peterm's blog

I'm not sure that I want to be the poster guy for cone killing in AutoX. Oh, well.

After struggling for a few days thinking that my jQuery code was somehow wrong, I found that I hadn't selected the various "supported device orientation" icons in my proejcts' target screen. 

To navigate to the this window, select the project, find the 4 icons and select away. While you're there, setup an App Icon and Launch Images.

One of the balances to maintain in the IT division is that has been referenced as "big cog, little cog". The big cog represented by ITS global services and the associated servcies; the little cog represented by the DL's/LITS and the services they offer.

I reflected a bit this weekend on wearing dual hats as both a Director in our Senior Management Team as well as a DL serving (BAS, Chancellor's/EVC units Planning & Budget, VPAA, VPDUE, University Relations and Student Affairs). It's evaluation season, so as I think back on another year of service a couple of nuggets fell out.

Operational v. Strategic

Steve McQueen is a cat. I've written about him before.

On or about June 21, on a warm evening, Steve and James Dean pushed out a window screen and escaped into the night. Around 1am, we heard what I thought was racoons mating; loud screeching. Lynda woke us up to discover that the cats weren't in the house. Panic ensued.

We found James in the front entrance way; his fur fluffed up to near double. We started to hunt for Steve. 

Background

The UC Santa Cruz http://emergency.ucsc.edu web site is used as a primary information source for near real time information in the case of a campus or regional incident.

The emergency site is based on the Drupal platform and runs under Aegir on an Ubuntu operating system. The hardware running the site is nearly five years old. It has several other Drupal sites running on the same hardware. We manage this server using a combination of shell and Webmin.

Background

[see http://peterm.ucsc.edu/drupal/content/how-were-using-open-atrium]

We need a method to handle work intake using as much of the ITS project management methodology as possible. Basically, this involves getting the appropriate details and initial scoping information into a one page form. One of the benefits of following the methodology is that we can aggregate and start to look at priorities against capacity for our group.

I wanted to upgrade the aegir tools on the -dev and -prod sites. I ran into some problems running the upgrade steps; which are probably due to some mistake I had made in managing the changes made since the original install. During the upgrade process, I was getting a variety of database error messages. I'm assuming that part of the problem was that I had originally installed 0.2, then upgraded to 0.3 and somewhere along the line, upgraded drush. Another symptom I was seeing was that my crontab for aegir was gone, so I could not process tasks.

 I finally got bugged by not having enough automation in text processing for the TPP project. In TextMate, I edited the Text bundle duplicating the remove Trailing Spaces and creating a remove Trailing Commas. It's a simple perl expression, perl -pe 's/[\,, ]+$//g'.

Huge time savings. One click vs scanning through the file for commas. More to follow on TextMate modifications.

 I came back to work on the TPP project over the past few days. A couple of problems needed resolving. First, I'd used the CCK float type instead of using Decimal type to hold salary data. While it worked for hourly and monthly salaries, annual salaries were longer than the column could allow. So, I started my test by deleting the 37 float fields and recreating them as decimal 10,2.

 Attached to this post is the PDF of the presentation I used at the 1/28/2010 SMT-DL meeting.

 Yup, we've got a cat. Four months ago, Alison found a cat and Lynda brought it home. It was found in a parking lot over at UNEX. He's healthy and very rambunctious. Lynda named him. I was going for Demon or Badkitty, but Steve has hung on. 

Here's a few shots of our cat Steve McQueen. He's fast and does all his own stunts. In this shot, he's been ripping through his tunnel and I'm chasing him with a camera. Cute?

Ran into a problem with a migration. Found this thread useful: http://drupal.org/node/511690

Ended up getting a successful drush connection using, drush -u 1 cron, drush -u 1 updatedb, etc. The site is owned by raknight, so my usual credentials didn't work. 

Updated – 02-17-2010

The new beta of Managing News has some changes to channel tagging. In order to summarize the most relevant data across a number of feeds, a "tag" can be applied that allows for grouping of like items based on the tag. For any particular incident, we'd be able to develop a set of keywords for searching out sources (Google, local news, Twitter, etc.) and tags for organizing content in near real-time.

Project Idea

For the Title and Pay Plan application, I had been using the standard views filtering to display a paginated result set of several hundred rows formatted as a table. As you know, the standard Views UI form uses a text field to accept user input. The clients didn't want to have users type, but rather select from a drop down menu.

For the Title and Pay Plan applicaiton, we are using a technique to display information that embeds a view into a node. You might wonder huh? I know nodes. I know views. Why combine them? Here's a picture of how it is being used.

For the Title and Pay Plan project, I made extensive use of the node_import module. Here are a few of the challenges I had with getting data imported.

Background