Day 2 of the Drupal Upgrade Experiment

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s blog posting that described the experience of upgrading a Drupal site from version 5 to version 6. To see the raw notes from yesterady, read the original post here. After all was said and done yesterday, I had (mostly) successfully upgraded Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 using our development servers. This involved updating or abandoning about two dozen modules, and took about 3-4 hours in total. However, we had two errors on the site:

Our Drupal Upgrade Experience

Today (August 12th, 2009) I am attempting to complete our last test upgrade of a Drupal installation from version 5 to version 6. I’ve done this upgrade twice already while working on a local server at home, but this is the first time I’m trying it at work, on “real” servers. I’ll be using this blog post as a running log of the experience, with gory details after the break.

Poster images in JW FLV player

Just a quick blog post for now, to talk briefly about an issue we had recently with the JW FLV player. We were trying to implement poster images (those still frames you see in the player window before you hit “play”, that tease the video contents), and had a problem where the movie wouldn’t play as soon as the image parameter was added.

Djatoka, Red5, and other media servers

Right now, the largest project on my web development plate (as opposed to the digital fabrication plate)  is the migration of the school’s Digital Library to a new infrastructure. It is pushing me into new areas of web application development, which is both exciting and a little nerve-wracking at times. Tonight, I feel a need to write about one of the bigger areas of uncertainty.

Student projects in SeaDragon

We’ve made a slight tweak to the student project gallery on our website, deploying SeaDragon to display presentation boards. You can see an example in action here:

Lindsey Warner: Courthouse Theatrics

My Drupal Conundrum

I’ve spent a good portion of the day today trying to duplicate – in Drupal – something that I can build in about 30 minutes by directly writing source code. At this stage, I’m going to throw this out to the Internet in the hope that someone else can help me figure out what I’m missing.

Several years ago I worked on a team that took the Herrick Building Archives online. This archive is a complete history of every structure that’s ever existed at Ohio State. The central focus of the archive is a building record – like this record for Ives Hall, former home of the Knowlton School of Architecture (where I work).

A building record is comprised of two basic pieces of content: the core building record, and zero or more addenda that were written each time the building was renovated.

To accomplish this in Drupal, I used CCK to create two content types: Building (for the core record) and Addendum (for each addendum. The Addendum content type has a node reference field back to its parent Building, which establishes the data relationship. When I coded this by hand, the addenda table had a foreign key back to the building table ID field.

The display page on the original site, then, essentially followed this structure:

1. Get Building ID from querystring
2. Look up core building record (date, text, etc) from building table; print that information
3. Look up all records from the addenda table which reference this building record (i.e. “SELECT * FROM tbladdenda WHERE BuildingID = 7″)
4. Loop through that recordset and print out the addenda text for each record

Easy, to the point of trivial. But how to do this in Drupal?

My first thought was to build a View, and take advantage of Tokens. Build a View that looks up all addenda which reference the current building ID. The problem I ran into, though (I think) is that the URL I’m working from is something like

http://mysite/building/Ives-Hall (building name)

rather than

http://mysite/building/7 (building ID)

This presented a problem when I tried to specify the argument in the view, because the preview only worked when I specified the building ID – not the building name.

My next thought was to make the entire page a view, using a Page display to show the core building record and then using an attachment display to look up the affiliated addendum records. That hasn’t worked either, perhaps for the same reason. I suppose this might be able to be fixed if I could just accept using an unfriendly URL, but I get the feeling that I’m missing something simple.

So – for those of you who read this blog – what am I missing?

Playing with a new toy

I recently had the chance to pick up a used iPod Touch (thanks, Mark!) and so far it proven a welcome addition to my technology arsenal. I got it at first to replace my mp3 player (so I could give my old one to Carole), but it has quickly become more than that – a game system for our son, an offline email client for me, and a rival for my laptop when it comes to working with some portions of the Internet.

For now, though, I don’t feel the need to upgrade to a full blown iPhone. I’m happy with intermittent connectivity where I find an open wifi spot, and frankly don’t have the budget to pay a monthly fee to AT&T. Maybe in a year or two.

The real reason why I’m writing this post, though, is to experiment with the WordPress app, which I hope will prove useful for a project or two at work. We’ll see how much I end up using this app versus a web browser.

On Individualized Learning

I recently became aware of the Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment as part of a project at work on open education. After scanning the list of articles published (which appear to be all available online in PDF format!) I found one titled “Individualizing Learning Using Intelligent Technology and Universally Designed Curriculum”.

The author, Michael Abell, seems to be operating more from an undergrad or even K-12 perspective in some of his statements – compared with an undergrad/graduate design school where I work – so the paper may not be directly applicable to my project. But, he does raise some interesting questions.

One of the first topics the paper covers is the notion of student learning styles. He seems to be arguing that one of the hallmarks of a successful individualized learning system is that it would be able to configure its contents to adjust to the learning styles of any given student. Given what I remember about the different types of intelligence and the variety of ways in which a student might prefer to learn, that seems like it might be a recipe for creating about seven different versions of the same curriculum; each tailored to a specific type of learning, but each differing somewhat significantly from the others.

That seems, to put things mildly, like it would be a time-intensive process. Noble, certainly – useful almost probably – but time consuming. Given that one of the promises of open education (at least as I’ve heard it from some quarters) is that it would free up instructors to be able to pursue more research, I wonder whether those two things are mutually exclusive.

Still, I’m intrigued. Another part of my job is to train students in how they can safely operate equipment like laser cutters, CNC mills, and other digital fabrication apparatus. In that type of instruction, the “bad thing” students need to avoid is not a low mark but personal injury or damage to property.

In that sort of context, the effort required to provide seven different variations on a core curriculum is much easier to justify.

Perhaps it might be time to either schedule a consultation with some local learning science experts, or to brush up on those different types of learning so I can start radically revising our fab lab training presentations.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Online Studios in Architecture

There are a few trends I’ve noticed within architectural education on which I’d like to ruminate – having to do with blogging in school.

One of the websites which I follow somewhat regularly is Archinect – specifically their School Blog Project. This is an initiative where they identify one or more students at each school of architecture in the country to blog about what they are doing in their school. It offers a good way to get a glimpse of what is going on at various schools around the country.

One drawback to that approach, however, is that if you get the “wrong” student from a school, you don’t get an accurate picture of what the school is like. Or, if the student doesn’t post frequently, you get no picture at all.

Another example of this sort of blogging, which gets around what is essentially a sampling error, is to have an entire studio blog about their work. I’ve seen this done at Cranbrook, Clemson, and currently at UNC Greensboro; I’m sure it has been done elsewhere as well. This seems to offer a much better impression of what a student’s experience is likely to be, simply because you get a sense of the entire studio participating.

Extrapolating from these starting points, I’ve been working over the last few months to develop a blogging platform for our school. The goal is to provide a digital commons for everyone in the school to blog about their work. We’re getting ready for the formal unveiling at the beginning of next quarter, and in the meantime I’m frantically trying to work out as many kinks as I can.

Stay tuned…

(I’ll have to edit this post tomorrow with relevant links to the various sites I’ve referenced here)

A music game

(I haven’t forgotten this profile – here’s some love, 360-ers – this is also posted on my MySpace and Facebook profiles, if you want to play along there)

The Rules:
Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 50 songs that play (no matter how embarrassing)
Step 3: Strike through the song when someone guesses the artist and song title correctly
Step 4: Looking them up on Google or another search engine is CHEATING!
Step 5: If nobody gets the song right, then you may post further hints.
Step 6. Make your own

1. Yeah, hey, When you wish upon a star, dreams will take you very far

2. If I cried, if I said I’m sorry, and if I told the truth a million times

3. What a feeling, what a feeling, all alone, I had a cry

4. Well bless my soul, what’s wrong with me?

5. Another Saturday night and I ain’t got no money

6. Why don’t you move, damnit?

7. Hey baby, is that you? Wow your hair got so long

8. I could feel you across the miles in my body

9. Where oh where can my baby be? The good lord took her away from me

10. Kindness, in your eyes I guess you heard me cry

11. They’re justified and they’re ancient and they like to roam their land

12. The light, the heat upon my face, the steady weight upon your chest

13. This is HEFW waste. Sweet chocolate starfish. Read. Over.

14. There is a house down in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun

15. Your eyes are burning holes through me. I’m gasoline.

16. The night is chilly as the stars above. The things you said that day made me feel loved.

17. Should I thrist or need, can I beg you for some water?

18. Where were you when I said you remind me of a portrait in a dream?

19. My heart, my soul, my mind, I pity me for true.

20. Breakin’ my back just to know your name, seventeen tracks and I’ve had it with this game

21. I just died in your arms tonight, it must have been something you said.

22. There’s a training course where boys and girls of real ambition start a new job in a factory

23. This time its on my own, minutes from somewhere else, somewhere I made a wish

24. Danke schoen, darling danke schoen. Thank you for all the joy and pain

25. I don’t need a shrink to tell me what to think, there ain’t no missing link in my love line

26. I’ve had one cup of coffee and a cigarette, then I roll out of bed with my shirt soaking wet

27. Finally found what I was searching for, it was here all along

28. When I was a young man, I carried my pack and I lived the free life of a rover

29. I just got your message baby, it’s a sight to see you fade away

30. You had something to hide, should have hidden it, shouldn’t you?

31. I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail, yes I would

32. Thinking about all our younger years, it was only you and me

33. Wanted 19 to 5, I found it hard to describe

34. I’ll buy you a diamond ring, my friend, if it makes you feel alright

35. Every single day we follow every rule that we know

36. We all came here for a party tonight and you’re gonna get left if you don’t get right

37. Hey you’ve got a lot of nerve to show your face ’round here

38. She won’t recover from her losses, she’s not chosen this path but she watches who it crosses

39. Come and gather ’round people whereever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown

40. Baby, I’m about a thousand miles, a thousand miles from my front door

41. I sat there looking ugly, looking ugly and mean.

42. If I had a million dollars, well I’d buy you a house

43. Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road

44. Above us lay the burdens, below us lay the truth

45. I want you to want me, I need you to need me

46. Yes this is a campaign slithered entrails in the cargo bay

47. I bought my baby a red radio, he played it all day a go-go a go-go

48. Lay down your arms and surrender to me. Or lay down your arms and love me peacefully

49. She knows that the devil’s got a burning fire inside of me

50. Clever got me this far and tricky got me in