May was another good month both in terms of information shared and turn out. We quickly got started with introductions and sharing of cool/new modules which included:
- News that someone is looking to make Sean’s Meetup Events module and the Drupal Groups infrastructure work together
- Maillog / Mail Developer provides an easy possibility to log all Mails for debugging purposes. It’s possible to prevent the mails to being sent, so there is no need for an extra mail server to test the mail functionality of other modules or the drupal core.
- Module Instructions shows the content of README.txt and INSTALL.txt files for contrib modules, linked off the modules administration page.
Ben then proceded to introduce everyone to Drush, the command line tool that everyone should be using for Drupal work. He gave an overview presentation and followed up with a live interactive demonstration, stepping through key functions like module downloads and installation and using core commands like site-install.
There was significant agreement on having another Play Day soon, so Saturday June 9th will be the next one. Be sure to RSVP on the Meetup event, and perhaps share what you will be working on or hope to have a conversation about.
The next meetup will be a Show and Tell meeting held on Thursday June 14th, 6:00pm – 8:00pm. Check out the Meetup event page for more details.
I finally got my MacBook Pro for work a couple weeks ago and found out how much I actually depend on using ctrl-left and ctrl-right while in bash to move back and forth between words. Yes, I should probably set bash to be in vi mode, but emacs mode is how I learned so why change?
On my MBP that combination does not work. I have no idea what combination it defaults to, but since I constantly bounce between linux machines and this laptop it should be exactly what I’m used to. Thanks to Labrat’s blog post Making BASH’s ctrl-left arrow work on OSX I know now to go to Terminals’s preferences to change this. Once in Settings go to the Settings panel (yes, you read that right) and select the Keyboard tab. The first two entries for Key/Action mappings are for “control cursor left” and “control cursor right”. Double click on each and change the entries to \033b and \033f respectively (hold Esc down for \033).
Edit: I forgot about Spaces which likes “^ Arrow Keys” for switching between spaces. I had to remember to change this to avoid conflicts.
Dropbox is a great utility to have handy, especially since it’s multi-platform and I don’t have to think about it. However, I primarily use a Linux laptop which isn’t always Internet-connected or at least not immediately when I login. This confuses Dropbox significantly since the client cannot find the servers and doesn’t retry. But this is nothing a little shell magic can’t fix.
The client starts up based on ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop, which calls dropbox start -i. Based on this NetworkManagerWifiWorkaround tip, replace the Command in Startup Applications with the following and dropbox will wait until your system successfully can ping www.google.com:
bash -c 'while ! ping -q -w5 -c1 www.google.com; do sleep 5s; done; dropbox start -i'
That’s great, except after some time (I believe a restart of dropbox) the command will revert back. So once you have the right command in ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop open up a terminal and run this command:
sudo chattr +i ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop
So now dropbox will wait for you to be connected, and won’t overwrite your change. If you still don’t use Dropbox check out their tour and then signup with my referral link to get an additional 250MB of space.
We had our first meeting of the Mid-Hudson Drupal Users Group yesterday. With about 7 people for the first meetup, we had a good mix of people who have never used it and some who make Drupal sites for a living. I’m very happy we finally met and excited for future meetups.
We talked about quite a few things, mainly on what we should talk about in the future. Here is some brain dumping from the session.
- We should meet monthly. Weekday evenings seem to work out best, especially with nice summer days coming up.
- Something that worked well and we will continue for future meetings is going around the room so each person can share their favorite module. This month’s list included:
- We should have a main topic of discussion for someone to present on. If we cannot get a projector from the library either Sean or Ben could probably wrangle up a projector for the night. Possible future topics include:
- Payment Gateways
- CiviCRM
- Ubercart
- Scaling and Caching
- Mobile design
- Organic Groups
- Taxonomy
- Possible things the group might do:
- Mentoring
- Peer Review (ex, “I need to display this data which includes x,y,z so I used modules k,q and d. What do you think?”)
- Homework Assignments
- Helpful blogs and video podcasts to pay attention to:
I think we’re off to a good start. We have some networking going and have already shared useful information. The next meetup will feature Vonn presenting on Taxonomy, which will most likely take place Wednesday, June 8th at 6:00pm. Vonn is lining up the Charwat Meeting Room at Adriance Memorial Library again. Pay attention to twitter feeds and the Hudson Valley, NY group at g.d.o to make sure you catch all the details.
You’ve all heard me promote the O’Reilly Media Wish list sweepstakes. Go read the rules but the basics are you generate a wish list of O’Reilly titles including books, ebooks and videos that total up to $500, and then you get an entry for the random selection. Slimming down a wish list to $500 is very much the hard part, but here is my selection.
(Disclaimer: All prices are O’Reilly prices with no discounts)
That’s right, a total of $499.29. I’m sure it’s possible to get closer to the $500 limit, but my goal was books I want and I will read. I’m happy with this list. Go read the rules an get your own entry in and best of luck.
