Archives for August 2006
Lila Yomtoob wins an Emmy!
24 August 2006 | miscellaneous, movies | 2 Responses
Congratulations to Lila on her Emmy, which she won for her work on the HBO documentary Baghdad ER. Yay Lila! We’re so proud!!
Lila and I met when our movies (High Life & Made in Secret, respectively) premiered together at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival in 2005. We got to hang out again last year in New York, too. She’s an amazing lady & a heckuva filmmaker.
Make sure you also check out the wonderful pictures of Lila & her award over at her blog, night and day sweatshops. So cool!
Tags: Baghdad ER, Emmy, Lila Yomtoob, Night and Day SweatshopsViews gets GMAPS integration (built-in!)
24 August 2006 | tech, drupal | No Responses
For all the drupal kids out there: I just updated the views module on a test site that I have, and lo-and-behold, it now comes with Gmaps integration out of the box. Or maybe Gmaps now uses views. Whatever. No more hacking the list view to create those loverly map views — it’s now simple & legit to create your own complex & interesting maps of content. Yay!
The version that I downloaded was the latest CVS release. It works great — Have at it!
Tags: drupal, gmaps, viewsDan Savage announces new podcast
24 August 2006 | miscellaneous, news | No Responses
Everyone’s favourite misanthropic sex advice columnist, Dan Savage, announced plans this week to start a podcast. And, as if that’s not cool enough on its own, his podcast will feature answers to questions posed via answering machine. Check it out:
Have you ever wanted to ask me a question but lost your nerve or sobered up before you could send me an email? Well, now you’ll be able to drunk-dial me and record a question from the comfort of that bar, washroom, bedroom, or dungeon. The number: 206-201-2720. Call and ask, I’ll listen and advise.
I’m soooo excited! He promises to announce the official launch in an upcoming column. Until then, read his great advice over at The Onion AV Club (or wherever else you want — I just wanted to use this as an excuse to point out that The Onion is a drupal site, in case you didn’t know.)
Patching Drupal modules (on Dreamhost sites)
22 August 2006 | tech, drupal | No Responses
I’ve been a Drupal kid for almost a year now, and today I finally managed to patch my first module. This wasn’t the most dramatic drupal first for me (ah, who doesn’t remember that first theming tweak, or the first time they put an icepick through their laptop screen in, um, appreciation of the (truly) awesome documentation at drupal.org?), but it was pretty satisfying, especially since I can clearly remember a time about 6 months ago when I had no clue whatsoever how to do it. It’s actually deceptively simple. Here’s how you, too, can patch a drupal module. (This is good for sites hosted on Dreamhost. It’ll should work on any host that’ll give you shell access, but there’s no guarantees in this life, no sir.)
Before you start, make sure your FTP user has shell access for your drupal domain. WHAT? You do that in the Dreamhost control panel: Manage Users => Edit (under ‘Action’ column) => Enable SSH/telnet access. Now you’re ready to go.
1. Download the patch you’re want to use.
2. FTP to your site & place the patch file into the folder of the module you want patch.
3. Locate & open your command line tool. It’s okay if you don’t know what that is (though I recommend getting good and snuggly with it if you don’t — it’s the best tool ever). If you’re a mac user, you can use terminal, which you’ll find in Applications=>Utilities. If you’re a windows user, you can download PuTTY. If you’re a linux user, I’m jealous and ashamed.
4. SSH into your site. What? SSH stands for Secure Shell, and it’s basically a program that allows your computer to make a secure connection to a remote machine. It’s a command-line FTP client with wings. To SSH into your site, type this in your command line client:
ssh -l your_ftp_username www.your_site_or_ip_address.com.
You’ll be prompted for your password; use whatever password you use for regular FTP. Once you’re in, you should see a neat-o ansi graphic, like the old-school BBSes used to use, and then you should get a prompt that looks like this: [fairfax]$. You’re in!
5. So now you need to navigate to the right folder. First, to list all the folders below where we are right now, we use the ‘ls’ command. so, just type ‘ls’. that should give you a list of folders, one of which should be the domain you want to enter. To get into that domain, use the cd (change directories) command. It works just like in DOS: cd aaronpettigrew.com. That should get you into the root of your drupal directory, or close enough for you to figure it out from here. Now we basically cd & ls until we’re in the right folder for your module.
6. Once you’re in the right spot, things get really easy. All you have to do is type the following:
patch < the_patchfile_name.patch
It’s really that simple — the patch command will find the right file to patch, and if the patch was written correctly & the versions all match and all, you’ll get some kind of unreadable but friendly confirmation message that it all worked after.
7. Go play with your newly patched module! Oh, and beware, patching is kinda not that great. It pretty much makes it impossible to update your site until the feature you’ve patched in is either committed to the module or made into its own new add-on module. Still, it’s kinda fun!
8. If you’ve come this far & you still need instructions, check out these links:
Good luck, and happy patching!
Tag: drupalA great article for music lovers
22 August 2006 | miscellaneous, music | No Responses
It’s going to be old news to some, but I found a great article tonight as I was cruising around. Grant Robertson at The Digital Music Weblog put together a fantastic list of decent online music sites/labels/bands. Not only is this a radical intro to Magnatune & the Creative Commons set — it’s also an inspiring run-down of how online music distribution can (and should) work. Check it out!!
Tags: DRM, IndieMusic, musicRecovering erased photos & data on a mac (and pretty much anything else).
2 August 2006 | tech, mac | No Responses
The bad thing happened to me this week. I went on a great kayak-camping trip with my girlfriend, had lots of fun, took a bunch of really fun pictures (from our kayaks, nonetheless!), and then promptly trashed them. Not only did I trash them, but I emptied the trash, too. D’aaarghh!
Luckily, after much searching, I found this handy app: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk. It’s an open source photo (and data) recovery program. It’s a bit tricky to figure out how to use it, but it’s actually dead simple (plus it’s free!!) & it works on all these OSes:
- DOS (either real or in a Windows 9x DOS-box),
- Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003),
- Linux,
- FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
- SunOS and
- MacOS
The only hitch is that you need a card-reader (or in my case, an mp3 player with card-slot), because you have to mount the card as a drive. Once you mount the card (just plug it in — if it shows up in the finder, or on the desktop, it’s mounted), using the program’s a snap: on a mac, you can navigate to testdisk-6.4->darwin, and click on the appropriate application (photorec to recover photos, testdisk to recover data & repair partitions). This will launch terminal & start up the program. Choose the device you want to recover media from and press enter. Now sit and wait (it doesn’t take too too long). Once the program’s done, all your files will be sitting in your user folder, in a folder called recup.dir_1.
One thing to note: the program will only find files that haven’t been written over yet. So if you’ve ’secure emptied’ the trash, or if you took a bunch of photos after you trashed the ones you want to recover, I think you’re probably out of luck. Or, at least, you’ll probably have to look further afield.
Good luck, I hope you never need it!!
Tags: data recovery, mac, open source software, photo recovery