Larry Garfield's blog

At Palantir, we frequently work with museums and universities that need to integrate large legacy data systems. In the case of museums that's usually a Collections Management System and/or a Digital Asset Management system (DAM) of some kind, holding information on thousands or hundreds of thousands of works in the museum's collection. In the case of a university, that's usually course information and availability coming from a registrar system. As a result, we've gotten a disturbing amount of experience integrating with oddball 3rd party systems.

At last week's Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis, Tiffany Farriss and I ran a workshop on remote data strategies based on the work we've done on several different museum sites. Of course, as a pre-conference workshop attendance wasn't that big (even though we did fill the room), so for those who weren't at the conference we decided to put the information up online. The slides themselves aren't that useful, but consider this the novelization of the presentation.

For those playing our home game, there's sample code provided at the end. It uses Amazon as a remote data source, and requires just the base amazon.module.

For today's simple but highly helpful trick, have you ever built out a whole bunch of views and then wanted to export them to a module? If you haven't, you're doing something wrong. :-) Of course, setting up the appropriate file can be tedious and error prone, especially in Views 2 where views definitions can be, um, painfully long.

DrupalCon DC is begins tomorrow! Palantir is out in full force this year, with no less than ten members of the team on hand. Try and find us around the conference (we're the ones with baseball shirts; go team!) for a free Drupal API reference card or Zen theming reference card. For all that coding on the plane home after the conference. (Admit it, you know you'll be doing it.)

And while you're at it, participate in the Palantir DrupalCon Geeky Code Contest to win a signed copy of Learning Drupal 6 Module Development! See below for details.

The bugs that bite, the flaws that catch!

Earlier today I ran into an annoying bit of evil with MySQL that I suspect is going to bite other people sooner or later. Hopefully I'll be able to save someone some debugging time by pointing out that a year's worth of MySQL 5.1 is broken under at least some Drupal modules. Here's how.

One of the oft-annoying issues with Drupal is file handling. There are many problems with Drupal's file handling at present (fortunately there's considerable effort now to improve matters for Drupal 7 that looks very promising), but today I just want to talk about a seemingly simple problem: Where to put the files directory. It's not as simple a question as you would expect.

You know you have a good working environment when: One of your colleagues in a moment of frustration declares "That's it, no one is allowed to send me email ever again... unless it contains a milkshake", and five minutes later has multiple milkshake-themed ecards show up in his inbox.

There's a reason I like working at Palantir. :-)

DrupalCon DC 2009 is getting started early this year, with the date for session proposals already passed. Palantir has once again submitted a number of sessions, but it's of course very possible that we won't be able to do all of them given how many strong proposals there are this year.

What are we up to? Have a look below, and go vote for those you like! (That's all of them, right?)

Are you going to Szeged yet? If not, you'll miss out on all the Palantir fun! Palantiri are giving no less than 11 presentations and two BoFs at DrupalCon Szeged this year. If you're going, stop by one (or several) of our sessions and say hello! And if you're not going, there's still time to sign up!

Here's our full itinerary:

It's official! Palantir is taking a vacation in Hungary this year. If you're planning to be in the Szeged area, look us up. Five of the Palantiri will be taking vacations this summer in Hungary, including George DeMet, Tiffany Farriss, Larry "Crell" Garfield, Ken "agentrickard" Rickard, and Sam Boyer.

Although we'll all be vacationing separately, we do plan to meet up in Szeged for a week. We hear there's some sort of Drupal event going on in Szeged in late August. Might be fun. Let us know if you want to meet up somewhere for a snack. If we have time, we may even see about giving a presentation or two.

Earlier this week I checked in Palantir's latest module, Kiosk. It's a simple little module, and I was rather surprised to find the name still free, but it actually shows off some interesting tricks.