Continuing on from the project I just mentioned...I wanted to remove the list of pages (which is analogous to a table of contents) from the book pages. On this particular site I'm using the book block on the right hand side, so having this information on the bottom of top level page makes for duplication of links and just seems plain funny. Below is the relevant diff -u on the subject:

So, I'm converting a site from a current static HTML version to a drupalized version and in the process we are taking comments that were created over email from a "contact me mailto:" email on the old site and putting them into forum discussions on the new site. Most of the discussions were "receive email, send response" variety, so it's just a node and a comment.

In order to give a feel of the time of the original email and the response, we used the node administration facility of setting the time when creating the nodes. That works great, but when you enter comments you don't have the same control over the time. So, we calculated the average response time in the emails and decided to set comments to be that far in the future after their node. The first curious thing to me was figuring out what dates in Drupal are based on - turns out it's the Unix Timestamp which is fairly common.

So, armed with the knowledge that the average comment lag was 183807 seconds, I ran the following sets of queries to get the desired offset:

mysql> create table gjk_junk as SELECT n.nid, created +183600 as new_time FROM node n inner join comments c on n.nid = c.nid;
Query OK, 19 rows affected (0.96 sec)
Records: 19 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> create table comment_bak as select * from comments;
Query OK, 19 rows affected (1.61 sec)
Records: 19 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> update comments c, gjk_junk g set timestamp = new_time where c.nid = g.nid;
Query OK, 19 rows affected (0.20 sec)
Rows matched: 19 Changed: 19 Warnings: 0

mysql> select c.cid, c.timestamp, b.cid, b.timestamp from comments c inner join comment_bak b on c.cid = b.cid;
+-----+------------+-----+------------+
| cid | timestamp | cid | timestamp |
+-----+------------+-----+------------+
| 2 | 1140696532 | 2 | 1141291314 |
| 3 | 1110370045 | 3 | 1141291509 |

Zack of CivicSpace made two posts recently. One about what the community needs to do (or if anything needs to be done) to ensure the long term development of Drupal Core. The other is about the costs of forking and how consultants should estimate a line item for "roll changes back into the core" into their bids. The goal on the second one is long term supportability for the client, and partially ensuring core gets the mods back even from all the "busy" consultants in the world.

In a post today, Chris Blizzard discusses the way "IT" workers are viewed and asks why open source contributors exist in the places where they exist (and don't where they don't).

I've thought about this a bit and my own personal take on this based upon some maps I've seen like the map of contributors/mentors in the Google Summer of Code project (which is a really neat project if you hadn't heard of it). Basically, if you look at the countries with large numbers of participants you'll notice that the countries are more likely to have participants based upon 1) the wealth of the country 2) the "tech focus" of the country 3) relative level of "safety net" policies in the country. There are a few outliers and that's understandable in any sampling.

I've had fun with stupid spam in the past, but this was basically just as good in a different way.

I just got a call from an aplus.net autodialer - they didn't actually talk to me, just played me a voice mail. I rarely go over on minutes, so I wasn't too worried about the time, but it's my cell phone for crying out loud.

Project re-Duplication? Well that's a crazy idea that people would not only duplicate a project, but re-duplicate on top of that. Except that it happens all the freaking time!

Project Cooperation vs. Competition

Zack from CivicSpaceLabs has done a comparison of Moodle and Sakai.

Either one of those projects could/should easily be integrated/absorbed into other Content Management Frameworks which is his kind of his point today.