SuperSatellite ||

Okay, here’s one for some of you who might have been in my shoes (you can’t hide, I know you read my blog, I’ve seen your dirty secrets).  By that, I mean you people who work in higher ed or who have gotten your masters.  I demand your input, and in return, I will owe you no favors.  I’ve been circling this topic for about a year now, and sometime soon, I really need to nail some plans down, because I’m basically throwing away free money at the moment.

As an employee of the college, I am afforded certain privaleges.  One of these is that I can take a certain number of credit hours for free each semester.  This varies with regards to certain monies, but it is at least one class’s worth, and sometimes a bit more (and who really wants to do more than that a semester when you work full time all ready? I’m not made of time, though it’d be cool if I was).  Granted, a class at a time is going to be a slow path to a Masters degree, but like I said, why waste the opportunity.

Currently, I have a BA in Communication, with an emphasis in theatre and a minor in multimedia.  Naturally, this does not reflect my profession to well, heh.  But you can’t study theatre and expect to eat regular meals, so one must leverage other talents.  The problem is, what do I study for my Masters in?

Option one, I stay on the theatre track, and get an MA in it.  This would put me on a track to a Ph.D. in theatre, which I’m not likely to continue towards, and give me a Masters in a field that I very likely won’t really leverage professionally.  But it would be the quickest route to the Masters, and it’s something I’m good at.

Option two, move towards something like Technical Teacher Education, which is a strange field related to qualifying yourself to teach tech topics in college.  But, it’s a fairly easy load, and something that I could potentially leverage in the future.  Assuming I want to do any teaching.  I think I can do enough damage to the world without stepping into that roll though (and I am).

Option three, move into my professional field, and find a focus in Computer Science and Information Systems.  I’m likely to get a reasonable amount of professional credit here (and maybe in option two as well), since I’m basically developing crap and working on web stuff day in and day out.  I could also probably strengthen my Java skills a bit.  The downside is that our CSIS department isn’t very strong.

Option four (and I swear the last one), Marketing.  Now that the web has been deemed responsibility of the Marketing office on our campus, it would make a certain amount of sense to extend my education in that direction.  I’m not totally sure what value that would add to me, but it seems like a reasonable option, since web development in many places is a marketing priority, rather than a tech one.

So, that’s the four sided coin I have to flip (or the D4 I have to roll, depending on which imagery makes you happier).  I’d like to get underway this Fall if at all possible, and I think I should investigate which option offers the most in the way of independent studying and online courses, since as I mentioned, I work full time.  But what have you done, or at least what would be your opinion in this situation.  What option would you go with?

After about a year, I am kicking Drupal to the curb.  I fully recognize it is a robust, capable CMS (Content Management System).  So are a lot of other systems.  But it’s just not fitting me well.  Sometimes I think CMS usage is as much about tastes as it is strict functionality (actually, I’m sure of it).  Sure, a sweater might be warm, but if it’s ugly (with a big clown on the front), you might wear something a little lighter for the sake of having something more appealing (and less clowny).  That’s where I am at.  I’m tired of clowns and sweaters.

I originally adopted Drupal to run Penpedia when I launched the site for a few reasons.  One, about that time I had started getting into Drupal just through the course of investigating different CMS’s.  I did like that user accounts could have their fields customized.  And I found a module that allowed for hand in hand single sign on authentication with the other half of the site, which ran MediaWiki.  That also made it appealing.  The longer I used it though, the more the rough edges started showing.

First, I didn’t want to start writing templates for a new system.  This is in part because I already know how to template other systems like WordPress, e107, dotCMS, and a couple others.  As a result, I start losing patience for learning others.  Not a huge deal, because theming Drupal isn’t terribly hard, it was just that I didn’t want to.  The theme I ultimately grabbed was only marginal, but I just never got motivated to write a custom one.  And frankly, I’m a little ashamed of that, because the design of the site is not indicative of my abilities.  But what did drive me nuts was the lack of any WYSIWYG editor built in.  And the module that enabled the feature was disgustingly complicated, and caused a lot of clashing with the code stripper.  The added steps of permissions and profiles for it to work right was just way beyond necessary.  Which leads me to the next thing.  The permission system didn’t please me.  It didn’t work how I’d expect, and seemed far to complicated for what it was doing.  That’s what I love about dotCMS, you can’t beat their permissioning system.  Doing complex, and sometimes even more routine, tasks in the back end of Drupal generally felt like a power struggle between me and the code, and I loathed the idea of having to go in and tweak anything.  And just to round it out, I’ve never liked the “node” concept.

But, just to remain clear, if it works for you, then great.  It just hasn’t meshed well with me, and has actually discouraged me from developing the site better.  That’s why I plan on changing things over there to Wordpress later this week.  The MediaWiki portion will remain unchanged, though there might be some tweaks to login stuff, as I am investigating what needs to happen to maintain single sign on with the two.  Plus, between here and there, I’ll only have one software package that I’ll need to worry about now, as opposed to two, which should encourage more development and activity on my part on the Penpedia site.  I think this will be a move all for the better, and it should benefit the site well.

The moral of the story?  There is a lot of value to standardizing on a CMS, and sticking with what you know.  Even if a system isn’t perfect, if you are familiar with it and know its capabilities, I think that beats out picking a robust system that just doesn’t click for you.

With the release of dotCMS 1.6 came one of the more anticipated new features in recent months, their new “social” calendar system. This calendar represented a noted improvement over the previous event portlet (though the event portlet still exists for some additional functions, like scheduling and managing conferences, etc). This new calendar makes use of a portlet to manage the system in the backend similar to the old event system, and builds out on the front end through a combination of Velocity, .vtl files, and some layout bits. It also creates event entries as content in a structure, so that it can be queried and pulled no different from any other content in the system (note that you might want to make sure that you don’t currently have structures called “Event,” “Building,” or “Facility” already, as it will want to make them if you are upgrading. New installs obviously don’t need to worry about that).

If you want to take a look at the calendar first hand, you can see the example that is up at the demo site, at http://demo.dotcms.org/calendar/. To access the back end, login to the admin console by going to http://demo.dotcms.org/c and plug in the user ID test@dotcms.org and the password test. In there, you’ll see the tab for “Calendar” that you can click on that will take you to a similar, but stripped down looking version of the calendar. I’ll be using the demo’s site front and back end when describing features, and in the video below.

Part of the major improvement with this system is that as opposed to the event portlet, it provides true calendar functionality, whereas the event system provided more of a list view, regardless of how you tackled it. This calendar is very AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) heavy, and thus can present an accessibility problem by default, but since all calendar events are simply structured content, you can very easily create a standard HTML based variant for users with special screen needs (and really, do you know a calendar that is truly 508 compliant out of the gates in the first place?). Storing events as structured content gives you an extra layer of control over the presentation of those events, control that is unmatched in other calendar systems. The interface itself is fairly smooth and intuitive, without a lot of tricky links, or confusing navigation (I’m look at you, Active Data Calendar). Though fairly simple in terms of usage, the fact that everything just works, and works like it should, carries a high value. And in keeping it simple, it is actually a very powerful little tool.

The calendar itself supports all the traditional types of functionality: Time, date, place, multi-day, all-day, list-week-month views, RSS feeds, detail view and searching. Additionally, you can add events from the front end (if enabled), tag events, filter by tag(s), filter by calendar(s), attach files and images, provide detail popups, and provide automatic integration into Google Maps. Using categories, you can effectively create completely self contained calendars of different events, and one event can exist within multiple calendars simultaneously. All in all, it’s a pretty nice feature set. It will also save you trying to integrate with a third party calendar for your business that would require and supply it’s own login, back end, and functionality challenges. With some CMS (Content Management System)’s, they might have a calendar, but it’s an additional install, plugin, or module that you have to manage. dotCMS includes the calendar out of the box (still free), and if you don’t want to use it, you just don’t display the page in the back end, so there’s no extra labor involved. Other enterprise CMS’s come with built in calendars, but you’ll pay dearly for those packages.

The primary challenge right now is that if you do not load the starter site, or are upgrading from 1.5.x, you don’t have all the front end files (not to be confused with the back end admin portlet for the calendar, which is totally there whether you upgraded or installed fresh and will be in need of no special attention) that you’ll need to display the calendar (this will be changing soon, however, as I understand they plan on bundling all that with the CMS so you’ll have it if you upgrade or don’t use the starter site). What I did to solve this problem was to go to the demo site, and lift all the files out of their /calendar directory. This had one disadvantage: all the files are hardcoded to the /calendar directory. So, what I have done is taken all these files, and modified them so that you can upload them into your system, and they will adapt to wherever you want to put it. Just download this zip file which contains everything needed to display the calendar to your visitors, extract it, and upload it either with the multi file uploader or over WebDav. The only other thing you need to do then is make a page in whatever folder that will be your calendar, let’s just call it index.dot, and place the following code into a piece of web page content that you use on the page:

This will load and fire off all the rest of the Velocity templates. There are two CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) files (grids-min.css and reset-min.css) that are needed because the calendar was designed with Yahoo Grids, and those styles make sure everything lines up properly. A third CSS file (cal-base.css) that is included is the base starter site CSS, and you could remove it as necessary to meet your styling needs, but I included it at the moment for the sake of appearance reproduction. All three CSS files are included in the zip file above already, and you’ll see them referenced in velocity/calendar.vtl. Using the files from the zip file, and the content above, you now have a calendar that you can move to a new directory should the need arise, or should you simply not want it in /calendar. If you move it, just make sure you change the /absolute/path/to in your piece of content to point at the new location of the load-calendar.vtl file. You could even make that portion dynamic if you wanted to, simply by removing the first line from load-calendar.vtl, and adding it to the content, making it:

The only reason I didn’t do that by default was so that way you never have to copy and paste that set() from here (since I can’t “include” a piece of content in the zip file), and to keep the information going into the content item that tells it to make the calendar as simple as possible. Odds are, once you place the calendar, you won’t be moving it around anyway. But this way you don’t have to change all the paths yourself, and you aren’t locked into using /calendar.

Below, I have included a brief overview of the new calendar, so that you can see some of the functionality and how it all comes together.

Download the customized dotCMS social calendar front end files (.zip, 131KB)

Today, I got an email from a relative on the subject of the volcano eruption that occurred in Chile recently. It was accompanied by several pictures, from the ground and satellite, of the plume. There was also a simple (and unsourced) statement in it:

The amount of ash that was spewed into the atmosphere by the Chaitén Volcano, (Chile) dwarfs the amount of pollution the United States automobile industry has created since the invention of the automobile.

And that is all well and good, assuming that it is true. I have two counterpoints I want to offer. The first is directed at this example, the second will be on the topic of global warming itself. If you accept that quote as a well researched fact, there’s still the point that the quote does not put anything into context. Just because the eruption had a larger effect, does not mean that auto pollution is fine and dandy. There’s a reason we use the word “pollution” in reference to it, instead of calling it “auto environmentally friendly side effects.” Going out in LA on the highway in the middle of rush hour and breathing deeply all morning isn’t going to come much more highly recommended that breathing volcanic ash without a mask.

I can grant an eruption has widespread effects on a biosphere, no doubt. Look at Venus for an extreme case of what uncontrolled volcanism can do to a world. But, Earth built its biosphere on this planet, where volcanic eruptions were common during the early millenia of its formation. They were used as building blocks for minerals, chemical reactions, and atmospheric reinforcement. Essentially, mother nature has built in checks and balances for such natural processes. Pollution we add in on top of it is a separate matter.  It’s also not even remotely similar in substance or process.

In response to the email, I offered only one sentence: “On subjects of Global Warming, I generally defer to this guy: http://youtube.com/watch?v=bDsIFspVzfI.” The video is right below if you want to watch it, I can wait.

I don’t have any clue who this guy is, but I wish I did. He makes a point similar to one that I’ve tried to make for a long time. I don’t care whether or not global warming is actually occurring. That is wholly unimportant to me. What is important to me is that even if it isn’t, that is no excuse to treat the planet like our own personal toilet. It’s no excuse to refuse to change and be better at what we do. To believe that our biosphere can resist massive clear cutting, unchecked strip mining, and depletion of resources everywhere they are found is a laughable, and tragic concept. It’s on par with saying the world is flat.  If you require proof, go live in a big city, stick your head out of the window, and look to the sky.  Tell me what your stars look like at night, or what color the sky is during the day.  Then tell me that we don’t need to do anything about our behavior.

That’s why I like that video above. He makes the point well about how risk analysis should dictate how we behave on such matters. We will argue until a new era dawns if no one steps in. So what if climate change never takes place? At least if we acted, we’d have great long term benefits: better cars, more efficient alternative fuel sources, better waste disposal. These things matter. Anti-climate change people without fail eventually use that position as a way of justifying a stubborn mindset that refuses to evolve and adapt to a newer, more civilized world (or at least a more civilized world that is fighting tooth and nail to emerge).  Action is always preferable to non-action, and the results, while potentially causing short term strains, always provide greater long term benefits.  Non-action and petty political and regulatory bickering on the matter is leaving us with $4.00/gallon gasoline and $250/month heating bills.

QED.

Finally back and settled in after returning from training in Miami. Now just very busy trying to catch up, and put some of the things that I learned to use. I did manage to grab some photos around the area on CocoWalk where I was, so feel free to browse the Flickr set. I also started playing around with geotagging the photos. I have no idea how useful that will be in the future, but what the heck? I wish that I’d had more time to get out and about, but I did hit two excellent sushi places, instantly reminding me that what I pass off as sushi here is nothing but a sick and twisted joke by comparison.

First, how come no one told me that some Chinese company was making new MGs? I saw one at the condo where I was put up at. It wasn’t anything fancy as far as sport convertibles go, but it was still pretty neat in its own way. Now I want to drive one and see what they feel like.

Nearby was CocoWalk, which is where the dotMarketing headquarters are and where I spent a lot of my time. It was Cinco de Mayo the night I arrived, so it was a pretty popular site, with the shops and restaurants (though I made the mistake of passing up Hooters.  I’m not sure what I was thinking to make that mistake). However, I did take a couple hours the night I got there and saw Iron Man. Let me just say, I was absolutely not disappointed. Go see it.

On the travel side, I think I will make the effort to never fly US Airways again. Worst planes and service I’ve ever dealt with. Tiny pretzels, mean spirited, inattentive stewardesses, terribly seats, and small planes. And to top it off, I appear to be getting increasingly worse anxiety while driving long distances by myself. My nerves light up high enough on the drive to KC and back that it very nearly makes me sick. I’m not sure what to do about this yet, but it is very unsettling. Obviously drugs would probably impair my ability to drive, and if I had someone drive me, it would cost a fortune. I think I’m going to try to start flying out of Tulsa, which is a tiny bit closer, or even Joplin, assuming I can find well timed hoppers.

As for dotCMS, I feel much better equipped than I have in the past after opening my skull and letting their lead developer pour knowledge into it for a full day. I anticipate having no problems setting up my development environment soon, and upgrades from here on out should be much, much easier. I also understand better how the parts come together, and what they do when the break. I also agreed to devote some time to helping with their community site doing some writing or theme crafting. That will be a fun side project I think.

I know some people have had questions about setting up dotCMS to run in an Eclipse development environment. If you were like me, you might have been having problems because you were reading the wrong setup documentation. Turns out there is a new one that was misfiled that is much better and up to date. Also, if you are running a dotCMS site on MSSQL, don’t run ant buildsql when you update. It breaks things, because it’s meant for the Oracle and Postgres camps. You’ll want to use ant buildmXsql.  Learn from my mistakes, heh.