Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to lead a study that examined the challenges faced by media organizations in managing digital content – in particular digital archives. The digital-revolution has brought many advantages to media organizations and content producers, but managing file-based workflows, and in particular digital archives – has proved difficult for smaller organizations.

As part of the study, I visited nine media organizations across Nepal, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Thailand. The executive summary of the report I produced on behalf of Internews can be read after the break (follow the ‘Continue reading’ link).

The complete report can be viewed online here at the Internews Web site.

Special thanks to Susanne Weigand. Sue’s literary genius transformed my choppy writing  into the smooth and very readable document that’s here now. Continue reading →

Here’s a recipe for adding (and formatting) captions to images in Drupal using Entity View Modes, File Entity, and Media 2.0.

A word of warning first. All of the required modules are either unstable or dev releases and so for those not willing to deploy these modules to a production Drupal install – this article should at the least give you an idea of what’s possible and what’s coming.

Design Goals

The objective is to allow a user to upload or select an image using the Media module, as well as choose a layout for the image. The media embed tags (non-HTML) placed into the body of the node/post will then be filtered by the media module, resulting in markup containing an image, surrounded by div elements with appropriate class attributes for position and styling. jQuery, or client-side JavaScript will not be required, and there will be a dedicated caption field. No other specialised ’captioning’ or image modules will be required. Continue reading →

Bash is fun. I mean it’s a little weird, but it’s fun. I’ve been reading the Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible, which I highly recommend. I also wanted a script I could use to update the multiple WordPress installations I’m now hosting.

I found Liz Quilty’s handy WordPress mass update script 3.4.1, but wanted to refactor the script to use functions, curl, and tar (as well as remove support for WordPress MU)

And so here it is, one of a handful of Bash script exercises I’ve completed to-date. Enjoy, and thanks Liz for the head start… Continue reading →

I recently suffered a UDP flood attack on my little virtual private server (VPS), and thought I’d describe the steps I went through to discover and fix the problem.

Symptoms

Periodically, my server would stall and become unresponsive. It was effectively dead, although not down. These ‘stalling’ events would last from 5-20 minutes, and then the server would come back up. Looking at my
Munin charts told me that my public ethernet interface (eth0) was being flooded.

Here’s a particularly bad day:

And this was after I had rate limited eth0 to 2mbits/sec using tc (more on tc in a bit).

CPU usage and interrupts for eth0 also spiked.

So something was flooding eth0, and stalling the server. Continue reading →

It’s Androids turn this time. Here’s a list of must-have Android Apps for my Jelly Bean update:

1) It bugs the hell out of me that there isn’t a decent and simple note taking app in Android. ColorNote makes up for it fine. ColorNote

2) The default Google Calendar also drives me nuts. I want a month view, with at least a few character preview for each item and a list below the month. Jorte is perfect for month and week views with gestures that make sense – although the data entry is a little ugly. Jorte Update: I actually tried Business Calendar before Jorte and for some reason my first attempt didn’t stick. I’ve since tried it a few more times and I’m liking it a lot. Business Calendar.

I also have Business Calendar installed because I like their widget (they all sync from the same home and Google calendars anyway).

3) A great file system explorer – ES Explorer

4) Evernote, Instagram, Facebook, Skype and a bunch you probably already have as well (okay so that’s like four more I snuck into my top ten).

5) Twicca – here’s what I think is the best Twitter client. It has a nice dark theme which matches my desktop – but the main thing is it’s fast, stable, and lets you control when you want to load new tweets – going forward or backwards. The data entry side is a little quirky as well – but I like it – it works – really well. Twicca

6) It took me ages to find a decent world clock – another shortcoming of Android. This one is ‘the businesss’ – Polyclock

7) It also took me ages to find a decent multi-country weather service. Beautiful Widgets and their Weather widget can’t seem to get the sunrise time right for multiple countries. Weather Services Pro on the other hand works great, seems accurate, (lets you choose your weather source) and fits nicely with my dark desktop. Weather Services Pro

8) Since the update to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean – Google decided to change the search bar from transparent – which sat nicely on my dark desktop – to a sickly gray opaque background – which looks about as nice as John Constable painting place mats. Thankfully there is the Apex and Nova launchers. I’m using the Nova launcher, and I love its 3D desktop switcher. Not only does it allow you to change the Google search bar back to a transparent color, but it it keeps the same application/widget list as the stock launcher –  while letting you choose how many virtual desktops you want, and which one is the default – which is slick. Worth the paid version – Nova Launcher.

9) There are a ton of ‘to-do’ and task managers our there – but I love this one - Astrid. You can access their Website from your desktop for synchronized data entry and you can share lists with others when you want to work together on a list – like a holiday, wedding or whatever. Evernote will let you create lists as well – but Astrid is sticky cool.

10) WiFi Analyzer – this is a great free app that will show you the signal details of your local WiFi networks, including better channels that you should be using (for your access points/routers), db range and interference etc. WiFi Analyzer

And that’s about it…

Here’s a short post on getting started with Nokogiri – a Ruby gem that wraps libxml. I’m writing this because well, the docs at Nokogiri kind of suck.

I wanted to read a simple XML document and my XPath fu was a little rusty. All I wanted to do was read some attributes from a root element, some element values off of the root, and then a short collection of items (very similar to an Atom document).

My main bone of contention with the Nokogiri docs was their use of the @doc.xpath("//character") search operator at the very beginning of their parsing tutorial.

How about we start from the beginning… Continue reading →

Here’s a solution to a problem I was trying to solve in Ruby. I wanted to create a 23 bit data structure, that would hold three values. A 14 bit year, a 4 bit month and a 5 bit day. Each of these bit sizes are the minimum number of bits required to support a maximum value of 9999 for years, 12 for months and 31 for days (with months and days optional – hence the custom data structure).

Using the bitwise & operator, you can either mask (protect) or zero out bit values. And then using the bitwise | operator – you can turn bits back on.

In Ruby you can create and manipulate binary literals directly using the 0b prefix. Continue reading →

I’ve toyed with a few titles for this post, including – ‘My Kingdom for a Backslash’, or ‘Fish Don’t Know They’re in Water’. In the end I felt ‘The Long Road /home’ was the most fitting.

This post is about my thoughts and experiences as a software developer, leading up to my use of Linux and building my first non-Microsoft based Web application.

In The Begining

I’m a non-CompSci grad – having started my academic life with a college diploma in biology (a Canadian community college is the equivalent to what would have been called a ‘polytechnic’ in the UK). After about four years of working as a laboratory assistant, I decided that biology wasn’t for me, and moved into IT.

I started the hard-way – in PC support, and slowly worked my way up from there. I had a couple of lucky breaks along the way, which combined with a lot of work, meant that I was eventually able to pass for a ‘nearly’ competent IT professional (whatever that means). Continue reading →

This link to Macworld was sent to me by a colleague – “iPhone 4S: Why no NFC chip?“. I think it’s another excellent example of editorial polyfiller. How can a market be created for NFC technology – without handsets that support NFC?

I think the decision not to include NFC technology in the iPhone 4S was based on two factors. Continue reading →

Brilliant – a must watch for all systems people and managers…