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The Noble Bees

Last summer we had honey bees under our house. They were getting in near the ground through a crack where our back addition met the main building. I wasn’t sure if they were doing any harm, but I thought I didn’t really want them stinging my kids. So I piled gravel against the house as high as the crack went.

Right away I noticed that the workers were now thwarted. They buzzed around the former entrance, wondering where they should go. However, over the next day or two the bees underneath the house squished their way out underneath some of the house siding. They notified their friends of the new passageway and soon they were going about their business as usual.

Not to be outdone, I applied silicone to the cracks where they were going. Sure enough, they chewed their way through it and got through again. My final blow was a thick layer of toothpaste in every crack that looked like a possible entryway.

The workers were now effectively blocked, and I thought they would surely go off and take a vacation or something, but no—they tired themselves out looking for a new entrance, and eventually resigned themselves to sitting sentry-like on the side of the house in the hopes that their situation would change. There they died.

Something about those bees resonated with me. I admired their sense of duty, and felt kind of bad for them. It made me think about myself, and how much I enjoy my own work. I’m not sure what I would do if I didn’t have daily labour that was required of me. I would likely feel lost, like those bees. So many people live for the weekend, or their next vacation. Give me the right tools and a job I’m good at, and I will be quite content with that—hopefully not to a fault.

Solving a Joomla bug double whammy with Debug Mode

I love the Joomla content management system but a problem that all open source CMSs face is that security upgrades often introduce breaks in the system. I recently had to solve a bad one and thought I should document it in case anyone else finds this to be useful.

The client’s Joomla 2.5.9 website uses the Kunena forum component (version 3.0.1), and they informed me that a user was experiencing a 500 error. When I went to check the forum, the site was reporting a 403 error and Joomla was not providing any details on that. Unfortunately the client’s host does not make it easy to view error logs, so I made some database backups thinking I would have to restore to a previous version.

Fortunately on a hunch I decided to search the web for “403 error” and “Kunena” and turned up a suggestion to enable Kunena’s debug mode along with Joomla’s debug mode. I put the site offline, then enabled the debug modes. Now the site output all sorts of useful information, and the first error I discovered was that an outdated “j4age” statistics component was causing an error. I disabled that component and voila, now I could see the 500 error that the client reported: “Fatal Error: Class ‘CKunenaLink’ not found in components/com_kunena/template/customTemplate/html/topic/default_message_actions.php on line 61”

This was much easier to resolve. I used TextWrangler to compare my version of that file with the default one provided with Kunena 3.0.1. My template (originally created for the Kunena 2.0 version) was referencing the CKunenaLink class which apparently has been deprecated. I replaced that line with the updated version and that solved everything. I turned off the debug mode, put Joomla back online and away it went.

Lesson learned: use Joomla debug mode before anything else!

A New Saskatchewan Logo

We have had conservative leadership both in our province and our country for a few years now, with mixed results. I will try not to trumpet my own political views but I feel the need to speak up about a recent action by the Saskatchewan Party.

For you non-Saskies out there, you should know that we have a very nice logo that in recent years has fell out of usage, apparently because its strong agricultural imagery is no longer representative of our overall industry outlook:

When it was first proposed that we develop a new logo, the idea was met with a fair bit of resistance. So for a while, the province resorted to using our coat of arms:

I thought this was a fine compromise. However, in recent years the Saskatchewan Party leadership has quietly begun using the logo below (I found versions in a number of colour variations):

While I could comment on the low-key methods they used to introduce the logo, my main issues are with the design itself. I believe in constructive criticism, so instead of just slamming it point by point, let me show you how I would fix it.

1. Let’s clean up that type shall we? Put the “of” back to a subservient role where it belongs, and go back to good old Helvetica.

2. What are those swooshy things? People flying right over our province, that’s what. What we need here is to change the swooshes to come from within the province. That way we can be known as a fountain of sorts. We export all sorts of good things, so let’s show it.

3. I think we need more swooshes and more symbolism. Let’s put in some growy-looking shapes that are reminiscent of the old sheaf logo, and a sun rising.

4. Green and gold? Identical to the ruling party’s colours? Come on. We are the “Land of Living Skies” (if our license plate is to be believed) so why not use a palette which is reminiscent of a nice sunset:

There you have it: a properly designed, party-neutral logo that properly represents our thriving province. I am against spec work, by the way, so if you want to use this logo you will have to elect me as the leader of some rival party and then vote me into office based on my other merits. If elected I propose that we institute the new identity on April 1, 2015.