coderamblings.com

This is one of my first drupal modules, built in November 2007, that used actions and workflows to automatically create a main block and a users block whenever a challenge was created.

I worked with an incredibly talented lady; Nina Shaka who now lives in Paris.

We worked with another intelligent lady Abby on
Indiehub, which was to enable sharing and watching independent videos, this is before Youtube.

Gilbert Paik who encouraged me to learn PHP, formed the back-drop for the creation of the Vancouver PHP Users Association.

Over the years, the association has held various international level conferences, helping to raise the stature of PHP and Vancouver, exposing locals to some of the finest minds in IT.

There I met some of the great PHP legends, including localized Vancouverites Shane Caraveo and Zak Greant.

After taking some courses at SFU, it was the height of the dotcom bust, I was desperate to gain work experience in my new chosen field, to prove that I was not a failure, and had not made the wrong leap.

I have fond memories of working with Rakie Kamara and Keesub Yun, they worked hard and had a good sense of humour.

As a project engineer at a Plastics Injection Moulding factory, I was fresh-faced out of University, and completely green. I joined a company that was very close to ISO 9000 certification, unfortunately the management quit en-masse, and I was hired to replace them. The quality documents they left behind gave me a good start in figuring much of the procedure. Also the team leaders on the shop floor were helpful to me.

When I worked in I'Anco Products Ltd as a Quality Control Engineer, one of my tasks was cataloguing the quality of products and determining cases of non-conformance.

It was a rough and tough environment, full of hurly-burly men with big hearts, lots of grime everyday, and of course that industrial Orange cleaner, that anybody working in metal shops are very familiar with.

When using feedapi and making nodes out of feedapi items, this can cause quite a load on the server.

If using sql search in particular, may cause the database to be bogged down, because each feed can generate a handful to 100's of feed item nodes.

There are quite good viable alternatives to sql core search, with the use of apache solr search module, xapian, sphinx amongst others.

Recently I tried out omni complete in vim, and I love it. It is included in vim 7. This adds a function lookup for php, html, python, javascript, css, xml, sql and c amongst others.

To enable under your home directory in the ".vimrc" file add one line
:autocmd FileType php set omnifunc=phpcomplete#CompletePHP

Syntax Highlighting

In "~/.vimrc"

:syntax enable
:colors pyte
:syntax on


If you are in need of custom tokens, here is an example of how to create custom token for a specific vocabulary.


/**
* Implementation of hook_token_values()
*/
function csm_support_token_values($type, $object = NULL, $options = array()) {
if ($type == 'node') {
$tokens['term-media-type'] = '';
$termArray = $object->taxonomy;
$tid_media_type = $termArray[15];
$term_obj = taxonomy_get_term($tid_media_type);
$tokens['term-media-type-tid'] = $term_obj->tid;
$tokens['term-media-type'] = strtolower($term_obj->name);
return $tokens;
}
}

If a customer has a Bricolage site, and wants to use some of the features of drupal, they can try out the Bricolage Integration module: http://drupal.org/project/bricolage

Otherwise, it is also possible to migrate from a Bricolage project entirely to drupal. To migrate data, I analyzed the database, to get unique ids (story__id) and the directory structure of the generated html files. Taxonomy and/or content type was determined from the directory structure, and main content was parsed from the html files.