Deeds

This Labor Day marks the end of my Summer Technology Break, a self-imposed exile from spending too much time at the computer when instead I could be enjoying family, the great outdoors, and the real world.  How did I do?  Well, the family spent some time in Michigan visiting family, friends, and the fish.  My 4 1/2 year-old son caught his first trout on his first fishing trip (thanks to the patience of Jason and Jean Stephens from Head Hunter Guides).  We also spent a week camping and hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota which included a family hike up Harney Peak.  For the most part, I would say my break from technology during my hours away from my "day job" was a success.

During the past week, you may have noticed that I'm posting less at CMS Report. I love the opportunity I've been given to blog about content management systems and pointing readers to the great articles I've read at other sites on the Internet.  Discussing information systems and information technology is not only part of my career, but it is also my hobby.  However, when the weather warms, the trees grow their leaves, and children playing outside can be heard...I yearn for a break from technology.  The other me beckons to spend time camping, hiking, going to baseball games, and simply being outdoors.

My wife is away on an operational ready exercise for the Air National Guard. For two weeks it's just Logan and Dad. So far we've visited the annual Big Boy Toy Show in Sioux Falls, SD. We also have moved my son to his "big bed". What a great time just to be men. Still, Logan is counting on the days when his Mom will be back.

Drupal 6.0 Beta 3 was released just before the Thanksgiving holiday. As in the past, I wanted to use CMSReport.com as a "live" test site for the beta/release candidates of Drupal as I did with Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5. However, as this site has matured, so has my reliance on too many contributed modules currently not supporting Drupal 6. So for now, I've decided to place Drupal 6 in a subdomain, drupal6.cmsreport.com.

I am excited with what I have already seen in Drupal 6. I consider version 6 to be Drupal on steroids. Drupal 6 has a lot of performance and power improvements that are already apparent even in the Beta. Put it this way, the day the Views module is ready for Drupal 6, is the day I go live with running CMS Report on Drupal 6.

Yesterday, I upgraded the PHP version on my server from 5.2.4 to 5.2.5. PHP 5.2.5 brings improved "stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, several of which are security related". I also reintroduced eAccelerator back onto the server. I stopped using eAccelerator last spring, not so much because I had any real issues with it, but because I spent the summer months hosting my sites on the cheap.

A couple months ago, I experienced a number of errors at my Drupal site that all pointed to a corrupted database. I believe the problem likely was the caused by a sloppy export/import I performed with the MySQL database while moving the site to a new server.

While my particular database problem was an easy fix, if you really don't know much about databases you may find that you really need some guidance on how to solve problems like these. This article is the process I went through to correct this particular MySQL database problem in Drupal 5 and some general database rules that show why this problem occurred in the first place.

Packt Publishing announced that Drupal has won their Overall 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.

After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for $5,000.

Joomla!, last year's award winner, placed second this year and was awarded $3,000. CMS Made Simple collected $2,000 with a placement in the number three spot. This year, Packt awarded open source CMS projects a total of $20,000 in prize money in five different categories.

Now that Summer 2007 is finally here, it is time to step back for a couple weeks and spend less time in front of the computer.  As I mentioned earlier,  I'm going to use some of this time to publish online a professional report I did on IT user support.  This report was submitted a couple years ago as a requirement for a Master of Science in Administrative Studies with an Information Systems track.  You'll get bits and pieces of it in the following weeks and once I'm done, I'll regroup them similar to the research paper I posted earlier this year.

Packt Publishing recently asked me to be a judge for their Open Source Content Management System Award. You can find a brief bio and mug shot of me on their judges page.

For my non-IT friends, content management systems are basically software applications you place on the Internet server that are quickly replacing the old "flat file" format. For example, I use a CMS to blog about CMS as well as this site. Yea, my website needs some work done to it...perhaps when cold weather returns to South Dakota. Despite what you might think from the bio, I'm still with the National Weather Service and currently don't have the time or resources to make my "side business" in information technology anything more than a hobby. If IT positions were ever "downsized" in the NWS, though I know exactly what I would be doing for work.