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Well it finally happened - Drupalcon came to Austin.  I'm excited to attend and meet many of my Drupal buddies.  

This is what the Druplicon looks like Austin style!

My beloved Firefox has been doing something strange when it tries to view websites that have certificate problems such as expired certificates.  For some reason my desktop computer would pop up a bland dialog box whining about the site uses an invalid security certificate.  My laptop doesn't seemt to do this.  Apparently no-one on the internet has ever experienced this problem so I felt it would be useful to share the solution with folks. 

Here is the alert box:

Using Drupal 7, I needed to programattically add a useragent field (webform calls these components) and a url field to my webform nid 7477.  The url field is a hidden field of type: Hidden element (less secure, changeable via JavaScript.)  If you leave off the extra array in the url definition, it will be the normal hidden type.  You can see this when you click the edit button for this component.  I hope someone finds this useful.

My eight year old recently got his Mbot robot from http://makeblock.cc Unfortunately there are pretty much no docs so this is my first effort to document what I learned.

I use a device called an OBI100 with google voice to make and receive phone calls when at home.  This allows me to use the same phone number for voice/cell/texts etc. It only cost me about $30 btw. Recently, I hit a snag. 

I recently purchased a cool new 4 TB external WD hard drive for backups.  When I plugged it in and rebooted my computer, I got a black screen and never saw windows boot up. I spent some time looking at various posts but never found anything useful so I thought I'd post my solution here.

Note.  the drive worked fine when I plugged it in.  I only found a problem when I rebooted the computer.  This is a problem as I plan to leave the drive plugged in so my system can make a daily backup each evening to the external drive.

I'm struggling with a peculiar little problem.  My old faithful windows 10 computer will never eject the USB thumb drive.  It doesn't ever show any errors.  Its quite puzzling.  I have several usb devices currently working including a 4TB usb hard drive, usb keyboard and mouse and a Fujitsu USB scanner.  When I plug in the usb thumb drive, Windows makes the familiar boing noise and I can view the contents of the drive, but when I click the bottom right icon to eject, all goes well but explorer still sees the drive.  I can manually remove the thumb drive from th

So I noticed recently when I ran ps -edalf on my mac that there were a ton of processes that look like this:

I have to often issue commands like: vagrant up, or vagrant reload and OSX wants to be sure that I know what I am doing so it cleverly asks for my password.  Thanks to the efforts of a very smart coworker, there is a workaround to this problem.

First do:
which sed

and replace the /usr/bin/sed below with your path to sed)

These go under cmd alias specification section

Use this command to edit /etc/sudoers (don't do it directly):
sudo visudo

Here are a selection of useful resources for learning more about Drupal 8.  I've found them useful.

Good Features presentation from Drupalcon LA 2015 by Mike Potter of Phase 2
https://events.drupal.org/losangeles2015/sessions/features-drupal-8

Matt Cheney video on Configuration Management CMI - Drupalcon Los Angeles 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl7-978oKNw

Building on this article and this video I figured I would spell out some of the details of using multiple ssh keys with github. I re-read the article a few times before I found the comments which spelled out what I finally needed to be able to have multiple email accounts each with a different ssh key for github repos. This article applies to a Mac running OSX but could easily be adapted to linux platforms.

When you use homebrew to install php 7.1 it will cleverly install php-fpm which listens on port 9000.  This is the default port for xdebug, so if you want to debug php scripts in a lando container, you will have some challenges.

TL;DR

If you've installed php 7.1 with homebrew, it listens on port 9000 so you will need to change the containers php.ini port specification to another port.  e.g.

xdebug.remote_port=9001

Then tell phpstorm to listen on port 9001

I recently found a very cool service called Wuala which is a cloud backup/sync solution.  I think it is really cool because it gives you 5GB free storage initially and all files are fully encrypted on your computer before they go to the cloud.  I've been testing it for a while and I think I'm going to give it a try at some of my clients too.  It allows you to share a folder with someone dynamically.  Very cool!  Check it out.www.wuala.com

Check out what I just got from Microsoft.  Looks like it is finally time to start moving folks off Windows XP.  Good thing we can still get Windows 7 as I haven't deployed any Windows 8.  I do hear good things about it though.  I may bite the bullet and get Windows 8 on a new laptop soon though.

Recently, one of my clients let their subscription to AVG anti-virus lapse and all 8 computers on their network were complaining about the subscription having expired.  I purchased a new license key and went about putting it into the AVG's that were running. Strangely, the field for the license number was grayed out so I couldn't paste it in.