The wheel, it is being reinvented every day.

I've been doing a survey of the systems that Queen's uses for content and learning management, going around and meeting with people and chatting about web solutions. It's great, because I get to meet my contemporaries and forge connections. There are a lot of us out there, scrunched away in tiny offices, working away in the dark.

However, nice as it is to meet and greet, I'm simultaneously dismayed by the number of custom solutions we've all created, solutions that individual admins have spent years (and in some cases tens of thousands of dollars in salaries) working on... solutions which replicate functionality that out-of-the-box, open-source software already does.

And what for? In every case there is an admin - or, worse, a contract company - who leaves a custom, legacy system that nobody else knows how to update, maintain, or use.

This started when I was at Applied Science - they created a student portal, fully custom coded. Why were we reinventing the wheel? There were many reasons, but most of them came down to failures of research, rather than failures of options. But it wasn't just us: this survey I'm doing is turning up similar issues all across campus.

Part of it is excusable - sometimes, the technology wasn't quite ready yet, so three years ago admins went their separate ways, and created stopgap solutions that became institutionalized. But god, even if they'd worked together across Queen's we could have gone so much farther.

And then the failures: ITS chose an open-source solution that they abandoned a year later... because it didn't have the functionality they needed, and it wasn't being maintained anymore. Whoops. Again, I think, a failure of research and planning - decisions were made based upon thinking about negatives (we can't use it if it can't do this, this and this) - without considering the positives (can we roll our own modules? Is there a development community? Will the tech get better?) In geek-speak, then, Queen's has been talking closed shop when we should have been talking open source.

Why? Part of it is that everybody works in isolation and doesn't know the ins and outs of the available web technologies - let's be gentle and say simply that Queen's can't afford to pay industry standard salaries, so they tend to get hobbyists-turned-pro (like me) rather than people who were working for companies who already went through these issues using good project management plans. So the decisions about what systems to use, or not use - as ITS found out - still failed them, because they didn't actually have a CMS expert working with them to tell them what was what. They made decisions based upon slick demos rather than upon developer community consensus.

And here we are: three custom, unsustainable portals, two failed open-source ventures, two completely custom, unsustainable CMSes, and one monolithic and frightfully expensive LMS later. And we're SO FAR BEHIND other universities it's not even funny.

Enter Drupal.

I said to somebody I was chatting with recently that Open Source, and being a Drupaller, is like religion. But that was just me being flippant, beacause it's actually not: unlike religion, I have extremely good, earthly reasons for why I am so devout. And Sony, IBM, Warner Brothers, SPIN magazine, Yahoo, UPEI and Calgary, porn.org (no, really), The Onion, Adobe (just Flex for now), Universal Studios, Nike, FedEx, AOL, Sun OpenOffice, Popular Science, Amnesty International, Harvard, Belgium, and the frickin' UN all agree with me.

I started developing my newest project in Drupal 6.3 last week, up from 5.1 at my last position, and HOLY GOD IT IS AMAZING. I forgot a) just how easy, and how much fun it is, to use Drupal, and b) how fast Drupal evolves. Six looks much like Five, but it has simplified so much - hooks for module development, menuing, theming, and views - that it is, literally, a joy to use. Fast, simple*, easy. I can't tear myself away.

So GET ON BOARD, QUEEN'S.

That is all.

PS: Use Drupal.

* For developers. Drupal is not MT or Wordpress: it's for programmers. But that's alright - you wouldn't expect a civil engineer to use MS Paint, would you?

I had an assignment due this morning, and when I went to print it out yesterday night I discovered that oh no! We were out of paper! A mad basement hunt ensued. Boxes were torn open, the recycling bin was pilfered for pages with nothing on their backs, and stationery supplies were thrown about in panic. Then, suddenly, a container caught my eye. What's this? Paper?

Oh, wait. It's stinky ol' A4. Yuck.

(I have no idea where it came from. I never used to touch the stuff, myself). Well, good enough. I printed out my paper and grumbled about the weirdness of it all. It just felt odd in my hands. It was all... long. And ... narrow.

Yeah, my life is tough.

Then I did some reading about A4 because, after all, I can't just use the damned paper. No, I have to understand its in-depth life history, relatives, motivations, and where it was on August 12 1954 at 10:00am. This behaviour, by the way, is basically the primary definition of a nerd. Which I clearly am.

Well. I did my reading. And now? I am an A4 fan. I'm all about the A4. It still feels weird and strange, but I'm just going to get over that because, from a design standpoint, A4 is FAR SUPERIOR to 8.5"x11" paper. It's all about the mathematics, folks. A4 is not based on the length of the King's foot ... no, A4 is based on ratios. Which are COOL.

The ratio in question is a very pretty ratio. It's √2. So for every single kind of A paper, the length divided by the width is the same. It means, in non mathy terms, that you can fit two A4s perfectly on one piece of A3 (2*1:√2 = √2:2), for example. No squishing, no lost margins or things cut off. It's so... exact. And METRIC!

The US is the reason why we're using the imperial Queen's-big-toe paper standard in Canada. Turns out that every other country in the world uses A4, and it is actually its own ISO standard. I love standards. I love international standards even better. The US is slowly starting to adopt A4 in some situations, finally, so there is hope for us here in Canada to adopt A4 at some point in the next millennium too.

So from now on I'm going to use A4 paper. All my assignments will fit awkwardly in my TAs binders and I will stand out! As weird! Or possibly British. Which is... er... good?

But at least I will be hardware-standards-compliant, kind of like using Firefox in the meat world -- a pain in the butt full of smug moral superiority and annoying layout issues. But that's the price you pay, isn't it? So I'll spearhead the movement: Spread A4! It's mathematical! And math is cool!