PureGin.org

One of the things that Dries said during his keynote at DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010 really stuck with me, and I've been trying to follow through. What he said was something like "if you don't schedule time to work on Drupal, it won't happen". Sadly, I've been finding this is true, so I decided I'd schedule three hours on Tuesday morning for Drupal. The plan is to wake up early-ish as usual, respond to email from my students, and then devote my morning to Drupal. Of course, I have some other work-related Drupal things happening, but this time will be for personal projects, the Drupal issue queue, and so on.

I've been meaning to get emacs on my Mac set up to debug PHP for the past five years or so, and have on prior occasions been defeated by the complexity (and disappointingly raw state) of some of the bits and pieces involved. It's all much simpler now: this post is a quick update of Evan Owens' guidelines.

1. Install Tohru Fujinaka’s GEBEN library. First download and unpack the latest tarball. It appears that there is a new (as of March, 2010) release (0.26), after a period of some inactivity. To install, run make and then make install in the resulting directory. I then added the following to my .emacs file:

   
   (add-to-list 'load-path "/opt/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/geben") ; Geben directory
   (require 'geben)
   
   

   Depending on your requirements and setup, you may need to do something a bit different - the point here is to let emacs know where the geben files are, and to load them.

Just reblogging from teaching.puregin.org: I posted my slides and some other material from my OpenWeb Vancouver 2009 talk on “Open Books, Open Minds, Open Source”. This talk explored how the conception of “openness” in information and knowledge, in the context of teaching and learning mathematics, has changed over the past 2400 years of mathematics education.

In particular the timeline of Education and Technology technology which I made can be found here: http://www.puregin.org/exhibits/edtech/edtech.html

Following Jacob Applebaum's talk on Tor at the OpenWeb conference in Vancouver, I tried installing Tor on my MacBook Pro (MacOS X 10.5.7).

I greatly enjoyed Zak Greant's keynote talk at OpenWeb 2008 on The Age of Literate Machines in which he reminded us of the many attempts by rulers and government over the ages to curtail freedoms such as the ones defining "Free" software.

I spent some time over the past couple of weeks writing some PHP code to support static code analysis and collection of metrics. It's very much a work in progress, but if anyone is interested, it can be found on the Bryght public SVN repository, at https://svn.bryght.com/dev

I just checked in again at Ohloh, a site which gathers, analyses and presents information about various open source projects on the web. Dries blogged about this a few months ago in his post on CMS codebase comparisons.

Something that seems to be new at Ohloh since my last visit is a box that presents an estimate of the cost of a given project's codebase (using the basic COCOMO model of software costing).

It's been almost a year since I downloaded the trial version of the NetNewsWire RSS Newsreader and took it for a spin. Today I downloaded the latest copy and plunked down my $29.95 to activate it. Boris was right... it's indispensable, though I guess it's taken me up until now to get to that point.

I've been long overdue for some sysadmin house cleaning - cleaning up my backup drives, and organizing the hundreds of Gigs of data that I've managed to convince myself are important.

I've finally re-enabled comments - dealing with the comment spam was getting to be annoying. I've enabled captchas to see how well they work.

Post away ;)