As a 1/4 Mexican, I feel gifted with a birthday on Cinco de Mayo

(for you gringos, that's May 5th)

Even better to share a photo of Drupal creator and curator Dries Buytaert in a sombrero (while a student at Ghent University, where Drupal originated)

photo via Forest Mars

Try my vegetarian recipes:

Bean burritos y arroz con frijoles

Pro Bowl Guacamole

This remains the 10th most popular post on my blog, up from 8709 views a year ago to 15,037 now

How I Came To Be Known As Decibel Places

I have used the handle netsperience as my "web brand" since 1996 - but when I decided to claim the domain, netsperience.com was already taken.

So I started to think about a good nickname for a programmer.

In the late 70s I occasionally published a xeroxed zine about the Providence, RI punk rock scene and I called it "Decibel Places"

Adding a decimal point completes the pun: I searched "decibel places" to see if anybody else was using it; I found one reference, clearly intended to be "decimal places" and I had a good laugh. Today, that result is buried at the bottom of the 17th page of Google results - the rest are me.

I switched my drupal.org username to "decibel.places" and everywhere else.

I created an avatar with the newly created obamicon.me by Paste Magazine. I was just playing around, using my laptop's webcam. I liked the side-lit effect, and the fact that the blue highlight on my face looks a lot like New Jersey.

LinkedIn suspended my account for using this as my profile image. I argued with them that it is an actual photo, but they would not allow it.

Recently my wife told me she doesn't understand what it means. I explained it to her: a double pun on my love for loud music and programming. "Oh," she said.

The only drawback is that many web sites like Twitter and Facebook do not allow a username with punctuation. (Facebook allows it in the URL but not as a user name.) Although this weakens the "joke" I think it actually improves search ranking with multiple spellings.

I have actually met people at meetups and parties who know me as "decibel" not by my real name. I guess it was a good marketing move. It's important to fully claim and establish your "brand" especially if it is your "personal" brand.

Someone should start a project documenting the origin of drupal.org usernames. How did chx pick the name? Besides what we think we know, what about merlinofchaos?

I'll admit I have been a Windows user since Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Currently I have my second HP laptop-desktop-replacement which arrived with Windows 7, which is a little better than Vista.

I have been stubbornly developing Drupal on Windows, even running Drush locally using Xampp and bugging moshe weitzman et. al. about supporting Windows. I don't think drush mmas works yet on Windows, perhaps it never will.

Recently I needed to use ffmpeg for media conversion, and although there are Windows binaries, Drupal modules did not know what to do with the Windows version. I ended up working on the dev server, which was not my usual process. Usually I work on a local version of the files and database, synchronize them with Git or SVN version control, and ultimately upload them to a development server before staging and production.

During a week hiatus between projects, I decided to set up a Linux workstation, to better match the LAMP web hosting environment.

My old laptop had a dual boot to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04. I had a hard time setting up my Windows wifi driver with ndiswrapper. It was sort of a novelty.

Since then, I have installed Ubuntu as a desktop OS on a couple of cheap computers from Property Room as gifts for friends, and also when a friend's Mac had terminal kernel panic, I wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu. People who were never used to Windows found Ubuntu pretty easy to use.

Ubuntu has come a long way, and with the addition of the PHP GD image library in Ubuntu 10+, it is pretty compatible with the web hosting servers I use, in fact my last project was hosted on a server running Ubuntu.

So first thing I did was get the wubi Windows installer for Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 LTS so I could install it as a dual-boot (I'm not abandoning Windows, I'm just broadening my horizons). Why Ubuntu? Many web servers run CentOS or Red Hat Linux - I installed CentOS at VPS.net - but Ubuntu is particularly well suited for a destop operating system, and hey, Linux is as Linux does. Plus I have a friend who runs Fedora on his desktop so he gets the latest updates - and he's always crashing and patching. I used the Virtual Machine in Windows to test web sites on Internet Explorer 6 running on XP (glad we mostly don't have to do that anymore) and I'm not very interested in using Virtual Box to run two operating systems at once. I also read warnings that it's easy to accidentally restart Linux in the Virtual Box, and that can destroy your Linux system.

Each release of Ubuntu has an alliterative animal name, 12.04 is called

Precise Pangolin (a Pangolin is a scaly anteater)

Next I needed to set up my machine for Drupal development, which also requires a web server, and MySQL and PHP (the "MP" in LAMP). I'm not sure what the best guide is, but the first one I followed was pretty old,  and it told me Ubuntu doesn't let you create web site directories at /var/www so I had to create a symlink from /home/www to /var/www and it caused lots of problems and eventually I ditched my configuration and started over without the symlink and everything is fine. The second pass I also found an excellent post about configuring Precise Pangolin for Drupal by Laura Scott with some nice tips. I had trouble posting a thank you comment, Laura had to tweak the Mollom anti-spam settings because it was refusing everything, the shoemaker's children always go barefoot.

In short, I had to install the Apache web server (I briefly considered nginx server, but mostly my projects are hosted on Apache), PHP and MySQL. Set up a vhost (virtual host) for the localhost web address in the browser, and a database. I have been configuring vhosts and databases for some time in the Xampp Wampserver for Windows, so I already knew how it works.

Finally, I installed Drupal 7.

I also installed Drush (of course) and Compass for SASSY stylesheets, and - yup, ffmpeg - and Git to connect my project to my Github repository.

Then I had to think about code. On Windows I mostly use the EditPlus text editor, which has syntax colorization for HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript - and has a really good "find in files" search. The default gedit text editor for Ubuntu is pretty good, with syntax colors and stuff - but sometimes I would use the Eclipse IDE on Windows, although it always felt like driving a bloated Hummer in a bumpercars ring. I poked around a little and found some Drupal plugins for the Netbeans IDE, so decided to try it out. So far it's great, more lightweight than Eclipse, but it did not come with PHP enabled when I installed it from the Ubuntu Software Center, so it took some research to figure out how to turn PHP projects on in Tools > Plugins. I also added Drupal Templates for Netbeans so typing in "hook_form" (for example) will display a dialog with options for pre-configured Drupal code blocks, which saves a lot of time:

Now that I could code and view the web site on the local server, I had to think about some productivity tools, and other stuff I was used to on Windows.

Drupal: Content's Magic Bullet

Drupal powers a huge number of Enterprise (Sony), Government (White House), Education (Columbia University) and Non-profit (DoSomething) web sites. How has this FOSS project grown in 10 years from an experimental student CMS to a full-blown Content Management Framework? How is Drupal adapting to support Responsive Web Design and Mobile-first content delivery? Drupal Application Engineer Randall Goya has worked with Oxygen Media, Adidas, Guess Watches, Columbia University, Pronto Media/IAC and B&H Photo to tailor Drupal for their content publishing needs. Kelly Bell founded the Gotham City Drupal collective for the NYC Drupal Developer community. Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg is Co-Founder & CEO of Zivtech, a web development company focusing on expert Open Source Software services. Richard Baldwin is President at epiSolve, a company providing technological innovation and targeted solutions. What makes Drupal such “awesomesauce?”

VOTE