I’ve had to create a few custom entities in Drupal 9 recently so I thought I’d share what I learned in the process. In this post I will step through the process of creating a movie entity in a custom module called imdb. Where they go Each custom entity should be defined as a class in the src/Entity directory of your custom module. The filename should match the classname but doesn’t have to match the entity ID.

We have a few Cypress scripts to test our API endpoints, but using Cypress for API testing didn’t sit well for me as Cypress is designed for browser based testing. I decided to rewrite our tests in standard curl but making the effort to make it flexible and extensible. The Components I needed three basic things to make this work and a cohesive manner: Curl itself Curl homepage Curl is available everywhere and is the de facto standard tool for accessing HTTP (and other) endpoints.

Last week Mozilla laid off a bunch of people. It’s not the first time and it probably wont' be the last. Whenever this happens it makes me think about the state of the open web and what we should be doing about it. Mozilla, at least the non-profit arm, is one of the last big players to be advocating for an open web with privacy and autonomy for all. It needs to be protected and supported.

Before my last 5 year(!) hiatus from blogging, I blogged about my job, which at the time was at McGill University. Two years after that I left McGill to pursue a new challenge. Things at McGill were good, I worked with a great team and we had a solid rhythm going. I’d just finished up a major project to replace our ageing infrastructure with a new scalable server setup managed by Ansible.

Thanks largely to Covid-19 and rain I had a lot of free time over the weekend, so I decided it was time to migrate my site off of the web host that I’ve been using for a few years to a free VPS node that I was given at a Drupalcon and never really used for anything. I also decided that it was time to ditch Wordpress and switch to a static site generator.

I’ve been working at the university for 15 years now. That’s my longest tenure with any employer. I’ll get my 15 year pin next year (not this year because my first year was on contract). When I started I was working on the internal financial systems but a few years ago I moved to the newly formed “Content and Collaboration Solutions department” and became a web developer, working on the main university website and all the sub sites.

My biggest hobby has become gaming. Not so much video gaming any more but table top gaming. Every Monday night for the past 9 years I’ve been getting together with five other guys (there was a woman too but she “retired”) to play Dungeons and Dragons. We currently play 3.5 edition but we’re switching to 5th soon. There are two campaigns running in parallel, one set in a world of undead where I play a gnome rogue called Garwicket, and the other set in a more mixed world where I played a fighter called Hunter, until he got eaten.

The boy is 9 and a half. How did that happen? A few months ago he was just a toddler, and now he’s almost in double digits. I’m suspecting some kind of weird time dilation effect. He is a strange boy in many ways. He loves to read and draw comic strips; his favourites are Get Fuzzy, Bloom County and Dilbert. He also reads The Oatmeal and XKCD when he thinks we aren’t looking.

Eight years ago we said we would never buy another house. Two years ago we bought another house. So much for that. The good news is we didn’t make the same mistakes as last time: we didn’t buy a house too big to manage. Instead we bought a tiny house, almost TARDIS like in its proportions. We also didn’t go back to the burbs, we’re still close enough to downtown to have a nearby Metro station and it only takes me 30 minutes to get to work.

In an attempt to be more active and get vaguely into shape I’ve taken up biking again. I used to bike to work, but it’s a little bit too far now and I’m afraid of having another bike stolen. So as I get a fair amount of time off in the summer I’ve opted for leisure biking. My first couple of rides were along the canal, one as far as our old Condo, about 10km, and one to Parc René-Lévesque, about 20km.

It was a week before Christmas in 2011 when I suddenly started suffering from gastric bleeding. I went to the emergency room, terrified that I was dying. After spending a night in a hospital corridor (free healthcare is great but sometimes the system is overwhelmed), I was admitted to a private room and the tests began. After X-rays, a CT scan, about one hundred blood tests, and a colonoscopy I was finally diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to spend two weeks working with four dolphins in Hawaii, studying their ability to learn language, specifically sign language. Occasionally the dolphins would exhibit behaviour which was not expected and they would start to repeat that behaviour every time you gave a particular sign. For example you might give the sign to nod their head, and the dolphins nods, but then also spits a bit of water.

Last weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, so it was time to head for the country. We picked up Granny (she’s 96 you know) on Sunday morning and drove up to the Laurentians with Aidan chattering away the whole time. It was a perfect Autumn day: clear blue skies, crisp clean air, not too cold, not too hot and the trees were showing off their Fall colours in style. When we arrived Aidan went off to pick arugula with his Grandma (Bama) before we sat down to a nice lunch of cheese and crackers and salad.

Most UFO cults don’t stay around for very long; they either self destruct, like Heaven’s Gate or fade away, like the Aetherius Society. Even the Raelians have slowly faded into obscurity. Scientology though refuses to die. Despite being declared a criminal organisation in Canada and other countries. Despite the huge amount of negative press they’ve had on the internet and elsewhere. Despite horrific stories like Lisa McPherson. Despite the now common knowledge that Scientologists believe in a galactic empire commanded by Xenu.

Yesterday we headed out to a downtown theatre with Aidan, his Bama and his bunny to see Patty and Sid on tour. Patty and Sid are the presenters of Kids CBC, a commercial free selection of shows for pre-schoolers shown every morning between 7 and 11. Patty and Sid were joined on stage by Curious George and Bo from Bo on the Go and on video (presumably live via satellite) by Drumheller, the skeletal dinosaur from Alberta, Mama Yama, the animated yam/penis from Ontario, Saumon the french-speaking salmon from Quebec and Captain Claw, the old sea-dog lobster from Nova Scotia.