alan dawson's blog

BITfixIT

alan dawson — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 11:11:40 +0000

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

Redirecting on Access Denied Errors

alan dawson — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 01:40:36 +0000

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.

getting stats from drupal watchdog

alan dawson — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 06:33:32 +0000

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%';

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

Creating an ULTRALAB hot seat clone in drupal

alan dawson — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:49:28 +0000

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

alan dawson — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 10:55:28 +0000

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!

Creating a Drupal module to allow individual tagging and links on user home pages.

alan dawson — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 20:35:15 +0000

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.

Decision making and design

alan dawson — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:45:17 +0000

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.

democracy tv

alan dawson — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 11:59:32 +0000

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 )

Fring - Mobile Symbian VOIP Application

alan dawson — Thu, 24 May 2007 15:07:09 +0000

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.

Hiding the Navigation Menus - except for logged in users

alan dawson — Sat, 12 May 2007 13:24:43 +0000

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 "";
}
}
?>