Matt Henderson's Blog

Today we (my buddy Arto and I. Ok, Arto with me looking over his shoulder) made some major under-the-hood changes to this blog, namely, migrating from the Wordpress blogging system, to Drupal. In particular, Drupal version 6.

Why the change?

• Capability. Drupal is an amazingly capable platform. For example, I’d like to have a content type on this blog called “route”. For articles of that type, I want to include some common data elements, such as a GPS track file, that can be displayed on a Google map, and downloaded by others interested in following my route. In Drupal, I can do this by creating a new content type (node type in geek-speak).

  So in this respect, Drupal is quite a future-proof system (relative to the others), in terms of having the infrastructure to do things in the future, that you didn’t foresee today. (Not to mention some cool technologies coming the Drupal way…)

• Eating my own dog food. My company has been working for the past year or so developing (in collaboration with the US government) an advanced communications and collaboration platform, based on the Drupal platform. All of our work on that project gets released back into the Drupal community as open-source, and so I’ll be directly benefiting from our own work.

• Available support. As a consequence of the above, I’m surrounded by people every day that can resolve nearly any weblog issue I might have. :-)

There may be some initial bumps (I think anyone subscribed to my blog will see the first ten posts marked as unread when they refresh the feed), the migration appears to have gone very smoothly.

I’ve been a happy owner of a hacked “Jailbroken” iPhone for a long time. My iPhone has been running perfectly well for me on version 1.1.1 for, well, since I bought it several months ago.

I also work with young people who live (and sometimes cut themselves) on the very bleeding and dripping edge of technology. One such “yoot” (taking a line from My Cousin Vinnie) told me the other day:

“Matt, I can upgrade you to 1.1.3 in about 30 seconds. It’s smooth, and easy, and risk free.”

So I caved. A day and a half later, my iPhone was running 1.1.3, and in my case, this carried both benefits and drawbacks.

Benefit: I can now manually reorganize the icons on the screen. If I don’t like the SMS icon at the top, I now have the power to do something about it. I can drag it to the bottom.

Drawback: The telephone ringing sound no longer works, so I now miss all calls. (Same with the alarm sound; so I now get up late and miss appointments.) According to the Apple Support website, “This is an issue with Jailbroken iPhones running 1.1.3.”

And, of course, there’s no way to go back. So, I now spend my days re-organizing icons, staring at the screen and waiting for phone calls to come in.

As my buddy Niall said, “Who needs a phone to do something as old fashioned as RING for goodness sake. I mean, you can drag your icons round.” Lucky me.

A while back, there was quite some chatter about DabbleDB, “a better web database to share, manage and explore your information.” The web application is apparently based on some impressive technology, at least based on a cursory exploration of the demos.

So today a friend of mine created an application at DabbleDB, and shortly thereafter an email arrived in my inbox inviting me to participate. I clicked the link, logged in, and was greeted by the following screen. I was left speechless.

This is sort of a summary post related to a combination of recent technological advances, combined with older technology, that’s making my networked life a lot more convenient.

MacFUSE & MacFusion: Mounting Volumes over SSH

Our company is very distributed — we have offices in Germany, Spain and the US, with a number of employees living in yet other countries like France and Ireland.

Today’s article will likely go down in the annals of blogosphere history as one of the more profound pieces ever written, as I explain why I’m so happy with my new $5 camera case.

I am a tremendous fan of the Canon PowerShot (“IXUS” here in Europe) family of cameras. They are rugged, compact, and take pictures that to my eye rival digital SLRs (especially after a bit of unsharp masking).

Arto, Alex and I were having a discussion (ok, argument) over coffee yesterday morning about the suitability of email notification for events which are available via RSS. An interesting part of the conversation came when we reviewed the history of RSS, and how it become popular.

This US is clearly ahead in many fields, but telephone services doesn’t appear to be one of them. I think it’s long been agreed that mobile services in the US are far behind their European and Asian counterparts (and this was in line with my personal experience last time there.) But after witnessing my mother’s recent adventures, I’m starting to think this might apply to fixed-line service as well.

Since I was about knee-high to a grass-hopper (yeah, I’m from the south) our family had the same telephone number, with, I think, AT&T service.

NetNewsWire (690 Unread Articles) -> Mark All as Read -> Aaaaaahh :)

…and just like that, I feel better. (Somebody let me know if I missed anything real important in the past couple weeks.)

Global Warming: You know it’s a problem. A big problem. And the kind of problem that just sort of creeps up on you. But how you fix it? Equally big problem. Who knows?

My email is sort of the same thing. I’ve spent the last hour cleaning, and my “Actionable Inbox” is down to 30 mails. My “Holding” box has 60. And my “Waiting for…” box also has 60. My Spam box has 4830 messages, accumulated over the last 30 days. (Spam Sieve report 99.5% accuracy, which means some 24 messages in there are probably good.

Not too long ago we launched a site — Fincalena.com — representing a milestone in what for me was a really interesting project. For anyone interested, I published an article about it over at Summit, our company weblog.

The Building of Fincalena