Eat Sleep and Code

I posted an embedded copy of Peak Oil for Policymakers (by Post Carbon Institute) on our family blog.

It's a pretty good rundown of one of the major issues that we work on at Post Carbon.

Drupal depends heavily on contributed modules to implement a lot of it's functionality. One of the benefits of this is that the system is very modular and it's easy to configure the proper set of functionality. On the down side, this can lead to module creep, where you install lots of modules that you don't "really" need because they do something cool. Among other things this can make keeping up with new module releases a pain.

Lately, I've been addressing this problem with a combination of drush and update_status. Drush is available for both Drupal 5 and 6, and update_status is a contrib module in 5, and in core for 6.

It's pretty straightforward. Update_status gives you an admin page (and can also notify you via email) displaying which modules you have installed, and if any of them have updates available, especially security fixes. Drush, on the other hand, is a command line interface to the Drupal system that allows you to manage packages from the command line (similar to apt-get on a Debian Linux system), run database queries, and other maintenance tasks (cloning database and directory trees, etc).

I install drush into sites/all/modules on a Drupal site and enable it in the system, including the Package Management, wget, SQL support, and toolbox modules.

Then, from the site root, one can run UNIX shell commands such as


php sites/all/modules/drush/drush.php pm update og


This particular example updates the organic groups module, which the update status page has informed me is out of date. Once I've updated the module, I run /update.php to apply any necessary database schema changes.

And that's pretty much it. I'd like to see automatic application of schema changes and automated rollback (so that updates are an atomic operation), and so on, but so far it has seriously reduced the overhead of bringing sites up to date. These two modules are the first that I add to any new projects I'm working on.

Valve offered up a free weekend of Team Fortress 2 this weekend; I snuck in an hour of playing last night and came away with a couple of impressions - it's a lot of fun, if a bit repetitive. I like the class-based combat and how (much as with Enemy Territory) it forces you to play as a team and support each other if you want to have a chance at winning the map.

Between that and my experience playing the Half Life 2 demo, I think I'll (finally) pick up a copy of the Orange Box, sounds like a lot of fun. I'm also waiting on Call of Duty 4 to drop on the Mac (July 7), and I need to fit a couple more Wii games into the budget.

Incidentally, there may be something to that whole thing about violent videogames affecting real life actions. Playing water guns with my 3 year old out in the front yard is fun, however I've played enough ET to instinctively go for the head shot, which it turns out is not quite as safe in real life :/

I know it's childish, but everytime I look at this it makes me smile... +1 for Internet memes that passed me by.