Author Archives: iain_emsley

I am a developer in the Janet web team as well as occasionally working on some Open Source projects. The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and are not to be taken as a position or comment by Janet.

Showing error messages and redirecting in SugarCRM

I was working on applying some rules to SugarCRM this week. The logic hooks have allowed this to be build in before saving or deleting a file. Thinking about the UI and the actions, I wanted to create a set of redirects which would show an error message if something could not take place. Normally, […]

Parsing ActiveMQ statistics to check on queue health

In my last post about monitoring ActiveMQ, I looked at various advisory queues. I also mused on the possibility of reading the stats from the queues and topics and parsing them so that if issues occur, they can be dealt with quickly rather than waiting for an issue to be reported. Although this information is […]

Using advisory queues to monitor activity on ActiveMQ

In my last post on ActiveMQ, I mused on using mirrored queues to keep a message store for varying reasons. It is a naive way of doing this but it showed how such a thing can be done quickly. As part of some ongoing explorations into operations and governance of MQ systems, I have also […]

Simple message storing with ActiveMQ

I have been doing some digging into monitoring queues on ActiveMQ and pushing the messages into a message store for what ever reason. The main reason for doing this would be monitoring error messages and giving developers and operations a way of exploring what is happening in a queue if data at a recipient system […]

Attending the Open Humanities Hack

I’ve just come back from a couple of excellent days of Humanities Hacking, organised by the King’s College, London Digital Humanities department and the Open Knowledge Foundation. To be fair, it went slightly differently than I thought it would. After an interesting start trying to find the room we were in, a few of us […]

A new project

Helsinki, Finland. OkFest. I had just come out of the Hans Rosling talk (or seeing it on a screen) and was talking to various openGlam people about it and we were rather excited. The conversation started off innocently enough. It started small enough as well. As these things do, it grew slightly. One Sunday (and […]

Thoughts on the Drupal Ladder, the Oxford day and communities

I went to a Drupal Ladder event organised by Torchbox just north of Oxford. I had a lot of fun and learned a fair amount.  The ladder itself is a community initiative which is aimed at getting more contributors pushing patches back to the Drupal core, especially Drupal 8. It also serves as a way […]

Communities, hackers and curators – some thoughts on parts of the openGLAM meeting

I was fortunate enough to get invited to the OpenGLAM expert meeting (at which I felt a slight fraud – but you get over these things quickly) on Building the Cultural Commons as part of the OKFestival. James Harriman-Smith and I had attempted to do something similar with Panton Principles for Humanities and Literature a […]

Looking at mentions and users in a Twitter message

I was preparing for the recent OK Festival and discovered that the Weird Council was taking place; a conference on the awesome China Miéville. As you may guess, I am a bit of a fan. Unfortunately I was not aware that it had taken place so I watched it on Twitter. Whilst on my travels, […]

Aping Google Spreadsheets with Drupal Entity Forms and Droogle

One recent small project which I worked on was the integration of Entity Forms with Google Spreadsheets. In porting the corporate site, we had the challenge of having to provide some existing Google forms on to the new Drupal platform. Since Entity Forms are used, a nice integration was fairly assured with the Rules module. […]