Blogs from the Labs
We've been biten by this on a couple of occasions and I suspect others have struggled with it as well.
When running a process that calls a Drupal function inside of a loop you might encounter memory errors in Drupal. The place that we see it most often is when building import tools. Our code is happily looping over the user data from our import and calling user_save() in Drupal. Or we're grabbing rows from a phpBB database and inserting them as forum posts in Drupal via node_save(). After importing a few thousand rows, the process dies and your web server tells you PHP has run out of memory. So you increase the available memory and your import runs a little longer, but still runs out of memory.
Here's a question that's given me a lot of trouble. I have Joyent, a company that is largely based on Open Solaris, claiming to be a Cloud Provider.
Here's the problem: Joyent does not provide an API. Or if they do, I can't find it.
Joyent has a list up that talks about what they think makes up a cloud provider:
- Virtualization Layer Network Stability
My session on Amazon AWS & Drupal at DrupalCampLA. We're walking out the door at DrupalCamp, so I'll get more details up shortly.
Just back from Drupal Camp LA, where I ended up giving three talks. It was fantastic to see several hundred people come out to a Drupal event over the weekend.
Particularly encouraging was the fact that the Beginner track was so well attended. Over 100 of the attendees identified themselves as Drupal beginners.
Jon mentioned we'd be at Drupal Camp LA this weekend, but he didn't mention what all we're doing and how big of an event this really is.
You want to attend Drupal events that matter, and DrupalCampLA 2008 already has more than 270 attendees registered. If the pattern holds for Drupal events, the last week will include a lot of last minute registrations, making this a larger non-DrupalCon events.
We're planning to be there, and we're bringing video and audio gear for three rooms, and sponsoring the video so all sessions get up online at the conference site.
Twitter won't work with my social network, because my social network relies on keyword taxonomies. So, right now, it's easy to associate twitter with a profile, because it's a 1-1 relationship. And I can build a twitter channel (#workhabitinc) for example, to pull from multiple twitter feeds. Channels are fantastic because it's folksonomic, which means it's meta-data generate by people at the time of their post (as opposed to pre-defined categories).
It seems every year there is a trend that pops up that I didn't realized was "hip" until I read it in someone else's blog. Ajax was one of those trends, a 5-6 year old technology that just blew up overnight and became a phenomenon. I knew it was cool, but we'd been doing remote javascript applications for years, so it was a little hard to understand the enthusiasm (I later got it).
If you're interested in seriously using Drupal as a blogging platform, there are few finer tools than Ecto. This screencast covers setting up Drupal 5.x with Ecto, step-by-step (it assumes you can install the program), so you can get up and running really easily.
The Cloud Computing session presented at the bi-annual DrupalCon Szeged session in Hungary has been posted by the Internet Archive, who is generously recording and hosting the sessions. Watch the video here.
Acquia's Ethan Fremen and WorkHabit's Adam Kalsey present.
