Thingy Ma Jig

Sprucing up your User Profile Pages

12 June 2007
programming Drupal design cool

I recently launched a Drupal Codebase site for a programming community and wanted to have the user profiles to be more than just a "signed up on..." and a Tracker Tab. I wanted them to have structured and customisable blocks, dynamic content, a Peer to Peer Message Board (almost finished)... I can have my dreams cant I?!

I recently wrote a book page on how to programmatically create a view. I wanted to do this as it would allow to me control almost an entire website with multiple content types, terms and users (as well as combinations of the three) along with RSS feeds - all powered by the Views Module + a bolt on module consisting mostly of a menu callback and a function to make and configure a view. This worked pretty well for a first try and principle test!

I then realised - hey, if you can do this with Views - why cant you do it with Panels too? Panels are fantastically useful for structuring multiple blocks, views and nodes onto a page. So I tried… And you can!

Canon EOS 400D : Nikon E4600 : Sony Ericsson K800i

12 June 2007
technology review photos mobile phone K800i Flickr EOS 400D E4600

I bought my girlfriend a Canon EOS 400D a few months back and I'm impressed with every photo that comes out of it - but I recently wondered if that was just because I KNEW it was a good camera. How good is it really? I mean, my Sony Ericsson K800i has a FANTASTIC camera on it (considering its a phone) and the Nikon E4600 I have (and my girlfriend had before her 'upgrade') took great photo's considering its price and it was VERY rugged. How could I test this... So I took all 3 camera's out and took 2 sets of photo's with each camera. Guess who won?

New Drupal Site - Codebase

06 June 2007
YADS programming Drupal Dark Basic Pro announcement

Today I officially launch a new Codebase for Dark Basic Pro. I'm a big fan of Dark Basic Pro and this Codebase is one of the ways I'd like to help the community back. There is a codebase which The Games Creators provide and it is a good codebase with a LOT of content. This codebase, however, offers more  "Web 2.0" features such as free tagging, comments and rating (and I've only just got started - more to come!).

Significant hardware change?

26 May 2007
windows software

 

After watching a DVD last night, I went to bed as usual. Then this morning I woke up to find Windows had convinced itself that I'd had a Significant Hardware Change. This led be to believe 1 of 2 things...

1. I had been sleep upgrading again. I thought I'd grown out of that...
2. Windows was up to its good old screw ups.

Interestingly, this is a fully legit copy of Windows XP Pro OEM and I haven't had a single hardware change since I installed it.

My first project using Ogre

20 May 2007
programming Ogre3D games free

With some help from a good friend, I took my first steps into game-making using C++ last night. I used a graphics engine called Ogre3D and tried to mimic a game I started making in Dark Basic Pro a few weeks ago. To my astonishment, within a few hours I'd managed to replicate the basic layout of the game using tools which cost absolutely nothing!

Which modules use hook_cron?

14 May 2007
programming linux geek Drupal cool

I recently needed to find out a list of modules which used hook_cron. I have SSH access to my server. Instead of writing a module (or using devel to execute some PHP) which returned the result of module_implements, I turned to grep. Simply cd into your modules folder (can be the Drupal install, but you end up recursing through unlikely folders) and run this:

grep -R "^function.*_cron" *module

How to SCP a path with spaces

14 May 2007
mac linux How to geek

I recently needed to remotely copy over SSH a folder from the remote machine to my local machine. Usually this is not a problem, however the path to this folder had a space in it. The folder itself is rather large and contains files which wouldn't really benefit from compression. It turns out the solution was quite simple.

Social Statistics module released

11 May 2007
software free Drupal announcement

I've been working on it for a few days now, but its finally released. Social Statistics is being used on this site and can be found on any page on an enabled site in a block. It provides pluggable statistics for (currently) 3 major Social Networking websites; Del.icio.us, Digg and Ma.gnolia. It currently boasts caching of statistics for a configurable amount of time, AHAH retrieval of statistics which are not cached (thus not slowing down page loads) and an API to make the project extendible to anybody who cares to add a Social Network to the mixture!

The core module consists, mostly, of a few menu callbacks and an API. This API allows the user to enable any number of enabled modules to add their contribution to the block. The 3 enabled sites all have an XML based API, but each does things slightly differently - hence my choice in using them as examples of the module as a whole.

You can find this module over in the Drupal Projects section.

From Russia without Love

08 May 2007
websites security programming linux How to Drupal

I've recently been receiving some spam from some Russian IP's. As each spam attempt was from a different IP, blocking individual ones was a little futile and time consuming. I did a quick Google and ended up at Deekayen's website as it seems he has had similar issues. His solution was an Apache level "Deny"… My solution uses iptables.

Girlfriend + Camera = playing with fire!

07 May 2007
review photos Flickr EOS 400D cool

After my girlfriend started showing an interest in photography I decided to buy her a new camera as a surprise. I chose the Canon EOS 400D and she has had it for almost 3 weeks now and already she has come up with some STUNNING photo's.

Her first shots with it were wildlife and nature based…