Talks submitted to IPC/WTC

I just submitted two talks for the +International PHP Conference.

Take your PHP app to the Cloud with Google AppEngine

Do you worry about not having the right amount of servers and configurations to handle your PHP app's success? Or do you worry about paying too much money for an over-architected solution? Google’s AppEngine only charges you for what’s used and can automatically scale up & down to meet your app’s demands. It’s a great way to deploy your PHP application into the cloud with managed scalability, performance and reliability. This session will guide you through a typical implementation as well as show you how to migrate your existing applications over.

I was thinking I can use the experience I gained from the Google Cloud Developer Challenge to build upon for this talk.

I also submitted a workshop idea for +Drupal. I figure I'm still recently engaged enough with Drupal to tap into an outsider's perspective and at the same time, have the years of experience to share.

Building Your Web Presence with Drupal

If you’ve been considering using Drupal for your website, but find the documentation and vastness of the platform overwhelming, this workshop will give you a guided introduction that will give you the confidence you’re looking for. We’ll start with an overview and then go through the steps of building a site or migrating an existing site. Then we’ll highlight contributed modules & themes that can take your site to the next level. We’ll also cover how to extend Drupal by writing your own custom modules to extend Drupal farther. Finally, we’ll talk about some typical server configurations to ensure your website can handle its traffic.

And for good measure, I also submitted a talk I've given before on +Google Analytics to +WebTech Conference:

Making Cents from Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool that should be utilized by every website. At first glance, you can easily retrieve common metrics, such as pageviews, visitors, etc, but if you don't dig deeper, you're missing out on some really powerful ways to monetize your website even further. This session will guide you through these deeper layers, helping you monetize your traffic.

What do you think? Sound like something you're interested in?

How to work with confirm_form in Drupal 7

Either my google-fu is losing its kung-fu grip or no one has really good documentation on confirm_form. This post hopes to change that (on both respects, since I hope to be able to find my own post later ;)). I have someone who's writing some custom Drupal module code to delete an object, but we want to confirm it with the user before actually deleting the object and she's running into a wall trying to understand how to accomplish that.

The trick is to use $form_state['rebuild'] = TRUE in your submit function. This kicks it back to your form method. So the form method should have two branches, one if it's the initial request and one if it's the confirmation request. Then your submit method should also have two branches, one for the initial submission and one for the confirmation submission. You should also use $form_state['storage'] to store the underlying states and data required for state discernment and form completion. Here's a simplified gist of what I'm getting at:

The healthy dose of dpm()'s are useful to help figure out what's going on, too. If you don't know, dpm() is a great function that's provided by the devel module.

I also uploaded the example module on GitHub for your perusal, download and adoption. :)

My Favorite 2013 Videos

I submit my favorite 15 videos from 2013. Not necessarily that they were created in 2013, but that I became aware of them in 2013. Why 15? Why not? Let's go!

#15: Flying Eagle POV

It's one thing to imagine this or to see a CGI rendering from the LOTR movies, but it's another thing altogether to see it for real.

#14: Dream of the 90's - Portlandia on IFC

Ok, so this is not safe for work or safe for kids, but as a teenager of the 90's, I can relate to a lot of this. I just wish I watched this before going to DrupalCon in Portland back in May ... it would have explained a lot.

#13: Zachary Quinto vs. Leonard Nimoy

Battle of the Spocks. A commercial, but to hear Nimoy sing the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins again is priceless.

#12: Most Expensive Starbucks Drink

This should probably be stricken from the list for its hedonistic and consumer values, but if you were wondering how much you could spend on a Starbucks drink, look no further.

#11: Two Monkeys Demand Equal Pay

Good to see that humans aren't the only selfish species.

#10: Feynman on trains

My wife is ahead of me on appreciating Feynman and how he can make previously unapproachable subjects not only approachable, but understandable to the point where you could teach it. I enjoyed this talk on trains and had no idea they worked like this. Never really thought about it before, but now I get it.

#9: Chompy the Shark

Yeah, I couldn't paddle fast enough and never (ever) go into that body of water again.

#8: Billy Joel singing with a student accompanist

It took some stones to request this, but the guy has chops and the end result is pure magic.

#7: Speed Painter on Anderson Cooper

I had to watch this multiple times.

#6: Volvo Trucks Stunt with Jean-Claude Van Damme

Crazy stunt. Of course, Chuck Norris had to top that.

#5: Latte for SharShar

SNL has really stepped up their game this year with some great comedy, including this great parody skit on the new Starbucks Verismo system. This video is no longer available on Hulu, but it looks like you can watch it on Vimeo.

#4: Almost Pizza

Another SNL gem. This is available on YouTube ... for now. I miss Bill Hader & Kristin Wiig.

#3: What Does the Fox Say?

I'm sure I lose some hipster points for this, but it is so great and bonus points for being something I can play (& dance) with my kids.

#2: New Hotspurs Manager

When NBC got the rights to the Premier League, they made a promo video with Jason Sudeikis.

#1: Jaws recut

I will never look at Jaws the same way again and if anyone ever brings up the Jaws movie around me, I will start laughing (at least on the inside). Sooo good.

I created a playlist of the 13 videos available on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Well, that was fun

So I completed work on my Google Cloud Developer Challenge project and it's live and submitted for consideration. I even put together a quick video walkthrough. Now it's time to sit back, cross my fingers and hope for the best.

The last few days have been a mad scramble, as I was done earlier, but when it came to deploying the project on the real live AppEngine, I ran into a series of production issues. The big one I posted about on StackOverflow, but after not getting any help there, I stumbled across this brilliant AppEngine/CodeIgniter boilerplate on GitHub, so I restarted the project from that and copied my controllers, models and views over there. That worked, so then it was small polish things.

+Ian Barber wrote a great post about improving the credential flow, so that inspired me to come up with a logo, which I did with the Drawing app in Google Drive. I also took out the Drive scope since I wasn't yet using Drive, although I think I will at some point, so the users can pull in files from Drive as well as save their results there.

Then when it time to submit the app, I realized the domain had to be in the format gcdc2013-X.appspot.com. D'oh! Since you cannot rename the instance name, I then had to go and create a new application, configure it, setup billing, etc for the new (& proper) name.

So now we wait & see.

Great news, even! [appengine project]

Not sure why I didn't stumble upon this until now, but I'm glad that I waited to develop the user aspect to my project. The PHP AppEngine folks have an unofficial blog with some neat tips & tricks, including this dandy to get the Google PHP API client library working inside of your AppEngine app. This is huge because with the library, you can take advantage of some of Google's modern systems.

So now instead of using AppEngine's native User class, I can now use my OAuth login approach. The old (2007!) User class was ok, but you aren't able to do much with the resulting user, beyond getting their nickname and ID #. With OAuth, you can get their profile picture to slap into your header, ask them to integrate with their other services (which you can use the library for, too).

My guess is that Google's working towards getting the library integrated into the runtime, but there's probably some dust that needs to settle somewhere.

Fun with AppEngine Task Queues

So AppEngine Task Queues are fun and I say that without really digging deeply in the matter. As part of my project, I incorporated them because I figured my app may take a while to crunch through the data. You have a 60 second limit to normally respond to a user's request, which is probably sufficient enough for my needs, but just in case, I decided to use a Task Queue. That increases the crunching time limit to 10 minutes, which should totally be fine for my needs. If you need more than 10 minutes, I would suggest breaking your crunching into smaller tasks.

One of the issues I ran into was that my task would not execute. I set up the code in its own CodeIgniter controller and I was able to directly access it with my web browser, but when I added the URL to the task queue, it would just sit there. It would try to execute, but nothing would happen. I found my first clue in my AppEngine logs, which read something like this:

INFO     2013-11-06 02:52:10,700 module.py:608] default: "POST /worker/process_set HTTP/1.1" 302 -WARNING  2013-11-06 02:52:10,700 taskqueue_stub.py:1980] Task task4 failed to execute. This task will retry in 0.800 seconds

A task has to return a status between 200 and 299 (inclusive), so that 302 was the clue. 302 is the code for Found and usually is followed by an HTTP redirect Location header. I tried several different things, but what finally worked was declaring the worker path explicitly in my app.yaml (vs. letting the default handler take care of it). This is something I would have to do eventually to lock down the URL from any external requests.

Uploading in GAE is different

Chugging right along and hit a speed bump, figured it out and got it working. Coming from the CodeIgniter File Uploading Class, the Google AppEngine (GAE) approach is totally different. You pretty much have to throw away what you know & use there. Direct file uploads to your handler will not work. You have to use the GAE API to create a dynamic upload URL to put as your form's action. You miss out on CI's ability to limit file types and image dimensions (you can limit file sizes), but GAE adds cloud storage and the ability to receive very large files (up to 100 TB). GAE passes back the $_FILES super global to a handler you specify when you create the URL.

So the first step is to add the API inclusion in your CI controller. Then in your handler that creates the upload form, you call createUploadUrl and pass that into your template for the form action parameter. Then you create another handler (which name you used in the aforementioned createUploadUrl method) and you can verify the upload from the $_FILES parameter and then do whatever you need.

Here's what my controller ended up looking like:

The Google documentation on the topic was a really good reference. Note that the user has 10 minutes until that dynamic URL expires.