Just moved from wordpress to drupal
Submitted by Rimu Atkinson on Wed, 18/02/2009 - 15:02This web site has just undergone a fairly painless transition from wordpress to drupal. This means that anyone who I've given a link to my portfolio recently is going to end up at either a 404 or the homepage. Now you know.
drupal: inserting flash content (youtube videos) fails to display in IE
Submitted by Rimu Atkinson on Wed, 18/02/2009 - 14:57One of the drupal web sites I work on had a problem where any youtube video that was posted to the site failed to display on internet explorer. Any other browser worked fine.
The code we were trying to insert was this:
Read moretheming just one node in drupal
Submitted by Rimu Atkinson on Thu, 04/12/2008 - 16:31Drupal's theming system uses file names to decide which theme to apply to whatever page the visitor is asking for. So page-front.tpl.php is the front page, block-footer.tpl.php is any block in the footer, page-node-10.tpl is the page that contains node 10, etc etc
However, out of the box, there is no way to theme just one node. You can't go node-1.tpl.php and expect node 1 to be themed. To get around this, add the following to your theme's template.php
function phptemplate_preprocess_node(&$vars, $hook) {
$node = $vars['node'];
Read more rails error: IOError: Couldn’t load the unicode tables for UTF8Handler (dump format error(0xb))
Submitted by Rimu Atkinson on Fri, 21/11/2008 - 21:07Argh I can't believe how long it took for me to track this one down. No one else on the internet had reported the problem before, so trusty ole google was no help. So I'm putting this one out there, to help others.
This error is caused when a file vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/values/unicode_tables.dat becomes corrupted. The easiest way that can happen is if while using FTP to upload your Rails app onto it's server, you are uploading the entire vendor/rails directory in ASCII mode. unicode_tables.dat contains binary data, which gets mangled when you upload using ASCII.
Read moreFreelancesos
Submitted by Rimu Atkinson on Fri, 21/11/2008 - 17:31
FreelanceSOS is a web site where freelancers can go to find work, and project managers can find freelancers to do work.
swfupload: file uploading nirvana. almost.
Submitted by Rimu Atkinson on Fri, 21/11/2008 - 17:08I've been playing around with using swfupload to allow users to upload large amounts of large files on ourspace.
It's pretty hot. Flash 10 compatible (security changes in Flash 10 broke a lot of flash-based file uploaders), progress indicators for each file and an upload queue which the user can add files to while other files upload.
Downers: doesn't work on linux (as far as I can tell, anyway) and uses flash. Minor problems, for most...
asp.net: huge difference between DataView.Table and DataView.ToTable
Submitted by Rimu Atkinson on Sun, 16/11/2008 - 12:36Both DataView.Table and DataView.ToTable return a DataTable from a DataView. The difference is that .Table gives you the underlying data, with no changes from the dataview's sorting or filtering. ToTable on the other hand, gives you the data in the dataview after filtering and sorting!
This is the sort of thing I've come to expect from PHP; similarly named methods that actually do quite different things, and/or inconsistently named methods which do opposite things.
ruby gotcha: exec command
Submitted by Rimu Atkinson on Thu, 11/09/2008 - 20:50Surprisingly small amount of documentation on the net about this....
When using the exec command, don't expect any of your ruby code after it to execute! This is because the command you run using exec replaces the currently executing script!
Use the system command instead, or the `` trick
Why it is important that software projects fail
Submitted by Rimu Atkinson on Fri, 05/09/2008 - 12:17This paper boldly challenges the long established misconception that the catastrophic failure of expensive software projects is detrimental to society. It first provides detailed theoretical and empirical evidence for Berglas's corollary to Parkinson's law, namely that software automation does not improve real productivity. It is then shown that not only is it acceptable for software projects fail, but that it is essential that they fail if society is to function effectively. In this way the heavy burden of guilt can be lifted from the shoulders of the numerous project managers that have su
Read more
