My knitting blog is now located at the Needle Exchange!
I’m trying to set up a cron job on my server to run a php script every hour, and for some reason the only thing that works is usr/bin/wget. Which is really annoying, because every time it runs the script it writes a new file and I end up with piles and piles of files all over the place. Anyone have any idea which command I should use?
Popularity: 5% [?]
How do I add something to the menu?
Menus in drupal are really weird. Instead of hooking onto a function, they hook onto the path of a page. At least, that’s what I’ve gathered from looking at the code. I’m sure drupal experts don’t think about it and just visualize it in another way, but what you’re essentially doing is grabbing a series of ordered arguments and basing everything you write on that. So if your path is /node/add, arg(0) is “node” and arg(1) is “add”.
Popularity: 6% [?]
The “popularity contest” plugin for Wordpress is the buggiest piece of garbage I’ve ever seen. I installed it on this blog and it worked, but then suddenly it started doing all this weird stuff to my admin system. I tried installing it on my other blog and it didn’t work at all. Support is also garbage; at least four people have listed the same problems as I have and none of them have gotten any responses.
Turns out it’s a problem with mysql; the plugin directly accesses the mysql database without an abstraction layer, and of course it uses queries that are dependent on a weird, older version of mysql. So there’s no hope of it working, ever.
I’m rather disappointed, but I’ll find another plugin that hopefully does the same thing.
Popularity: 11% [?]
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed the past few weeks, it’s that drupal tutorials for developers are written by people who can’t teach, and drupal tutorials on blogs are for managerial, “I don’t know what php is” folks that don’t go in depth enough so you’re pretty much doomed to not finding any quality information about writing modules for drupal anywhere.
I’m currently working on additions to the i18n module for drupal, but since I’ve never worked with drupal before, it’s hell trying to figure out how on earth to write any code. It’s actually really frustrating; hooks are written in really weird ways, and there’s not simple way to say “when you write the menu, add this link.” Tutorials aren’t much help because as I said earlier, drupal tutorials for developers are written by people who can’t teach. So any time I have a question and manage to answer it myself, I’ll write a little thing about it here.
First question: Can I make more than one block per module?
Popularity: 5% [?]
I’m doing corrections to an electronic course right now for the third time. I don’t actually mind at all having to do these corrections; what really bothers me is that despite my request to have the corrections submitted electronically, for the second time I’ve been given a stack of paper with corrections marked in pencil. There are only 23 corrections to be made, but the entire course was printed out and the pages to be corrected were marked with post it notes.
I just measured the width of paper in my office, and there are 500 pages for every cm. That means that the 2cm high stack of paper I was just given contains at least 150 pages. (I’m cutting off 50 pages because pages are less compact when they’ve been leafed through.) Because I know the person responsible for the course has printed out at least 2 copies of the course for his own use, as well as another set of corrections for me a few weeks ago, that means that for this one single electronic course, at least 600 multi-purpose, 0% recycled, single-sided pages are going into the recycling bin this week.
We’re clear-cutting British Columbia for this?
Popularity: 5% [?]
Cheetah Babies: perhaps not as fast as Ben Johnson (yet), but like 10,000,000,000,000 times cuter.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Here’s a great post from Ward-O-Matic on The Day the Cow Sneezed by Jim Flora. Fantastic artwork, and a great insight on children’s book printing in the 50s.
Popularity: 5% [?]