Read More…

Validating multiple drupal form fields and only outputting one erro

by Barrett Olafson, Director of Production

I've run into this problem twice. So it was time to figure out a solution... Check out my solution on the drupal support boards @ http://drupal.org/node/155695#comment-1263443 Read More…

Installing FTP on a CentOS 5 system

by Barrett Olafson, Director of Production

I recently had to install a FTP client on one of our live servers. This was a first time occurrence for me, so I thought it might be useful to document for anyone else looking to do the same. - Use yum to install the FTP package: $ yum install ftp Read More…

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