Confessions of a cat

If you have not heard about this “Philadelphia Experiment”, then here’s a small recap:

in 1943 the american government made experiments with an electromagnetic device designed by Nikola Tesla, and John von Neumann (Neumann Jancsika, az egyik “hős” magyar tudós jóember). This device is supposed to “bend” gravity and/or “time” in a way that made a warship disappear. The navy wanted to use this technology to make their ships “invisible” - well it would have been enough for them if the ships are invisible to radars, but eventually in this experiment, the whole ship disappeared for 10 minutes or several hours (the various sources cannot agree in this regard). Unified field theory is said to be used in this…

Of course the navy denies all of this, and there are no witnesses that can be trusted. What a surprise! Conspiracy theorists love such things, and as such this story has some wild connotations available on the net.

I have found the most trusted review of this event can be found on wikipedia:

Philadelphia Experiment on wikipedia

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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.

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Well, there are lots of books published in the field of IT (as well).

Unfortunately most of them are crap. Thank god I haven’t spent that much money on IT books; as I have only bought a few of them, actually. 

There are lots of publishers as well, each with their own distinct (?) style. There’ apress, manning, o’reilly, packt, pragmatic bookshelf, etc. My favorites are manning and packt by the way. And pragmatic is good with its rails / ruby books, too.

Usually you can get the pdf from all of them, which is cheaper, and much faster to search / use. But that’s not what I am into right know.

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