planet

If you want to blackout your site in protest of SOPA/PIPA, here's what you gotta do:

(hat tip to http://www.zachstronaut.com for the blackout page).

Important: Keep the url mysite.drupalgardens.com/admin/content handy. 

Once you follow these instructions, your site will go dark (if it is January 18th 2012).  If you want to get it back, you will need to delete the block later.

1. Navigate to Structure -> Blocks
2. Click on "Add Block"
3. In the "Body" use the dropdown to change from "Safe HTML" to "Full HTML" (the buttons will go away)
4. Make the block show by setting a region.
5. Copy the following and paste it into the body:

<script type="text/javascript">
    var a = new Date;
    if (18 == a.getDate() && 0 == a.getMonth() && 2012 == a.getFullYear()) {
        window.onload = function () {
            var cover = document.createElement('div');
            cover.style.position = 'fixed';
            cover.style.zIndex = 9999999;
            cover.style.width = window.innerWidth + 'px';
            cover.style.height = window.innerHeight + 'px';
            cover.style.top = 0;
            cover.style.backgroundColor = '#000';
            cover.innerHTML = '<iframe

I presented at DrupalCon London on contributing to Drupal.  The talk is called “How to have an open relationship… with software.”  Sadly, there is no nudity, polygamy or even dirty jokes.

 Nope, it’s just about how it is strategic to contribute to Open Source software and techniques for sales, marketing, management and developers. I did the same talk at Drupal Camp Montreal in September (video and Slides - not matching video).

• Engineers have good stability and income
• Managers are scared to death we aren’t really working hard
• We had a boss screen in DOOM and it worked, etc.

This article describes how to use regexes and some bash tricks and bad voodoo to split a SQL file into pieces in order to get it into MySQL in a reasonable amount of time. Parsing SQL is notoriously painful and error prone, so if you see mistakes here (I'm sure there are), please comment!

I recently got called in to work on a project for a customer I had never worked with before.  It is a very well known media / retail company and the job was to build a new interface for a media player / video library they required.  Pretty standard stuff, some views a couple quicktabs, a bit of ajax coding and a lot of pixel-f**king.  Anyway, near the end of the week long project when it came time to stage it, I realized I had a pretty big problem.  This site had 2 million users and several tables of profile data and other information.  My SQL file was over 3GB and took 6-8 hours to import.  Eek!  

So knowing that I wasn't going to write my update functions 100% perfect the first time, and I would likely have to import several times until I was confident it was working okay, I needed to find a way to get the DB to import in a more reasonable amount of time.

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity (and pleasure) to mess around with File Conveyor. File Conveyor is the bachelor's thesis project by well know Drupal contributor Wim Leers. It can do a lot of different things, so it's a bit hard to summarize, but essentially:

• It monitors a directory (remote or local) for new or changed files.
• It sends those files through various processesors which may rename, resize, or otherwise act on the file.
• It then sends the finished files to various destinations which could be local, s3, ftp, and many others.

The primary motivation for the project was to be able to feed Content Delivery Networks (CDN) with files from your site and resize images, compress Javascript, etc on the way. You can see the docs about Drupal integration in the CDN project. The code is written in Python and makes use of several other open source libraries, in particular Django Storages (does not require Django) While File conveyor supports a lot of storage types (s3, ftp, etc) through Storages, there was no way to send files via SFTP. One of Acquia's clients urgently needed sftp / ssh support to send files up to Akamai.

Being the resident Python expert at Acquia (which isn't