Confessions of a cat

If you do any web development or page layout / editing then sooner or later you realize that this old latin text is being used all around. 

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

Although some web-development IDEs have a built in snippet editor that contains this handy text (e.g. Coda form Panic) and there are various websites (lipsum.com) devoted to generating tons of paragraphs of this text and its variations I found the following 2 short applications to be of most use to me on the Mac. › Continue reading

One of my favorite “dumb” topics in recent years is scientology. Mainly their wrongdoings. Well the whole thing is a big mistake in my opinion, but they have truckloads of lawyers to prove you’re wrong

There’s a hungarian blog where lots of their shit is exposed which is one of my favorite pastimes.

When I realized it’s a religion just to be granted tax exempt status (it was revoked in 1967 by the IRS then granted again in 1993 mainly due to the fact that the above mentioned truckload sued lots of IRS entities and persons and they come to some kind of an agreement - the time is quite right now to review it…)

I thought this crap band’s shit just recently got more exposure. But I am wrong. Here’s the cover of Time magazine from 1991:

Scientology octopus

If you fancy a good read then please go to their website and read their nice article here:

The thriving cult of greed and power

Well worths the time.

 

Drupal Multimedia

Drupal Multimedia has been released towards the end of 2008. It was written by Aaron Winborn, who also wrote and maintains the embedded field (emfield) module for drupal.

 The book has 11 chapters of which one is a general introduction probably not necessary for anyone who has spent at least a week with drupal.

An other chapter, the very last one, is devoted to future speculation regarding drupal and internet trends in general. It is an interesting read nonetheless. There are some words about microformats, rdf and “the” semantic web amongst other things.

So skipping these two chapters that don’t really deal with the subject matter, the rest of the book deals with 3 things:

1. images, both local and remote (flickr for instance) embedding and theming them
2. videos, local and third party embeddable ones (youtube, etc.) and theming them
3. audio (you guessed right, local and not so local ones) and theming again

In general if you have no idea how you can use images, video or audio with drupal, have never heard of CCK and Views and have not got the faintest idea about theming then this book is highly recommended for you.

If you have already been exposed to modules such as Image, Imagefield and Filefield then you might not learn too much from this book.

Also as the whole drupal infrastructure tends to quickly change over time the information contained in the book is not the most up to date (understandable), and might not contain the ideal solution (or close to it) to your problems.

The author gives good ideas though, so if you have no idea how you can build an mp3 player with playlist support or how you can add a thumbnail for a video file that is shown on page load (like youtube) or how to create an image gallery, then give it a go. You won’t regret it.

› Continue reading