So this is fun.

I use the present tense because it's already been a fairly long-term project and the end isn't quite within sight. I've been working with Arduino microcontrollers for a few years now. Becoming a licensed ham radio operator has opened up a whole new world of applications for these little gems. I even bought the book "Arduino for Ham Radio", published by ARRL and authoerd by George Popiel, KW5GP. This is a guy after my own heart.

I've been using Drupal since version 5.2, but lately, I've really started to become annoyed with the framework. OK, not just lately, but more now than ever. Don't get me wrong, I love Drupal. It's just that everything is so complex, and what I really need is simplicity.

I started using the Codeigniter framework when it was still in its infancy. I understand that many folks have bailed in favor of more modern, comprehensive frameworks like Laravel, with which I've dabbled a bit myself. However, most of my sites are not mission critical or revenue generating, and web development is not a full-time job for me so maintaining my CodeIgniter sites is a practical option.

In April 2016 I had the privilege of participating in an ARISS space chat (Amateur Radio on the International Space Station). This is a little-known program which connects students who are licensed amateur radio operators with the astronauts on the space station. It was a tremendous event, the first ever in Rhode Island, and I was extremely moved while watching children ranging in age from 6 to 14 speak live to Jeff Williams aboard the ISS.

So for reasons too extensive to get into in this post, I decided to make the jump on my MacBook Pro from OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) to the latest OS X which at the time was 10.11 El Capitan. Prior to making this leap, I checked the compatibility of all my mission critical applications. Naturally, however, the upgrade came with many challenges when it came to setting up the local web application development framework. Apache was fairly straightforward, as was PHP 5.6. MySQL was another story.

Since Drupal 6 has reached end-of-life, I decided to dive in and upgrade the tech blog to 7.5. It wasn't nearly as smooth as all the minor updates, but I think I've managed to work out most of the kinks.

First off, the update.php script was throwing loads of "module not found" errors. Not sure why, but it doesn't seem to affect the actual performance of the site.

The next problem I had was due to my kludgy hack of the default "Garland" theme, which I fixed by resetting my custom logo selection under Appearance, then reloading the logo.

Now that Ubuntu 10.04 (Desktop version) is past the LTS period, I'm stumbling across more issues that I have to solve "manually". A particularly perplexing one lately was the inability to play flash videos from within ANY browser (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Chromium). I googled & regoogled, & tried everything I found, some of them recommending complex reinstallation procedures.

In the end, it was a relatively simple fix. Of course, YMMV.

You'll need to download the adobe flash plugin debian package file

For whatever reason, Apple decided to bury the Directory Utility application in Snow Leopard. You will no longer find it in the utilities directory, but it still exists in /System/Library/CoreServices. Simply "Go" there by selecting "Go to Folder" from the Finder menu (⌘⇧G), and type the path into the field. From here on out, the process is the same for Mac OS X 10.5.