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I’ve got a project that will require the use of Drupal (or something like it, but it’s looking like Drupal at the moment - I’ve got a mockup running for the project, and it’s solving about 90+% of their defined needs just using a stock Drupal installation with a handful of plugins), and one of the things that the users will have to do will be to upload files (images, .doc, .zip, whatever) into the system for reflection/commenting/review. They would also like to use these uploaded files outside of the system (for instance, on their own web pages, in an “ePortfolio”, whatever), and we’d like to provide a solution that wouldn’t force them to upload the files separately into two locations (their WebDAV volume for “regular” use, and into the Drupal system for review).

A quick Google search turned up a WebDAV project as part of the Google Summer of Code, but it’s intended to expose the Drupal database via WebDAV (for backup, or alternate interfaces…)

Any ideas on how a file uploaded into Drupal could be placed into a user’s institutional WebDAV space, rather than in Drupal’s /files/ directory?

ps. this was posted using Flock, and I think it took me longer to enter it via the WYSIWYG interface than it would have taken to just enter the HTML. Perhaps once I get used to the editor… Oh, and no place to enter categories? wtf?

Update: Apparently, editing an existing post using Flock’s editor makes the post disappear from my blog. Have to go in and manually re-publish the post after editing in Flock…

Technorati Tags: drupal, lazyweb, eportfolio, webdav

Julian and I were just IMing about how to set up a new Subversion repository - and we both commented about how this process should be documented. King set one up last week, and we said the same thing then.

So, I bit the bullet, and wrote up a first draft of the documentation for the process of creating a new Subversion repository for a Learning Commons project.

I left a page to list all documentation for the Learning Commons, in case the idea takes off and others start doing it…

I’ve used wikis to store “spontaneous documentation” before - but I’m hoping to keep the wiki as part of the formal documentation process. We’re about to head into another Learning Commons website rethink, so it might make sense.

Last night, it totally hit me just how fried I am. I’ve been fighting off burnout for awhile now, but I think I may have finally succumbed to it. I realized this when, at almost midnight, my family was upstairs fast asleep, and and I continued to work on my PowerBook to try to catch up on the backlog of bugs to fix - not feeling like I was making any progress anyway. I’m having to keep working this late so I don’t have to essentially abandon my family, which I refuse to do.

My work is backlogging because of some insanely tight deadlines, on 2 projects that are chronically understaffed. The One Project has been in actual development for over a year now, and while we’re close to being done, the Final Stretch is looming, with all that is entailed with that. The Other Project relies so completely on The One Project that I have had to walk a carefully balanced line between the two. Can’t finish The Other, without The One working well. Can’t work on The One without billing time to The Other, since we’ve used up our budget for The One long long ago… On top of that, I inherited The Other Project after budget cuts led to layoffs here in the spring, and there is no way I would have set the project up the way it is - but it’s waaaaay too late to change anything. The only thing left to do is grit teeth and push through it.

So now, The Other Project is coming due. Like, tomorrow due. And I’m still putting in revisions to content, and tweaking code in The One Project to support what is needed. And working with external contractors on some key supporting files that are basically out of my hands, but I can’t deliver without them working perfectly. And still receiving revisions to content and structure for The Other Project. And bugs/todos piling up for The One Project. Repeat ad nauseam.

Basically, to finish The One Project properly, the three of us programmers need to be able to direct 100% our our energy toward it for about a month. And, to finish The Other Project properly, I need to have the time and energy of about 5 people in order to finish massaging what can only be described as a freaking huge mass of content and resources.

My caffeine intake is waaaay up. My sleep is waaaay down. My cranky rating is off the chart. I feel (rightly or wrongly - doesn’t matter at this point) like I’m placed as a single point of failure for The Other Project, and have had to neglect The One Project more than I’d hoped and promised. It had gotten to the point where I seriously considered leaving, for the first time since I started here in 2001.

Anyway, there endeth the rant. Hopefully there is light at the end of the tunnel (there is an end of the tunnel, isn’t there?). In case anyone from either Projects stumbles across this - this is why I’ve been so pissy/grumpy/silent lately. Trying to keep my head down and pulling out all stops to get this stuff done, but there’s not a sane way to do that.

On the plus side, it’s Evan’s third birthday this weekend. I’ll be forced to take most of the weekend off for that, and we’re heading to West Edmonton Mall on Sunday and Monday (staying at the hotel in the mall). Should be at least a welcome break from the unceasing pressures…

Update: No, I’m not planning on quitting the Learning Commons - it’s just one of the things that go through a person’s head when faced with seamingly endless pressures. I’m staying here - we’ve got lots of ideas that will be fun to be a part of implementing, so I have no reason to go elsewhere.

We had a great hacking session today, with Josh piped in over iChat and VNC from California, and King and I hunkered around his collection of Cinema Displays. We managed to replace our krufty jGenerator-powered flash file wrapper class with one based on JSwiff, in under a day.

JSwiff takes care of the nastiness of dealing with the .swf file format, and provides an extremely helpful XML intermediary - you can convert any .swf file to this xml format, modify the xml, then render back as .swf. Very handy for what we need to do.

Basically, all we do is a fancy search-and-replace for some custom tags (for things like the image - encoded in Base64 - and the tombstone fields for display on screen) in this intermediate xml file, then pass it into JSwiff and ask it to transform that xml into a swf that we can use in our finished presentation. It’s fast, and so far very reliable. As an added bonus, it appears to handle accented characters and such, which totally borked in jGenerator. Mavericks will look better now, once I regenerate all transformed assets.

And JSwiff doesn’t look like it will be affected by the scary deadlocks that made jGenerator basically useless for us. Yay, JSwiff!

Even better, if this works out (it’s still being tested), then Pachyderm 2 is fully usable again, and on track for the October release!

I originally posted this entry on May 18, on the Apple Digital Campus Exchange (ADCE) “Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning” weblog. I’d post a link, but everyone (including myself) would have to login to the ADCE system to read it. So I’m reposting it here in the hopes that it might make some difference. I’m not holding my breath. I was almost convinced that a walled garden might have value, but on further consideration I have to agree wholeheartedly with Alan - and won’t be posting to the ADCE weblogs unless/until the walled garden is opened up to everyone.

One thing that the read-write model of the internet is pretty much diametrically opposed to is the concept of content silos, or walled gardens of content.

There has to be a pretty compelling reason to lock content behind logins and registration. Restricting publishing is another matter, but restricting access to content that is not confidential is just plain wrong.

People won’t create accounts just to read content. Walled Gardens will wither and die - quickly atrophying into irrelevance.

I can see having a requirement for a login to post in the discussion boards, or to comment on a weblog (although even that is questionable). But the concept of having to log in just to find the URL to a weblog is pretty shortsighted.

Hopefully that’s just an oversight that will be quickly righted (especially considering the fact that Google has already found the ADCE blogs).

Update: I’ve put a quick-and-dirty PlanetADCE site up, which aggregates all posts from all ADCE blogs into one easy-to-read page. Enjoy!

PlanetADCE remains the only way to read the ADCE weblog posts. At least until the walled garden stormtroopers decide to seal our backdoor entrance…

The only way this kind of walled garden would fly is if it were the first, the only, or the largest (by an order of magnitude or so). ADCE isn’t any of those, but it does offer some cool things. For me the biggest draw of ADCE is the fact that it’s getting Carl Berger blogging. If that was the only product of the project, it would be well worth it.

For the Pachyderm project, we wanted a way to automatically update, build and deploy a WebObjects application and its supporting framework. The initial reaction was to just use a shell script, with xcodebuild running on the server to build the appropriate projects.

That didn’t work for us, because our server is still running 10.3 (with the appropriate older XCode dev. kit), while we’ve moved on to 10.4 and XCode 2.1 for development- so our server can’t understand the .xcodeproj files and barfs appropriately. Doh.

So, King and I whipped up an Automator-based workflow that runs on one of our dev. boxes. It first runs a shell script to update the source code from subversion, then builds the framework and application. It then runs a shell script to record the subversion revision number in a file in the compiled application (so we can display the revision number for bug reports etc… and not pollute our source code with revision numbers). Then, it connects to the server over afp, moves the old build products out of the way, and copies the new ones into place. About an hour later, WOMonitor comes through and cycles the app.

Basically, there is one “master” workflow that runs several nested workflows. This “master” is saved as an application, and I’ve set iCal to launch it every morning at 1:00am.

Yes. Source code management and enterprise application deployment with Automator and iCal

It seems to work well, but we initially had some permissions problems. It will also make it trivial for use to update the app at will.

The Mavericks project is scheduled to wrap up in the next week (officially, but there will be some straggling updates over the next few weeks, I’d guess). We’ve been using the latest beta of Pachyderm to author the online version of the Glenbow Museum’s Mavericks exhibit. It’s a huuuuuge project. I just did a screen count, and while it’s lower than I estimated, it’s still a behemoth. 1254 screens are currently authored, with another 150+ coming online tonight (once Shawn finishes up).

That’s ~1400 screens, authored via the web interface, and compiled into a bunch of handy dandy flash websites for use as part of the Museum’s online exhibits. By the way, that’s the single largest test of Pachyderm 2.0, by several orders of magnitude. And, while authoring in a alpha/beta software package is a bit quirky at times, it actually worked surprisingly well. Boy, do I have some ideas for improvements though

That’s also a lot of picky little details that need to be cleaned up in the next few days. Stray images (over 1600 images were provided for the project), stray metadata, stray content, fun with MS Word “smart formatting” messing everything up (I’m going through a few of the published sections, and finding a LOT of those insipid MS Word formatting characters… Going to have to write some SQL to strip/convert them globally…). Template tweaks. Test. Review. Fix. Repeat

While it’s been an amazing test of Pachyderm, and a very cool project - I’ve learned a lot about Alberta history - I can’t wait until this thing is wrapped up. Keeping 1400 screens and their supporting bits in my head has been hurting for a while now…

Once it goes live, I’ll post links and stuff to share with the rest of the class.

I’ve been asked to participate in a new effort by Apple, called the “Apple Digital Campus Exchange” - it’s basically a community of folks much smarter and more interesting than myself (ranging from Cole Camplese to Alan Levine to Larry Johnson to Carl Berger) who just get to talk about stuff like The Future, iPods in the classroom, etc…

I thought this was going public next week, but I see it was actually scheduled for launch on May 12. Since it is now somewhat after May 12, I think I’m safe linking to it…

I’m a contributing blogger on the Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning in a Digital World weblog. It needs a longer title, or at least an acronym.

I am pretty darned excited by this ADCE effort - it could be a chance to get the stuff we’ve all been dabbling with over the last little while finally pushed out to the Rest of the Class™ (because the folks that still haven’t heard of or use blogs etc… just might sit up and pay attention when the Big Glowing Apple Icon starts talking about it. All we really need is for it to me shown in a Stevenote…)

I took the opportunity to write my First Post to the Tools blog, where I babble for a bit about the internet not being read-only, yadda yadda…

On the technology side, they’re basically mixing existing tools, including Wordpress and vBulletin (and some others, I’m sure) to provide a pretty compelling software suite for managing the community. (the admin side is secured behind an Apple Connect login, or I’d share the URL to that - it’s pretty cool, though…)

Oh, and someone in Apple Corporate decided that we all needed bios on the website. I absolutely hate writing a bio. Booooring. So I decided instead to have fun with mine. They want a bio? I’ll give ‘em a bio!

Update: The Campus Exchange community site is now live, with registration open to anyone. Come play!

For the Mavericks project, I get to transcode 9 DVD-ROMs worth of high resolution TIFF images into JPEG images for use during authoring by Pachyderm (I could use the TIFFs directly, but that would tax the system more than I’d like to during beta testing).

At first, I was wondering what to do about this. Back in the day, I’d use Debabelizer Pro, or a Photoshop action or something.

But, I just fired up Automator.app, and in less than 60 seconds had whipped up a Workflow that finds all TIFF images buried within a selected folder (or volume), copies them to a designated folder on my hard drive, then transcodes them to .jpg files. Exactly what I needed. In under a minute. It’s going to take a while to run (copying and transcoding roughly 40GB of images may take some time), but the process is now almost completely Automated. I couldn’t find the Finder action for automatically swapping DVDs unattended, or I’d just let this sucker run unattended all weekend…

In my books, this one task just paid for my Tiger upgrade.

Update: After it’s done processing the first DVD, I’ll see if I can tweak the Workflow to display status information. Right now, it’s slowly copying files from the DVD, and there’s no direct way to see how much is left to go (I can go into Terminal and ls -1 | wc -l to see how many files are in the target directory, and hit Activity Monitor’s “Disk Activity” tab, but a nice shiny thermometer progress bar would be nice…

On the way into the office this morning, I listened to a very interesting podcast produced by Matt Pasiewicz and released on the EDUCAUSE blog/podcasting network. The podcast was a recording of a presentation by Lisa Kosanovich from BYU, titled “Project Governance: Avoiding Administrivia” - I listened because I feel like I’m drowning in administrivia lately, and was pleasantly surprised by the presentation. She refers to several detailed slides in a powerpoint file, which is available on the resources page for the presentation.

It turns into an excellent overview of functional project management, and how to avoid the easy traps that pull projects into dysfunctional ordeals. She gets a bit off track when using the Air Traffic Control system on September 11, 2001 as a sample project, but the rest of the session is really good.

If you’re working on a project, please listen to the podcast. You don’t have to agree with everything in it, but it is certainly a good starting point.

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