The new stage module addresses both safety-netted staging of individual content and management of change sets.

It works by tapping into Drupal’s revision system, which already allows you to track changes to content over time and to revert to older content. For specified types of content, any additions or edits are published using the normal Drupal workflow, but on publish, the revision number is pinned at its last blessed point. You can edit or add any number of documents, and they all remain pinned at their pre-edit revision until you roll the whole batch of changes forward. When you roll a batch forward, all the revision numbers are brought to their most recent and pinned there until the next deployment. In the administration section, you identify staging and production servers. If you view an affected node from one of the specified staging hosts, you see the latest copy; if you view it from a production host, you see the pinned version.

This workflow is ideal for environments in which fairly frequent milestones are deployed. Because of Drupal’s handy dandy revision system, you can compare versions of the content across pushes to see what’s changed.

The module is hot off the presses this morning and so is probably still buggy and feature-poor, but it’s a start.

Not to be outdone by her little brother, Lennie has started reading and writing on a limited basis. She’s been increasingly curious about letters, and we’ve been helping her learn their sounds and doing the old “duh, ahh, guh” drill to show her how to string them together to make words. The other morning, she had written “cat,” and neither of us had explicitly drilled her on that one. When we asked her how she had come up with it, she said that she had just worked it out based on the sounds. I’m not entirely sure I believe her, but it’s certainly not beyond the realm of what’s possible.

She continues to be a good little artist as well, picking up things like perspective without any prompting. The other day, she drew one fish at sort of an angle and some other fish from the side; the sideways ones had only one eye (they were not flounder). This sounds lame and obvious if you don’t have small children, but it’s a pretty neat thing to watch happen.

I’ve flown Lennie’s little kite a few times recently, admittedly just in our little street and not higher than 20 feet or so, but it’s a step, yes?

Reading the original entry and the comments (it’s probably the most commented non-techy entry of mine) made me want to give it a little bump. Whether it’s vanity or an inclination toward public service I’m not entirely certain.

Flock makes money when people use the search widgets built into the browser to search through Yahoo, and we’re opting to donate 10% of the money we make through this edition of the browser to some green cause (to be determined later by user voting). It kind of makes me think of the free rice game: Play a fun little game and give rice to starving people just by playing. Keep your search engine set to Yahoo and use our product to actually do your searching and save trees at the same time. Who knows? It could be your search for Paris Hilton that enables an ecologist to rescue a baby panda from the clutches of a poacher bent on selling its organs to a far eastern natural medicine dealer.

Some strings from the back that look like model numbers:
HDD2188
MK8025GAS

Cylinders: 16383

Compaq P/N: 312954-001

Update: A coworker took a quick look at the images and said he guessed the piece pictured was a connector that could be removed. Sure enough, I gave a slight tug and the thing wiggled. So I tugged a little more, and there was a regular old IDE connector plugged into it. I currently have the drive mounted and am yanking pictures off of it. Whew.

Brioche is thought to be the bread Marie Antoinette was referencing when she (the story goes) said “let them eat cake.” My bread book has recipes for three grades of brioche, broken down into the classes “rich man’s,” “middle-class,” and “poor man’s” brioche. The primary difference among them is the quantity of butter, which was harder to come by (and keep) a few hundred years ago. Antoinette’s plea, then, was basically an attempt to swap a little butter for her own dear neck. I’ve made the middle class version so far, with its two sticks of butter and five eggs (the rich version has double the butter!). I’m not sure I have the nerve to make the rich man’s version. You can probably see why this bread translates into cake. And come to think of it, the bread actually looks a bit like pound cake.

This is the initial batch of flour, milk, and yeast, which ferment for less than an hour to start pulling flavor out of the flour.

Here I’ve added the rest of the ingredients (including a stick of butter, which accounts for the yellow color) and stuck in the fridge overnight.

This is the view from above after forming the shape of the bread. Looks kind of like a flower.

This is a better view of what the bread is likely to look like post-bake if all goes well.

And here’s the final product. The top ball slipped over to the side, so it looks kind of weird. The ball in the picture in my book has slipped a little bit, but not nearly this much. The ball in the book is also much smaller, and I think the weight of the risen dough had something to do with the slipping. The bread is tasty, in any case!

Although I was conscious of the intention and had a contrarian urge to break with expectations and pee anywhere but on the target, I found myself unable to resist the temptation. Even while considering things like the possibility that I was part of some filmic sociological experiment the privacy ramifications of which would be hairy to say the least, I trained my stream almost proudly on the little spiral, striving never to miss the mark (quite literally).

Needless to say, the trick was effective and my aim impeccable.

When I visited the urinal in Chicago, I found myself a little disappointed to have no particular target to aim for.