Category: Technology

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Burningbird Technology Weblogging

Another year, another web server

Drupal 7 is right around the corner, and my efforts to see how it would work on my existing server made me decide it is time to move to another hosting company. I need more control over my own space, and what is, or is not, installed. After discussions with the inestimable Laura Scott (@lauras), my go-to person for anything Drupal, I’ve decided on a Linode VPS account.

Linode has attracted a good Drupal community, which is important to me. In addition, it provides an extremely easy to use interface, which makes it quite simple to manage the space. I also like the fact that the company provides a good selection of documentation on how to do things geared to its own environment.

Since I’m making a major Drupal upgrade and moving to a new server, now is the time to look seriously at how my web sites are configured and designed, and make changes. I think this is one of the advantages to major releases—they provide a time to stop, think, and decide if you want to keep what you, or if now is the time to make all those other little changes you’ve been thinking about.

Since I’ve designed my own Drupal themes, I need to upgrade them to Drupal 7, as well as incorporate new HTML5/RDFa features. I may even do a re-design, not sure yet. I don’t like web site designing, so I may just grab one of the existing Drupal themes, and tweak it.

Several of my sites haven’t been updated in a donkey’s age, so I need to figure out if I’m going to continue writing at the sites. I probably will keep most, if not all, but I may do some major re-organizing.

I’ve not been taking many photos this year, as some of you have noticed. I need to re-design my photo pages to incorporate Drupal 7 changes and also my changed photography habits.

I’ve become much more interested in eBooks and the ePub format this last year. I was looking at creating an ePub module for Drupal, but someone already started this effort(Drupal ePub Module). However, there’s been little work on the module, and I’m thinking that an extension to the Print Module is a better approach. Or perhaps the best thing to do is just create an ePub friendly XHTML theme, and do a wget or curl on a book’s pages and use one of the many existing ePub publishing tools to create an ePub eBook. It’s better to be a smart developer than a clever one, and smart developers use what exists. Plus the same pages can be used to create a Kindle book, a Nook, and others.

I have been thinking of incorporating Disqus into some of my web sites. I’ve used this service at other sites, and I like how it works. Commenters can edit their comments, track their discussions across many sites, and they don’t have to provide a username and password for each web site (*cough* Gawker) to expose to hackers. Plus, if I turn comments off, the people still have access to their own writing. And Drupal has a module for Disqus, though I’ve not been able to get it to work with my theme (another reason to re-design my pages).

One thing I really like about Drupal 7 is if you don’t like the new administration interface, you can turn off all the new bits. You can turn off the overlay (don’t like), the page-top toolbar (still considering), and the new Dashboard (a keeper). I also like the fact that all the modules I use now are either incorporated directly into Drupal 7, or the developers have guaranteed a first day Drupal 7 release. Most of the modules have also committed to accessibility—that’s something you don’t often see with content management systems. Or W3C specifications.

Categories
Technology

That’s just not right

Earlier, I found a PR release from the AVMA (American Veterinarian Medical Association) undermining Missouri’s Proposition B in favor of its “model bill”. In an associated video, the AVMA’s CEO, Dr. DeHaven, states that Proposition B only sets limits on the number of dogs that can be kept, when in actuality, Proposition B does more (DeHaven’s video)—much more than the AVMA model bill, which relies almost completely on a commercial dog breeder honor system (and large scale commercial dog breeders are not necessarily known for their honor).

Afterward, I received an email related to a bug I’m following in the HTML5 working group. In response to detailed, thoughtful request for a way to provide alternative text for a video poster, the HTML5 editor, Ian Hickson, declined, writing as rationale:

The request here is just cargo-cult accessibility and would not
actually improve the life of any users, while costing authors in wasted time
and effort.

I reacted the same to both: that’s just not right.

You would think that humane treatment of dogs and ensuring accessibility for folks would be no-brainers, equivalent to being “agin sin”. You would think so…and you would be wrong.

Whatever sense of empathy and compassion we had, once upon a time, seems to have been left in a long ago forgotten consciousness. Today, what rules is the bottom line, and if that bottom line must run over the bodies of puppies and disabled, equally, run it must because there’s a new sense of pragmatic necessity that rules in the land.

Those who cannot see do not really need to know what the poster to a video is all about, because authors can’t really be bothered to provide the information. It’s not pragmatic to even consider the option. As Hickson stated earlier in the discussion of the bug:

I’m confused. Why would you (a blind user) want to know what the poster frame
is? How does it affect you?

How does it affect you‽

The welfare of dogs is important, yes, but not at the cost of the rights of the breeder. Weighing the needs of the dogs over the wants of the breeder is not pragmatic. The AVMA invited Wes Jamison, a communications professor from Florida, to speak about the role of veterinarians in today’s society. What he said explains much about the AVMA position:

Dr. Jamison … indicated that the veterinary profession, by emphasizing the importance of the human-animal bond, enables consumer hypocrisy, which is exploited by animal protection organizations. He argued that the AVMA should abandon advocating for the human-animal bond in favor of fighting for the right of animal owners to use animals as they choose, whether that entails companionship, food, or labor.

The human-animal bond is hypocrisy‽

Pragmatic hell, that’s just not right.

Categories
Burningbird Technology Weblogging

My first attempt at Drupal 7 upgrade fails

I made my first attempt to use the new Drupal 7 beta to upgrade my existing module experiment site. Unfortunately, I quickly ran into a fatal error:

DatabaseSchemaObjectExistsException: Table cache_path already exists. in DatabaseSchema->createTable() (line 621 of /home/myname/public_html/books/includes/database/schema.inc).

I submitted a bug for the error at the time it happened. Checking back later, though, I couldn’t find the bug. I assumed I had mucked it up somehow when submitting, so re-submitted it. However, when I checked a couple of minutes later, I couldn’t find the second bug. I noticed then that when you access My Issues, it only shows open bugs. When I adjusted to show all bugs, I found that my bugs had been quickly closed out by someone saying they were duplicates of another.

I can understand the enthusiasm the developers have with wanting to close out bugs quickly, but unfortunately, my bug was not a duplicate of the bug so noted. What caused the problem, though, is known, but the error message I received was inaccurate.

Drupal 7 is dependent on the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension that is now in PHP core. Previously, we could add PDO via PECL—the PHP Extension Community Library. However, the PECL PDO is out of date and Drupal 7 now only supports the core PDO.

One problem with this, though, is that cPanel, the site management tool popular with many Shared Hosting companies, disabled PHP core PDO because of compatibility issues. It’s only been recently that the application has stopped disabling PDO, but hosting companies like mine are still in the process of upgrading to the PHP core PDO. Until these companies make this upgrade, we can’t upgrade to Drupal 7.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that the Drupal 7 upgrade doesn’t test for the appropriate version of PDO, and we get bizarre errors such as the one I described earlier. Luckily, there is now a patch, which I ended up testing yesterday and that should give people the appropriate error. The problem with it, though, is that it recommends people check out the requirements page for Drupal, which, among other things, informs people that they can install PDO with PECL.

screenshot of Drupal requirements page with PECL PDO instruction highlighted

Hopefully, the disconnects will soon be corrected, and most folks are in environments where the PDO is from PHP core, rather than PECL. I was impressed at how fast everyone did jump on this after the initial duplicate bug mistake was discovered. Once the patch is in place, and the documentation updated, people will at least now know why they can’t upgrade and can chat with their hosting provider about the necessary upgrade.

Until my own shared environment is upgraded, though, I’ll have to stay in 6.x land. Many thanks to Everett Zufelt for his help in pulling all the Drupal pieces together for me.

Categories
SVG

My SVG progress bar

In honor of Microsoft supporting SVG in IE9, Web Directions is hosting an application contest: create your best and most innovative progress element using SVG. Microsoft is providing the prizes, and they’re nice: a new laptop, XBox, and Lego Mindstorms kit. Tasty.

I was inspired to create my own SVG progress graphic applications, using a well known graphic that I borrowed from Wikipedia. I did the work for fun, and won’t be entering the contest. Why? For one, I don’t have a Windows machine that runs IE9 in order to test the application. For another, I’ve never been much of a contest type of person. Plus there’s that validation requirement: pretty tough when you combine SVG inline in XHTML5 with ARIA.

Note that you can access the page and the examples using any browser you want— including Safari. Either the applications work, or they don’t; I’m not going to stop you from trying them.

Categories
SVG

Making progress with SVG

Web Directions has created a No Bit, Sherlock developer challenge, with nice prizes such as a laptop and XBox for the person or persons who comes up with the most creative variation of SVG progress element. A nice play on the name (“no bit”), but even nicer prizes.

I’m not participating in the contest, but couldn’t resist playing with the idea of creating progress elements with SVG.

One type of progress element is the indeterminate progress, also called a throbber. If you use Twitter, it’s equivalent to the circling animated graphic, and indicates that an event is happening, but the web site can’t determine the exact progress of the event.

When I think of an unending event, I always imagine ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its own tail, and creating an infinite seeming circle. It can represent many things in many different cultures but, to me, represents a continuous cycle with no beginning, middle, or end. It just is, until it is no more.

With that in mind, I thought I would try my hand at creating an ouroboros indeterminate progress element. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to stretch my rather limited graphic skills in order to create the ouroboros: Wikipedia provides an elegant graphic, already formatted as SVG (PNG format), and with a license that allows me to use the graphic for my own work.

My first indeterminate progress element plays on the cyclical nature of ouroboros, by rotating the graphic around its origin, as you can see in the following example if your browser supports SVG. Clicking the start button begins the animation; clicking the end button, stops it. The application makes use of the built-in transformational capability of SVG.

It’s an interesting effect, but a little CPU intensive. In addition, there’s nothing uniquely SVG about the effect. I could have just as easily grabbed the PNG formatted graphic and used the new CSS3 transform attributes to rotate the image. I wanted something that plays on the uniqueness of SVG—that non-bit nature of SVG that forms part of the title of the Web Directions contest.

SVG is a vector graphics language, which means that a graphic consists of various elements, all combined into a whole. The ouroboros I used is actually made up of several path elements, forming the head, the eye, and the different scales along the body.

What if, instead of cycling the entire serpent graphic, I just cycle an effect around the serpent? A popular Ajax-based throbber is the one that Twitter uses, and consists of a animated dashed circle, where the dashes around the circle are hidden and displayed using a circular motion.

I applied the Ajax style throbber effect to my ouroboros graphic to create my next effort, as shown below. In this case, the serpent remains static, and only the scales change color, in a circular motion, to indicate some action is taking place.

I prefer the second approach, and it’s less CPU intensive than using a rotating graphic. You can also play with the colors: just make sure there’s enough contrast between “inactive” scale and active one so that the circular effect is easily seen.

Of course, both of these designs are for an indeterminate progress graphic. What about a deterministic one, where there is a beginning, middle, and end?

Even though I was inspired to use ouroboros because of the cyclical nature of the graphic, I’m also using SVG, which I’ve always felt to be synonymous with limitless possibilities. Ouroboros also means complementary opposites and what is more complementary, and opposite, than an event that’s not started, and an event that’s completely finished?

I made a third progress animation, but this time, there is a beginning, middle, and end. As whatever task progresses, my serpent’s scales turn from gray to black. In order to ensure that my application user knows what’s happening, I also provide a text description of the progress.

One last change for all of the graphics: ensuring they’re accessible.

All three graphics are given a role of progressbar. All three would also normally be associated with the task using other ARIA attributes. In addition, since the third application is a deterministic progress graphic, I also set the aria-valuemin, aria-valuemax, and aria-valuenow attributes on the SVG element. (I could have also set these values on the g element that groups the graphic within the SVG.)

If you load the graphic within Firefox using the NVDA open source screenreader, you’ll not only “see” the progress, you’ll also be able to hear the progress. And though these variations are a fixed size for demonstration purposes, they can be easily scaled as small or as large as you want, because I’m using SVG.

A fun little challenge. I’m looking forward to seeing the Web Directions “No Bit, Sherlock” contest entries.