About a decade ago, back when Catherine and I had no Oliver, and thus had surplus time on our hands, we bought a canoe.  It is a nice canoe – nothing extravagant, but enough to knock around in the waterways of Prince Edward Island in.  We did not canoe extensively during our footloose time – a few trips in the West River, a rather bizarre attempt, with my brother Steve, to navigate the Morell River, and an unfortunate outing into the North River in the area surrounding a sewage outflow.  But we always had high hopes.

Those high hopes were diminished somewhat when Oliver arrived and our surplus time disappeared.  When Oliver was 3 years old we made some attempts at resurrecting our canoe lifestyle, but our initial personal flotation device trials resulted in a face-down-in-the-water Oliver, and so we were scared off.

This week, though, with summer speeding by and Oliver’s childhood advancing, I resolved to reapportion some of my summer time to getting the canoe up and running again.  

We started last night with a trip to Canadian Tire and the purchase of a wee paddle and a new PFD, followed by an hour-long session in the CARI Pool to insure that the PFD actually worked (it did!).

Tonight I dragged the canoe out of the carriage house, hosed it off, and assessed the wear and tear of 8 years among the skunks, cats and raccoons (in general, not to bad: some animal attempted to eat the styrofoam seats, but not too much damage was done, and the craft remains seaworthy).

Next on my list tonight: find a way of affixing the canoe to the roof of our 2000 VW Jetta.  When we first bought the canoe, Sporting Intentions sold us a $20 kit of nylon cord and styrofoam blocks that snapped on the canoe’s gunnels; they served us well, but were eaten by the aforementioned animals in the interim so needed to be replaced.

Alas I’ve had no luck replacing them: there are plenty of kayak carriers in the stores of Charlottetown, but nobody but Sporting Intentions sells canoe carriers, and they’ve “gotten away from the styrofoam system” and all they have to offer is a $400 Thule system that, while it’s beautifully designed and snaps right into the Jetta, is overkill for what will likely be a weekend outing or two this summer (I should add that the Sporting Intentions salesperson was super-helpful, both in selling me on the virtues of the Thule, but also in pointing us to good spots to put in).

So as of this writing I’m still searching.  Canadian Tire is selling styrofoam “pool noodles” for $1.99 each and I’m pretty sure I could adapt them for the job, add $20 worth of tie-down straps and have something that would safely get the canoe into fresh water.

Times a wasting and the snow will be here soon, so I’d better be quick about it.

Suggestions welcome.

Finally, after being euphemistically known as an “entertainment centre,” and unofficially referred to as a “racino,” the casino in Charlottetown is being renamed to what it is: a casino.

There have been rumblings of discontent within the cultural intelligentsia of Charlottetown for the past few months about the donation, that last night became public, by developer Richard Homburg of $2 million to the Confederation Centre of the Arts, and the resulting renaming of the Centre’s Main Stage to Homburg Theatre.

While their are myriad reasons to call this donation into question, the foremost, to my mind, is the simple vanity of it all.

Selling off naming rights is a well-established institutional practise, and one the Centre has used before in smaller ways without outcry.  But Prince Edward Island is a special place, a place that treats vanity as a serious sin, punishable by suspicion and long term just-out-of-earshot scorn. 

On the Island, it’s fine to be successful, you’re just not supposed to show it off.

That Homburg appears to have ridden into Charlottetown, decided to remake the city in his image (complete with large HOMBURG signs slapped on everything that doesn’t move), and then, in a vainglorious coup de grace, paid to have the cultural heart of the city renamed after him, is vanity the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

While it’s hard to argue with Homburg’s generousity, to my eyes the impulse is tarnished by this self-idolatry.

My old homebrew blogging system used a hierarchical set of categories to tag posts.  It looked something like this:

• Technology
  • Apple
    • Steve Wozniak
  • Backup
  • Barcodes
    • UPC

And so on.  When I migrated the blog to Drupal, I needed a way of getting this set of categories out of the old system and into Drupal. Here’s how I did it.

First I created a new Drupal Vocabulary (Drupal-speak for “set of categories”) called “Topics” and then I looked in the drupal.vocabulary table to find that the vocabulary had a record number – or vid – of 5.  I noted this for later.

The old system’s categories were stored in a MySQL table that looked like this:

CREATE TABLE `categories` (
  `number` int(11) default NULL,
  `name` char(75) default NULL,
  `parent` int(11) default NULL,
)

For each category there was a number, a name (like “Apple”) and the number of the parent category, if any.  While there are various ways of importing categories into a Drupal “taxonomy”, none of them exactly fit the bill for me, so I decided to go the “write a PHP script to do it” route.

First I selected all of the categories, in numerical order (because I wanted to make sure that parents appeared before their children):

SELECT number,name,parent from categories order by number

For each of the categories I inserted a record into the Drupal term_data table:

INSERT into drupal.term_data (vid,name) values (5,'" . addslashes($name) . "')"

In then retrieved the tid (or “term ID”) value:

select LAST_INSERT_ID() as tid

and noted this for later use should I need to identify the ID of this category should it be a parent to a child encountered later.  I then also inserted a record into the term_hierarchy table, using a value of either 0 (zero) for categories with no parent, or the tid value for the parent, noted earlier, for this with a parent:

INSERT into drupal.term_hierarchy (tid,parent) values ($tid,$parent)

Put it all together and the code looks something like this:

$query = "SELECT number,name,parent from categories order by number";
$result = MYSQL_QUERY($query);
$howmanyrecords = MYSQL_NUMROWS($result);

$currentrecord = 0 ;

while ($currentrecord < $howmanyrecords) {
    $number = mysql_result($result,$currentrecord,"number");
    $name = mysql_result($result,$currentrecord,"name");
    $parent = mysql_result($result,$currentrecord,"parent");

    $query2 = "INSERT into drupal.term_data (vid,name) values (5,'" . addslashes($name) . "')";
    $result2 = MYSQL_QUERY($query2);

    $query2 = "select LAST_INSERT_ID() as tid";
    $result2 = MYSQL_QUERY($query2);
    $tid = trim(MYSQL_RESULT($result2,$currentrecord2,"tid"));

    $tids[$number] = $tid;

    if ($parent <> '') {
        $parent = $tids[$parent];
    }
    else {
        $parent = 0;
    }

    $query2 = "INSERT into drupal.term_hierarchy (tid,parent) values ($tid,$parent)";
    $result2 = MYSQL_QUERY($query2);
   
    $currentrecord++;
}

The end result was a 788-term vocabulary, with hierarchy preserved, in Drupal, ready to attach to the posts I would import next.

I’ve mentioned this before, but if you’re looking for an easy way to buy locally-produced organic vegetables on Prince Edward Island, you should give Aaron Koleszar’s Organic Veggie Delivery service a try.

The produce is local, the schedule and mechanism for delivery and payment is easy to manage, the delivery car is powered by biodiesel, and you’ll not meet a nicer veggie delivery person than Aaron.

Here’s a snippet from Aaron’s email today, announcing his return to the fold:

I’m pleased to announce that after 6 weeks recovering from hernia surgery, I plan to resume deliveries on Thursday/Friday of next week (July 23-24). Orders will be due by the night of Monday, July 20. Later today (or on Friday) I will send out an update detailing what’s available and what’s in the veggie boxes.

I’d like to thank everyone for your patience and for all of your kind words, thoughts, and wishes of a full and speedy recovery. The surgery and recovery went well and I’m mostly healed. I’m feeling quite well, but I still need to be careful with lifting for a while.

For the time being, I will only be delivering every 2 weeks, so the next delivery will be scheduled for August 6-7. I expect weekly deliveries to begin late August or early September.

Also, you should know that my partner Jodie and I are joyfully anticipating the arrival of our first baby. The forecasted due date is August 13. However, if the actual baby delivery date happens to coincide with vegetable delivery dates, then I might have to delay the veggie delivery a bit. In such an event, I would of course be in touch to inform you.

Okay, I’ve figured out the key combination in FCKeditor that’s causing me grief: I’m used to typing Command + Left Arrow to go to the start of the current line in an editor.  While this works as expected in a normal input field, if I do this in FCKEditor it’s interpreted as “back” by the Firefox and takes me back to the previous page, therein losing everything I’ve typed into the editor.

Apparently this is a Mac Firefox-only issue, and is discussed in this blog post and this Firefox bug report.

While some recommend Keyfixer as a Firefox add-on that fixes this issue, I couldn’t get it to work, and opted, instead, for keyconfig.

To install keyconfig, just visit this page, click on the link to the latest keyconfig.xpi file, and install the add-on.  Once it’s installed and Firefox has restarted, select Tools > Keyconfig in Firefox, select the row named goBackKb that’s set to ⌘Left Arrow and click Disable.

Once I did this, using FCKeditor in Firefox on my Mac became a much more pleasurable experience, what with the whole “you could lost everything with one careless keystroke” somewhat removed.

The barricades went up on Monday morning around the parking spots in front of our house, and there were tree surgeon types scouting around, so we knew something was up.  We feared the worst, but it turns out that the giant tree (and it is giant) in front of our house was simply due for a trim.

There’s nothing like a meeting of the Charlottetown Downtown Residents Association to make you feel like gathering a bunch of your drunken  motorcycle-racing friends, finding the highest, ugliest, most architecturally unsympathetic building in the city, climbing to the top and making mad passionate love to Tim Banks while the hooligans pee in the bushes and pull wheelies on their muffler-less dirt-bikes.

Being trapped in a room with that bunch of frightened curmudgeons makes me want to renounce every curmudgeonly thing I’ve ever written in this space in favour of an endless, lawless bacchanal: bring on the crows, the miscreants, the graffiti-writers and heck, even the developers of obscene buildings. It’s better that we have a downtown that’s chaotic and vital than the sedate 1950s utopia envisioned by the downtown livers.

That is all.

You’ll notice some drywall dust around this blog today, all part of a renovation project that I’m just tentatively taking the wraps off now.  After 10 years of maintaining this blog in a masking-tape and baling-wire codebase that started life as something called “the Catherine Hennessey engine,” I’m migrating everything to use the open source Drupal system,

To longtime readers this may come as a surprise.  Certainly it’s surprising to me.  Or at least to 1999 me.  I’m a coder at heart, and the notion of using someone else’s code to maintain as something as intimately connected to me as my words was, for the longest time, anathema.

But for the last six months I’ve been knee-deep in Drupal, part of a large website migration project for one of our clients.  I’ve been churning out custom Drupal modules, learning the ins and outs of “the Drupal way,” slurping content out of myriad ye olde CMS into Drupal and helping a team of editors and designers make Drupal their home.

Along the way I started to love Drupal.  To love its quirky yet powerful undercarriage, its rich collection of modules, its open community of developers.

And in the end I realized that if I was going to be writing code, I might as well be writing code that could help more than just, well, me.  There’s a lot to be said for drawing from and contributing to the open source well, and that well seems enough like home now that I’m comfortable with it as a place for my words.

In this spirit I’m migrating somewhat before the “okay, everything’s done” stage has been reached.  You’ll see evidence of this from the very basic design of the site (I started with the very nice Basic theme and am working along from there; I’ll keep working), from some broken links here and there (although I’ve spent a lot of time trying to ensure that nothing breaks), and from some missing content (I haven’t yet brought over the 17,000 comments that have been written readers – coming soon).

Also in this spirit I’ll be writing a lot about some of the challenges I faced in migrating from the old homebrew system into Drupal.

In the meantime, some technical notes:

• the URL for the site’s RSS feed is now ruk.ca/rss.xml – but the old URL should automatically redirect.
• the rukapedia is, at least for the time being, over at wiki.ruk.ca – the content there might end up here eventually; still thinking about that.
• things like my Twitter feed in the sidebar wil return soon.

Lots more to come.

Regular comment-leavers in this space will recall that, for many years, I’ve employed a simple, easy-to-read mechanism as an “are you human?” test to help cut down on spam. A recent uptick in the amount of comment spam — and weird comment spam it was — has prompted me to switch to using reCAPTCHA, a similar mechanism that has three distinct advantages over the old system:

1. It’s harder to design automated attacks for.
2. It has an listen-to-audio-option, make it more accessible.
3. When you use it, you’re helping to digitize books.

I’m particular fond of point number three. Apologies to those that find this new mechanism a barrier to commenting.