July 2012

30 Jul

HP Cloud Runs Drupal In Our Own Cloud

Posted by matt in drupal, hpcloud, php, programming, stackato

HP Cloud has migrated its blog site into Drupal. This makes the fourth Drupal migration for HP Cloud. But it is the first one to be running entirely inside of our own cloud.

We're using HP Cloud Compute instances, our Relational Database in-cloud MySQL server, Object Storage for all static files, and CDN to seamlessly serve public files out of a content distribution network. What is more, we now have a Stackato-based architecture for rapidly deploying Drupal sites into the cloud.

Over on the HP Cloud blog, I've got an article explaining the architecture.

25 Jul

Pandoc: Convert Your Documents

Posted by matt in mac, markdown, os x

Pandoc is an Open Source tool (and a library) for converting documents from one format to another. Specifically, it can take a document written as Markdown, reStructured Text, Textile, HTML, DocBook, or LaTeX and convert it to any of a plethora of other formats, including:

Word DOCX
Open Document Text (ODT)
HTML, XHTML, or HTML 5
PDF
LaTeX
EPUB ebooks
Many others

The Pandoc project provides installers for Windows and Mac. Pandoc already has packages in most (if not all) of the popular Linux distributions.

In addition to its general conversion functionality, Pandoc augments the input formats with support for citations, mathematical notation, and many Markdown extensions.

Matt Butcher

Posted on 24. Jul, 2012 by matt

16 Jul

Buy a Book for Aaron Winborn

Posted by matt in drupal, php

Aaron Winborn is a prolific contributor to Drupal, not just code-wise but as a community member as well. He's been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative nervous disease that will shorten his lifespan considerably. He has posted about his condition and its impact on his family on his blog.

Along with the the other co-authors of Drupal 7 Module Development, I am donating my portion of the 3rd and 4th quarter royalties of this book to a special needs trust for the Winborn family.

Drupal 7 Module Development is a great book for those interested in getting started with Drupal development. If your looking for a good Drupal book, please consider buying this one. 100% of the royalties will go to the Winborns.

Even better, contribute directly to the trust. Our royalties work out to only a few dollars per book. A direct contribution will go a lot farther.

11 Jul

JSON's Biggest Problem

Posted by matt in programming

If there is one single problem I would identify with the now nearly ubiquitous JSON format, it's the absence of comments.

Why is this a big deal?

Comments can be used to document. Since JSON has gained currency as a configuration file format, this is a big deal. Take a look at the default Apache configuration file. Take a look at /etc/hosts. Comments play an important role as unstructured inline documentation.
Sometimes things need to temporarily go away. Sometimes during testing, it can be necessary to change large sections of a data file. Being able to toggle a couple of comment sections is the easiest way of doing this. But as JSON stands now, this sort of thing requires keeping multiple copies of a file around (and synchronized).

I'm hardly the first person to criticize JSON for this, and Douglas Crockford, the author of the JSON spec, has responded to this criticism. But his response is, I suggest, unsatisfactory. Here's why.

07 Jul

Fortissimo is now run by Masterminds

Posted by matt in fortissimo, masterminds, php, programming

For a few years I have fostered the development of Fortissimo. Fortissimo is a different kind of PHP framework. Instead of the MVC pattern, it combines the Front Controller pattern with the Chain-of-Command pattern. Like Software Factories, it is based on the idea that developers should focus on strongly interchangeable and re-usable components and provide a DSL that can be used to combine components.