alan dawson's blog

A community run volunteer powered openaccess workshop where people can get free IT advice and access in the Pitsmoor area of Sheffield.
http://www.burngreave.net/mailman/listinfo/cafe
http://www.bitfixit.co.uk
Its looking to develop training to help its volunteer techies get better Linux and FLOSS skills

Drupal gives ability to control access to content.

If a user hits some content that gives a 403 error ( access denied ) either because they have not got correct access rights,
or are anonymous it is possible to control what happens next.

This php snippet does just that.

here are some simple examples of some SQL to get information from watchdog, using sql string matching...

SELECT message,timestamp FROM watchdog WHERE message LIKE '%daws%' 
AND type='user' AND message NOT LIKE 'notify%';

you get the idea...
to see how many password resets I'd asked for I'd do

SELECT hostname,message,timestamp FROM watchdog 
WHERE message LIKE '%Password%' and type='user' 
AND message LIKE '%ligh%';

or

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM watchdog 
WHERE message LIKE '%Password%' and type='user' AND MESSAGE LIKE '%dawson%';

OK .. rough notes on work in progress of the hot seat software ... basically so I can remember how to do it again.

There are quite a lot of settings to get right. Some through drupal, others on a shell on the webserver ( or however you mod the files on there )

Its work in progress but at this date can be found at http://hs.technologyandsocialaction.org

Eric Lee: Linux: The first 100 days

I notice that Eric Lee,who moved to linux shortly after the

first pradsa workshop, is still going strong in the free world.

Nice one!

Leonie recently asked me to add a feature to the technology and social action web site that allows participants to categorise the content on the site with their own tags. This we enabled by using the community tags module. She also asked to add a feature where a user tags would be available on their profile page. This took a little more work as this feature required a new module writing. I've just finished it.

The recent pradsa2 workshop at University of West of England had a session on decision making. Our group decided assess the design decisions in developing this web site. I'll start putting my understanding of that process here.

Before the first workshop I perceived the site to be a place where people would come to ( ie log in ), produce content ( ie blog stuff, post forum questions ), building a corpus of examples and knowledge.

I came across Democracy TV from http://www.getdemocracy.com/ a couple of years ago. It makes uses some of the best of the webs protocols, RSS, Bittorrent, and the big video hosting sites like YouTube, to allow independent and short film makers get their content out.

Install the client, subscribe to channels, and download and watch what you're interested in. ( if you use Ubuntu see http://www.getdemocracy.com/downloads/ubuntu.php )

Just discovered http://www.fring.com/
It allows you to use the various large VOIP providers like skype , google talk, msn and its own user base at http://fring.com on Symbian mobile phones using a data connection rather than a GSM connection.
This allows you to make VOIP calls to your friends on MSN, or you can use a service like SkypeOut to make interational calls without paying an exorbitant per minute rate.

Created a custom block with the below php code and then disabled the drupal built in navigation block

<?php
global $user;
if ($user->uid) {
if ($menu = menu_tree()) {
   echo "";
   echo "
";
   print $menu ;
   echo "
";
   echo "";
}
}
?>