Geeking Out

I'm having a strange problem on some of my Drupal sites. Hourly a cron job runs to rebuild caches and do regular maintenance. This is something every Drupal site needs.

Some time in the last 6 months I was finding that cron would get stuck and not complete in the hour. Another would get started and block. Eventually my webhost stopped spawning processes for my user which lead to weird errors on my web page (page not found errors).

I was logged in as me, not the uber administrator when I started messing about. I cleared the cache tables, including the cache_menu table. I was planning on rebuilding the cache table, then the menu system. I was logged in with the wrong account, and I couldn't remember the administrator account. Since I had thrown out the menu system, I couldn't navigate to the lost password page.

I had royally messed up my site.

I fixed it by going into the DB and copying the known password from one user to that of the administrator account. I logged in as administrator, ran cron.php manually, then hit up the page to rebuild the menu system.

So far so good. The next day I ran into this tip: How to reset the password of user 1. A little DB query action to set the administrator account password.

I am still having the weird cron blocking issue though. Every couple days I just log in to my web host and kill the running processes and then everything runs fine for a bit. Bandaid solution that is labour intensive.

I can't figure out how to debug cron issues in drupal though. I've read some tips that running update.php can reset things, but that didn't work for me. I've read this page that suggest modifying core files to add more logging about which module is running cron. I think that will be my next step.

I saw this infographic on BoingBoing recently, and it really struck home for me. This is even more painful when you have an impatient child that just wants to watch their DVD and doesn't understand why they have to watch previews and can't skip things.

I've always wondered why movie studios think that it is a good idea to annoy and harass the customers that have paid for their product. To me that seems like a great way to drive away customers. Perhaps for my kids DVD's that we have bought, I should make a backup copy that allows me to skip the unnecessary previews and ads.

The worst previews are the ones that advertise movies coming "this spring". Once the DVD is a couple years old this just sounds silly.

via BoingBoing

A long time ago I discovered TweetLens on Boris Mann's site. I was looking for a web based Twitter client that allowed me to synchronize my reading between computers. Tweetlens offered this and was pretty slick.

Tweetlens has a long list of features that I love, but recently something happened on the site, and I started having problems logging in and getting content. It was unavailable for a while, and when I could login, it seemed a lot slower for some reason. The creator of TweetLens has also moved on to other projects and put the source code up on GitHub. I took a peak at the code, but it didn't think it was in a state where I could figure out how to install it on my own domain.

I started to look for something new.

I quickly discovered Brizzly on TechCrunch. I've been using Brizzly for Twitter reading for about a week now, and although I miss a couple features from Tweetlens, I don't think I will be going back.

First off, @Brizzly just looks a lot nicer and more polished. I may not be able to mark items as read, but the site tells me when there are more tweets to download, then after I retrieve them they are highlighted in yellow.

Brizzly allows me to quickly and easily switch between multiple accounts.

I can create groups of tweeps. Handy for getting common topics together. What I also discovered is that you can add people you don't follow to a group. There are some people I like checking in on once in a while, but they tweet too much to follow them. I have a group for people just like this.

When scrolling down through the tweet list, they have a never ending scroll feature that is just awesome. When you reach the end, the page requests the next set of tweets and displays them inline. I don't have to click a link to refresh the list.

Their DM's are more like IM's which is cool too. Url's are auto expanded for you, twit pics and youtube video's are displayed inline, you can save draft tweets, you can mute people, and more. Read their help page for a better list of features. Also, Brizzly uses OAuth for authentication, so you never have to give them your password.

Downside is that they are still in Beta, and you need an invitation code. Mine arrived a couple days after requesting it. They also seem receptive to suggestions and bug reports which is nice.

Overall my switch to Brizzly has been a good one.

I Love Victoria!

How many places can you recognize in the video?

A couple nights ago I did some maintenance here on muddylaces. I fixed a mistake I made a long, long time ago. When I first created this drupal site the first account I created was for gfox. I hadn't read the best practices guide, so I didn't understand that this was a bad thing.

Changing this in the database proved daunting and fraught with danger. While I was reading the Using Drupal book I discovered the views bulk operations module.

This module provided the ability to change the owner of a node. A light bulb went off and I quickly realized what needed to be done.

I set up a view to see all nodes (content) on my site. I then configured the view to allow bulk editing, and chose the "Change the author of a post (node_assign_owner_action)" operation. I tested this a bunch before enabling this view. The main issue I found was that I couldn't target content for a specific userid. Instead I targeted content for the currently logged in user.

I then created a new_gfox account, and then when I was logged in as my first account started using the view to assign the content to my new account. A few minutes later I was done.

It was pretty easy to do this once I had the missing piece of the Views Bulk Operations. After the assigning was all done I renamed my first account, then renamed my new account.

The only unfortunate side effect was that the notification or subscription module went berserk with all the changes and sent out a ton of email to people who were subscribed. Woops, should have disabled that for a few minutes.