You use this clever one line script that I found at Snipplr:

svn status | grep "^\?" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs svn add

And as long as your file names don’t have spaces in them the script will add them recursively to your SVN project. By the way if you have spaces in your file names then you are being silly.

Here is the easy way to do it:

[theamoeba@amoeba2]# yum install php-pecl-ssh2
[theamoeba@amoeba2]# service httpd restart

I am reading HEAT at the moment and Bill Buford’s making of fresh pasta interested me. Actually I lie, well that is sort of true, actually I was first interested in making my own pasta after watching a short clip of Jamie Oliver explaining how to do it.

Anyway, all that nonsense aside. I gave it a try this morning and it didn’t come out half bad. I don’t have any pasta creating contraptions. So I used a Braun “blender” thing and a rolling pin. Basically to make the version I made you throw an egg per person into a blender and then about 100g of flour per egg. In my case it was 1 egg and about 100g flour as I said at the beginning.

The measurements are sort of immaterial though as you must just add flour until the consistency is right. The mixture will make slightly sticky yellow balls. Once you are happy with the mix you just throw it onto a longish surface that is covered in flour so that the mix doesn’t stick to the table forever.

You then want to either go to the shop and buy a pasta flattening machine or just use a rolling pin like I did. If you are using a rolling pin just keep flattening the sheet of egg/flour until you are happy with it, the flatter the better but not microscopic.

Once it is flat you can cut it into weird shapes or make a kind of spaghetti out of it. You can get a machine to do this or like me do it by hand. So you just sort of fold the sheet up into a long rectangle, making sure to flour between each fold so it doesn’t stick.

Then you just use a sharp knife and cut slices out of it. I made mine pretty thick which was not such a good idea, so probably a max of about 1 cm wide. But it is all up to you. Italian cooking is not about being precise. Hehe.

If you are interested in cooking I would recommend that you read HEAT. It has a lot of insight about good food, how to cook it and also what happens behind the scenes in the kitchen of most decent restaurants.

Basically this is not as simple as it sounds. First we started by hunting around for an HTML5 solution that might be able to work, but we found that to be a wishy-washy solution that did not really work at best. The next route that we took was to manipulate Flowplayer that has an awesome javascript API and plays nicely with jQuery.

The final solution is Flowplayer together with a really simple jQuery slider developed by CSS-Tricks called AnythingSlider. But getting to that took some interesting gymnastics and a couple of sliders later.

The problem with most of the really simple sliders is that it is very complicated to stop their auto sliding from outside and they also have really crappy functions, mostly everything is piled into one or two functions with a couple of useless options.

What I like about AnythingSlider is that is has all sorts of functions for playing/stopping, jumping between slides etc with functions that you can call with simple click functions. This makes some real sense in terms of building extensions onto it.

Even though AnythingSlider has this awesome API we still had to add some clever bits and pieces to it in order to allow Flowplayer to control the way it worked.

So as I said the final solution is a simple integration of Flowplayer and AnythingSlider with a couple of modifications to the AnythingSlider code. This allows us to play movies inline in the slider while still keeping full control of what the slider can do or not with Flowplayer.

I will write some more about it later when the client goes live.

Simple huh? Erm… no

Since both Drupal and Moodle would be using the same database and would also be sitting on subdomain there were not too many complexities in that department. The problem was getting Moodle to create a cookie and then force Drupal to use it. Ideally I would like to have used oAuth or something nicer (I use this in the vaguest sense of the word), but there was no time to create clever solutions.

Basically the solution looks something like this:

• Clever Drupal module that creates an API callback to sync Moodle Users into the Drupal database. An admin chooses which role you want to sync users from and which role you want to sync the user to.
• A tiny little Moodle hack that creates and deletes a cookie that will tell Drupal which user to login and also to log a user out when the cookie is not available anymore. This is also only for that specific role that you select to sync to.
• Then lastly there is a small Drupal hack that checks for the cookie and either logs a user in or logs a user out, depending on the content of the cookie.

Let me just say that I really REALLY hate writing hacks. They disagree with me completely down to my core but in this case I did not have the luxury of time to screw around trying to create a module that could do this. Perhaps the client will be happy to allow future development around the system. I would then definitely look at doing a more elegant solution with perhaps as I have said before, oAuth or LDAP at the very least.

At the moment the module is working well and there don’t appear to be any glaring bugs that we have been able to identify. So even though this is not an optimal solution I am very happy with it so far.

I will most likely write a more technical post at a later stage, but I am not 100% sure on the secrecy policy on the code

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

MGMT – Kids from SCHUMF.fr on Vimeo.

Iceland Furry from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.