Congratulations to our good buddies and award-winning web design & development partners over at Pride Design, they have just flipped the big switch and put their new website live – nothing like a new website for the new year!
They tell me that there is still some tweaking and tuning to do on the site and that they will be getting around to in the next week – but once again congratulations and well wear!
I am about to embark on a little research, I intend to compile a list of resources in Ireland for Irish Software Engineers and Developers. I want to include and bodies, websites, web forums etc. that provide a genuinly useful service to Developers and Engineers in their day-to-day work and in developing their careers in general.
I intend to steer clear of the large for-profit training outfits and that we all know and love and instead focus those resources that really have something useful to offer while not charging a small fortune (times being what they are). I’ll be checking all around the country, not just in Dublin.
Once I have the list compiled I will post it here, in the mean time if you would like to suggest a resource please post it here or email it to me – Thanks!
Q: How can I pass an argument to a ‘block view’ in Drupal 6?
A: There is no way to pass an argument to a block view in Drupal 6, but don’t panic as there is a way to achieve the same result through some slight-of-hand.
The use of arguments with Drupal views are vital for getting the most out of the views functionality. How are the arguments normal passed to a view? Well, if a view is configured to produce a page then the arguments are easily passed as part of the requesting URL, while if a view is embedded using code, then the arguments are passed in as part of the call to embed the view. But if a view is configured to produce a block, how do you pass arguments to it? The bad news is you can’t – the good news is that there is a way fake it and achieve the same result.
The trick involves providing a PHP handler within the view which will be called when the view is invoked without an expected argument (this is what happens when the block is displayed!). We just arrange for this handler to retrieve and return the argument’s value and then the view will behave as required – just as if the argument had been passed to it in the first place.
To do this create the block view as normal and configure the required argument(s). For each argument we choose the ‘Provide default argument’ option, and select the ‘PHP code’ sub-option. We then provide some PHP code which will ‘get’ and return the argument’s value, it doesn’t really matter where or how the PHP code gets the argument once it returns the correct value. Have a look at screen shot below:
The example above is a bit simplistic as the PHP code just returns a static value – not very useful at all! A more realistic or useful example (inspired by one of the posts referenced below) would be to return the argument that was passed to the page that contains and displays the block. Consider the mythical paths:
www.somedomain.com/content/projects/web-design
and
www.somedomain.com/content/projects/illustration
Here things are set-up so that ‘web-design’ and ‘illustration’ are arguments to the ‘projects’ page, they result in only the projects of that type being displayed. Assuming we are using the pathauto module for nice clean URLs (as we almost always are!) then the following PHP code when provided as the default argument handler will get the URL, parse it and return the argument part to the view.
[code lang="php"]
$path = drupal_get_path_alias($_GET["q"]); //get URL alias
$path = explode("/", $path); //break path into an array
if ($path[0] == "projects" && $path[1] != "")
{
return $path[1];
} [/code]So there is is, it’s definitely not the easiest method in the world but at least it does provide a mechanism of getting those arguments to the view…
Sources: http://drupalsn.com/learn-drupal/drupal-questions/question-2650, http://drupal.org/node/332521
For setting up a Drupal maintenance cron job on the blacknight.ie unix hosting plan, I have found that the following command works well:
/usr/bin/wget -O – -q -t 1 http://www.yourdomain.com/cron.php
Original Source: http://drupal.org/cron
The Register writes today about a new report which details the ’25 most dangerous’ programming errors – a list which was compiled by 30 organisations. Very interesting indeed, nothing unexpected in the list really, but I reckon that a full review of it in the light of ongoing and recent project work could be very worthwhile.
It certainly calls into question the whole ‘if it builds, it works!’ paradigm of software development ;-)
We are using good old Drupal and its Content Construction Kit (CCK) once again to create a custom CMS for our client. One of the things that usually completely mystifies me time and time again is how to customise a new content type’s add/edit form layout. So, lest I forget again in the future, here’s a link to a good article on the subject:
Today I came across a situation which brought it home to me again how (in my opinion) C++ could desperately do with native lambda function support. The standard library has introduced a load of great algorithms, but providing predicates and the like to them is a real pain – and I think that because of this people tend to stick to hand rolling good old-fashioned loops.
Consider replacing a few different characters in a std::string with a single given character, e.g., replace the characters ‘$’ and ‘|’ with ‘_’. A good way of doing this in C++ would be to use the boost regular expression library, but we could also use the std::replace_if() algorithm. All we have to do to use this algorithm is to privide a predicate that indicates if a given character should be replaced or not (say called is_bad_char()), then we do something like:
[code lang="cpp"] replace_if(str.begin(), str.end(), is_bad_char(), '_'); [/code]
Looks easy enough, and it’s nice and concise. All we have to do now is define is_bad_char(), something like:
[code lang="cpp"]
struct is_bad_char: public std::unary_function
{
bool operator() (const char& c) const
{
return !(c == '$' || c == '|');
}
};
[/code]I mean! what a pallava! that’s quite a mouthful, would you really be bothered? You would have a loop coded in just the time it took to start to remember that syntax, never mind the typing. it also looks terribly inelegant.
Now when native lambda support arrvies we will be able to do something like this instead:
[code lang="cpp"]
replace_if(str.begin(), str.end(),
<>(char c) -> bool { return !(c == '$' || c == '|'); },
'_');
[/code]That’s much better… but not available yet, we will just have to wait for c++0x to arrive. In the mean time I will just have to use lambdas in the many other languages that support them and pine when using C++.
Our Linksys NSLU2 NAS finally died after a long and protracted fight to keep it on its legs and serving. It has been acting up for a month or two now and now simply refuses to boot unless there are no drives plugged in (that’s not much use!!), I have a feeling that I could probably get it up and running again with freshly formatted disks etc., but I couldn’t really be bothered as I have wasted far too much time on the thing already.
It is only two years old, and although it is a very useable and low cost NAS solution I think that due to the shocking manner of its demise I couldn’t possibly recommend that anybody uses it at all! My opinion has been backed up by the people to whom I have since talked, their Linksys NSLU2s suffered very similar fates at eirily similar ages.
Anyway, as the attached disks are formatted as linux ext3 volumes I just plugged them into a spare mini-ITX ‘black box’ type PC that we had here and installed a very slim and cut-down version of Debian with Samba. A few quick fsck’s later confirmed that there was no damage to the volumes (phew!) and in an hour or two the disks were back on the network and stable. A very acceptable gratis stop-gap solution thanks to Debian and a spare PC!
I have recently been doing some fairly intensive merging and difference checking with Tortoise SVN and subversion and once again find myself thanking my luck stars that Winmerge is installed on my (windows) system just waiting to lend a helping hand!
For those who haven’t come across it Winmerge is an open source tool for visually checking file differences, it allows you to move individual changes or differences from one file to the other. I have found it to be one of the best such tools and it’s free! It also does a good job of comparing a whole directory tree of files.
Tortoise SVN can be configured to use Winmerge when showing differences etc. rather than its default difference visualiser, I find that this makes tortoise much more effective. Instructions for configuring Winmerge as the default diff viewer can be found in the Tortoise help pages, but to summarise:
Right-Click on a folder in explorer, choose the ‘Tortoise SVN’ sub menu and then choose the ‘Settings’ menu option. Click on the ‘Dif Viewer’ pane, select ‘External’ and enter the following into the text-box below:
C:\Program Files\WinMerge\WinMergeU.exe -e -x -ub -dl %bname -dr %yname %base %mine
[the path entered will depend on where you installed Winmerge, for the real low-down on configuring this you had better check the documentation!]
Anyway, to sum up, if you find yourself struggling with comparing files or merging changes with subversion then I have found that Winmerge can be of great help, I can’t imagine doing without it anymore!
Here is an interesting article about the economics of human CAPTCHA ‘solving’ in India. $2 for a 1000 reads, that’s a lot of squinting at wavy, almost impossible to read letters to the dollar, can’t be good for the health! Apparently it’s part of their ‘data processing’ industry!