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Evan and I went for a nice winterish walk today. Picnic at a local playground, then down to the neighbourhood Starbuck's™ for something warm. He sure does like the hot chocolate with decadent whipped cream on top. I brought the camera along, Just In Case™ and let Evan take some shots while we were warming up.

He composed, focused and shot the photo of myself completely on his own (granted, in autofocus, but it was on center-single-point-autofocus, so he could have easily focused on the Petro Canada station in the background). Personally, I think it's one of the better photos of myself that I've seen. Not bad for a 4-year old. I should start saving up for a Hasselbad for The Boy™.

ps. tried posting this with the latest build of Flock, but it failed miserably. First, it provided the same old hideously unsorted list of ~350 categories, then it just plain failed to post. Doh. Back to PFF and/or Drupal's web interface… Flock's posting UI didn't let me center anything, adjust image properties, or anything else rather useful.

I headed downtown this morning (waaaaay earlier than I'd have liked) to attend the Lexi.net Online Identity Conference. I was curious to see what an internet-related conference would look like in Calgary, having been involved in others elsewhere. I wore my NV '05 t-shirt, of course

I got downtown too early – the buses out of Tuscany go straight downtown, but the last one passes my house at 6:45. So, I had some time to kill before and after registration. What to do… I know! A photo walk down Stephen Avenue Mall!

I wound up taking over 60 photos during the pre-sunrise twilight, and after the sun came up.

What was I talking about? Oh. Right. The conference. After frostbite set in my fingertips, I headed back to the Telus Conference Centre, grabbed some caffeine, and talked a bit with some other attendees, including Wired.com writer Regina Lynn, Aaron J. Seigo, Doug aka Dr. Tongue, and a bunch of others.

The first session was on privacy and anonymity, with some interesting links. Not sure it was aimed at the right audience, though.

After that, I went to Kirstin Darguzas' session on Blogging Your Identity. Kirstin is a professional "mommy blogger" and gave a really good talk on boundaries, online identities, and what it's like being a full time blogger (doesn't sound like as much fun as one would think).

Next up was Janine Warner, talking about Virtual Images – finding out what's available about you online, and how you can take control of it. Very interesting talk, with links to a few tools I hadn't heard of before. I gather her usual audience is more CXO-oriented, so some of the strategies may not be needed by us mere mortals (I'm not about to pay $120 for a company to research what's online about me – this blog likely does a good enough job of drowning out anything I don't know about )

During the lunch keynote session, Heather "Dooce.com" Armstrong told the back story of her blog, how she got fired (yeah, she deserved it ) and how things are much better as a result. I was very interested in her descriptions of personnas and boundaries. What's off limits? What's fair game? She's much more willing to blog about her family than I am, which is fine since they seem to be relatively comfortable with it (aside from Jon's squirming at some of the stories). The lighting backdrop during her talk was mesmerizing/distracting, with fluid Fire and Ice rolling up and down the wall behind her and onto the ceiling. Very cool. But distracting.

Jon Armstrong gave a great presentation after lunch about Branding. He gave a an overview of the general process of branding (initially for companies, later for individuals, mostly about Apple ) Jon's pretty funny, and his Keynote skills were refreshing. Mostly a simplified Lessigian style presentation, marred only by the lack of a wireless controller.

I had to leave before the last session, but having chatted with Regina, I'm sure it was another good one. Sorry I had to leave early, Gina!

I was rather impressed with the conference. I was quite surprised at the international (well, binational) attendees. About half of the people I talked with were in town from the States just for the conference.

It had quite a different feel from a Northern Voice (this was much more formal/traditional) but was much more intimate than an NMC or WWDC. Not a bad balance. Maybe Calgary's ready for Northern Voice YYC? The venue would be completely wrong for that, though. No wireless, for one thing. No wireless? Really? WTF. Wait – I left the laptop at home anyway I just brought my camera and a little reporter-style notepad. A much better way to attend a conference.

The database gods are laughing at me. This time, the mysql database for my blog fell over. Died. Unresponsive. It was an ex-database. Pining, as it were, for the fjords.

The blog dropped offline for an hour or so, and when it eventually came back, there were all kinds of scary database error messages being spewed into the log. I took a closer look, and the Drupal "cache" table was wedged and corrupted. Thankfully, it's just a cache, so I nuked the table and recreated it fresh. Easy peasy. I've got lots of backup snapshots, so it would have been almost as easy to restore any other table, but with the potential of lost content (posts and/or comments).

It looks like everything is back up again. Poking around the admin side of the blog, it looks like there was another nasty evil spam attack this morning, with 99% of it blocked by spam.module, but some actually got through. No idea if the database crash was related to the spam attack.

Update: Nope. It wasn't that simple. Now I'm getting the MySQL "Lost connection to MySQL server during query" error again. Crap. And phpMyAdmin is locking me out. Hopefully, that just means Dreamhost is working on the database from the other side. I'll try to stay away for awhile. Dangit.

Update 2: It's back up, and feeling much more responsive. I've tweaked the throttle settings, which disable some of the more database-intensive sidebar blocks when lots of users hit the site. The throttle has already been thrown, with 257 simultaneous users (256 of them anonymous). Hopefully that will help prevent the database from wedging again. 

I've been following the activities of educators and ed-tech folks in Second Life. It seems like it could be a really compelling virtual environment to help enhance online learning, by providing a shared quasi-physical face to face venue for distributed groups that wouldn't otherwise have one.

The amount of effort and care being put into these virtual places is stunning. The architecture is impressive, and the potential to create your own regions is compelling. 

There are some amazing, interesting, and cool things being done in SL. For instance, the Space Museum, where you can walk around, climb on, fly over/through what appears to be every space craft ever created. Sit on top of the Space Shuttle, and see just how much taller the Apollo rocket is. And how much smaller SpaceShipOne is. Walk up to the Hubble Telescope and see an animated cutaway showing the lightpath through the instrument. View a simulated solar system, complete with orbiting planets.

Second Life – Flying around rockets: Taken while flying around the Space Museum in Second Life.

Second Life – Solar System Simulation: Taken in the Space Museum in Second Life.

What I don't understand is the faithful reproduction of the physical environment, warts and all, in the creation of other educational spaces. I don't want to pick on any organization or group, but I have seen two separate education-oriented SL places, and each has involved exact reproductions of lecture halls. Dozens of seats, aligned in rows. A stage with a podium. A large screen.

Second Life – NMC Classroom

It's an obvious first step, but in a simulated virtual environment, why would you willingly apply the same constraints as a real lecture hall? Why would you create a place where there is a concept of a "bad seat". Where your "view" of a presentation can be obstructed. Where the number of available seats is limited. It the case of the screenshot above, the audience is limited to 32 members, unless people are willing to "stand".

I'm not sure how Second Life would be applied in a real education setting, as compared with something like Croquet , which is more of a collaborative workspace environment (think Hypercard, rather than The Sims™). 

I’ve been struggling with this for what feels like months. On a project, we’re using a third party hosting provider, who offers us space on a managed server, complete with everything we need to run Drupal in a shared hosting environment. We’re running a copy of Provisionator on the server to help us deploy lots of Drupal sites easily.

Here’s where it gets messy. We can create new databases just fine, but importing a .sql file takes for freaking ever. Imports that take 3 seconds on my Powerbook can take 90 – 300 seconds on this server. Running the import on a dual G5 XServe with the same version of MySQL finishes the job in about a second.

I’ve tried removing variables from the equation. Using full-on Provisionator. Using a separate custom .php script. Using phpMyAdmin. Each take so long that browsers often time out before completing the import (leaving partially imported databases). I’ve tried command line mysql directly on the server, with the same range of very slow times.

I can’t seem to find anything that might make imports of a smallish .sql (~400K) file take so long. Unfortunately, it’s making the process of deploying new sites essentially useless for now.

The curious thing is that once a database has (eventually) been populated, the select queries seem to run at normalish speed.

Any ideas on how to get the server back up to speed? It’s running MySQL 4.1.20 with MyISAM tables on a RedHat Linux box. I don’t have access to tools like top, ps, netstat, or even env, so exact details of the box’s config are shrouded in a veil of mystery and obscurity.

Last month, while on vacation at a lakeside cabin in BC, I received an email asking permission to use one of my photos on Flickr for a magazine cover. “uh, sure? it’s creative commons, so have at ‘er. Can I have a copy?”

I got my copy today. Is that ever cool. It’s for a petroleum industry magazine “The Negotiator” (sounds like a movie starring Clive Owen or the like), and lo and behold, right on the front cover, is my photograph:

It’s not the first time one of my photos has been used in something like that – I’ve got one in the GifTRAP game, and one in a book about colours and shapes, but it’s still pretty cool to see one of my photos on a magazine cover!

I've just moved the Provisionator module onto Drupal.org's CVS server. The current version of the module is far from complete, but it does function. Specifically, it does:

• create database for new site
• populate database with selected mysqldump template file
• copy template site directory (with settings.php, files, modules, themes)
• modify settings.php as needed
• create symlink to expose Drupal via Apache for the new site (as a subdirectory of a server, currently)
• add a new record to the database, describing the site
• list all records in the Provisionator database table

It's got a lot of room for improvement, and more than likely needs some tightening down for security and Doing It The Right Way, but it works. It also currently assumes MySQL, and a very specific shared hosting pattern where Drupal isn't in wwwroot itself, but is exposed by adding multiple symlinks within the wwwroot directory.

I'm having difficulty creating the actual Project on Drupal.org – I get an Access Denied error. So, until that's resolved, it's available via CVS at least. Once the Project is created, there will be an issue tracker, etc…

Oh, and don't laugh too hard at the code. I know most/all of it could be done cleaner/better/faster, but I'm cobbling it together as I learn. Also, I'll be working on better documentation so others can use the module or contribute code.

PS. Man, does CVS suck! I’ve been using SVN for source code management for over a year. Feels like being dropped back in MS-DOS or something now that I’m using CVS again. Ick. Hopefully, Drupal.org will migrate to SVN sometime soon?

Update: The permissions issue on my Drupal.org account has been cleared up, so Provisionator.module is now on the air!

I bought my Canon Digital Rebel XT back in June, with the timing of the purchase a direct result of Canon Canada’s $100 rebate offer. I bought the camera at that time specifically because of the additional rebate. Otherwise, I would have likely held off a month or two, probably waiting for the release of the XTi. (an aside on the timing – I actually jumped the gun, buying the camera 2 weeks too early to be eligible for $400 back from work, so actually lost $500 in rebates and benefits because of the timing – that’s almost half the price of the camera)

5 months later, and Canon still hasn’t made good on the rebate. I’ve been in touch with their support folks, who passed me off to a 1-800 number and website for a separate rebate fulfillment firm “The Rebate Company“. Classy. So, I try calling the number, which only works during normal business hours. Except that’s when I work, too. So, should I be calling them from the company phone? The Rebate Company website is useless. I go through the motions, and they claim to have no record of my claim. My word against theirs. Black’s Photography can’t help me because it’s a Canon program. Canon can’t help me because it’s a Rebate Company program. The Rebate Company is just not helping.

Canon, I love the camera. I’ve taken almost 5000 shots (about 1000 per month). I’ve been recommending Canon cameras to everyone who asks. I’m planning more purchases (lenses, flashes, etc…). But I’ll be staying far, far away from the rebate program. It’s false advertising when they don’t deliver.

I don’t have a long, deep post for this Remembrance Day, other than wanting to say how grateful I am to the men and women serving in the forces.

To my grandfather for fighting in WWI.

To my uncle for fighting in WWII.

To my cousins, for acting as peacekeepers, and paying the ultimate price.

This world would have been radically different without their contributions.

Thank you.

Photograph by James Tworow.

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