Blog

It's been a while! You might be wondering where I've been hiding all this time. Well, this being the first time I've been able to sit myself in front of my home iMac for more than 10 minutes in two weeks, I decided I'd finally stick a posting on the 'ol blog again, with a quick update of the happenings in the Archdiocese of St. Louis.

The Installation

Basically, this has been my life for the past two weeks. During a normal day, I would prepare for the installation, go home, work on the condo a bit, then worry about the installation. Then, I'd go to sleep, wake up, prepare for the installation, etc. (repeat this over and over again). In fact, from Monday through just a few hours ago, I think I spent more time at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis than in bed!

But the payoff was huge:

To the uninitiated, Boost is a module for Drupal which has the potential to make your Drupal-based website run many times faster than it's currently running. Boost basically converts pages on a Drupal site into static html files, and allows your website to direct anonymous (non-logged-in) users to the cached html pages.

Doing so speeds your site up quite a bit, because instead of your web server having to run some PHP scripts and connect to your website's database, the server can simply send the complete html file, which requires no extra processor cycles or memory to compile. If your website has a lot of anonymous traffic, the potential speedup is very large. Instead of serving hundreds of users per minute, you could serve thousands.

[UPDATE: Pictures are now online - you can view them over on Flickr.com].

I just finished importing all the photos from today's Priesthood Ordination Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis; it was a beautiful Mass (as is usual), and, as we still don't have an official Archbishop, the Archdiocesan Administrator, Bishop Robert Hermann, celebrated the Mass and ordained the four men as holy priests.

Pictures will be coming... for now, you'll have to be content staring at the picture below, taken with a—gasp!—Canon SLR. That's right; I pulled a list-minute audible and was able to borrow the a brand new Canon 5D Mark II from a friend, complete with a nice 24-105mm f/4 IS lens:

Something you don't think about every day, but something that could save you enough change to get a Big Gulp every now and then: You can take a few simple steps to drastically reduce the amount of power consumed by your computer. Especially when you're doing many things at the same time with multiple hard drives and the screen turned on at full brightness!

This article is written specifically for the 24" iMac (late 2008), but applies to pretty much any Mac that uses electricity (read: ALL of them). By following the steps in this article, you can save a bit of power, which translates into saving a small amount of change each month. And who wouldn't like a few extra nickels in this economy?

The Discovery

I recently purchased the APC Back-UPS NS 1250, and one of the most amazing features of the UPS is the ability to see how many watts are being actively consumed by a device plugged into it.

I found the results of my testing to be quite interesting. When I had the iMac running with the screen at full brightness, the computer was using the energy equivalence of an old 100 Watt tungsten (i.e. 'energy sucker') light bulb! I don't typically run the screen this bright, though, because the lighting in my computer room is typically subdued. So I turned the brightness down all the way (a comfortable level for my vision), and looked again. This time, the computer was using about 75 Watts. NICE!

(Big bright chart for visual learners).

I recently had a problem with cron on one of my Drupal sites, related to an issue I'll be posting about soon (namely, using Drupal's built-in search with more than 4.5 million entries in the search_index table). When I manually tried running cron, I got a "Cron failed" status message. I checked the log, and it said "Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running."

Apparently, something had messed up (probably due to the fact that I was messing with database tables while cron was working on them) with the previous cron job, and Drupal couldn't start a new cron job anymore. So, with the handy help of Google, I found part of a solution to my cron woes in the Drupal.org forums. Here's what I did to prevent this cron error from happening again:

Recently, an article on Accessibility appeared on Planet Drupal which caught my eye, so I clicked on it. When I was taken to the article page on d7ux.org, the banner across the top of the page caught my eye (as it was intended to do!):

Our UX Principles:

1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable.
2. Design for the 80%.
3. Privilege the content creator.
4. Make the default settings smart.

I think those four principles, especially numbers one and two, should be the driving force behind any web or product design.