The more I work with Drupal - and the more Drupal matures - the more I think "there isn't anything I couldn't write with Drupal to get a job done."

Now granted, Drupal isn't meant to be used for everything - but I sure could see using it for a whole lot more than its being used for now.

Drupal has been compared to lego. But I think Drupal is more like living organic chemistry - where simple building blocks interact to create things that are greater than the sum of their parts.

The code is alive. Improvements from release to release spawn more contributions. More contributions spawn newer ideas. Newer ideas result in greater improvements.

And Drupal is literally evolving. Each distribution of Drupal evolves to more effectively exist in an ever expanding number of niches. Two different Drupal implementations may obviously be related, but could be vastly different because they solve different problems in different ways.

Its all very exciting stuff.

andre

For some fun, I decided to write a pokerstars hand history parser.

The purpose of the parser is to look at a hand history file and extract meaningful information for each hand it contains. The information is collected in a structured way... i.e. one big honking $hands array.

I collect the table name, game type, pokerstars hand number, tournament number and blind level (if a tournament), player names, seat locations and chip counts, and all action each player takes throughout the hand. Essentially all useful information found in the hand history file for any given hand.

I knew deep down that this would require regex work - but I first started parsing with some string functions. And before I could even fully parse the first line of a hand history file I knew this approach would be far too slow.

So, I was forced to re-instroduce myself to regular expressions. I've used them before, but not too often for tasks requiring complex multi-line processing. For the most part the regex work went well. But, every so often I would bump up against a stupid problem where the pattern I was using 'should have' worked but wasn't returning the results I expected. Such is life in the world of regex debugging.

Every few weeks I sign on here and vent my frustration with Internet Explorer.

Random sample of problems this week:
Box model still broken.
Hex Colour rendering is FUGLY - and just plain wrong.
New antialiasing of text is BRUTAL - I have to keep rubbing my eyes to make sure its not my peepers that are causing the blur.

A simple fact is that Internet Explorer breaks the internet. It is simply impossible to design for it without wasting time. FUCK.

andre

Well, I can't say that I haven't given it a chance - because god knows that I have.

Internet explorer 7 sucks ass. The majority of CSS rendering problems have not been addressed. They have fixed a couple of things, but not the real issues.

If elected grand supreme poobah of the universe I would decree that Internet Explorer be banned for ever.

Fuck you internet explorer... fuck you.

andre

In the fine tradition of starting things I may never finish, I started to write a program to help solve Sudoku puzzles.

A bit of background:

• Sudoku is a type of puzzle that is pure logic. (if this then that or if this then not that)
• They've become wildly popular in the last little while.
• I've only ever attempted to solve one
• The entire time I was trying to solve it, I was more interested in the idea of writing a simple program that would help someone solve the puzzle than solving the puzzle in front of me

So I gave up on solving the puzzle and started writing the program that would help me solve the puzzle.

If I ever get around to finishing it in my 'spare time' then I will create a Drupal module based on the program. But, don't hold your breath. I already have too much on my plate ;-)

andre

The other night I attended the first ever meeting of the Toronto Drupal User's Group at the Linux Caffe.

I would say that for a first meeting it was a success. While there was a little confusion over the date and time of the event, several people showed up and we got to the business of deciding what the group was going to be all about and what format we would like the meetings to use.

We decided:

• The group will meet monthly - likely the 3rd tuesday each month
• There will be beer at all meetings
• There will be short individual introductions to start meetings off
• There will be some sort of professional development presentations made (Demo of some cool Drupal feature, or exciting Drupal site - or related Drupal coolness)
• There will be free form networking / mingling after that

Boy, I've just not been keeping up with my blog.

It occurs to me that some people I know check my blog just to know what is going on in my life.

Professional:
Well - a while back I started a steady paying gig with another company. Like Be Circle they work primarily with not for profits and, in fact, are a non profit themselves. They also happen to be a Drupal shop - so the fit is nice and I'm glad to join their team.

Programming:
I've been playing around with Zend Studio Enterprise and must say that I am very impressed. Having a debugging session with code on a server is very handy. And all the integrated tools/features are nice too.... CVS - FTP - SQL etc. Its a bit sluggish on my desktop machine - since that machine doesn't meet the min requirements (800mhz+) - but it works beautifully on my laptop.

Play:
I've been halloweening with my girlfriend for the past couple of weeks. She's done most of the work, but I signed on for a couple of projects including a "neon" sign I made using EL wire.

The folks over at Microsoft have released a list of CSS bugs that they are going to fix for the release of IE7.

Standards and CSS in IE... From the MSDN blogs

* Peekaboo bug
* Guillotine bug
* Duplicate Character bug
* Border Chaos
* No Scroll bug
* 3 Pixel Text Jog
* Magic Creeping Text bug
* Bottom Margin bug on Hover
* Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
* IE/Win Line-height bug
* Double Float Margin Bug
* Quirky Percentages in IE
* Duplicate indent
* Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
* 1 px border style
* Disappearing List-background
* Fix width:auto

In addition we’ve added support for the following

* HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
* Improved (though not yet perfect) fallback
* CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)

Here is a snapshot of the radar-screen devleopment. I wouldn't normally share this kind of intermediate development step with the world - but I thought this was an interesting picture...

Take a look at a 2 Hour Word Radar Snapshot. The snapshot is of 10pm May 15th to 11pm May 15th.

Blue indicates a words starting position... Pink its ending position... the grey boxes show the path... If words are moving towards the center they are more frequently used in headlines. Words moving away from the center are losing frequency in the press.

This is of course just a step in the development process... The final product will look nothing like this... but it still is a neat picture (IMHO)

andre

Ages ago, I was working on a silly little app that was going to draw a radar screen filled with words found on tenbyten.org.

The back end was done a long time ago. I was grabbing a word list once an hour - keeping track of the words in a database - and also calculating coordinates for words based on their current ranking at tenbyten. I also maintained a history of words and their location... so that I could show the movement of words over time.

The problem was I didn't have the time to develop a nice front end for this radar application. I considered building a Flash front end... but I'm not a flash developer so the process was too time consuming.

Well recently both the SAJAX toolkit and dynAPI caught my attention. Both are tools that I wouldn't mind using. But, I have to learn how to use them. Another example of Zen learning at work again...

Wouldn't it be cool if I could build my radar app in pure HTML, CSS and Javascript? I thought so too...

So I've started down the path.

Apparently, everybody had read this article except for me.
(I found it after I read this

Not even one year ago -- June 13, 2004 -- Joel "Joel on Software" Spolsky said it in one of the most-linked-to essays on software development of the year, How Microsoft Lost the API War:

Well now I have read the article - and it turns out I didn't need to (though I'm glad I did). I have first hand knowlege about what the author is talking about because I stopped trying to write rich applications for the desktop in 1998. Since then every line of code I have written (except maybe a few dos batch files) has been for a web application. I stopped caring about the Windows API 7 years ago. And that is "How microsoft lost the API war."

The web captured my imagination the first time I logged on with a graphical browser in 1994. (The web hadn't quite captured my imagination the first time I browsed via the text based lynx browser from my shell account). I really thought the web was the coolest thing ever. Hyper-text multi-media global information resource that had a very low barrier to entry. A place where anyone and everyone could self publish. A place rich with amazing creative design. And, I must admit, at the time, an abundant source of free girly pictures was a bonus.

I love open source - free intelectual property - shared by all - owned by none.

In the spirit of that comes

Bruce Perens' Open Source Series

Part of the series includes PHP 5 Power Programming.

Yippie!

andre