Coding

All files and directories created in a Unix environment such as Nova are assigned permissions based on the level of access available to different user groups. In order to understand permissions better, we will discuss users, groups and ownership. Users Unix is a multi-user operating system. It serves many users who have ownership or certain privileges of resources on the system. You have recently set up a Nova account at UMUC and therefore have become one of its users. ...

Drupal can be installed on any number of environments, but since it was developed primarily to run on an Apache server with PHP and MySQL database, it makes sense to mimic this environment as much as possible in a development sandbox. There are LAMP applications for both Windows (WAMP / XAMP) and Mac OS (MAMP) which can serve as a Linux replacement, however recent innovations with Virtual Machines and Vagrant means that we can re-create a more native environment for development quickly and easily. Below I will describe how you can setup Drupal using some of these tools in less than 10 minutes. The Vagrant setup used here is Scotch Box. The objective is to setup a Drupal development environment with full LAMP stack capabilities including command line access and Drush integration using the native Linux file system for speed and compatibility. ...

Lately I’ve been carrying out some work involving the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). There is tons of information about FOIA on the web including on the official foia.gov website, however I decided to summarize the main points of this law in an easy to read / digestible format. This article is broken down into three main parts, a brief intro, the main areas covered in the law, and concludes with the exemptions. ...

I recently migrated this site to Media Temple’s managed Wordpress hosting plan. For a number of years I had been running a dedicated server through CoreNetworks, which I have been extremely happy with. More recently however I have come to realize I no longer have the need for dedicated server and began researching cheaper managed hosting alternatives, which brought me to Media Temple. Over the years I have heard a lot of good things about this company so when I found out about their WordPress plans, I decided to make the plunge and migrate carnaghan.com to its new home. So far my experiences have been relatively positive. ...

For a while now I have been using WAMP as my daily driver for Drupal development on my Windows 8 machine. For anyone who is a Drupal developer and uses WAMP (or a variation LAMP stack on Windows) has probably felt the pain it brings in terms of sluggishness, incompatibility with native Linux applications (Drush anyone?), and a headache administer PHP modules. I won’t even get into the problems I’ve had in the past getting cURL to work properly in Windows. I decided it was finally time for me to explore Vagrant as I had heard a lot about it but had never taken the time to do any amount of research. ...

I am often interested in hearing about how people within the software development community keep up with the latest changes in tools, technologies and programming languages. It seems that every few months there is a new framework or better way of doing something in an entirely new tool-set or language. For me personally, I don’t have much time during the day to spend reading the latest industry blogs and online development new outlets, so to help supplement this I routinely listen to a number of podcasts on my commute to and from the office. ...

Have you ever had a need to test email functionality on an application within your local development setup? I have found this process to be both time consuming and confusing in the past, especially when working within firewall restrictions. Of course we can always test with real dummy email addresses, but what if we accidently send a mass email out to real users? It is much better to test everything locally first. ...

Recently Microsoft started offering a $100 per month credit to all MSDN subscribers for using their Azure cloud based services. A lot of developers here at ICF have MSDN subscriptions so I definitely recommend checking this out if you haven’t already done so. I never really considered using Azure for anything as I had assumed it was mostly used as a cloud based hosting service similar to Amazon. It wasn’t until I recently read a blog post by Scott Hanselman that I realized Azure could be used for much more than that. ...

Last week I attended my first Drupal ’learn sprint’. For anyone interested in contributing to the Drupal community, learn sprints are a great way to network with other professionals in the area while learning how you can contribute to Drupal. ...

The decision tree application is currently a work-in-progress. The main source files can be downloaded here: Source Files. The current demo is non-functional and only shows a subset of the application, which will be developed in the upcoming weeks: Demo Application (Work in progress) ...