So I finally gave something back. Granted, in proportion to how I've benefitted from open source software over the years, it's not much. But it's (marginally) better than nothing, right?

I released a Drupal module I call Commentify, which is one of several modules I wrote (or thought up/architected) to integrate Drupal with the proprietary CMS we use at work.

This happens to be the module with the widest potential appeal, since I can't imagine too many people are interested in modules that interface with proprietary registration systems, or with non-mainstream, non-public video vendors. (Randy's Location Ads module rocked, but there's no way that's ever going to be ported to Drupal 5.x or 6.x)

Basically, it lets you attach Drupal as a commenting solution to any sort of foreign content management system.

It was something of an inauspicious release, because I managed to make not one but TWO big, bonehead mistakes with CVS, which I blame on haste and my preference for and familiarity with Subversion.

Embarrassing, but they were fixed with some help from the CVS guru at Drupal.org.

Have I mentioned that I loves me some Drupal?

Oh yes. I probably have. Anyway, in the last 48 hours of last week I managed to take two sites from photoshop mockup to fully functioning. Well, almost, anyway. There are of course some minor issues with Internet Exploder to deal with, and some pages to be tweaked.

We created a common template architecture for niche sites that can rapidly be reskinned with CSS to create unique sites with minimal code changes. The rest, from the Heritage site course guide to the Mom2MomSC.com multimedia sharing page was implemented with a minimum of coding, and in very short order using community-contributed Drupal modules. We plugged in our proprietary Omniture analytics module, Vmix video integration and my own Videowrapper module to round out the sites.

I'm a fan of more abstracted frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django and the like for highly specialized vertical applications, but for a rapid time-to market general purpose application platform it's hard to beat Drupal, where most of the common hooks like authentication, access control, content organization, are already in place, and hundreds (thousands) of other high-quality modules are just a click away. And if you want to plug in your own alternate solutions (like we have for integration with a proprietary corporate registration system), you can do that too. So basically, you can concentrate on features that achieve your business goals, rather than the ancillary elements.

What would you rather do? Spend your time an energy reinventing the wheel, or building revenue and audience generating products?

IMHO, which is worth what you paid for it, I'd rather run something that got me 95% of the way on a project and let me spend most of my time on the remaining edge cases, optimization and security than spend 95% of my time just getting the framework built to support whatever business goals I have.

Or, "does the process matter more than the work?"

Maybe I've been in my isolated little work world for too long, where I've had to wear lots of hats, and for the most part, teach myself everything I've needed to know, and just get things done. But apparently that's not important these days. These days, you need to GTD. And agility in your process is not enough, you have to be Agile, and Scrum.

What's all this? Well it seems to me that the process of how work is done, especially software development work, is more important to some people than the work itself.

I've been dismissed from interviews because I couldn't describe the Scrum process, yet I've worked iteratively on software projects, delivered features on deadline, and added features over time. Hmm.

I've read job requirements that include "Must follow GTD process and be Agile". Hmm.

I've watched 'professional developers' fritter away time and money talking about their code sprints while not actually delivering any product (or even product components). Hmm.

I guess it all looks good on a resume, and I may be naive, but when did concentrating time and energy (and money!) on the process become more important than concentrating on building the product/service? When did buzzword compliance become the key criteria for evaluating employee potential?

Where do you draw the line between the effort you spend on organizing your time and the effort you spend actually moving work forward?

Flame me if you must.

The 50th birthday of the LEGO brick is in January 2008 and there is plenty to celebrate. Children all over the world have played with LEGO bricks for the past 50 years, and LEGO is still right at the top of many wish lists – just as it always has been. Industry and trade associations also recognize the LEGO success. Just before the turn of the millennium the LEGO brick was voted “Toy of the Century”, one of the highest awards in the toy industry, by both Fortune Magazine in the US and the British Association of Toy Retailers. [Link]

I attribute my lifelong love of design, architecture and engineering mainly to my love of Lego as a kid. Over the years I got far more enjoyment from building massive cities and intricate planes, trains and automobiles from the little bricks than I did from any video game or the like.

So happy birthday, brick.

Oh, and happy birthday to my brother Mark too. He's kinda important as well. :)

We spend lots of dough each year converting material from our dead-tree editions into web-friendlier versions for our web sites. We crank out a bunch of PDFs, and send them through the ether to somewhere where the labor is cheap and the workday long, like Vietnam, Indonesia or Canada or something. Then some poor soul slices 'n dices them into jpegs and links and such, and sends 'em on back, and posts them on our site.

So I thought to myself, "Self, you can do that without having to do something silly like use people and worse, pay for it.

It's a work in progress, but it goes something like...

• Export PDFs of ads from our DTI advertising system, and page PDFs from our Newsway prepress system.
• Multiplex the PDFs through xpdf, imagemagick and swftools to extract text, convert to bitmaps and convert to Flash files respectively, with some proprietary workflow software. Maybe we'll OCR them with Tesseract if we can get a box with enough CPU horsepower, rather than the virtual machine it's running on, for extra text-extraction points.
• Combine the files into an XML feed.
• Send the files to the front-end system. Probably Drupal, but possibly a Rails app, or McClatchy's own Workbench CMS.
• Display to the user with a combination of flash, jquery and CSS like so:

Shazaam! $35k saved.

Not to mention, jquery almost makes coding javascript fun. Almost.

While the Mac whore zealot was clearly awestruck by Apple's new MacBook Air, what with its svelte profile and light weight, not to mention complete lack of upgradability, less power and higher price than standard MacBooks... I was more interested in the latest iPhone firmware update that was also announced at yesterday's MacWorld Expo Stevenote.

First, those of us who aren't terribly interested in participating in the jailbreak arms race with Apple can now customize the home screen of the phone without installing new software and generally dicking around with things for very little benefit. So I can now banish the mostly useless Notepad and iTunes store to a second screen.

Furthermore, you can now save a web page as a widget directly on the home screen, which dovetails with Apple's philosophy of making iPhone development web-based rather than client based. I've got links to my Google calendar, Facebook, Newsgator and JiveTalk right up front.

iphone map

The other cool feature is Google's new mapping application, which while sucking less than it did previously, now catches up to Google's version for the BlackBerry and other handsets, with the inclusion of the Location button. By clicking on the little crosshair icon, the Gmap app will use cell tower triangulation to try and find your location. It's nowhere near as accurate as GPS, to be sure, but it's a handy feature, and seems pretty accurate

In the pic, we're only off by 50 yds or so. Not bad for those "where the f--- am I?" moments.

My loyal readers reader may want to tune this one out. I'm going to take a brief respite from my usual fare sophomoric humor and crude language to delve into the geekery necessitated by the recent shortage of space on my precious, yet abused, MacBook, caused saving far too many pr0n files important spreadsheets.

Anyway, the 80 GB drive I thought I'd never use up was filled to the brim, so I purchased a 250 GB, 5400 RPM Samsung HM250JI drive from NewEgg.

It took about 2 minutes to remove the old drive and slot in the new one. I'm not going to be redundant here, so you can just go download the PDF instructions from Apple instead.

Then the fun part. I attempted to use the Apple Disk Utility.app to partition and format the drive, and it failed. Over and over again. Sometimes the volumes would show up, sometimes they wouldn't.

I googled and googled some more.

I finally hit upon the correct keyword incantation that told me that you need to go to Samsung's support page for the HM250JI drive and download a firmware utility.

Download the M5S80_iso.zip file. Burn the ISO file to a CD. Boot from said CD. Let the firmware updater do its thing.

Shazaam. Now Disk Utility will play nice with the drive, and you'll have plenty of room for your midget-bondage-foot-fetish-golden-shower pr0n powerpoint presentations.

I spent a goodly portion of the New Years holiday weekend watching football (yes, football) and some way-cool outdoor ice hockey on ESPN HD and FOX HD. When we switched back to good ol' analog ABC to view another game, I thought my eyes weren't working right. The screen was all jagged with compression artifacts, the graphics were illegible. I could see blobs moving around the screen, but couldn't tell if they were linebackers or amoebas.

eeeew

HD was all that. Even on my enhanced def TV. For once, I could tell Morgan that he was right, I was wrong.

And then, I tuned in tonight to CNN's coverage of the Iowa caucuses on their CNN HD channel.

Even at 480i, every mole, every zit, every drop of spittle on the faces of Wolf Blitzer, Jack Cafferty, Bill Schneider and the rest of the motley middle-aged broadcast crew were rendered in breathtaking detail.

And these were the people slathered in professional makeup jobs, their most outstanding flaws painstakingly hidden from the public eye. The poor folks caucusing away in their midwestern homes, schools and granaries didn't have the same benefit. Howard Dean looked pretty rough too, beamed in live from the DNC dirigible droning in orbit around Des Moines.

That begs the question - do I really want to see the sparkling detail Anderson Cooper's lazy eye, or the voluminous folds of Cafferty's saggy eyelids? And further, what does this mean for broadcaster wannabes of the future?

I predict that when HD becomes the standard (in 2009) we'll have to replace our current fleshy talking heads with porcelain skinned, perfectly coiffed animatronic doppelgängers - otherwise we'll never be able to eat pizza while watching the 10 o'clock news without running the risk of gagging on our pepperoni when the camera pans across to the sports guy's herpes flare up.

Note: I guess I'll find out how bad us normal folk look when I get my own turn on the high-def screen in a few months.

I found this and of course, having the sense of humor of your average (or maybe below-average) teenager, I could not resist. I even considered rigging up a script to use nmap to find all of the jetdirect servers on our network and change them all at once.

I started with "OUT OF CHEESE" three days ago, but nobody noticed until today. Of course, you had to be over 6 feet tall to see the display, so that probably had something to do with it.

That's right, my shiny new iPhone is on its way from mainland China. In a mere weekend it'll be in my grubby little hands, and I'll be cursing it for it's BellSouth Cingular AT&T service.