Having just finished writing another plugin for WP I now have an even stronger understanding of it. There are definitely things I like about it (UI) and things I don't (API).  What it does right and "not-so-right" can be directly attributed to the project goals.

I've been working on two WordPress projects. All I can say is WOW. I'm amazed at how far it has come. It is rapidly moving from a basic blogging tool to a full on CMS. The documentation is excellent and the API seams clean and intuitive from a developers perspective.

I'm currently engaged on a project migrating a HUGE site from Coldfusion to Drupal. There are a lot of challenges along the way which I'll try and break down and document. My latest article outlines pulling data out of a legacy CMS and programatically inserting it into Drupal as a Node. Fun Stuff!

This evening I was working on a client's VPS server. It is a relatively powerful account with 512MB of dedicated ram. It is running 1 drupal site along with all the fixins for running 15 email accounts. After running top I noticed it was exim. The box was getting pounded with spam, so spamassassinwas chewing up valuable resources.

I've been rocking GNU Screen like crazy lately. I don't understand why I never truly saw the light before. Any developer or admin that uses a terminal needs screen.

I'm working on a drupal project where I need to sync content (HTML and JSON) with a remote website. I need to manipulate the data and have it accessable as either blocks, nodes, or both. Essentially what I needed was a scraper with a cron hook and call back functionality. To my suprise I couldn't find a Drupal Module that did exactly that.

Luckily the project is large enough to justify custom module development. Attached is a "beta" of my module. My hope is that others will have a need for it and can motivate me to improve it! I give you "cronget".

From the readme:

Over at one of my favorite websites, thedailywtf.com there is a wonderful posting about riddles during job interviews. Below is a snippet of my favorite:

During a screening interview, I was asked how I would design a bike
fit for someone visually impaired. I responded something to the effect
of, "What, like, for blind people?", and she answered yes.

I just wrote up a quick <a href="/node/36"> how-to</a> on using S3 and EC2 as a hot (or cold) LAMP box failover. I currenly have something similar running in production and am overall pretty happy with it

Tasks like this really make knowing (and learning) bash extremely helpful. I'm no ninja but there is a certain satisfaction being able to rock SED, AWK, XARGS and cook up some RegEx patterns.

I've been working on a proof of concept for setting up an EC2 instance to act as a hot backup for a website. If all goes well we will be working on a larger scale deployment. It is still in the heavy development stage but is successfully running a LAMP based web application.

I actually remembered to document the whole process and posted it to: http://prolucid.com/node/33

I'm currently working on a task where I needed to create a virtual machine. Typically my virualization software of choice is VMware (Server and Fusion depending on platform). In this particular case I was working on an 8 core Mac Pro and had a paid version of Parallels Desktop 3.0.