admin's blog

I guess this has been in the works a while now, but as of the end of this year I will no longer be taking on coding/website jobs for clients - at least not in a "drop it in my lap and expect it to be done right away" type capacity if at all.

Whilst the work is ok when it's around, it's too sporadic to be relied on and tends to mean I'm either rushed off my feet or it's dead for weeks/months on end.

Weirdly I've been doing a lot of video coding recently. I spent a lot of weekends a year or so ago looking into this stuff out of curiosity and now suddenly it's a large part my job for completely unrelated yet rather coincidental reasons.

Here's some stuff I've been tinkering with to do with scratchable video playback with a view to trying to find a replacement for my much-loved but "abandoned" realtime video/3d software (pilgrim 3d).

If like the rest of us, your drupal->twitter updates stopped working on the 31st August then you might want to check out the link below.

This basically applies if normally your drupal site posts status updates to twitter. On 1st Sept Twitter started using a different authentication method "Oauth" which is a bit more fiddly to set up.

I had to do a fair bit of digging till I found a working solution. Post #58 is the one to follow.

http://drupal.org/node/404470

Have you ever had to work on a spreadsheet where you've got a thousand or so rows and you need to select all the ones marked "shop payment" or something and assemble them into a separate spreadsheet for analysis? It's a right royal pain to do by hand.

I don't know if this a problem many people face but recently I've found I've been doing a lot of analysis of spreadsheets..sales figures, survey results, accounts, sorting paypal shop payments and that sort of stuff.

Here's an interesting problem I encountered the other day...say you're promoting a downloadable product which offers a free demo version.

Hopefully self-explanatory. It's an illustration of a principle I've encountered quite often. Should be avoided at all costs.

first I found this which looked ok:

http://www.marketingtechnician.com/blog/drupal-module-tracking-attachmen...

but then found this which seems to do the job even better:

http://drupal.org/project/download_count

Both modules seem to require the drupal file handling to be set to "private" (admin/settings/file-system). You can tell it's working with the private files because the url changes and ends up something like /system/files/myfile.dat rather than /files/myfile.dat

Looks to be another system a bit like openfiler but possibly with more clever trickery...unlike openfiler, I haven't tested it myself yet but looks to be very interesting.

http://www.gluster.com/community/documentation/index.php/Gluster_Storage...

I just finished a proposal meeting which reminded me of this... I know this is an oldie but it applies today as much as it did in '02...not just in webdev but in business generally. Niftied from here.

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If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers

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January 10, 2002

testing 123