Posts from November 2009

Zend_Acl is a powerful tool to help manage access control logic, but it can be difficult to determine just where and how to use it. Today, I'll show you how this blog manages access control using Zend_Acl with some custom Doctrine record listeners.

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Tonight Jamie and I went to see the One O'Clock Lab Band's fall concert, with guest artist John Mosca, trombonist and co-leader of the Village Vanguard jazz orchestra. I don't think I'd been to a One O'Clock concert since I graduated a few years back, which is odd given how much I like jazz, and how close we've lived to UNT this whole time. But no matter; it was an excellent concert, and I hope to keep going back.

It did put some things in perspective as far as my playing goes—if tonight's trombone section is any indicator, I probably shouldn't have ever been in the band myself. Don't get me wrong, I can play the trombone…but I think I was never quite disciplined enough to play as cleanly and effectively as these guys did.

Since I am taking jazz classes again, I'm hoping to improve; once I get started with lessons and ensemble playing again I'm sure some of it will come back to me…but not without a good bit more shedding than I did last time around. Here's hoping for a better sense of discipline in the semesters to come.

This has been a year of busy weekends for Jamie and I, but these last couple of days have been a nice exception, especially after how busy last weekend was.

Late Friday afternoon I took off a little early from work so I could put together a simple patch for one Zend Framework issue; I can happily say I've participated in my first ZF bug hunt. I don't get to work much with Zend Framework in my day job, but it's always fun when I have enough free time available to contribute something, even if it's only two or three lines of code.

Saturday, I got up early to take the dogs in for a haircut; PetSmart did a very good job, especially on Wembley:

After that, we met up with Jamie's parents in Mesquite for a Gilmer ISD playoff football game. I'm not really much of a football fan myself, but it's fun to spend an afternoon out in the fresh air with the wife and in-laws …and the game caught my attention a few times, so it must have been good :)

Yesterday, meanwhile, was another great day at church; we played in the orchestra in the morning and then helped lead a combined kindergarten/preschool choir rehearsal. I think we're getting pretty good at wearing the kids out towards the beginning of practice; they tend to rehearse better if you give them a little bit of crazy right when they get there. I'm really impressed with how well they're handling the rests; we're doing a medley, and most of the kids stood absolutely still and silent between songs. We still need to work on the words a bit, but once that's taken care of I think we're going to have a great concert!

Recently, I've stumbled across a few rather interesting blog posts on how Drupal is perceived in other parts of the PHP development community. Thought I'd post the links and make a few comments here.

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Well, all this weekend's adventures seem to have paid off pretty well; I'm back now from DrupalCamp Austin and I thought I'd go ahead and review some of the things I took away from it all.

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So, I mentioned the other day that I'm going to DrupalCamp Austin this weekend, and that's certainly still true…however, it's been more of an adventure than I planned.

Jamie and I took off this afternoon around 5:00, excited for the weekend down south. The drive went well at first, but I think we might ought to have turned back when we saw the road on fire. Or when later on, our car just decided that accelerating wasn't hip anymore, and that it'd be better if we just sat by the side of the highway in the dark for awhile. (Despite several calls to the local highway patrol, nobody came to help us until we called the towing company instead.) Or when we ended up at the towing company office, and later at the neighborhood Sonic, with a pile of luggage, two small dogs, and no more car to speak of.

Fortunately, Jamie's brother and sister-in-law were kind enough to come pick us up and take us the rest of the way…so unless today takes another strange turn, I'll still be at DrupalCamp come morning.

Here's hoping :)

Here are some of the most helpful things I've learned about the Drupal features module in the last few weeks, written down in preparation for my DrupalCamp Austin deployment presentation this weekend.

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A couple of weeks back Adrian Rollett (one of my co-workers in the CWS office) and I submitted a talk proposal for this coming weekend's DrupalCamp Austin; we've been doing a lot of Drupal deployment research at work lately, and thought it would be worth sharing what we've found. The schedule was posted this morning, and it turns out we're in!

I'm excited to present; this will be my first time speaking at a professional conference, and I think the subject matter will be of interest to a lot of folks, especially people who deploy a lot of similarly-configured Drupal websites. Adrian will be leading off with a discussion of drush_make and install profiles, and I'll finish it up talking about the features module. Taken together, these three pieces of functionality make it possible to encapsulate your Drupal site's configuration in versionable source code, which in turn makes it one heck of a lot easier to redistribute those configurations as desired.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the November meeting of the DallasPHP user group; I've only attended sporadically so far due to how far away I live, but I decided I definitely needed to go to this one: they were talking about the Doctrine ORM, which is the database library behind this blog, and fast becoming one of my favorite open source tools.

One thing that the presenter (Jake Smith of getlegal.com) touched on towards the end of the evening was Doctrine's event listener system. I think it may help me replace some of the uglier backend code I'm using for access control on collections, since I do my access control at the application level (after the query is finished) rather than at the database level (during the query).

More on this later if I'm successful; meanwhile, many thanks to Jake for his great presentation!

This afternoon Jamie and I co-directed another session of the Denton Bible kindergarten choir. We took the kids "Christmas caroling" around various empty classrooms as a way of teaching them some new Christmas songs without losing track of their attention spans…turned out to be a great way to keep them on task. We've also been teaching them about various kinds of musical opposites: fast/slow, loud/soft, notes/rests, and so forth. I don't really remember what kinds of concepts I was learning at that age, but they seem to be getting it pretty well.

I really enjoy working with these kids, for quite a few reasons. For starters, I absolutely know that the work we're doing in there is making a difference. We're not just teaching them about music; we're giving them a reason to use it. A few weeks back some of the kids sang on the way out: "Love one another as Jesus loves you." We taught them the song, but we didn't tell them to sing it right then; they just wanted to. That's a very encouraging thing to see; they may not understand it completely, but it'll stick with them until they do, and that's an incredible blessing for them and for those of us teaching the songs.

I'm also learning a lot about how I relate to children. I've always been a bit awkward around little kids; I never know exactly what to say or do, or how to say or do it. For some reason, I'm always scared that they're going to judge me or tease me or something like that…which is sort of stupid of me, considering (a) it doesn't make much sense to fear the opinions of someone who's only been alive 5 years, and (b) these kids haven't really learned that behavior yet anyway (it's not like they're printer-puncher). No, none of those fears have turned out to be justified; these kids actually seem to want to know what we're teaching them, and they consider it important to respect their teachers (even if they don't quite know how just yet).

I suppose all this is part of the reason why Jesus encouraged us to come to him like little children. Children definitely aren't perfect, but they understand that they are in need, and that gives them a distinct advantage over guys like me when it comes to learning important lessons.

Beyond that, it's been very encouraging to me to see this kind of thing valued by the church. I've already blogged a bit on my other site about adults' participation in church music, but I think the issues apply to children's music ministry as well. Kids need to understand and appreciate the joy of serving God in this way, and having a program like this is one of the best ways to teach them that. Hopefully we will continue to do so effectively throughout the rest of the year.