Late Night PC

I've looking at Drupal theming for a while now. I just had an idea yesterday though. The theme I was analyzing uses an H1 tag for the site title and H2 tags for the headings over navigation. I tried to decide if this made sense for me or not. On many sites this may be appropriate. It's possible that the name of the site is the most important thing and the navigation includes a heirarchy of decreasing semantic importance. It's also possible that the site is like many sites. The site title is a random five letter word and the navigation has a title like "Navigation".

By default, Drupal adds the text "Not Verified" to comments from unregistered users. It also adds the rel="nofollow" attribute to the links they provide. I didn't like either one of those things so I set out looking where to fix it. It turns out that both these bits happen inside the function theme_username(). This function is hookable. That is to say, this function can be replaced by a custom function in a theme.

I should be happier about this. Gallery 2.3 was released on Saturday. I would be happier except that last week I finally decided to upgrade and went with 2.3RC2. My timing is amazing. I'll be upgrading shortly but this also gives me a chance to show off the much cleaner look of my photo albums now that I've set up the Drupal module that integrates Gallery2 with Drupal. It took a lot of work but I feel like it was worth it.

I've been working on rewriting my Wordpress SVG inlay plugin as a Drupal module. So far it works pretty well but I'm not ready to say it's secure or functional for most sites. The basic concept of the SVG inlay is that sometimes you just want to display an SVG image in a post or page. Not as a style element but as something that visitors want to look at which is relevant to the content. Like a chart, a graph, a network diagram, maybe even a little game.

Way too often after working out a tough problem, I'm just too confused or tired to blog about it. Tonight is like that but I'm writing anyway. I just got my gateway machine routing again and it was disgustingly simple (considering the amount of time it was offline). I'm not going to explain all the details today but basically I have a machine that serves as a gateway between the LAN here in the supersecret headquarters of Late Night PC and the rest of the Internet at large.

Learning Perl the Hard Way was a good read. Only took me a few hours and I feel like I have a good introduction to the language. As usual, I worked through the first few examples but rushed at the end. Allen Downey does some really fun stuff: Huffman coding and Markov Chains in short programs that show off the power of Perl. My favourite thing about the text though was that I got to skip all the redundant crap like explaining what a variable is. Learning Perl the Hard Way is aimed squarely at people who are already familiar with other programming languages. If you code in C then you'll be comfortable with this book.

I have a dilemma kind of like what Jason blogged about a while back. He was looking for some software that would do tagging of photos that met a few specific needs. I have similar needs and I decided to go with digiKam partly as a result of the research he did. So I've been tagging some of my photos in digiKam and I can do some helpful searches thanks to this effort. Now I'm running in to a limit of tags though.

Waterloo has a Drupal developer group and they're getting together tomorrow night. James Walker (of Bryght/Rain City Studios/Lullabot fame) is going to be there talking about module development. It'd be a 3 hour drive for me to get to a 2 hour meet up but I seriously considered it. I've been learning module development off and on for a couple years now. I've actually done a couple for personal use. Sharing experience in a group like this is a lot of fun and you get a lot more insight in person than you can by just reading. I'd encourage anyone nearby to head on over and check it out.

Does Windsor have enough Drupal developers for a Drupal group? Do we have enough LAMP developers to support a group? I like the Windsor Blogger meetup we've been doing (more bloggers welcome, btw). The blogger meetup seems to have been going long enough now that it's a regular thing. I'm a little jealous of Waterloo, they have about the same population as Windsor. I think we should have enough developers to get together and share some ideas once in a while.

There's a thread on Slashdot now about the MMOGlider case. I've never really looked at the software but I've heard of it. A lot of the discussion is leaning toward why people would want to use a program to play WoW for them and what that says about the game.

Someone suggested that Blizzard should look for a way to just completely remove the incentive for players to use it. If this program removes a hassle for the player then just remove the hassle from the game and the perceived need for glider goes away, therefore the program goes away. So the hassles here that people see in the game are time wasted running and the huge time investment in getting up to maximum level (70 now, 80 next month).

What follows comes mostly from my replies.

I just got an update to Lightning on my Windows machine. The main calender view looks a little sharper, I like it. Lightning isn't the perfect calendar application but it's the closest thing I've found. The multi-week view always did seem kind of week to me before. It was hard to tell what months you were looking at. They've tidied that up nicely now. The new style also seems to have less wasted space.

Sharing calendars through iCal is mandatory for me, Lightning isn't the only client that has to use my calendars. It has always dealt with that very nicely. Now I also got an error message about difficulty writing to a calendar file, I think this is new since I used to have occasional silent (and irritating) failures. Error messages aren't fun but they're an improvement on silent failure.