Taking the pain out of Windows - w/ a Mac and VMWare

I needed to install some PC accounting software at our office, which only has Macs right now.  Althoguh I was originally going to use Bootstrap, Mac’s built-in software that allows you to switch OS on startup, I opted for VMWare Fusion for the Mac ($80 for a single license, vs. free for Bootstrap).  One of the main advantages of VMWare Fusion is it’s ability to drag-and-drop from your Mac desktop into your Windows window - smooth like ghee, man.

In addition, VMWare had a Windows Easy Install option - you provide the license and Windows install CD, and it runs the whole thing for you in one fell swoop.  The whole process, including buying VMWare online, took about an hour (a lot of that was the Windows install) but it went smoothly from beginning to end, no glitches.  And..  when I’m done with the Windows window, I put it in “Suspend” - and can come back to it as fast as a PC coming out of sleep mode.  Meaning I don’t have to wait for Windows to boot up every time I want to use it.

All said and done - yeah, Windows still sucks, but it’s less painful when running on something as sweet as VMWare Fusion.

Great Drupal Resources (and a fun event): Drupal Module Finder and Drupal Code Search

My friend Brian Wood at UC Berkeley (and part of BDUG) pointed to a couple of great resources by way of John Bern’s blog:

Drupal Modules:  A comprehensive way of searching for, favoriting and ranking Drupal modules.

Drupal Code Search:  A site using Google’s Code Search API to lookup Drupal code strings.

Neither are officially sponsored (nor sanctioned - yet?) by Drupal.org.  Nonetheless, I love this tertiary after-market style ecosystem building around Drupal.

Also, from Amazon, who is one of several people representing Druapl at the LUG Radio events in San Francisco:

Selena Deckelmann , and Andy de la Lucha, daytime Linux system administrator, nighttime design geek,  will be doing a fun and theatrical event pitting WordPress easy entry and their huge user community versus Drupal’s you can do anything and it’s huge “join the community now!” developer focus.

Should be a really fun event!

Signup and more details are here.

BadCamp report back

As usual, the Bay Area Drupal Camp was a mix of information well over my head, and other stuff that thudded off my chest (read: not over my head).  I’m not a coder, so I was lost in the the Drupal Ninja session I wandered into and I quickly wandered out.  On the other hand, I’m pretty damn good as a site admin, so the CCK tutorial was mostly interesting to watch teenaged Dimitri move with lightening speed.

I attended the Drupal theming session, and got confirmation from what several themers said at the Sunnyvale OSCON/ DrupalCon: if you are doing a lot of theme development, don’t start with any of the default themes and tweak from there; instead, build a clean theme from scratch, and use something like the Zen theme to inform your work.  (People also stressed not to use Zen as your primal building block).  My very sparse notes on this session are at the bottom of this page.

Kentbye posted a bunch of audio of the sessions here. There’s also a continuation of the usability session discussion here.

Another “as usual” is that I gleaned the most interesting information (for me) at the periphery.  I had a few specific questions that were answered in between sessions.  I got direct and indirect pointers to new tools and - more importantly - new modules, or reminders of modules I need to revisit.

There were several apps people were using in their demos that I took note of:

• Web Developer Toolbar (for Firefox) was a favorite.  It’s very useful for theme work, something I now can’t live without.
• Firebug - very similar; I’ve yet to see a comparison of the two
• Colloquy - an open-source Mac IRC client that is user-friendlier than Snak.
• TextMate - apparently the favorite of Bay Area coders; I’ll stick with TextWrangler for now
• Yahoo UI tools - for CSS tools, see the bottom of the linked page (the Grid CSS builder tool linked here)- uh, I still don’t quite get how to use this, but it can generate clean, Yahoo-standards-based CSS.

And then, more modules.  Just a few days ago I was telling someone new to Drupal that one of the
key challenges is staying on top of new the Drupal modules
(800+ was a count I saw in one presentation, but that seems high. 
Maybe that’s all modules for any version of Drupal….).

In nearly every session, someone would mention a module I had never heard of (or had not looked at closely enough), so here’s my new Drupal module follow-up list:

• The Devel module - no, nothing new here; but it may actually be useful for non-developers as well
• Signwriter - a module to allow you to use custom fonts in headings; apparently better and easier to use than sIFR
• Panels - allows you to put different content into “panels” - different areas on the page.  You can potentially stuff more things into your main content area than just a single node or a view.  I looked at Panels for a specific project a while ago, and at the time I thought it could do more than it actually could, so I left it behind.  I also recognize now how to acheive a lot of what I was looking for with template overrides, but it may be worth looking at again.
• Subscriptions - someone mentioned that this is a good replacement for Notify, but not quite.  This allows you to subscribe to updates of particular nodes or taxonomies.  However, I use Notify (on a particular site) to send out all site updates.
• DBA - A presenter mentioned that she uses this to make automatic backups of her database which get emailed to her every night. It allows you to administer the database without using something like phpMyAdmin…

I feel like I haven’t added that much to the general store of knowledge.  Hopefully a link here will be of some help to someone.

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Additional France / Europe car rental resources

ViaMichelin not only provides driving directions, but gives you the option to calculate travel costs based on: whether you select to take the toll roads or not; and the current price of gas!

If you’re curious about the latter, check out Zagaz - click on the map to get a localized listing of gas prices….

Technorati Tags: France, Michelin, gas, driving

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TextSoap

Because I spend most of my time between email, blog posts and just basic note-taking, I do a lot of work in TextEdit, on the Mac.  I’ll go a week or two without opening Word (except to read something someone else sent me).

The trouble is, going back and forth between emails, text docs, and blog posts wreaks havoc on basic things like line breaks, tabs, etc.  Not to mention the annoying forwarding marks in emails (like the old-school “>” characters before each line).

Several years ago, I looked for a tool to help me deal with this, and found textSOAP.  In the intervening years I moved to a PC (there wasn’t PC version at the time), and only recently came back to the fold.

I guess the main reason I’m writing this was that I purchased a copy to help me with a long email draft I needed to re-edit. I was able to purchase the software, download it and use it right away.  But I ran into a weird licensing error - I had bought a deluxe license, but the software wasn’t reflecting that.  I wrote a rather irritated note to tech support, expecting that I had misread the checkout fine print or something - and got an email back within an hour with several suggestions on how to fix the problem, from the developer himself (the very first suggestion worked).  I guess this  is one for GoodExperience.

Technorati Tags: textsoap

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More Drupal / ePortfolio movement

Yesterday, some colleagues and I got a tour of the new version of DrupalEd, FunnyMonkey’s build-out of a education-specific portfolio and social networking platform built on Drupal.

Needless to say, it’s slick and lean (as can be with all of the functionality installed). It’s going to be very exciting to see how schools implement this platform. Presidio Hill School is interested in a limited funcitonal use for eportfolio / self assessment - partly in order to not overwhelm our teachers with all the other tools it has (as one of my colleagues urged). Nonetheless, other schools - from elementary to higher ed - are jumping on the opportunity.

In my last post about this, I didn’t point to where the action is really happening - the DrupalEd Distribution discussion group.

Technorati Tags: eportfolio, DrupalEd, FunnyMonkey, PresidioHill

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New translation challenge: video subtitles

Wow - the translation world gets even more interesting / complicated (as if it weren’t enough already).

dotSUB allows you to translate video content subtitles. I assume most of the videos they are using so far include the original language “closed captioned” subtitles required by law (probably in use more widely in sports bars than for the deaf, but - really, I don’t know if that’s true….)

As is usual with Web2.0 sites, you land on the front page and have no clue what the hell the site does. This demo, though, gets the idea across very quickly.

Thanks (again) Tim.

Technorati Tags: i18n, dotsub

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Drupal custom PO file generator

Wow - this is hot - if I understand it correctly. A tool to (re)create PO files for your Drupal modules. As opposed to the autolocale module that will import PO strings from your modules after you enable them (useful is a) you don’t have shell / command line access to your server, or b) if you turn on I18n or Translations later in the game, and don’t want to troll through your directories importing al teh PO strings.)

I’ll let the actual author’s description do the talking:

• “Maybe you want to translate a drupal module or template, but can’t find the original po file?
• Do you want to create a new po file?
• Simply use ther form below, and the WGenPo (”Web Drupal Po Files
  Generator”) will give you the empty po file to fill with your translation strings.”

[PO - "portable object" - files are used in Drupal to identify strings of text that will allow language translation for any particular module. So if your module uses the phrase "Enter your dog's name", the PO file will list this phrase as a line of text that can be swapped out for another language - as long as you have this phrase in the other language. Otherwise, it will just keep the phrase in the original language. Yeah, that's a bit of a lame description, but if you don't know what it is, this tool is NOT the place to start....]

Technorati Tags: drupal, i18n, translation

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MapSack

My French doppleganger (or just namesake?) and co-WineCampFrance conspirateur Grégoire pointed me to this site yesterday - MapSack: very slick interface of photos, maps, and recommendations.

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Some cool new Drupal modules

Or what I learned at OSCMS part whatever

• Viewfield: I can’t put it any simpler than the description for the module itself. “Nodes hold content. Views save queries. Wouldn’t be great if a node could hold a saved query? Now it can.”
• Persistent login: The new persistent login module is much fancier than the original one that was built into previous versions of Drupal. For example, Drupal makers the persistent login session cookie for 3 weeks. If your login cookie is stolen (using a PHP hack?) - there’s not much you can do about it; you can re-login, but that cookie will last for 3 more weeks for whoever stole it (more notes on this here). The new persistent login will track previous logins, and be able to warn your account if someone’s accessed it with a stolen cookie / token. As the guy said, “It’s actually more secure.” It also requires you to enter your password when making special edits (like your account password) - you can even set (via admin) the pages which will require a password (like the Mac’s security system when updating software).

Technorati Tags: security, Drupal

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