OneSeventeen
Real Name: Chris Adams
Rio Rancho, New Mexico (United States)
IT Administrator
Biography
I'm a follower of Christ, husband, and father (in that order). I've also spent several years programming PHP, some for a fortune 100 company, some for a major university, and far too little for my side projects. While I love programming, I've been called into full-time ministry as an IT Administrator for my church, and also host the super-lame geekons podcast over at http://www.geekons.com I don't talk about drupal, and very little about web design, so I doubt Rob and MF would mind if you sneak a peek. =P
I strongly believe that flash navigation and table based layout is the equivalent of removing wheelchair ramps at your business, and that flash intros should be reserved for movie websites and those little business card CDs you wind up throwing away before finding a CD ROM that will even play them. Flash is cool, but jQuery and SVG canvas on HTML 5 is going to be even cooler.
Oh, and that button with the Geekons logo over there, that was made in Inkscape under Ubuntu Linux. Most of my work is done under Linux merely as a proof-of-concept that a ministry can operate with a tiny tech budget if they wanted to. I'd love to see every Bible-based ministry operating debt free (you know, the way God says we should), and sometimes moderate hardware with free software for a few years is better than immediately jumping into an all-Mac network with the CS4 master collection on everyone's machine. (yeah, I've seen ministries that try that, which is silly until you are debt free)
Latest Contributions
New Geekons.com layout
I already have tons I want to change, but I'd like to hear even more ideas if you have them:
Where does God belong in your daily tasks?
I think I'm a bit too legalistic at times, because I don't understand why people don't want to drop "J-bombs" in their music, on their website, or anywhere else.
I don't think a song has to have a certain JPM (Jesus-es per minute) to be good, but I can't help but think that Jesus has a prominent place in everything we do. If I build websites, but never talk with my clients about Jesus, what's the point?
If I record songs, write books, fix cars, etc. etc. etc. but don't take the channels God has given me to witness, then what good is it in the long run?
I am guilty of this myself, so I hope I'm not coming across self-righteous, but I just wanted to know if I'm legalistic just because I think God belongs in every part of my life, including my work, my passions, and my hobbies.
What do you think?
Why isn't XUL more popular?
I'm working on a task-management app (to keep track of "to do" lists) that I'm using as a way to learn XUL, which is what Mozilla Firefox is based on.
(Firefox and Thunderbird are the two most popular XUL applications)
It seems cool, and is a great way to get started into cross-platform development without having to compile code, which also means checking design updates is as easy as hitting refresh in your browser.
Any geeks here interested in it?
Why, or why not?My first module: TwitterBlock
Being a fan of Twitter, and a user of Drupal, I made my first module today.
Once enabled, the preferences page for it lets you put in a Twitter.com username and password, then you can place the TwitterBlock block anywhere you want on your drupal site.
It just displays your friends' most recent twitter post, along with their avatar.
It needs TONS of work, but you can see the basics at http://www.geekbrownbag.com
Cool, huh?
Requires curl because that's what the twitter API supports and PHP5 because I'm lazy and use file_get_contents.
I would love to figure out a way to throw an error if you tried to enable it on a system that didn't meet the requirements.
Drupal Caching and Minimizing MySQL Queries
I've started using "normal caching" which is actually pretty nice but only seems to take me down from 70 queries to 64 queries. :(
Is there a way to minimize this even more? Drupal tells me the module "Content" is not compatible with Aggressive Caching... does that mean Content Templates or is it really saying that any content on a drupal site does not support aggressive caching?
My host is going through some MySQL issues right now, and I wouldn't mind disabling comments and forums until they sort it out if that meant I could have Drupal bypass the database altogether unless I manually went to the admin panel.
Any tips?
Eek! I just noticed that because I make extensive use of custom fields my "archives" page executes over 200 queries without cache and 189 queries with cache!
For data that will only change once a week, that kind of scares me.
