We got the very sad news this afternoon that family friend Todd Skinner lost his life in a fall while climbing in Yosemite yesterday. Our thoughts are with the families.

It seems Firefox has come out ahead of schedule. It is great to have spell checking while typing back in this uber web browser. Most of the extensions seem to work too. A good day all around.

One of the things that came with moving back to the west was the distance between us and one of the greatest NPR stations KUNC. Always a joy to listen to KUNC did not go for the all talk format, nor did they assume that the folks listening wanted a monoculture of classical music. Instead they have a great variety of music and an outstanding collection of shows from National Public Radio and American Public Media.

Enter Podcasting and the ability to get top notch programming delivered to my desktop and then to the iPod or CD. Combine this with iTunes Music Store and there's little reason one need leave the house, ever. But alas things are not perfect. Apple excludes Podcasts from the playlist in the iTunes Party Shuffle so the best way to play a somewhat random mix of music back throughout the day excludes podcasts. There are some scripts like this one that plays NPR's Hourly News reports. What we really need now in iTunes is a good way of scheduling our own semi-automatic quasi-radio schedules with a mix of music and talk that meets our needs. Read more about Podcast playback

I'm working with a complex network of Drupal sites and trying to find the best way to do federated users. The Drupal Module approach is a little too shotgun for this case. I need fine control, roles, taxonomy access etc. for each site but would like to have a common username and password. In the best of all possible worlds single-sign-on.

One approach uses MySQL views to accomplish this. So far this seems a good approach but it is not as simple to administer as I'd like. The Open Journal Systems approach is very much what I'd like to implement. An administrator goes to the main site and can see all the users and can assign users to various sites. It would be possible to do this with the roles in Drupal but one would quickly end up with a huge number of roles in managing just a few sites.

Authenticating all sites to LDAP would be another option worthy of consideration.

A discovery in this process has been that to share the sequences table most effectively using MySQL's ability to handle symbolic links for tables seems to be the best way. This solves two problems. One is modules that don't work well with table prefixing. The other problem it avoids is one of table locking when trying to use a MySQL view in place of a table. The drawback is you need an up-to-date version of MySQL and it may not work with other databases.