Back to top

past

Vegetarian Eggplant Lasagna - For after the Spinach Scare ends

We made this recipe tonight. It's delicious.

1 medium eggplant, fresh
1 head spinach or 1 package frozen
1 pkg. lasagna noodles
1 pint cottage cheese (low fat if you prefer)
1 jar Favorite meatless sauce
1 sm. pkg. Mozzarella cheese
Salt and pepper
Several plump tomatoes
Parsley, oregano, etc.

Category: 
People Involved: 
timeline: 
Location: 

What is google doing with their new features?

People often say "what is google thinking with {insert name of their new serivce}?"

Google and Open Source Project Hosting

At the OSCON this summer they announced Google Code Project Hosting a Sourceforge like open source project hosting environment. It's inline with some of their other projects like Summer of Code, a project where Google pays university students to spend their summers working on open source projects. A system where Drupal got 14 projects (a value of over US$70,000 - listen to a summary of the progress in Lullabot Podcast #23).

Now, when they announced the whole Project Hosting thing it seemed like a nice thing for them to do for up and coming projects - but it also seemed more than a little redundant. If you're a small or medium project then Sourceforge will work great. If you're a larger project then maybe you need to use the OSUOSL (consider donating to them). Either way, it seemed more than redundant for Google to offer this hosting.

Mozilla Talkback

Mozilla has long used a system called Talkback and it uses a closed source, proprietary system that requires a license and is owned by a company called SupportSoft. People complain about this system all the time in forums saying "mozilla should build their own talkback system" to which the response is "why don't you build it as your own open source project and let us use it" to which the repsonse is usually something like "oh, I don't code, you should write it for me on your own time". You can guess how I feel about this exchanges...

People Involved: 
timeline: 

Spanish White Wine Tasting - September 2006

So, we had another wine tasting night and it was delicious. This time, being the end of summer, we had white wines from a Spanish speaking country (or Portugal, cause hey, I love me a Portugese Vinho Verde). Anyway, after the fiasco last time where everyone's favorite was the last bottle ordered this time we let people try out wines in any order they wanted...with a slight exception...one of the people bringing wine forgot buy until the day of, and they purchased a warm bottle so we threw it in the fridge for a while. And we didn't get it out until the end. Guess which bottle won? The one that was in the fridge and that we drank last.

Damn the man.

Anyway, here's the data:















FlowerDogCell phoneScionFaceNo groom
Erin342533
Greg113315
Derrick321333
Todd442233
Dave213554
Ken531145
Lauren43.94.5132
Spencer243424
Nikki343344
Jana323445

32.892.553.13.23.8
Category: 
People Involved: 
timeline: 
Location: 

FON Social Router: Density by Country

More on FON Routers By Country

So, following on my last post about Fonero growth by country and after reading about required density for "wifi roaming coverage" I started thinking about density of routers in my data.

Getting the Country Area Density

I picked up the population and land area by country from "GeoHive". It's really an awesome set of basic data for anyone who likes this kind of thing. So, using that and a little bit of Spread Sheet magic I came up with the following table that shows countries ordered from most dense to least dense FON coverage.

























































CountryPoints 8/21Area (KM2)KM^2/PointRouters Needed
Singapore916937.66,576
The Netherlands2,09141,52619.9397,389
Andorra2246821.34,480
South Korea3,56698,48027.6943,812
Belgium74630,52840.9292,933
Spain10,177504,78249.64,845,826
Switzerland81441,29050.7396,396
Israel24720,77084.1199,560
Italy3,852301,23078.22,893,981
United Kingdom2,975244,82082.32,352,193
Luxemburg292,58689.224,848
Taiwan42635,98084.5345,702
France5,654547,03096.85,256,775
Germany5,589357,02163.93,428,953
Denmark31243,094138.1414,252
Austria48883,870171.9806,341
Portugal58292,391158.7888,219
Ireland31270,280225.3675,782
Sweden1,863449,964241.54,326,791
Puerto Rico219,104433.587,559
Estonia8845,226513.9434,986
Finland508338,145665.63,252,447
USA12,4799,631,418771.892,641,762
Hungary10593,030886.0894,844
Greece149131,940885.51,269,114
Japan290377,8351302.93,634,483
El Salvador1321,0401618.5202,392
Norway201324,2201613.03,118,795
Poland182312,6851718.03,007,848
Dominican Republic2748,7301804.8468,756
Costa Rica2551,1002044.0491,557
Chile282756,9502684.27,281,577
Argentina8242,766,8903357.926,616,658
New Zealand65268,6804133.52,584,637
Uruguay35176,2205034.91,695,201
Mexico2781,972,5507095.518,975,653
Guatemala11108,8909899.11,047,511
Venezuela104912,0508769.78,773,817
Ecuador27283,56010502.22,727,820
Colombia971,138,91011741.310,956,217
Canada7039,984,67014202.996,051,822
Peru601,285,22021420.312,363,756
India1363,287,59024173.531,626,480
Turkey34780,58022958.27,509,146
Brazil3718,511,96522943.381,884,732
Australia1917,686,85040245.373,947,306
Paraguay9406,75045194.43,912,926
China Mainland1979,596,96048715.592,322,558
Russia7317,075,200233906.8164,263,351

Notes about the Data

The data is from August 21 and the last column in the data shows "Routers Needed" meaning the number of routers needed to achieve the "full density" of 25 routers/square mile (roughly 9.6/square Kilometer).

Conclusions

I'm not sure that there really are many conclusions you can draw from this. Singapore, the Netherlands, Andorra, and South Korea all have fairly high numbers and if you look at metro areas in those countries you can see that indeed walking down a street you'd have pretty good luck finding a FON hotspot. It's not particularly useful to know that the USA needs 92 million more routers to have nationwide coverage - as every cell phone provider will tell you there is lots of land in the US that you just don't need to bother covering! It would certainly be more interesting to know the density of certain metropolitan areas - I assume that some similar internal analysis went into the decision to target 25,000 free routers at Manhattan.

Category: 
People Involved: 
timeline: 

Mountain Biking Community site

Your Mountain Bike YADS

Last night I got reintroduced to the YourMTB.com website which is a pretty cool mountain biking community site. It's built on the Drupal platform and is the first in a series of adventure sports enthusiast sites being created by Enthusiast Group. It's great to see, first of all the functionality that they were able to create, but also a well done, high-quality and attractive site implemented using everyday Drupal modules. Making it Yet Another Drupal Site - YADS.

Mountain Biking Social Networking/Citizen Journalism

It's a social networking and citizen journalism site wrapped up into one with the niche focus on the mountain biking community. So, you can see reviews of mountain biking products or user submitted mountain biking photos but it's also got a community aspect in multiple forms such as forums and community events.

Support the IMBA

They currently have a pretty cool deal going on where if you become a member and add your moutain biking photo to the site, they'll give $5 to the IMBA. That's a great deal and they haven't hit their limit yet!

Fun Features for Drupal

When I say "well done, high-quality" the stuff I'm talking about is some of the small details they've implemented. Specifically, creating new content redirects you to your user tracker page. At first this struck me as an odd place to redirect rather than the page itself. Then I realized the motivational effect this could have - it's like saying "here's the stuff you've created, why haven't you created more?". They are using the userpoints and buddylist modules to help promote networking and giving content to the site. The theme is littered with calls to action to post more photos, videos, stories. This worked well for me - after joining one of the little "calls to action" is what got me to upload my photo - and get the $5 donated to IMBA.

People Involved: 
timeline: 

Exciting weekend for Drupal

Fancy Javascript Stuff

This weekend JQuery1.0 was announced. There have been hopes and dreams to add this into Drupal core for a while, but it was waiting on GPL licensing, then on a 1.0, and now on proper agreement that it works well. So far, GPL licensing and the JQuery 1.0 have happened. Now we just need to make absolutely certain that it works well as a replacement and/or simply as an addition. You can follow the progress and problemsin this issue.

There seems to be a few bumps along the way, but hopefully we can solve them.

Fast Path File System Cache - fastpath_fscache

The file based cache was an interesting issue. In HEAD, Drupal contains at least two interesting improvements: partial bootstrap using drupal_bootstrap and the ability to have pluggable cache mechanisms. The first allows a highly custom page to do only a partial bootstrap if it knows that it only needs to interact with a subset of the Drupal "world" (i.e. apis, objects, etc.). The pluggable cache mechanism allows someone to say "well, I don't like having my cache in the default location of the database because my database server is my bottleneck, so I'm going to use an extra module to cache my files to the webserver's disk which is much faster". It allows people on a shared host to get the performance previously available only to fancy/complex server's with a reverse-proxy. This is very exciting to me because several of the sites I work on are situations with 90% anonymous visits and where the database is a bottleneck (e.g. this site). In those cases this file system cache module should be a great addition.

Note that as of this post, the fastpath_fscache module is listed as being "beta" quality and not recommended for production sites. I'd love to see some performance numbers, perhaps using the guidelines that webchick put together in the handbook on HOWTO Benchmark Drupal Code.

Category: 
People Involved: 
timeline: 

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - past