Group 42

This paragraph from Jody Hamilton's post, Drupal Time-savers made me laugh:

Seen via life hacker:

My 22 Best On-Camera Interviewing Tips Ever by a fellow named Thomas R. Clifford.

The comments are worth reading, as well.

A "new" Drupal blogger with audio expertise has appeared on the Planet Drupal scene. Geoff Hankerson's blog has a mix of Drupal and technical audio pieces. Excellent! There are very few people with a solid foot in both worlds.

I'm pleased to announce my first Drupal module contribution: This Day in History. It provides an "on this day in history" feature block for your website. For example, if today was January 6th the birth of Joan of Arc (born January 6, 1412) might be displayed in the This Day in History block.

The module adds node type: Historical event, and supports the Node import module for importing historical events. Any number of display blocks can be created, and the events displayed can be selected by a number of different criteria, including randomly. If no event exists for the current day, no block is displayed.

This is absolutely super-cool amazing! In this YouTube video a fellow named Johnny Chung Lee at Carnegie Mellon University shows how to use a Wii Remote to create a light pen based touch screen white board. He also shows how to apply the same technique to a regular computer screen. I can see manufacturers coming out with a $100 version of this for any computer in the near future.

Update: Unfortunately, looks like there was a copyright issue with some of the material, and this vid was taken down. Hopefully it will make a reappearance in an acceptable format.

Update 2: More information here: http://laughingsquid.com/bloggers-divided-over-lane-hartwell-photography-issue/

Seen in Susan Mernit's blog post Quote of the Day: Here comes another bubble, this YouTube vid made me laugh. Sadly, there's too much truth underneath the humour . . .

When more than one person is working on a site there invariably comes a moment when something breaks but nobody changed anything . . . or did they? A version control system catches the file changes, but what about Drupal settings? A new module addressing this issue appeared on the module RSS feed last month so I took a look.

The Journal module (Release 5.x-1.0) is very straightforward. It adds an additional text field named "Journal entry" to all Drupal forms via hook_form_alter.

Thickbox is a JavaScript widget built on top of the jQuery library. It displays an image or text in a pop-up window, allowing a user to view the image or text without leaving the original page. This is useful for viewing full-sized pictures by clicking on a thumbnail. It also has a gallery feature for picture groups so the user doesn't have to leave the pop-up box to cycle through a set of full sized pictures.

The Thickbox project page is http://jquery.com/demo/thickbox/. Everything is there on a single page, including implementation instructions for the widgets. It's the single best place to see what Thickbox can do.

The Drupal Thickbox project page is http://drupal.org/project/thickbox. At the time of writing the current module version is V5.x-1.1, implementing Thickbox 3 (the most current is 3.1). In addition to bringing Thickbox to Drupal the module adds Drupal specific integration:

I recently bought a Zoom H2 recorder and I'm loving it. It's a handheld stereo audio recorder that records directly to a SD memory card. It has four built-in microphones as well as microphone and line-in inputs allowing it to be used as an independent field recorder or plugged into a mixing board or other device. And it runs off 2 AA batteries. In short, almost exactly what I want in a handheld recorder.

Even though I've only just started with the audio thing I'm really happy with the results. But better to let you listen.

The standard Drupal path is often ugly. Enter the path module, which lets us assign a friendlier alias path. Both the alias and the "real" path, typically called the Drupal path or the internal path, can be used to access the page. Internally Drupal always uses the Drupal path, regardless of which path was used for the original access. For example, if you assign the alias /about to /node/3, it's still /node/3 to Drupal.

The arg function gives us the Drupal path of the current page as component bits. For /node/3, the arg function returns arg(0) = node and arg(1) = 3. Even if the page is accessed via /about, the arg function returns arg(0) = node and arg(1) = 3. To get the Drupal path as a string, you can use $_GET['q'], which would return the string /node/3.