Coder in the Rye

At the monthly SF Drupal User Group meeting on September 13th, I gave a presentation on the transition from IBM Websphere to Drupal at San Francisco State University. We brought over our "Portal" (intranet) from using Websphere to Drupal in late 2009 and have seen great results. The archived presentation can be found here Transition to Drupal Powerpoint presentation

Student assistants at the school have been getting interviewed with the following question when applying for a programming job:

"Please write an application to find the first 10 consecutive digits of the mathematical constant e for which every digit from 0-9 is present only once. You can use the programming language of your choice." (e.g., 1984263570)

Did I miss the boat on seeing how cool the new Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device is? Actually, I'm on a boat at the moment, so I guess not, but perhaps that explains why I hadn't heard before how cool this thing is.

The best $50 I ever spent for work. Beginning July of last year, I began working two months during the summers on the merchant mariner Training Ship Golden Bear for California Maritime Academy. Working on a ship produces numerous complications, not the least of which is lack of access to all the equipment you may need and no Google to turn to for answers.

So, last year I prepared by making a few purchases, including An IDE/SATA to USB adapter and A good computer tool kit both of which have been invaluable to my work on the ship.

  I first heard of Drupal in 2007, but it wasn't until February 2008 that I would give it any thought. At that time, I began a process to help the Division of Information Technology at San Francisco State University choose a Web Content Management System. Notice, this was just for the central IT site and not for the entire university. As you can see from this Drupal timeline Drupal 6 was not yet available, and so I tested out 4.7.x and 5.x versions.