Articles

I've resisted calling this section a blog primarily because I know I'm not likely to post to it on a regular basis. However I occasionally have an idea or tutorial that seems worth sharing with a larger audience. Hopefully you'll find them useful.

Greenhouse/Cold Frame for a Square Foot Garden

I started a Square Foot Garden this year, and wanted to start the season early for a some frost-sensitive plants. I built a simple bed cover / greenhouse over one of my three 4' x 4' beds to see if it would allow me to plant about 4 weeks prior to our average last frost.

Understanding METAR files

METAR - aviation weather report - data sets are available on an hourly basis from stations all over the world. They're a great way to get current weather conditions for a region. The format is very terse, so I've put together a short guide to understanding them:

RAILS_ENV with mod_fcgid and SuEXEC

Getting Ruby on Rails to behave itself running under FastCGI (as provided by mod_fcgid) and SuEXEC can be challenging. One subtle problem is that Rails expects its environment (production, development, test, etc.) to be specified within a environmental variable called 'RAILS_ENV'. Unfortunately, SuEXEC will not allow that variable to be passed into its environment.

Creating Hierarchical Web Sites with Drupal 6

One of the first questions I had when I started working with Drupal for a client project was "How do you emulate a traditional hierarchical site structure?" i.e. tree menus, logical paths, and other such niceties.