MichaelCole.com

I am a PHP web developer, looking for contract web development work using my skills in Drupal, PHP, and Javascript/JQuery.  If you like what you see, or have questions, contact me.

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"Goats are led, sheep are driven."

There, I said it.  Google's search didn't list it, but it needed to be said.  I was looking for an attribution, but it's going to have to be anonymous.

It's a proverb about motivation.  Sometimes we're dealing with goats, sometimes with sheep.  It's good to know the difference.  Turning goats into sheep is easy and often unconscious.  Turning sheep into goats is hard work, but possible.

Hi, I made this for myself, and thought someone else might be interested.

It's an automated install bash script for a Sympal ready lamp server, based on Ubuntu 9.10.

#!/bin/bash

# install a lamp server for Symfony/Sympal/Drupal

# get up to date
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
echo "Set mysql password to 'password'"

sudo aptitude -y install cvs subversion wget curl  # dev basics
sudo aptitude -y install apache2 mysql-server phpmyadmin php5 php5-gd php-pear # basic lamp server with phpmyadmin

Subversion is awesome, but it's command line interface is "non-intuitive".  Here are some short-cuts I created to remember the commands.  The most useful are:

Tomorrow, I'm giving a presentation at the Berkeley Drupal User Group (BDUG) on Version Control and Drupal. 

http://www.slideboom.com/presentations/113014/Drupal-Version-Control

I uploaded them to slideboom while I tweak my website to offer files.  The slide transitions don't show in the flash, but require clicks to move through.  This is what's happening if you're clicking "next" and get no go.  Anyways, I'll update my site later this week.  So many things to do, so little time. 

Go Drupal!

Mike

I recently upgraded from ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. 

At the same time, I upgraded from an older computer to a newer pc I built from parts off newegg.

The Best Thing About Ubuntu?

I didn't have to reinstall my operating system to change computers!  Just moved the drive over and linux was able to boot right into a new computer.  New motherobard, new cpu (more cores), more mem, more disks, new cd drive, new video card, new screen resolutions.

I bought a new mouse recently and it squeaked! It was cute for about an hour, then got really old.

It is a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 v2.0.  Generally, it feels a little cheap in the hand, but whatever.

Short version of fix: 

From the wheel button, trace the creavice between the buttons to the top of the mouse.  There is a tiny notch.  Press down hard. 

This worked for me at least temporarily.  Best luck!

- Mike

Hello, setting up source code control is less than exciting.  Here's a quick way to do it. 

Adapted from a great article: http://alephzarro.com/blog/2007/01/07/installation-of-subversion-on-ubun...

Yeah, I said it.  And Google, I hope your read this.

Why I wouldn't recommend Google Apps to small businesses/individuals?  Because there is no easy way to transfer email from Gmail to Google Apps.

The best I could find is

http://www.thamtech.com/blog/2008/03/29/gmail-to-google-apps-email-migra...

This might also work (but I didn't try it): 

http://blog.xiaoduo.info/wiki/GmailMigrationScript

I'm now stuck with 20000 messages xfered, and 6000 not.  Bummer.

Update:  I finally got it  to work with this script:

Virtualization is great!  I can run a full native linux stack on my windows PC.

I want to share this image with others using bittorrent.  To speed up downloads, I want to make the exported files as small as possible. I don't necessarily need to shrink the images files on my host computer, just the exported files.

So the plan is to export it as an ovf (open virtualization format) and vmdk format, and then create a bittorrent.

I accomplished this in three steps: