Andrew Brookins
Book reviews, proclamations, techno-wizardry.
Categories: food, life | Add a Comment
By Andrew Morton

A few weeks ago, Kim and I were riding home from our weekly trip to Fred Meyer, and I had an epiphany: I never wanted to go back. Kim wasn’t fond of Fred Meyer, either, so we hatched a plan to limit how much time we spent at the supermarket, and how much we bought, [...]

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flowers

This weekend, Kim and I rode bikes from our apartment in the Lloyd District of Portland to the Tacoma Bridge, following the Esplanade and the Springwater Corridor. The ride took a couple of hours at our mild, Sunday-morning pace, and it offered gorgeous views of the Willamette River and Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. Spring and [...]

Categories: codes | Add a Comment
clojure icon

Clojure is a new functional language for the JVM. This post is a collection of links, articles, screencasts and free books I’ve found to help me learn the language and understand functional program design. Key features Here are some key features of Clojure that I find extremely interesting: Designed for concurrency A Lisp dialect – [...]

Categories: games | Add a Comment
aliens

My favorite board game ever has to be Aliens, published in 1989 by Leading Edge Games. If you’ve never played it, there is a Flash adaptation available, which seems to be free. I was introduced to the game in the early 90s by the same guy who taught me how to play Dungeons & Dragons [...]

Categories: redspire | Add a Comment

The other day, I stopped hearing any sound effects on my Toshiba Satellite work laptop, which has an Intel HDA sound card. I’m running Karmic Koala, so I rolled up my sleeves and dug into the cause. As an experienced Linux user I’m familiar with the occasional driver problems due to using computers effectively designed [...]

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Today I ran into trouble configuring a Windows 7 guest on a Linux host: Windows 7 couldn’t find an appropriate driver for the virtual NIC. The solution was in this forum post. Basically, I had to manually edit the VMWare image’s .vmx file (while the virtual computer was turned off) and add the following line: [...]

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I just finished deploying a Fat Free CRM install with all the under-development plugins to Heroku. Starting out with Saturn Flyer’s write-up, I learned a few things along the way, and now I have a cool Rails-based sales app to play with. Working with a read-only filesystem The biggest stumbling block I had was realizing [...]

Categories: redspire | Add a Comment

When I created Solace, a little web app that helps me find interesting Craigslist ads, I needed to generate a list of all Craigslist locations. Update: Full source code for Solace is now available on GitHub. There were a fair number of locations in the US, so I wrote a quick Ruby class using Nokogiri [...]

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robot

Find Solace! Solace is a web app I wrote to experiment with the Yahoo Query Language. It pulls Craigslist data from YQL to allow searching for keywords at multiple locations (as opposed to the CL web site, which requires that you search one location at a time). Source code The source code for Solace is [...]

Categories: books | Add a Comment
I first read Yukio Mishima on the Oregon coast

Kim and I are heading to Coos Bay this week to celebrate Thanksgiving with the Davidson clan.  I am already thinking of books — is that wrong? My favorite thing to do on the Oregon coast, other than spend time with the in-laws and all of our super-adorable nieces, is trawl a couple of my [...]

Categories: writing | Add a Comment
Egg Village, Ghana

This month I reopened the blog I wrote on my trip to Ghana in 2006, in an archived state and with a short introduction. The original title of the blog was “Ghanadrew,” which I kept for the archive.  You can read it online at: http://ghanadrew.blogspot.com Though I tried several times over the past few years [...]

Categories: books | Add a Comment
photo by wakarimasita

Kim and I have been reading The Wind-up Bird Chronice, one of Haruki Murakami’s best-known novels, for the past couple of months.  It has taken us a long time to get half-way through the book.  This is my second reading, and I am surprised to find that the author’s style, themes and approach leave me [...]

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Married

Kimberly Davidson and I were married in December of 2008.  We had a site up for a while to show photos from the wedding, which I am in the process of converting a flickr stream.  Stay tuned.

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Redspire Redesign

Over the past week I redesigned and recoded the web site for my part-time consulting business, Redspire Development. I wrote a custom PHP blogging app with the CodeIgniter framework to make simple posts to the site, rather than use WordPress or Drupal.  Visit the following blog post over at Redspire for more technical details: http://redspire.net/blog/new-site-whats-under-the-hood

Categories: redspire | Add a Comment

Note: This is an outdated, unmaintained, archived post.  Proceed with caution. The Views integration module released with CiviCRM as of version 2.2.8 works best if your CiviCRM and Drupal databases reside on the same server and are accessible by the same username and password. However, there are cases when this will not be so: Your [...]