My employer’s current practice is an annual Sitecore upgrade. I recommend this as the maximum interval; we should do more frequent upgrades when important-to-us new features, fixes, or enhancements are released. It may be prudent to even consider twice-a-year upgrades given Sitecore’s rapid release schedule.

Here’s the specific benefits of frequent upgrades:

• Fast track putting UI enhancements and bug fixes into production.
• Puts new features front and center. Even if we don’t use these features right away, they are often the basis of near-term enhancements.
• Fast track putting enhanced modules into production. Many times, newer module versions require upgrades of the base product, too.
• Avoids bifurcated environments. Aggressive upgrade policies reduce the pressure to try out and do development on newer releases than what we have in production.
• Avoid cost of delaying implementing new features. We once delayed upgrading from 6.2 to 6.4. This contributed to not-aggressive-enough learning of 6.4’s enhancements, causing our old technology to get more deeply ingrained in our practices. This made our move to 6.4′s paradigm more complex.
• Reduced upgrade complexity. We and other customers experienced difficult upgrades when we failed to upgrade frequently. Frequent upgrades means each upgrade is more of a snack than a huge meal.
• Better supportability. While Sitecore has a generous support policy—they appear to support many versions going back—it is inevitable economic reality that dusty versions will have a harder support experience. The best companies are aggressively forward-looking.
• Cleaner install and better reliability due to reduced use of hotfixes. If we do a frequent upgrade regimen, we can often defer hotfixes to when problems get fixed in future releases. With infrequent upgrades, we will be under pressure to rely more heavily on hotfixes (customizations) that 1. must later be backed out, 2. may not be as well-tested, creating unintended consequences during use, and 3. when backed out, could cause unpredictable changes.

My employer has a legitimate fear of frequent upgrades due to its experience with our ERP. Indeed, upgrades to this ERP are monstrously complicated. A Sitecore upgrade is a fraction of the complexity of an upgrade or even a patch on our ERP.

Due to the way Sitecore is architected—it generally disallows spaghetti code or direct modification of vendor code or logic—and my disinclination to customize the base product, compared to our ERP, it is rare that we will run into code incompatibilities with newer versions. Our custom code will usually “just work”.

To conclude, I recommend frequent upgrades whenever possible. It has convincing benefits, and, really, it is just a sign of an engaged product owner that wants a relevant, competitive web marketing presence.

A lot of FODMAP resources recommend avoiding gluten. This is bad advice: the FODMAP diet is about problem carbohydrates. Gluten is not a carbohydrate; it’s a protein! Avoiding gluten is not a goal of the FODMAP diet.

Here’s why many are confused. Gluten-free products generally do not contain wheat, barley, or rye. These should be avoided on a FODMAP diet. Therefore, FODMAP-sensitive people may have success with some gluten-free products.

But not all! Some gluten-free products have FODMAPs. For example, Rudi’s Multigrain gluten-free bread has inulin. People on a FODMAP diet cannot have inulin; it’s a long-chain polymer of fructose!

So what’s my point? FODMAP dieters will probably end up buying gluten-free products. However, you’re doing it not because of the gluten–a protein–but because of the carbohydrates. Products that contain gluten but do not have the problem carbohydrates, like beer, are generally not a problem on the FODMAP diet.

I fired off the below letter to my Texas legislators. If you are also concerned, contact your legislators (find them here) and Dallas County Schools (info@dcschools.com).

My letter:

Senator Duell and Representative Sheets,

Dallas County Schools has installed automated ticketing machines on its school buses. These machines photograph motorists who pass a stopped school bus that has its red lights flashing.

I am aware of motorists getting pointless $300 automated traffic citations, These are due to how Dallas County Schools bus drivers are using their flashing red lights.

In this case, school bus drivers are activating their red lights when departing or entering bus occupants are simply walking between a bus and a school. These pedestrians will not cross a road. Last I checked, cars don’t drive on sidewalks or across school lawns, so this use of red light flashers to stop cars on an adjacent road–where departing or entering school bus occupants won’t even go–is an abuse of power and disrespectful to Texas citizens.

This needs legislative attention for two reasons:

First, if the law requires bus drivers to use flashing red lights even when it’s pointless, the law should be revised. Drivers should only be permitted to use flashing red lights when students entering or departing the bus are actually going to cross the road that the bus is on.

Second, if this is due to Dallas County Schools policy, then this needs to be investigated by the legislature as an unprecedented cash grab. $300 per automated citation is egregious. This is 400% the cost of a statutorily-authorized red light camera ticket. And that begs the point: are automated ticketing machines on school buses even statutorily-authorized?

I realize we’re in tough economic times, but it’s egregious for Dallas County Schools to collude with area cities to set up unusually expensive traffic tickets enforced by a statutorily-unauthorized automated ticketing machines, apparently so that they can abuse motorists who, while being on the wrong side of the law, could not have possibly endangered a student: you can’t run over kids that won’t even be in the road!

Aren Cambre

Drupal has its uses, but I only recommend it for point solutions or, if in large-scale use, for cookie-cutter things where all the Drupal instances are configured almost identically and share little content. I generally do not recommend it for enterprise-wide WCM.

I wrote:

I am assembling this dataset for my in-progress doctorate. (I am a doctoral candidate.)

A couple of notes to help interpretation:

• This is for all officer-written traffic tickets: speeding, red light running, paperwork violations, equipment violations, etc.
• Does not include:
  • Tickets unrelated to traffic, like disturbing the peace or drug possession.
  • Parking tickets.
  • A modest % of tickets that I could not geocode due to no address, bad address data, or limitations of my geocoder.
  • Portions of Dallas outside Dallas County.
  • Tickets written by other jursdictions. I left out Texas Department of Public Safety because they have hardly any activity in Dallas County except for NTTA freeways. Dallas heavily patrols the NTTA-owned Mountain Creek Lake Bridge, however!
  • Tickets sent directly to county courts instead of municipal or JP courts, like DUI.
  • Automated ticketing machines like Dallas’s red light cameras.
• This may modestly understate Dallas County sheriff and constable tickets because I have about 2 more years of Dallas city tickets in here.

I find it surprising that the most significant traffic enforcement activities are generally not along major roadways, but rather are in areas of town commonly perceived as dangerous.

Two huge peaks are at the Five Points area (Park Ln. east of US 75) and Ferguson/Buckner. Other obvious areas of emphasis:

• Downtown
• Maple and Wycliff
• Just north of Bachman Lake
• Pleasant Grove
• Oak Cliff
• Fair Park
• North Skillman
• Red Bird area

It’s as if traffic enforcement is largely being used as a pretext for arrests and searches that might otherwise be difficult to pass constitutional muster. That may be interesting as commentary, but it is not a focus for my research. I’m really focucing on the safety effect of enforcement.

There is an apparent focus on intersections, although it’s possible that this is an artifact of officers writing in the nearest intersection for the ticket’s address.

This time, I found that a small portion of Dallas County Sheriff and Constable* traffic tickets indicated which lane a speeding citation came from. I teased out that data and got this:

Note that this is mainly for freeways.

Lesson learned? Stay out of the left lane to avoid speeding tickets.

*Constable traffic patrols were disbanded a few years ago, but my dataset includes their activity.

We have over 11,000 accounts in our Active Directory. I needed a list of the Sitecore users, who are only a small percentage of the 11,000.

We have nothing in Active Directory that sets them apart, like group membership.

We architected our solution so that users are never assigned directly to items; users are members of Sitecore roles, and we assign Sitecore roles to items. All I have to do is rifle through all my Sitecore roles.

So how do I find my users? It took a little C#. Here’s the core code:

var roles = Sitecore.Security.Domains.Domain.GetDomain("sitecore").GetRoles();
foreach (var role in roles)
{
    foreach(var roleMember in Sitecore.Security.Accounts.RolesInRolesManager.GetRoleMembers(role, false))
    {
        if (roleMember.AccountType == AccountType.User)
        {
            var userObject = Sitecore.Security.Accounts.User.FromName(roleMember.Name, false);
 
            // only adding SMU domain users
            if (userObject.Domain.Name == "myActiveDirectoryDomain")
                AddUserToList(userObject);
        }
    }
}

This gets all Sitecore domain groups and extracts all users who are a member of my corporate domain. Of course, you’ll replace myActiveDirectoryDomain with your own domain name.

I created a separate AddUserToList method to handle adding these items to a Dictionary:

private void AddUserToList(User user)
{
    if (!_users.ContainsKey(user.Name))
    {
        _users.Add(user.Name,user);
    }
}

After the core code runs, you’ll need to code your own stuff to spit out what’s in the dictionary.

Here’s what I used:

foreach(var user in _users)
{
    var row = new TableRow();
    OutputTable.Rows.Add(row);
 
    row.Cells.Add(new TableCell { Text = user.Value.Profile.UserName });
    row.Cells.Add(new TableCell { Text = user.Value.Profile.FullName });
    row.Cells.Add(new TableCell { Text = user.Value.Profile.Email });
 
    if (user.Value.Profile.FullName.Length == 0)
    {
        row.CssClass = "alert";
    }
 
    var rolesCell = new TableCell();
 
    foreach (var role in RolesInRolesManager.GetRolesForUser(user.Value, false))
    {
        if (role.Domain.Name == "sitecore")
        {
            rolesCell.Text += "
 " + role.Name;
        }
    }
 
    rolesCell.Text = rolesCell.Text.Substring(7);
    row.Cells.Add(rolesCell);
}

Note that I already had a Table named OutputTable on my ASPX page.

Tadaa! The result is a list of all my domain members who are Sitecore users.

I propose Gay Credits to absolve Chick-fil-A guilt. They’re cheap, only one penny per $10 of Chick-fil-A spending!

Here’s why:

Chick-fil-A donated $5 million to anti-gay groups over 8 years (2003-2010). Over this time, Chick-fil-a’s total sales were $18.8 billion.

What percentage of that $18.8 billion went to anti-gay groups? $5 million ÷ $18.8 billion = 0.027%. That is, 27 thousandths of a percent. In other words, for every $10 you spent at Chick-fil-A, about a quarter of a penny ($0.0027) went to an anti-gay group.

If this guilts you, you can have four times the impact of Chick-fil-A on the culture war if you donate only 1 penny to a pro-gay group for every $10 you spend at Chick-fil-A. Yes, just one penny!

Each penny is a Gay Credit, and each Gay Credit absolves $40 of Chick-fil-A purchases!

Now how do I make a market for this…

A message from the author

The point here is that one’s contribution to an anti-gay group through buying at Chick-fil-A is smaller than a rounding error, and you can 4X Chick-fil-A’s impact for almost nothing.

All this aside, public sentiment is clearly going against the anti-gay groups. Chick-fil-A’s donations aren’t affecting the long-term trend, which is clearly favoring equal rights for gays.

Appendix

Chick-fil-A’s annual sales numbers:

• 2010: $3.6 billion (source)
• 2009: $3.2 billion (source)
• 2008: $3.0 billion (source)
• 2007: $2.6 billion (source)
• 2006: $2.3 billion (source)
• 2005: $1.9 billion (source)
• 2004: $1.7 billion (source)
• 2003: $1.5 billion (source)

Here’s how. It can be tedious, but these make it easier:

1. CDs are mostly stripped-down instances of full Sitecore environments.
2. Any needed database changes are handled when upgrading the content mastering (authoring) environment.

You only need to do 3 things on CDs.

But first, two notes:

1. If you upgrade the CDs before you’ve upgraded the content mastering (CM) environment, you may have unstable CDs until the CM upgrade is done.
2. Sitecore’s .update files are really Zip files. Just open it with your favorite Zip program, like 7-Zip, and it works like any other Zip file.

For each update file, do the following three steps. You must perform them in the release order of the update files, starting with the oldest release.

1. Add new or changed files

Extract everything in the addedfiles and changedfiles directories of the update file. You’ll extract them over the web root. Tell your Zip program to overwrite existing files.

2. Delete files no longer needed

This is the hardest part. Inspect the update package’s deletedfiles and deletedfolders directories of the update file. Every file (not folder) under each corresponds to a file or folder under your web root that needs to be trashed.

Note the wording: “every file“. For example, in Sitecore 6.5.0 rev.110602_fromv640rev101012_2.update, there is a file named AuthoringFeedback under deletedfolders\sitecore\shell\Applications\Analytics. That means you would delete the directory at sitecore/shell/Applications/Analytics/AuthoringFeedback under the web root.

You may have to dig deeply and thoroughly to find all files and directories.

3. Edit .config files.

Do all .config file changes that correspond to the update package you just handled. A list of .config file changes are at http://sdn.sitecore.net/Products/Sitecore%20V5/Sitecore%20CMS%206/ReleaseNotes/webConfig.aspx.

Wrapping up

If you’re going through multiple upgrades, it’s tempting to do all them at once–do all the file additions at once, then all the file deletions, and then do all the .config changes. This might work as long as you work through the update files in their release order, starting with the oldest release, and if Sitecore didn’t delete something and add it back or vice versa.

For example, suppose you were doing four updates at once. In update #2, a file named x.png was deleted, but then it was added back in update #4. If you do all your file additions first, then do all deletions 2nd, your final state will have no x.png.

As long as you’ve been careful and did the CM environment upgrade first, the CDs should “just work” when done.

I don’t like Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA’s) homosexuality policy, which bars homosexual adult leaders. I’d like a change: our understanding of homosexuality has improved, and BSA’s policy needs to improve, too. But at the same time, I don’t think the public debate appreciates the risk of change.

Every Scout unit is owned by a chartered organization. A charter is a license to use Boy Scouts’s program.

Most chartered organizations have negative views of homosexuality:

1. 56% of Scouts are in units chartered by religious institutions with officially negative views of homosexuality, like the United Methodist Church, Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Church, and the Catholic Church.
2. 3% of Scouts are in units chartered by religious institutions that accept homosexuality, like the United Church of Christ.
3. The remaining 41% are in units chartered by civic or educational organizations, and their stances can vary. For example, a University Park, Texas unit, chartered by a parents’ club, barred a homosexual parent from leadership based on objections of other parents. (My son’s pack is chartered by a PTA.)

Even when accounting for variances within institutions–for example, some United Methodist congregations are accepting of homosexuality, some United Church of Christ congregations don’t accept it–it’s still likely that most chartered organizations have negative views of homosexuality.

The BSA is in a difficult spot: its ultimate power, its livelihood, rests in chartering organizations–they run the Scouting units, they provide all the youth, and they have the final voting authority in BSA.

Can BSA survive if it angers most its chartering organizations?

I wish BSA could be neutral, letting chartered organizations do their own homosexuality policies, like what was recently proposed. But in seeking change, I don’t want to recklessly harm or destroy the centerpiece of the American Scouting movement.

I’m sure some of you will say this is still perpetuating discrimination. That’s just not true. It has taken decades, sometimes centuries, for society to correct civil rights problems. It’s not reasonable to expect the BSA to make instant-presto changes, especially given that it must be sensitive to the policies of its chartered organizations.

The ACLU’s scorched earth war on Boy Scouts isn’t the right solution. We can do this better, and we can do it right, with a pragmatic, dialogue-rich approach. In the end, destroying the organization is not the right way to fix its policies.