Blogs

The standard behavior of HTMLDOC with a block of text, as with any browser, is to break the text across pages if the text won't fit on the page.  This can be prevented however, by simply inserting a comment before the element containing the text.  An example is as follows:

VMT will be going to DrupalCon DC this coming March 4-7th.  We're proud to be individual sponsors of this fantastic event.  DrupalCon is generally held two times a year at locations all over the world.

This March we are fortunate to have the conference right in our backyard, and we're really excited about it!

During deployments to Staging, Pre-Production and Production environments you typically have a good number of SQL scripts that you need to run. One solution would be to just take a directory listing straight from a command prompt and dump it into a batch file. This gets tedious, so I wrote a C# command line application to attach a text file to the batch script (to include instructions and any other important information) and then populate batch files for the Staging, Pre-Production and Production environments.

Drupal can be readily configured to act as an Intranet or Extranet solution.  An Intranet is generally defined as an information system for posting and sharing information that functions in much the same way as the general Internet, except that the information is restricted for people within the organization: employees, managers, board of directors, etc.  An Extranet is simply an Intranet the allows select access to groups or individuals outside of the organization: vendors, partners, clients, etc.

I learned a fun bit of java trivia the other day, that I thought I'd share.  Let's say you have a lazy-loaded singleton design including the following code:

...
public static MySingletonClass getInstance() {
	if (instance == null) {
		instance = new MySingletonClass();
	}
	return instance;
}
...

Of course, in a threaded application, you'll want to make the setting synchronized, so you can be sure that two threads calling getInstance() simultaneously for the first time don't create it twice. So all you need to do is synchronize it, right?

Matt and I have been experimenting with part of the JNLP API called SingleInstanceService.  Basically, it's a sort of super-static singleton class that's shared between all running instances of the application.  This is really cool in theory, as it allows you do do things like count the number of running instances, and allow only one.  There's some great code implementation examples, as well.

Drupal is a great Content Management System out-of-the-box, but one of its real strengths lies in its extensive variety of modules. There are a number of modules which are so useful that we generally always install them with every Drupal implementation that we do.  I've listed them here grouped by general function for you.

Recently we had a situation with a production website setup in a mult-site Drupal installation, where the site started outputting garbage randomly.  The site had been undergoing some maintenance, which included the installation of the signup module to enable users to register for events, as well as an upgrade to CiviCRM 2.0.

For quite some time I have had rather ambitious plans surrounding the VMT Blog portion of our website. Every day our programmers solve dozens of problems ranging from the mundane to the bizarre. These issues span the gamut of the technologies that we work with, and many of the problems are generic in nature and require a bit of research to resolve.

Yesterday I discovered you cannot use apache to host multiple ssl-enabled sites on the same ip address. This was rather irking, but not the end of the world for my current project.

Apache will just use the first SSL declaration it finds for all following vhosts, and since it is TCP layer 4 and HTTP is TCP layer 5, this makes since the session is already setup by the time it gets the http request.