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Jan
12
2011

Drupal 7 notes - dealing with "ghost fields"

Came across a problem someone else on Drupal dubbed "ghost field" in one of the issue queues.  My issue with ghost fields came about while setting up Profile2 to use in my profile (strangely), but the problem happens in other modules as well.

The problem

  1. create a profile type (or modify the main one)
  2. add a field
  3. delete the field (I don't recall seeing any difference between saving data in the field or not)
  4. try to add a new field with the same name, get an error saying the field name is already in use, but it doesn't appear in the "Add existing field" list

The solution

Jan
08
2011

The sorry chicken saga

There was much excitement and trepidation at Wannabe when Chess, our bossy little evil Pekin bantam went broody, and amusement when the more demure Tempest decided that she, too, would also like to hatch some eggs.

Chess the Pekin bantam sitting on 24 eggsTempest the Pekin bantam sitting on 1 egg

We were pretty thrilled to have broodies, as one of our long term plans was to increase our flock naturally, including letting the broodies raise their chicklets, and bring in new blood every so often to prevent too much inbreeding.  This idea has since expanded to Josh planning on developing his own chicken breed.

Jan
05
2011

Summer rain

It's the hottest driest summer ever in Australia (except in Queensland and northern WA where they're experiencing floods, and meanwhile in Europe where they're having longest coldest winters with craziest snowfall).  Here in Perth most of our rain happens in winter with drips and drabs here and there in late autumn and early spring.  We don't usually get rain in summer.  The last few days I've felt quite at home while a large number of my friends have been complaining of the oppressive, stifling, terrible humidity.

Yesterday, I noticed the humidity, which probably means it was pretty damn high, and not helped at all by the fact that there wasn't any wind worth mentioning.

Today, the radar looks like this:

Radar image from Australia's Beareau of Meterology - 5 Jan 2011

Right now there is a particularly heavy cloud going over and my big kids are outside whooping excitedly about it and jumping in puddles.  The temperature is lovely and cool and very much like Christmas Island, which is making me simultaneously happy and homesick.  The rain smells lovely.

Jan
03
2011

Officially with the school aged kids

When my little big boy and his agemates hit kindy age (normal 4 year old kindy), I commented to a long time friend from back when Southies (better known now as Perth Natural Learning Network, website in the works and there is a Facebook group) first started up sometime near the beginning of 2007 that their social life had suddenly exploded with everyone's kids having birthday parties and playdates and whatnot.  She quite enthusiastically said yeh, she loved it.  I also find it enjoyable, though at the time for me it was more of a conscious noting of the fact that I had a child that was getting towards the stage of "big" (ie school aged) kid.  I was slowly but surely moving out of the realm of "mum of babies and toddlers" and into "mum of big kids" land.

Tao with Lego Hogwarts. Yes I recycle photos.  Sue me.

Dec
27
2010

The obligatory silly season writeup

Mostly for family, as I mentioned in the last post we're usually with one of our families at Christmas time.  This year is a rare occurrence, the last time it happened was almost 6 years ago when I, at the end of gestating Tao, decided flat out that I was not going anywhere.

Firstly, let it be known that we have no Christmas tree (though I am seriously contemplating one of these Fruut trees).  My family, who love their Christmas trees, may or may not be aghast to discover this was the best I could do:

Two bardboard boxes full of Christmas presents, in lieu of being under a tree

Dec
24
2010

Christmas time, mistletoe and wine, and slightly different this year

The lovely Ursula (also known as SulaMoon) over at deviantART gave me and another friend of hers pearwood a dragon for Christmas.

I think it's agonisingly cute.  Ursula is an amazing artist.

Dec
17
2010

Starting over

So.  the provider I'm using for my reseller account got itself taken out by a zero day exploit, which apparently wiped out their main drive and most of their backup drive.

My possibly incorrect interpretation of the email they sent out suggests that the attack was just on the one server.  I'm wondering if they were silly enough to have the backup drive in the same machine or if they were just unlucky enough to have triggered the attack or had it running while doing a backup.

Dec
16
2010

Avatar blue

Quick and dirty render of Za'haran's face

QaD render of Za'haran's face to see how the eyes and lip textures turned out.  They're not terrible, though I think I want to do more with his eyes.  Using the Fast Skin shader that ships with Lightwave, which does a pretty good job of making skin look more skin-like than I know how to get it.  I added a procedural to break it up as it was entirely too smooth and perfect.

Oct
12
2010

How in the hell do you alter forms?

In Drupal 6 you could do it with hook_form_alter()s in template.php or a helpful little module called Node and Comments Form Settings.  With 7...I have no idea, but apparently not quite the way I've done it before.