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Showing posts from 2014

Lily's New Hat

My cousin Vikki has been helping us for the past month and is leaving to head back home in a couple of days. We had her over for dinner last night and she brought Lily a new hat!

Varnish, Drual and ical (.ics): expiry issue fixed

My normal configuration of a public site on my servers involves using varnish for the page cache and setting expire page to 1 day. This mostly works quite well (the varnish module in Drupal takes care of clearing the varnish cache when you're creating/editing content). We recently launched a new Drupal version of the Calgary French & International School  (okay, I was just along for the tail end to help with the launch, Karin and Rob get the credit for all the work), which includes an ical feed for parents (generated from views of course). That's an excellent thing - parents can subscribe to the feed and have all the upcoming events on their mobile device (or google calendar, or both). But we discovered that although it works great on the Mac desktop, it wasn't working well for iOS (i.e. the iPhone). It would poll frequently enough, but only actually update once a day. It turned out that these two devices are interpreting the http header 'cache-control' di

Lily, is it time to make some garlic bread?

Lily is my daughter, born a couple of days after my previous post, now almost 5 months old.

CiviCRM and Accounting in 4.3

The 4.3 version of CiviCRM that first came out in April 2013 addresses a key problem with CiviCRM for large organizations: namely, accounting integration. So what exactly does that mean, and how does it work? Since I'm working on a big migration to CiviCRM, and the client has "accounting integration" needs, I've been diving in and trying to understand the nitty gritty. Since I started, 4.4 is now out, and 4.5 is almost out, and I understand they've made some improvements, so this is now a bit dated, but still might be helpful. First off, "accounting integration" doesn't mean that CiviCRM will now replace your accounting package, but the goal is to make it play nicer. The key issue for my client is that reports coming out of their current system are used as input for their accounting system, so it needs to speak the same language - i.e. things like GL account codes, and double entry accounting for things like contributions where the donor is promi

Transport layer security on the Internet

Yesterday I posted this: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/2014/submissions/a-new-open-transport-layer-security and sent the link off to some friends and family. They had some good things to say, and some of that helped me clean it up a bit. But the feedback and discussions I had also helped me to step back a bit from the specifics of that proposal and think more generally about the problem. The problem I'm talking about is a mash-up of technical detail, privacy concerns, security concerns and good old fashioned apocalypse with a dash of conspiracy anti-government kind of stuff. So there's definitely more than one way to look at it. I like to think of it as "collapse of trust on the Internet as we know it". Here's the scenario: at some point in the next 5 years, a method is discovered that allows people with enough computer power to decrypt 'secure' https connections. Once this is generally known to the public (e.g. via a leak like that of Mr