Matthew Helmke (dot) Net Posts

I have four Python books on my shelf. I like the language, at least in theory. It is easy to read, clear, and powerful. In practice, I really don’t program much. I was hoping that this book might push me over the edge from writing shell and PHP scripts for my simple needs into Python land. So many of my friends love the language.

I read the book this week. There are a lot of great ideas in there that would be useful for a sysadmin. The examples chosen are generally practical and useful. I was a bit disappointed by the occasional typographical or capitalization error, especially in code examples and discussion, which are not uncommon in first edition books, but are generally uncommon from O’Reilly books. I also found the early emphasis on iPython to be a bit excessive.

This is a bit shorter than my usual review, mainly because I can’t think of much else to say about the text. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t great. A sysadmin who is motivated to use Python will find it useful as a foundation. A veteran Python programmer who wants to use the language for systems administration will probably find the book filled with stuff they could have figured out anyway. I wanted to love the book, but I didn’t. I didn’t hate the book, either. I just feel a bit “meh” about it.

Today we have the opportunity to hear from one of our staff members in the Ubuntu Forums, Rocket2DMn, in the latest installment in our Ubuntu Community Interviews series. Rocket2DMn first came to our attention as a result of his help answering questions in the forums. It wasn’t long before he became a member of our Beginner’s Team, which is focused on helping newcomers to the world of Ubuntu and Linux in the forums. He’s a great guy, a patient helper, and a wonderful asset to our community.

1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real” life — name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.

My name is Connor Imes, I’m currently 22 and live outside of Philadelphia, though I am originally from California.  I’m a software & systems engineer by trade, but also enjoy other activities like running, skiing, mountain biking, and watching movies.  I hope to travel around the world for my job, meeting new people and experiencing new things.  I am also the only member of my immediate family to not choose a career in medicine, and the only one to not serve in the US Navy.

2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?

I’ve been using computers most of my life, starting with DOS and Windows 3.1.  My passion for computers began with playing games, then progressed to building and tweaking systems, and ultimately to programming and using Linux.  My first experience with *nix came in 2004 at my university where we used Sun Solaris.  My first Linux experience came in 2006 from putting Fedora Core 5 on a game server that I hosted with my roommate all through college.  I started dual booting my laptop with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn in May 2007, once a stable ntfs-3g driver was available so that I could share data between the dual boot setup.

I did my first programming when I was in 6th grade, a buddy of mine started learning, so I got a pack of Visual Basic CDs with some books, and went to work!  It also lead me into constructing a few basic websites along the way.

3. When did you become involved in the forums (or the Ubuntu community)? What’s your role there?

I started on the Ubuntu Forums right when I first started using Ubuntu, and have been a regular from day 1.  I joined the Unanswered Posts Team and Beginners Team at the beginning of 2008 and have been heavily involved since then, esp. with the BT.  I sit on the BT Council and head up the Wiki Focus Group which works with the Ubuntu Documentation Team.  In July of 2008, I was invited to become part of the Ubuntu Forums staff.  I considered declining the offer, but felt I could contribute positively to the community in that role, as well as build some good relationships in the Ubuntu community.  I accepted, and am certain that both predictions have proven to be true!

4. Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one?

Yes, I was approved for membership in early 2009 by the Americas regional board. I was going to apply during the summer of 2008 with a handful of other Beginners Team members, but delayed my application.  I saw a lot of members come to the BT, and many were interested in becoming Ubuntu members – I just wanted to show that you could be a strong and dedicated contributor without being an Ubuntu member.  I’ve never really been a fan of titles and badges because I hate to see them distract from what is really important, which is having fun and making a positive impact.

My contributions are mostly on the forums, launchpad bugs, development release testing, and to the documentation team.  I’m looking to contribute to official system documentation and to triaging (and troubleshooting) some of the common but tough bugs – kernel, X, and wireless problems!

5. What distros do you regularly use? What software? What’s your favorite application? Your least favorite?

Ubuntu is my primary distribution all around, I use it on my laptop (I’ve ditched the dual boot there), and I dual boot between Vista and Ubuntu on my desktop.  Nowadays, Vista is only really kept around for gaming some weekends, and any specific functions I might need it for in the future.  In the past few years, I have spent time with (in no particular order): Ubuntu, Fedora Core, Mandriva, Puppy Linux, Gentoo, Red Hat, CentOS, and OpenSolaris (not Linux!).

My favorite applications would have to be the ones I use every day – Firefox, Pidgin, Xchat, Amarok, VirtualBox, Thunderbird, the conky.  I don’t think I have a least favorite application.

6. What’s your fondest memory from the forums, or from Ubuntu overall? What’s your worst?

The forums can sometimes be a bit of a roller coaster, it is tough to decide a best and worst, but I’ll try.

The FOSS community can often be very vocal, and despite our best efforts, sometimes a little rude.  This became very apparent in summer 2008, shortly after I became a moderator on the forums, when a user posted about Foxconn supposedly sabotaging their BIOS to intentionally not work with Linux.  This was, of course, bogus, but it hit Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, blogs and other sites all over the world and created quite a mess.  When I jumped into the fray almost 12 hours after it started, I found people bashing Foxconn left and right, and in all the chaos, nobody had even bothered to attempt triage on the Launchpad bug.  I did it myself, and followed the case all the way through to the end.  Since all the forum threads ended up getting closed as flame bait, I wound up keeping the community up to date with developments, and was ultimately in contact with a Foxconn representative.  By the time it was all over, the original poster was banned from the forums, Foxconn worked with the poster to test new BIOSes, a fix was released, I was relaying information, and the community was singing Foxconn’s praises for taking us seriously.

I think it was the worst and best of my experiences on the Ubuntu Forums to date.

7. What luck have you had introducing new computer users to Ubuntu?

Since it’s a rare occasion that I run across new computer users, I haven’t had much success in this department.  I have shown off Ubuntu to a number of people, and introduced some of them to the great world of Linux and FOSS for the first time.

8. What would you like to see happen with Linux in the future? with Ubuntu?

I would like to see Linux become more available in off-the-shelf computer systems for home users, and for the general user population to know about Linux as a viable alternative.  I also have very high expectations for Linux overseas, esp. in developing countries.  However, I hope that neither Linux nor Ubuntu become victims of their own success.  To clarify that statement, I would love for everybody to know about and have the ability to use Ubuntu (or another flavor of Linux), but I don’t want either to lose aspects that make them so great or gain baggage that will spoil their appeal.

9. If there was one thing you could tell all new Ubuntu users, what would it be?

If you are thinking of switching, I would highly suggest using some FOSS in your current setup before you make the switch.  Get comfortable with programs like Firefox, Pidgin, OpenOffice.org, and VLC – these will ease your transition so that when you get here, everything won’t be totally foreign.

After you install, you are very likely to sit face to face with the system and have a moment of “OH MAH GAWD what was I thinking?!”  Breathe.  Remember that the Ubuntu Forums are always just a few clicks away, with knowledgeable users ready and willing to help you out!

I recently became the maintainer for a site that uses a bit of JavaScript. Surprisingly, I have no previous experience writing or maintaining anything in JavaScript, so I needed to get up to speed, if only to know what is going on. To help me out, I picked up a copy of Shelley Powers’ new book, Learning JavaScript.

I am familiar with Shelley Powers’ work, having read Unix Power Tools, a book that holds a special place on my shelf for its usefulness and depth. She is obviously someone who knows what she is doing.

This book states in the preface that

Readers of this book should be familiar with web page technology, including Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and HTML/XHTML. Previous programming experience isn’t required, though some sections may require extra review if you have no previous exposure to programming.

That sums up the only negative thing I might be tempted to say about the book. Usually, O’Reilly’s “Learning” series books are excellent resources for complete newcomers and are the sort of books that I might point a novice toward. While this book is designed for the JavaScript novice, it is not the best resource for a programming/web creation novice. If you can’t follow or understand the following quoted sentences, this book isn’t for you. If you can, this book does an excellent job of covering the basics of JavaScript in depth and may end up being the only text you need on the topic.

JavaScript has just three primitive data types: string, numeric, and boolean. Each is differentiated from the others by the type of value it contains: string, numeric, and boolean, respectively.

My first exposure to programming was in 1981, using BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer. Over the years, I have studied (and often forgotten, but can certainly read a bit and understand the concepts of) LISP, C, Bash scripting, Perl, Python, and more. Lately I have spent more time using PHP and enjoying it, since that is the language of things like WordPress, Drupal, vBulletin and other commonly used CMS and interactive web site software. The two sentences quoted above seem perfectly clear to me, but I can imagine what they must seem like to someone with no experience with programming languages. So, now you have been warned. Let’s get to the good stuff for those who understand the jargon.

This book is clear, with enough detail to help you understand what is happening without bogging you down in the minutiae. The reader is expected to see how and why each facet of the language would be useful, so the examples given are simple and seem to be designed to help her get the feel for usage without pretending to be a cookbook of programming recipes, although some seem quite useful as they are such as Chapter 6’s code for browser detection, which allows you to modify content and/or how it is displayed based on the web browser being used to view your site.

The text covers everything you are likely to need while using JavaScript, and more importantly for me, most everything a person is likely to stumble across when reading existing code. You get a solid introduction to data types and variables, operators, statements, objects, and functions. This is built upon with chapters on debugging and cross-browser compatibility. This new second edition (just released earlier in 2009) has several updates and changes from the previous version including a wonderful comparison of the benefits of generating and processing XML data using Ajax versus using JSON.

If you are considering using JavaScript on a website that includes the dynamic creation of web pages, or if you have inherited one that you are now responsible for maintaining, this book would be a good resource to help you start to understand one of the more common languages used for doing so. This is especially true if you have any prior experience with any other programming language. If you want a cookbook, scripted-style, “do this, now do that” sort of beginner’s guide to making a site that holds your hand through the whole process, this is not the book you want.

Michael.Godawski is a great example of what makes the Ubuntu Forums so special. This is why I chose him for the next installment in our Ubuntu Community Interviews series. Michael started in the forums and in the Ubuntu community as a Linux novice and has progressed to being a consistently helpful contributing member, assisting new users with their problems and being a positive example of kindness and gentleness, combined with competence. It is people like Michael who make the overall Ubuntu community so welcoming to newcomers. He also is a great representation of the international nature of our forums and our overall Ubuntu community.

1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.
   My name is Michael Godawski, at the moment I am 23 years young. I was born in the beautiful Cracow in Poland. Today I live in Düsseldorf, Germany studying history of art and sociology. Not the typical studies for a “geeky” Linux user you say. And you are right.I am everything but a computer zealot. For me they are just machines, dead boxes full of weird stuff in it like cables, microchips, and who knows what…

   But you can do fantastic things with them. And you meet wonderful people with the help of them. Suddenly you are talking to people from the other hemisphere which is a great thing. They (the computers) become an inextricable part of our daily life so it stands to reason to get to know each other better. Nothing more but nothing less.

   What can I tell you more? I do some Aikido when I am not playing piano; when I am not on the mat, nor at the piano I visit the website you might know from hearsay – ubuntuforums.org.

   I like to read. I hate to read from digital displays.

   I like to travel, as far as my pathetic income of a student allows me to.

   I like to compose new music pieces. I hate superficial people.

   I like writing. I also like to throw my writings into the trash and don’t fuss about it.

2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?
   The first contact with “computers” was an ancient Atari 2600. I remember playing some really cool “games” on it like a flight-simulation, during which you had to destroy the adversarial plane – a simple moving dot. T’was cool, your imagination power was really tested to the maximum.After the Atari the big blur begins: blue dos screen was omnipresent for a long time. Then an ultra-fast Pentium 75 entered my life and with it Windows 3.11. Then came a Super Nintendo: again classics like Zelda, Secret of Mana, of Evermore, R-Type, Pilotwings enter my mind….

   Where is Linux you ask? Well, my first Linux experience was an epic fail. I installed Red Hat something on my PC and literally nothing has worked. Perhaps I was too young or the machine was too dumb, I don’t know, it was not the right time I guess.

   So I sticked with Mr.Gates for a while. And who knows if I had ever changed to Ubuntu if Windows would fulfill all my needs… But stop… I am strongly against bashing an OS as the inferior one. That’s a moot point. Every single OS has it right to exist and should act as an inspiration to make things better than they already are.

   So Windows was not a product of the Satan for me, you could play nice games on it and so on… but something was missing.

   And that something I think I have found in Ubuntu. Don’t ask me to specify this something. I guess it is not the juxtaposition but the blending of the digital with the natural, the tradition with the future, the machines with the people. Whoa we are getting far to philosophic here…

3. When did you become involved in the forums (or the Ubuntu community)? What’s your role there?
   I joined the ubuntuforums.org during a star-spangled night in 2007. Forgot the month.
   My nick was janquark.

   Then came a break. Real life took over. Taught me some things.

   Comeback to the forums with my real name somewhere in 2008.

   My role on the forums? I help where I can. Be it as a member of the Beginners Team and Unanswered Team or like writing guides and tutorials on my website –

   I have no specific role. And I do not want to be put into one category.

4. Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one?
   Yes, I am. Just recently approved.
5. What distros do you regularly use? What software? What’s your favorite application? Your least favorite?
   Favorite distribution? You bet it’s Ubuntu. Favorite software? Bluefish, VLC, Rhytmbox, OO, FF3, Gimp, gFTP, Transmission, sun xVM Virtual Box, pretty un-exotic list… but it works for me. Perhaps I will test some distribution in the future who knows, I do not feel like jumping to others now.
6. What’s your fondest memory from the forums, or from Ubuntu overall? What’s your worst?
   Let me say this. Honestly… if the time I spend on the forums be it as a helper, be it as the one with the question, would only slightly be somewhat an awkward, displeasing and annoying experience I would quit immediately. But it is not. Every time I log in I have fun. Sometimes the breaks between the logins are shorter sometimes they are longer. But I cannot point out a specific time when I felt especially happy or especially annoyed. It is rather a constant feeling of having a good time…
7. What luck have you had introducing new computer users to Ubuntu?
   “Oh… wow.. what is that? Is this Linux? Windows was not good enough for you he?”“I want to have this 3D Desktop too? But will it be difficult and complicated?”

   “You are using the console? Man…DOS – times are the past.”

   “You are on Linux? Well, yes then you don’t have that much trouble as I have on my §$%& Windows PC.”

   Only a sample of real-life quotations. I did not have many success stories of converting PC users to Ubuntu. But I could destroy some of the old prejudices and clichés. I especially like when people do not notice what OS I am using but what results I present them with it.

8. What would you like to see happen with Linux in the future? with Ubuntu?
   I want Ubuntu to become a truly worth-mentioning alternative for the average computer user. I especially stress the average in the sentence above.
9. If there was one thing you could tell all new Ubuntu users, what would it be?
   As my ubuntuforums.org title already says: It is only a machine.It is much more important to spend some time with your family, playing an instrument, doing some sport, traveling the world, reading a book, writing, painting, or just going out with your friends, than staring at a square display of a computer.

   In this spirit I hope I have not bored you to death and you know me a little better than before.

   Michael Godawski

I have read a lot of Drupal books as well as online materials. This particular book is one I was looking forward to for a long time. It was just released in December 2008 and is from O’Reilly Press. I have never made it a secret that I find O’Reilly’s books to be consistently good, and usually the best in any category in which they have offerings available. This book lived up to my expectations.

Using Drupal is easily the best book I have read so far for helping a person who knows nothing about the content management system (but who has a base familiarity with web hosting) figure out how the software works, how to add and configure features, and how to make powerful and useful web sites.

The book begins with a very clear, yet detailed introduction to Drupal; what it is, how it works, and the history behind how the project was conceived and the evolution of web site development over the years. It then continues with a long chapter that gives a crash course in each of the unique aspects of the Drupal system: content management, modules, access control, roles and permissions, taxonomy, theming and more are introduced with clear and useful examples.

After this is where the book steps out of the crowd and into a league of its own. Starting with chapter three we are served a series of well written chapters, each describing how to use a specific module or set of modules to do something wonderful with Drupal that is useful, interesting, and powerful. We learn how to use the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module with the Views module to build useful forms for displaying data in a way that is appealing and easily understood by site visitors. We are shown how to create multilingual sites, sites with product reviews, an internal wiki for group collaboration, an online store, and much more. All have clear descriptions of the process, the options available, and great examples.

One of my favorite chapters is number six, which discusses managing workflow. Perhaps you have a busy site with lots of contributors and a few people who are ultimately responsible for posting the created content after it is reviewed. This chapter describes how to make this process much more efficient than I would have done it originally by using actions and triggers with the Workflow module to have newly created content automatically enter an approval queue while notifying the editor responsible about its existence and still allowing the original user access to modify the content while it waits for approval. This allows you to see content in various states, perhaps approve or simply make notes on it, and not waste your reviewer’s time forcing them to check whether content is waiting for review or not by giving them automatic notifications (which may be configured many ways). That is a great idea that I would not have thought of or figured out by myself, and it is just one of the well thought out and elegant designs this book presents.

I still have one more Drupal book en route, and another that I want to buy. If I think they are worth sharing, I’ll post a review of each of them in the coming weeks.

I took a trip this last week, one that involved several hours of airplane travel each way. I took along a book that I just picked up that looked interesting. If you are like me, you have heard about and read through some of the philosophical foundations of software licensing, copyright law, and intellectual property, but sometimes it all seems so complicated that you aren’t really sure how it all fits together. Patents, copyright, trademarks and trade secrets, licenses and contracts all seem to overlap at times making a sort of intellectual property law soup that can be hard to digest. That is precisely why I picked up Van Lindberg’s Intellectual Property and Open Source: A Practical Guide to Protecting Code.

Now, I have read books by Lawrence Lessig and the writings of people like Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond. I am on board with the idea of making information, including program code, as free and accessible as possible. What has not been clear to me is the legal aspects. When is it possible to use GPL licensed code in a project? Which licenses have the greatest affect on the freedom of the code and in which ways? How is this different from software patents and why do these patents even exist? This is the tip of the IP iceberg.

This book was written by someone who works as a liaison between engineers and lawyers, translating for each side to the other. If this book is any indication, I bet he is quite good at his job. The information he presents is incredibly clear. While it is not intended as a substitute for legal advice from a lawyer who understands the specifics of the law in your locale, it is intended to give you an understanding of what the issues are, the definitions of and affects of patents, copyright, trademarks and trade secrets, and more, and I walked away after reading it feeling like I have a base understanding of the issues that is a lot deeper and clearer than I had before.

The book begins by giving a bit of history regarding the economic and legal foundations of intellectual property law. It continues from here into very specific discussions of each part, including the history and arguments leading up to why we have the laws we have today. Once the foundation is understood, it becomes more obvious how we arrived at our current (and rather messy) state of affairs.

The last third to half of the book focuses directly on open source software licensing. The book includes a discussion of the similarities and differences in perspective between the Open Source and the Free Software movements, the specifics of each of the main software licenses in use today and how they have and have not been tested in the legal system, gives advice for programmers and intellectual property creators who are also employees of a company to help them interact in good faith with their employers in the hope of preventing problems, and even such interesting legal areas as reverse engineering.

The book does not focus on the philosophy behind why someone would want to us a free or open license for their work. If that is what you are looking for, look elsewhere. However, if the specific legal issues interest you, but you don’t understand legalese, I don’t think I have seen a better text. I think it would be appreciated by a lawyer, a programmer, a project supervisor, or anyone who just wants to try to make sense of the topic.

Anyone following this blog for a while will notice that I have been reading a lot of Drupal books recently. I have a big project that I am working on for someone, and I want to do a good job for them. While I run Drupal on matthewhelmke.com, it is a very simple implementation solely to list my recently published work. I also ran Drupal on a site for my business, but that has since closed.

Anyway, this new site has and will incorporate some features that are new to me. Some are being carried over from an older version of the website that someone else created, and others are completely new to the site. Several involve media, both audio and video.

In the past, I have embedded photo galleries into Drupal installations, especially using Gallery2, and I have had fun figuring out how to embed non-photo media formats into gallery software like Coppermine. That was back in the days when Drupal 4 was currently supported, so after some searching, I decided it would be more fun to figure out everything using Drupal 6 and contributed modules, without making major modifications to massage in other software.

I started reading the main Drupal website, scouring the list of current modules for version 6. There is a lot of great stuff there, almost too much to sift through. I saw that the publisher of the Drupal 6 book and Drupal 6 Themes book that I had read also had one on multimedia, so I picked it up. I’m still looking at other Drupal books, too, including one that isn’t yet published but is being written by a fellow Ubuntu member, Emma Hogbin. If any seem worth mentioning once I read them, I’ll certainly give them a shout out later.

Okay, on to the book I’ve just finished reading, Drupal Multimedia.

Like the other two Drupal books I have read by this publisher, this book is relatively short, coming in at about 240 pages. It is also focused on only one part of using Drupal, which means that you don’t have to sift through a lot of information you are not going to use. This is definitely not a basic, “here’s how to install and get started easily” sort of text, but more of a precise guide to using Drupal to serve various forms of media files in a way that can be styled easily to fit in with your overall site theme, and that does not require the use of non-Drupal software or modules. In other words, my initial thought was that this book would be exactly what I needed for this phase of my current project.

The book assumes the reader is capable of installing Drupal on a server and assumes you have a base installation up and running perfectly before beginning. It then starts with a quick introduction to the building blocks of Drupal: nodes, regions and blocks, themes, and modules. It discusses how to use CCK to create custom content types and fields, views to set up how they will be displayed, and breezes through the important parts of theming these additions to match the overall look and feel of your site. That is all in chapter one.

The next several chapters are filled with easy to use plans for installing and configuring various modules to deal with images, galleries, thumbnails, slideshows, audio and video. The author quite clearly describes how to get each of these media to fit in and work with your site, exactly how you would like it to work.

I am still in the planning stage of this particular site’s upgrade. This was a good time to read through this book, because it gives me a chance to quickly and easily figure out what I can do for this project, without needing extra time for research or requiring big modifications, and enables me to discuss it intelligently and confidently with those making the decisions. If you have a similar project, the book is worth a look.

Now, if anyone knows how to run iTunes on Linux so that I can begin working on the details of making a podcast feed (from the Drupal Audio module) available in iTunes, I would be grateful. This is to fulfill a special request from the site owner, and I’ve figured out the feed from the Audio module, but without a way to run iTunes, I can’t test it without borrowing someone else’s computer, and that’s not a good thing. I will, but I really don’t want to do a virtual OS installation just for this (and pay for the licensing of a proprietary OS I won’t use for anything else).

In the past, I have worked for others. More recently, I have run my own business. A few months ago, I closed that business and moved back to the U.S.A. and am currently doing a little bit of freelance work, writing mostly, just until I begin my grad school program.

My experience with freelancing has been mixed, primarily because I have discovered that I have some gaps in my knowledge.

To see if I could get some help, I picked up this book, The Principles of Successful Freelancing. While the book is focused on working as a website designer, the main principles should apply to most fields. That is good. I have done some website design, but the bulk of my freelance work has been writing for books and magazines, or consulting.

I have enjoyed reading this book. In short, the content is about 20% pep talk, 20% reality check, with the remaining 60% being great advice and useful information.

Obviously, no book will ensure that anyone will be a success at freelancing, but I could have used the information in this book a long time ago, before I started my last business. That business was successful, but I would have benefited greatly from the insights in this book, and in retrospect, I would have done several things differently.

The Principles of Successful Freelancing gives great advice about what is really needed to be successful working for yourself. It starts by having you ask yourself the right questions to determine your attitude, your capabilities, and to make sure your perspective and expectations of the process are realistic. It then moves into practical steps of preparing for the transition from employee to self-employed, managing your finances, preparing your work space, finding and keeping clients, and so on. It even has a great chapter about learning how to find and maintain a healthy work and life balance as well as advice for making the transition in reverse, if you find this isn’t the life for you.

At my current stage of life, I don’t expect freelance work to be much more than a side project. That doesn’t mean I will never go back to working for myself, or starting a business with a partner or two, but for the moment I am content to do a bit of writing here and there to earn some extra income and prepare to do something else as my main source of money. This book has many good tips for freelancing part time as well, and has been well worth the time I spent reading it.

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I like Drupal. I use WordPress on this site and think it is fabulous, but for sites that want to do more to connect with readers or customers, I think Drupal is one of the easiest and most powerful solutions out there for creating a quality site with as little difficulty and pain as possible. I personally administer three sites built on Drupal and have built others.

I am in the process of making a new site for someone with a nice looking, but aging site that was built on Drupal 4.7, which is no longer supported. I am looking through the site’s functionality and theme and have upgraded both to use Drupal 5, but only to be sure that it has current security updates while I make plans with the owner for a complete redesign.

While researching ideas and functionality to present for use in the new site, I ran across a brand new book from Packt Press called Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions that I found enjoyable, and very useful. Now, I already know what I am doing with Drupal. I know how to read the project’s documentation to find and configure modules and themes, and I know how to get help if I need it. Even so, this book gave me some great ideas that I am going to share with the owner of the site I am working on and that I hope to use.

The entire book centers around creating a website for a fictional company, The Good Eatin’ Bistro. You start out with a discussion of the basic needs for the company, then begin with the basics of creating a site suitable to the customer’s needs. As the book progresses, you learn how to use some well-known and some other less-known modules to add interesting and useful functionality to the site that makes information easy to find and interesting to view.

Do you want a site that allows all members of a project you are involved in to have individual blogs, with a calendar to display events, and a map? No problem. Have a restaruant and want to put your menu online in a way that looks good, and is easily changed. Easy. Are you interested in creating a newsletter that people viewing your site can sign up to recieve occasionally? You can. All this and a ton more are in the book.

I think one of the most useful parts of the book for most people will be the last chapter, which talks about how to find out how to add functionality not discussed in the book, where to get help, and has some great tips on things that not everyone thinks about like hosting, hardware, and working with developers and artists.

One thing that crossed my mind is sharing the book with the owner of the site I mentioned. He won’t understand the technical details, but this book is written in a way that I believe will make what I am doing very clear and make it much easier for him to talk with me about his hopes, plans and desires. For that reason alone, the book is valuable to me, and it might be to others as well who are not actually interested in creating a site themselves, but who need to know enough detail to be able to discuss site building intelligently with a developer, designer or team of people working to create a site for them.

The book does not cover theming, but focuses solely on enabling features, enabling and configuring new functionality to a site built on Drupal 6. If you are interested in theming Drupal 6, I recommend a book I reviewed last month on the topic.

It has been a little while since we last had an installment of our interview series. With the new year fully begun and things moving back into a regular schedule, I think it is time we continue the introductions.

Today we get to hear from Karl, known in the forums as PartyBoi2. In the last two years, he has racked up over 3000 posts and helped tons of new users, attempting to focus on posts that have gone entirely unanswered as well as helping beginners with their adaptation issues.

1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.

Hi everyone, my  name is Karl and I’m a 34 male who in 2000 decided to leave my family and friends looking for greener pastures so to speak and migrated to Melbourne Australia from New Zealand. I have had a interesting last 8 years in Melbourne where I worked in the hospitality industry and unfortunately made a few wrong choices and ended up with drug and alcohol addictions which nearly cost me my life. In 2006 I quit my job due to my deteriorated health and put my trust and faith back in  Jesus and saw amazing things happen including freedom from the drugs and alcohol.

I don’t have any title or letters before my name and have had an average education and probably see myself as the ‘run of the mill’ type of guy who has learned most things by trial and error and experience. Currently I am doing some study and are hoping to start a new career in the IT industry as a Technician, with the possibility of starting a small computer business with some friends geared towards assisting underprivileged people.

2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?

When I was younger I use to  play the odd game on my friends Amiga computers but was a bit of a late bloomer I would say, as I did not take a real interest in them till a few years ago, even though I  got my first computer running win 98 around 1998.

In 2007 I was looking for an alternative to windows, as windows was out of my price range at the time and I needed a operating system so I could communicate with my family back in New Zealand. I had heard about linux many moons ago and thought that since I had plenty of spare time I would teach myself Linux. I had a look at a couple of different flavors of Linux but was unsuccessful at installing them, probably due to the fact I was a newbie and did not know what I was doing. Most of my searching for a Linux flavor came from searching www.linux.org  and since I had been unsuccessful up to that point of being able to install any I started to check out the forums and support for each Linux distribution that interested me and found that Ubuntu had a large active forum with plenty of Documentation. So I took the plunge and successfully installed my first Linux operating system which was Dapper 6.06 and launched myself into learning about the Ubuntu operating system.

As my interest in Ubuntu grew so did my interest in computers in general and before I knew it I had friends calling on me to fix their computers when ever things went wrong, which was a wonderful learning experience for me and encouraged me to learn more.

3. When did you become involved in the forums? What’s your role there?

I started using  the Ubuntu forums in about June 2007 even though I had signed up with the Ubuntu Forums in January of that year. At first I mostly read different threads in the Absolute Beginners section reading and learning about the different types of problems people were having then finally one day dived in and started replying to some of the posts.

I think my role really is just being part of the Ubuntu forum community like so many others and doing what we enjoy which is assisting others and helping out where we can. Generally I reply to posts that have not been answered and would  say that “Installation and Upgrades” is where I post the most and enjoy helping out the newbies.

4. Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one?

No, I currently am not a member, its not something that I have really thought to much about to be honest, but maybe down the track once I have contributed more it maybe something that I would consider.

5. What distros do you regularly use? What software? What’s your favorite application? Your least favorite?

Ubuntu is my number one distro at the moment , I have installed a few others like dsl and gentoo using virtualbox but have not really spent much time using them. Might look at other distros more once I get a bigger hard drive.

My favorite application would probably have to be deluge p2p program. I don’t think I have a least favorite applications but if I had to choose one, Evolution would probably be the closest as I have always preferred Thunderbird and never really got accustomed to it.
The main software that I use is the gnome-terminal, Thunderbird, Xchat Vlc, Nano and Firefox.

6. What’s your fondest memory from the forums, or from Ubuntu overall? What’s your worst?

My fondest memories have been when I have helped people get the answer to their question, and knowing the relief they feel when they can finally stop banging their head against the wall. Some of the other fondest memories would be the different types of people I have encountered on the forums and the eagerness they have to help others out. I don’t have any worst memories really the closest I would say would be when I replied to a thread and another poster told the original poster to ignore what I had posted and do it their way. As I have said I have not really had any bad experiences and generally I have a very good impression of the forums and the active members.

7. What luck have you had introducing new computer users to Ubuntu?

For awhile I did some voluntary work refurbishing computers for the underprivileged which also became a good opportunity to promote Ubuntu, when I first started they were sending out computers with windows on only, after awhile I started installing Xubuntu on a lot of the computers and they also started getting sent out and I was able to inform the people I work with more about Ubuntu as well as giving out a few Ubuntu disks.
Not long ago there was  someone who stumbled into ##beginners-help on network irc.freenode.net who was trying to connect to another server who had never heard of Ubuntu, after talking with them they downloaded and tried Ubuntu, so I guess I have had some success at introducing people to Ubuntu and I am sure there will be plenty more opportunity’s  to promote Ubuntu.

8. What would you like to see happen with Linux in the future? with Ubuntu?

I would like to see people’s awareness increased about Linux and Ubuntu and see more computers sold with the option to have Ubuntu come already installed.
Also to see some of the things that hold back Linux improved like games and drivers etc.

9. If there was one thing you could tell all new Ubuntu users, what would it be?

Breathe, don’t stress, it takes time to learn a new operating system. The forums are a great place to get help and remember that no question is stupid and that everyone was a newbie at some stage.

There is also the ubuntu wiki pages that can be helpful as well as irc ##beginners-help on network irc.freenode.net or #ubuntu on network irc.freenode.net