Bryght blogs

Raincity Studios acquires Bryght - watching the story break

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 07:14:51 -0800

In case you didn't hear about it yet, Raincity has acquired Bryght (my Raincity acquisition story) This is the first time I've participated in a formal press release. As a blogger, I find the language of press releases a bit un-natural and it sure is weird seeing how 'press releases' work e.g. how some more 'traditional' websites basically just re-publish the press release as news without adding any commentary. Hmmm sounds like a lot of bloggers. Or how people respect or don't respect embargoes. Thinking out loud: would be great to have a tool to graphically monitor the flow of news through the web starting with a blog post or press release.

Anyhow just some meta musings before I have my first coffee! I am stoked about joining Raincity Studios! Go Raincity go!

Thousands of lines of code, millions of dollars

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:45:00 -0800

Inspired by Ohloh, and a need to start scoping migration of a large cluster of Drupal sites from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5.x/6.x, I've started some work on a static analysis / code metrics tool specifically intended for PHP / Drupal.

Code is available from Bryght's public svn repository, with repo URL https://svn.bryght.com/dev/svn/scripts/metrics.

The metrics.php program is currently implemented as a command line script, which is pointed at a directory containing code to be analyzed:


% php metrics.php code_dir

Reports are generated on standard output.

History

This code started from the sloccount.php script written by Arto Bendiken. I've tried to extend the script by making it more comprehensive and precise, but also more flexible and general. The architecture is intended to be pluggable, allowing users to easily write analysis tools for new types of files.

Currently there are two supported file types: generic, and PHP.

The 'generic' code analysis supports 'C' style code, with in-line comments initiated by '//' and comment blocks set of by '/*' and '*/'. This gives rough metrics for javascript and CSS files.

The PHP analyzer uses PHP's tokenizer and a rudimentary parser to obtain additional information about PHP code.

Analysis is completely separated from reporting: the analysis phase builds an array of metrics per file, where each metric can itself be structured.

DDDD Francis Pilon and Boris Mann on SVN, CVS Source Code Control Best Practises Video

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:06:20 -0800

On Disguised Drupalist Debug Day, I recorded this video where Boris and Francis discuss how to manage source code with SVN and CVS and other source code control systems for Drupal and software development in general.

Disguised Drupalist Debug Day - Raincity has excellent guide on how you can help Drupal

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:15:12 -0700

Raincity Studios has put together an excellent intro on how to contribute to Drupal as part of their prep for Disguised Drupalist Debug Day aka DDDD. If you are in the hood today October 31, 2007, come on down to 1 Alexander Street Suite 400 and 420 and join us! We'll be here until 5p.m. ish

Deep Rock Drive launches - join today and experience the future of music!

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:33:10 -0700

Bryght has been helping out with Deep Rock Drive so we're thrilled at the launch of this cool music-related Drupal web app. Join today and check it out! More later!

From Come in, we’re open!–The DeepRockDrive Blog:

QUOTE

Everything at DeepRockDrive revolves around the community of artists and fans, so growing that community is our #1 priority. With our doors open, we can welcome new music lovers from around the world, who can create petitions for the artists they love, and vote on the petitions that other fans have created.

Together, we want to get petitions to 1,000 votes so that DeepRockDrive can invite the artists to play a live interactive show. While we work together toward that goal, we’ll be doing some free promotional shows to help us ramp up the capacity and the interactivity at DeepRockDrive live performances.

Whether you like rock, hip-hop, jazz, country, classical, opera, folk, children’s tunes, or any other genre of music or live performance… we can’t wait to see you there!

END QUOTE

China Access 08

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:40:37 -0700

China Access 08 is meeting at Workspace Gastown on Tuesday November 13 at 6PM. The meeting is going to cover "what's new?" "what's changing?" and "what are the best companies doing about it?". Focused on strategic business opportunities in China, the meeting is planned to be two hours long. Alan Carroll executive chairman, Pacific Rim Forum is going to host a presentation on "The Ten Most Critical Insights about China that will help you Succeed in Business". To finish up, Andrew Gilkes executive director, China Access 2008 is hosting another presentation on "The 10 'Better Question's To Design your Corporate Strategy in China 2008-2010". The night will continue after 8PM for those who are interested and want to continue the conversation.

Tweaking Drupal Search

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:51:46 -0700

I've recently been doing work extending and adapting Drupal's search module, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to show just how easy it is to tweak search module's indexing behaviour.

One of the issues I was asked to address is the default behaviour of search module with respect to hyphenated words. One might reasonably expect that searching for 'intuitive' or 'counter' would find a post containing the hyphenated word 'counter-intuitive'. However, search module will by default not return a match unless you type 'counter-intuitive', or 'counterintuitive'.

Reading through the code for search module, we find that embedded dots, underscores and hyphens are simply stripped out of words, to allow meaningful search behaviour for URLs and acronyms.

Fair enough - we'd like searches for 'F.B.I.' to match documents containing 'FBI', and vice-versa. But it is counter-intuitive that searching for the constituents of a hyphenated word won't necessarily find posts containing that word.

Fixing this seemed like it might involve a lot of work. I was happy to discover that the architecture of search module allowed me to enable the behaviour I wanted for hyphens, without breaking the nice default behaviour for such things as acronyms, with a half-dozen lines of code.

The key doing this is the search_preprocess() function, which invokes the hook_search_preprocess() hook in all modules that implement it. The hook takes a string (initially the text to be indexed) and returns a transformed version of the text. Fortunately, this hook is invoked before hyphens and such are stripped out. It is possible to imagine many applications of this kind of transformation, but it is easy to see that we can use it to append the individual words constituting a hyphenated compound to the text.

Say Hello to Smith Milner, new Bryght Intern

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:44:17 -0700

Smith started yesterday and will be with us until Christmas. We're putting him on the full "Web 2.0 program" (learning about blogs, wikis, RSS, flickr, upcoming, facebook, etc) and getting him to blog and add events at Bryght.com and Urban Vancouver and lots of other top secret :-) fun projects and tasks. I'm stoked to have a younger person in the office again because I love the perspective and sensibility of youth. Welcome Smith!

Mobile Monday Vancouver re-launches October 2007 in a more informal style

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:22:33 -0700

[cross posted from Roland Tanglao.com]

I'm helping a wee bit with the re-launch on October 1st in a more informal style like Steph and Bryan did for the original Mobile Monday Vancouver way back in January 2006. Register today, it's free; see you at Granville Island Brewing Company at Granville Island on October 1st at 6p.m!
From MOBILE MONDAY VANCOUVER, October 1, 2007 | Bryght:

QUOTE

Roland Tanglao is helping organize MoMoVan October 2007! (event on upcoming)

Every first Monday of the month 100 of the smartest local minds will share their ideas in places that we all love. The new WINBC Mobile Monday Vancouver (MoMoVan) starting Monday, October 1st is going back to its grass roots origins. FROM HELSINKI’S MOMO GLOBAL SUMMIT TO VANCOUVER’S LOCAL INNOVATORS Are you an interested, opinionated developer, entrepreneur, CEO, Ph.D or student ready to share with others your thoughts, ideas, and solutions around our local wireless industry and Web 2.0 community? Are you ready to have fun? How about free pizza, free beer (1st round), and free parking? We have listened to people like you and developed an event that YOU want:

What Would Seth Godin Do?

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:31:07 -0700

Inspired by Darren's boring site note—which I usually find interesting—about his trying out a new WordPress plugin to his blog, and a brief email conversation, I developed the What Would Seth Godin Do? module. It uses code from the WP plugin written by Richard K. Miller, adding a block to Drupal 5 sites for the first few visits people make to the website, with a friendly message to that visitor. The administrator chooses how many visits constitutes a few, and what the message might be, such as 'how to get started' or, currently, a link to the site's main RSS feed. The block disappears after the number of visits set by the administrator.

The way it works is that it adds content to the enabled block if the visits are under the specified number, tracked through a special cookie, and if that number is reached, the block's content goes blank. (Drupal blocks do not display if there is no content to display.) The name of the module is inspired by a blog post Seth Godin wrote last year arguing that new users to a site should get a little more help than frequent visitors.

It took about a half day to write, test, create the project on Drupal.org, and re-learn the correct steps for checking it into CVS, and fix silly bugs like leaving in the dummy text during the initial checkin. Oops! I still have the module flagged as 'developmental', since I haven't done enough testing, and would like to make sure it works across browsers. It's a pretty simple module, so I would love to hear feedback about it before tagging it for a 1.0 release.

Unwire your block one Meraki at a time

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:29:53 -0700

There's no need to wait for the mythical City of Vancouver WiFi. Build your own WiFi mesh today with a Meraki box imported by Mike West with some help from NetEquality. Bryght in combination with the folks at Outcome3, Nitobi, Donat Group Enterprises, Communicopia, Elastic Entertainment and more daily are "unwiring" our very large extended Gastown block (Alexander to Abbott-ish initially with the goal being everywhere in Gastown eventually) of tech friendly companies. This means that anywhere you are in the mesh you will be able to use WiFi.

Raincity Studios social media maven Dave Olson explains what this means:

QUOTE

When considering the usage patterns (home users at night, business user by day) there is certainly abundant redundant bandwidth available and yet no reliable way to just get online without trying a bunch of SSIDs, risking cleartext password, hacking through a backdoor or other scheme.

DrupalCamp LA 2007 and California Final Thoughts

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:25:11 -0700

DrupalCamp LA was wonderful thanks to the incredible organization of Crystal (and others who I am too lazy to name here) and to the participants. Here are some thoughts on DrupalCamp LA and this part of California in general:

People - loved meeting up with our close partners at WorkHabit (great to finally meet Earnest and Dominic) as well as meeting some new folks like Markus, Jen, Mike, Steve, the army from Achieve Internet (thanks for the drink and food on Saturday!) and many others
Drupal Install Profiles - not only do you want one, but if you are a consulting shop, you need one, watch for Boris's follow-on presentation at DrupalCon Barcelona
Deployment - as ably presented by Jonathan of WorkHabit and Mike - What happens if you have hundreds of sites and need to upgrade them? What do you do if you have a popular social media Drupal site with content being added continuously and users being added continuously and you want to upgrade it? Bryght and WorkHabit have been dealing with these issues since 2004, it's now hitting other big time firms in the Drupal ecosystem like Lullabot, Warner Brothers and Achieve Internet. DAST, AutoPilot, and Hostmaster 2 are the keywords to watch.
Theming - I enjoyed the beginning of Milind's Drupal theming presentation. I wish I had time to synthesize all the Drupal theming presentations I have seen into one Godzilla kick a*s one :-)
Venue - AOL Beverly Hills was spectacular. Great conference rooms, kitchen and lots of places to sleep, recharge and hold informal meetings and the bandwidth rocked. I uploaded many many photos at consistently at 100KB/second!
Cars - shiny, big and expensive (many many Mercedes and BMWs) seems to be the order of the day. I drove brother in law Andy's 2001 BMW 330 for 20 minutes; I am not into cars but if I was it would be BMWs - I'll stick to cheap, cheerful and economical Japanese cars like Hondas. The taxi driver of Armenian heritage who took me to meet my Mom was thankful to his Filipino doctor and when he heard I was of Filipino heritage and meeting my Mom, he drove very fast and very safe in his big American taxi.
Mirror World (à la Gibson's Pattern Recognition) - LA seems to be a subtly different mirror of those days in Vancouver when it's sunny: every street is big and wide unlike Vancouver, the sun shines perpetually unlike Vancouver which bizarrely had the same weather as LA but a few degrees cooler, there are freeways everywhere unlike Vancouver (which could have gone down that path but through hard work and accidents of history did not)
Food: My brother in law took good care of me: delicious Japanese organic food at Fukada in Irvine, great coffee at Abbot's Habit, great Mexican food, yummy retro Italian American at Andre's with my Mom who happened to be in town and my aunt, can't wait to go back to Glendale and eat some seriously delicious and inexpensive Filipino food
Capitalism: 15 million people with lots of entertainment money and geeks meant great shopping: Samy's rocks for photo stuff (bought a FireWire 800 Compact Flash Reader to replace my broken USB one) and I went to two Apple Stores and Fry's

10 Minutes on Drupal Deployment - Jonathan Lambert DrupalCamp LA 2007

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:57:08 -0700

[UPDATE: download the original high quality MP4 file from our awesome friends at blip.tv]

A portion of Jonathan's portion of the Drupal Deployment Session at DrupalCamp LA September 9, 2007 at AOL Beverly Hills. The full session was recorded by Jonathan on his cool 3 chip camera and will be posted later.

DrupalCamp LA Drupal Install Profile Session - Now with updated slides!

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:31:51 -0700

Judging by the feedback I received in person and from thund3rbox, my Anatomy of a Drupal Install Profile session at DrupalCamp LA last Saturday was well received. I have updated it with the update Keynote, PDF and Powerpoint presentation that I actually used. Next up will be some Drupal install profile screencasts as requested by the people at the session in LA. Got suggestions, feedback, etc? Please edit the Anatomy of a Drupal Install Profile wiki page

DrupalCamp LA Session - Install Profiles or how to share your awesome Drupal Webapp

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 13:02:35 -0700

[Cross posted from my personal blog]

Have you ever built an awesome Drupal website or webapp and wanted to share it with others or clone to save you config time? Then Drupal Install Profiles are for you! I'll be leading a session called Anatomy of a Drupal Install Profile at DrupalCamp LA (organized by super organizer and super everything Crystal Williams) this Saturday September 8, 2007 in Los Angeles at AOL in Beverly Hills. The presentation is already available (I reserve the right to drastically modify it :-) !) on our public wiki page, AnatomyOfADrupalInstallProfile as a Keynote, PDF and PowerPoint attachment. Feel free to edit the wiki page with your thoughts, etc.