Windows 7 fail

I downloaded the Release Candidate of Windows 7 earlier this year, and today I decided to give it a try. After booting from the dvd and asking a couple of questions it asks for a cd rom driver(!). What did you say, Microsoft? You are booting from that CD rom drive. You also have a whole DVD to store whatever drivers you need. Every major linux distro I've tried manages include drivers for my cd rom on a CD! Of course, like every other Windows installation it stops more than one time. And of course it doesn't boot into live cd mode before start asking questions, but that is hardly anything new for anybody who has installed Windows more than a couple of times.

Update 2010-06-13: Finally managed to get some trial running on my laptop, and have used Windows 7 for a couple of weeks on my laptop. It behaves a lot better on my three year old laptop than Windows XP ever did, but I don|t know if this is because of Windows 7, or because it doesn|t contain hp drivers.

Creating Drupal themes from scratch

If you want to create Drupal themes from scratch, i.e. you do not want to modify an existing theme but rather paste your own html and insert placeholders, MODx style, then this post is for you.

MODx has long been my favourite framework because of it's simple and powerful templating system (copy and paste your html, insert placeholders, go), but recently the lack of visible activity has convinced me to look for other alternatives. I bought "Using Drupal" and "Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website". One of the reasons I never started to use Joomla! was that it always seemed like it would force me to organize content into two levels. After reading a few pages of the book I found out that it was in fact true. So I put the Joomla! book down and started reading "Using Drupal".

Drupal seems a lot more flexible. The thing that has always scared me away from Drupal and back to MODx is templating. Here is an example: http://drupal.org/node/11774 The templating system is very flexible, -and may seem very complicated.

In addition to this, the ultimate beginners theme, Zen, actually complicates things further if you, for instance, would like to move an existing site to Drupal, or if you want to unpack the html from the designer, insert your placeholders and test it. At least that's my conclusion so far.

Here's a simplified version of my current workflow: 

• Use a standard theme for your admin pages:
• Adjust settings under http://<yourservername>/admin/settings/admin
• Download an empty theme. The best I've found so far is foundation. 
• Unzip and paste into themes folder.
• Rename page.tpl.php in the empty theme to something else.
• Paste your html to a new file called page.tpl.php.
• Using the old page.tpl.php as reference, insert similar placeholders into the new one.
• Enable and test.
  

I'm new with drupal, and I wish sobody told me this yesterday: To make an absolute link to an image in a theme, without worrying about where the theme is going to be installed, you can do the following:

<img alt="logo" src="<?php echo(base_path().drupal_get_path('theme','your_theme_name'))?>/img/some_image.png" />

If you are using phptemplate, the drupal_get_path-call might be substituted by just $directory, making it even simpler:

<img alt="logo" src="<?php echo(base_path() . $directory )?>/img/some_image.png" />

The second one was found here:  http://drupal.org/node/52520

Netbeans got a nice css preview

Was doing some spare time drupal work in Netbeans 6.8 when I suddenly found out it had working css preview. See screenshot below for details:

Logging into my other (work ) account I found it in Netbeans 6.7 too, which explains why it wasn't mentioned in NetBeans 6.8 -- New and Noteworthy

The "bug"

A couple of days ago I troubleshooted some code that was supposed to take a ResultSet as input and return a String as output. For some reason it would just skip the entire resultset, regardless of what I did. In hindsight, it's funny. That last() gave me a lot of debugging, including looking for possible concurrency issues. Don't know why I put it there in the first place either :)

A very short review of the N82

I got my Nokia N82 about one year ago. Here is my short review: The good

• Built in camera is good!
• Build in GPS is decent. I like it. (the reason I say it's decent is that my brother, who was used to the Nokia navigator phone says the N82 it's horrible in comparison.)
• Makes good use of features. Examples:
• Camera can geotag pictures automatically.
• The "Sports tracker"-program uses both GPS and motion sensor to provide detailed information.
• Stable. (Was horribly slow a couple of days ago, but that problem disappeared after uninstalling shozu. Also this was the first time I experienced real trouble with this phone.)
• Handles 1500 messages in sms inbox withouth a hitch.
• You can search for keywords and the phone will find all occurrences in calendar, mail, addressbook, music etc. And it is resonably fast.
• Go back to previous suggestion feature when writing sms
• Syncs with eGroupware. (Takes some effort to get it right, but that is mostly because of eGroupware, not because of the phone.)
• Alarm clock: You can choose which days it will ring.
• You can access the phone using bluetooth easily under Linux (Ubuntu, at least.)
• Wifi.

The bad

• Lacks autocomplete on entering phone numbers.
• Two needlessy easy-to-hit shortcut key to access media features.
• If you store the same cell phone number on two contacts, just the phone number will be shown in the display, with no warnings given.

Edit 2009-05-21: Add the point about storing the same number under two contacts.

Updated the pomodoro timer

I've finally upgraded the pomodoro timer. List of updates:

• You can now open the applet in a pop-up window. See fourth tab on the top.
• Buttons instead of small links. (Thanks Sten, Johan)
• Fixed a bug that prevents new unplanned and urgent items beeing added after the last one has been moved up.)

If you are a pomodoro fan without a physical timer, -go ahead try it! You are encouraged to leave feedback on http://www.itlanddata.no/the-pomodoro-technique/feedback.html If you like it, you are also encouraged to give me a link back. (Thanks again, Johan.)