Whew - I made it. Its been about 7 years since we had to move and I guess about 15 years since we crossed a state line when moving, but this little trip takes the cake for the most arduous process I hope I ever experience. 5 days of packing and loading and then a day lay over then two days of unloading. Our movers were probably just as sick of us as we were of them Seriously though –> 3 guys to move a whole house! We had more guys to move our 1 bedroom apartment from Queens to Manhattan.

I got my new internet service up and running 5 minutes ago - still no TV (I’m going back to DirecTV) - but at least now I can get some news.

My next challenge will be learning the nuances of PA beer laws. I was not allowed to buy 2 twelve packs last night in a “beer take out” store. What the heck! Well anyway - I have to locate a “beer distributor” and get some brew.

We’ve lived in New Jersey since about 1993 starting out in Hoboken and moving several times westward to Neshanic Station and then Lebanon Borough. It is with a lot of sadness that we are leaving the Garden State, our great little town of 1500 people (yes there are towns in NJ with only 1500 persons!), and our friends as we head west into Pennsylvania.

We’ll miss our cool Victorian house that we’ve worked hard to restore. I feel that we have definitely left the house in better condition than when we moved in. My favorite contribution to the house is the rebuilt front porch. The custom railings are milled in solid cedar and the floor is tongue and groove mahogany finished with timber oil.

I’ll be off the ‘net for a while as we get packed, moved, and unpacked. We’re looking forward to our new house and I’m sure happy about cutting 2/3 of the distance off my daily commute.

Drupal is a very powerful and flexible framwork for web site and applications. You can do some really amazing things very easily. However sometimes the opposite is also true - simple thing can be seemingly impossible or annoyingly complex. Like many people I like to post personal pictures of vacations or other stuff to my web sites. Drupal’s capabilities for easily publishing a set of pictures, having them auto-scaled, and then visible in a gallery seem to be crude.

What’s up with this? I’ll examine some of the tools available for Drupal 6 and give some examples for exactly how to make a couple of the these work. Maybe in the end we’ll see things aren’t so bad afterall.

Plone - another CMS I use frequently - has a really nice and easy interface for creating galleries that are powered by various JavaScript wrappers like Lightbox or Simple Gallery. You can grab a gallery product, install it, copy a zip file of pictures up to a Plone site, they will get auto-extracted into a “folder” in your plone CMS, and then they will get scaled and thumb nailed for you. The scaling is all driven by the Python Imaging Library, a powerful set of graphics manipulation tools that is similar to PHP’s gd library.

With Drupal there is nothing nearly as easy, although with a bit of work you can get close. The most promising tool that I can find is Brilliant Gallery - however it is not yet ported to Drupal 6 and it does not seem like there is any work on a port. I found a few other modules that look to have the features I want:

• Slideshow Creator
• Lightbox2
• Image

Before getting started with these modules, a bit of level setting is a good idea. I’m running Drupal 6.2 with a very up to date config. I’m running with the latest rev of PHP for Win32 and also the latest MySQL for Win32. I’m expecting you to be pretty familiar with Drupal and how to install and enable modules.

The first thing to do is setup FCKEditor with the IMCE mdoule for file upload handling. I highly recommend doing this and will assume that you have - FCK includes a decent set of instructions for itself. IMCE is a decent file browser and upload manager and sets things up for individual use too. The included instructions are pretty straightforward.

Once you have done this make sure you have the gd library enabled in the image toolkit section of the administration interface. Now you should be able to go to your user’s page and see an extra tab called “file browser”. This is supplied via IMCE and you can use this to upload all kinds of files, including images. Images have extra support for resizing and thumbnailing. From what I can tell you must add pictures one at a time. That’s a problem for people like me that tend to take pictures until their 5 GB SD card is full Another quirk is that if you try to upload a pic that is larger than the max file size you are allowed to upload, IMCE will still try to do it , but not give you an error when it fails.

Of course there is a backdoor to uploading files. If you have access you can manually copy files under the directory tree that IMCE is using to manage files. On my machine this is /sites/default/files. With IMC installed with FCK too now you can have a single directory structure for managing your images in one spot.

Now onto the modules!

Slideshow Creator

This module has the makings of a decent gallery tool. There’s (at the time of writing) a development version for D6. I found that it installed easily, but check the dependencies and get all the JavaScript stuff installed. Once you have it installed you need to go and add a new filter type for the markup that is used to create galleries. The instructions in the readme are accurate.

After getting that done and loading up a few pics as described you can display galleries. In the module properties there is a setting for the resolution of the images. They must match this resolution exactly so be sure to either use the IMCE tools to scale them - or use a nice tool like Faststone Photo Resizer. FPR is cool and I prefer it to IMCE because I have much more control over what’s going on.

With Slideshow Creator you can create discrete galleries of specific images or you can tell it to bring up all pics in a directory. The former is documented well in the readme, but the latter is not so here’s an example of the latter:

[slideshow: 2, rotate=2, blend=1 height=400, width=400, dir=|sites/default/files/pictures/|yes||Generic Photos|Arent they great?||]

That seems to work ok. There are a couple of options that you can fiddle with to control how the gallery behaves and looks, including some settings for the “auto” mode on changing the image. There’s a CSS that you can use to customize the look a bit more.

Overall - not a bad tool except for the manual work of image sizing and the crude control over how the gallery appears on the page.

Lightbox 2

Lightbox2 is a pretty nice module. The installation is straighforward and well documented. Additional documentation is available too. Once installed and enabled properly you just need to add a few images (using the method above with IMCE or just cpoying a few to a url your drupal site can see) and then you need to add links to them following the instructions in the readme.txt. There are options for single images and for slideshows. Unfortunately there is no option to add all images in a directory to a slideshow. This options would make this tool a killer.

When you have your images in a gallery they are nice rollovers to go the previous or next image, you can zoom an image, include captions, etc. Very nice! Performance is good too. Because the images are loaded up in the Lightbox they will not mess up your Drupal theme either.

So far the only downside is the requirement to many create all the hyperlinks for the images in your gallery. There is an option to hide the links so that you can have one linked image with multiple pictures. I found that very useful. What I do is create the image and link where I want it on the page and then include all the other grouped image links with the hidden option down at the bottom of the page so that it does not mess up my content with blank space. That works pretty well - it also makes it much easier to just cut/paste the link and change the image. If you use FPR to resize your images and use the autonumber function then creating the links is much easier.

Image

The Image module provides a number of pieces of functionality that allow you to handle uploading, scaling, and managing images as well as creating galleries. There’s a lot of good documentation on the module as well, although its not clear if it has been updated for D6. The installation instructions work well. You’ll need to go in an adjust a few things - your path to the image upload and processing directory and by default the image module restricts you to a measly 800KB pic. I gave that a x10 so that my 12 mpel pics get uploaded with no issues.

Once you get all the modules enabled you need to add a gallery - then you can add images individually under the content management menu or in groups using the image import menu in the administer content menu. I noticed that when I added a bunch of images it did take a while to get them all scaled and thumbnailed, but it did work! That’s really nice. What’s even better is when I go to look at the gallery the Lightbox2 stuff works and will show the images in the Lightbox perfectly! Well that is very cool indeed!

There’s a few nice blocks for images to put in your sidebars, but strangely no gallery block. I guess you can probably add your galleries as primary/secondary links or something.

I’ve hit a couple of issues with this module. the galleries are nice and it seems possible to spruce them up a bit, but I have not found a decent way to integrate them into my posts without just creating a hyperlink out. A hyperlink out is ok, but it means a user has to then click on a link to start the slideshow. I’d like to have the first image load up directly. The second issue I’ve seen is that the thumbnails and derivatives don’t always get created on the first import, but will get created when the gallery first loads up. This causes a really slow page load the first time. After that then all is well. I think with really large galleries of 100 pics then you’ll have some issues with memory and timeouts, but as long as it is only during the first load then that’s ok for me.

What’s the deal?

I’m pretty happy with Lightbox2. I think I’ll use this for most of my galleries. Image is nice, but until I can figure out how to get the galleries better integrated with my posts I think I will only use this for large galleries of pics (50-100 pics)  that I want to get quickly up on my site. Image seems to be the most complete gallery tool for Drupal and using it with Lightbox2 really does create a very powerful and easy to use set of tools that puts Drupal on a par with the best that you can get for other tools like Plone.

If I fugre out how to get smoother integration of Image galleries in my posts, I’ll put an update here.

I just passed 1000 miles on my Saab Turbo-X. I’ve been doing a lot of back and forth driving around the Philadelphia metropolitan area. This has given me a great opportunity to break-in my car, learn how to handle it on both freeways and country roads, as well as how to operate the controls.

To start off with the car has had no mechanical issues - a good start. The interior and exterior of the car is exactly what I wanted - elegant, but simple and functional. I’m extremely impressed with the quality of the materials and the fit and finish. The paint is amazing.

The quality of the ride, including during heavy rain, is excellent. It is a firm ride, but not jarring - I cannot imagine a better sport feel for a sedan. You feel the road, but between the suspension and the seats you get just the right feel. The car gives you the feeling that you are always in control.

There’s plenty of power on demand from the engine for passing. Wind noise even at high speeds on the highway is minimal. When you drop in down in gear and hit the gas it just flies.

The car has serious power off the line and then is a spirited charger whenever you need it with, as far as I can tell, no lag from the turbo. Turning and handling is precise and really quite amazing in tight turns on the back roads. It puts my old GTI to shame.

When the XWD system is active, you don’t really feel it. I went thru an outside banked turn over a one-lane bridge and could feel the outside wheels kicking in for extra duty at about 60 MPH. The assist from the system is very smooth and not “jerky” like most systems.  The same corner in my GTI would max out at about 40 MPH

There are a couple of big surprises for me:

• I complained about shifting in my earlier reviews, but after a few days I have to say now that I was wrong. The shifting in this car is better by far than my previous car. In particular down shifting is very smooth.
• The navigation system is quite nice. It is vastly superior to the Acura 2007 system my wife has. There’s a split screen view with the radio and the touch screen interface works very nicely. The audio cue voice is a bit hard to hear so you need to crank it if you are driving with all the windows down.
• The wheels: beautiful - much better than any picture especially after a bit of brake dust gets on them.
• Braking is smooth and powerful.
• The car’s sounds are really amazing, but not overpowering. You can hear the engine and exhaust notes inside and outside the car, but they are not obnoxious at all.
• Gas mileage has averaged about 22 MPG over the 1000 miles. That is really surprising given my mixed driving and a bit of silly driving and stuff.
• I’ve never had adaptive headlights before - wicked cool!
• The whole gas tank lid issue has been debunked as newbie ignorance…oops…

Ok - so there must be something bugging me about the car right? True:

• The nav audio cues are too quiet - or they are not adaptive enough.
• There’s no foot or floor level air vents as far as I can tell.
• I wish the sunroof was a little bigger - I like air…thus my problem with nav cues
• The pillar between the front and rear windows is quite wide - extra caution is needed for odd angle merges on the passenger side.
• I need to get my locks reprogrammed so that they auto-lock after the car goes over 7 MPH.
• The settings menu on the main dash is powerful and you can do a lot to customize your car’s setup., but you really gotta RTFM.
• I would prefer it if the air conditioner did not come on automatically…I have to dig into the settings to see if I can change this.

Maybe I’m not Motor Trend or Road & Tack or whatever; I’m a “regular” driver: this car is amazing. It is definitely is the best car I’ve ever driven, much less owned.

Drupal 6 has been out for a while now and modules are getting ported to the new version. For those of us that are relatively new to Drupal it has been a long slow wait - but the benefit is that we have a bit of extra motivation to learn and do “stuff” for ourselves.

If the search for cool modules and functions on the Drupal site one thing you begin to see is the importance of modules that might not necessarily supply a prebuilt function, like a calendar for example, but provide the ability to define new types, views, or displays of data from either your Drupal site or a different source. The modules I’ve been exploring are:

• Feed Aggregator
• CCK
• Views
• Panels

Feed Aggreagtor is supplied in D6 and is pretty self explanatory. The remaining 3 are very powerful. I checked out the really cool myplay.com site Sony-BMG put together. If you haven’t seen it you should check it out. They made extensive use of Views and Panels to build this site. Views is in beta now for D6 and since I also wanted a calendar, I decided to start experimenting with Views. Ok - to explain that comment: the best Calendar function for D6 uses Views for the rendering of the event data. Because Views are still in beta I had to do some tweaking.

There are a bunch of overviews and tutorials for the original Views modules on drupal.org - so start there if you want an overview. What you’ll find however is that once you get past the “what is a view?” type stuff they aren’t much help. In short a View is a list of “stuff”. The list is defined in the Views administration area through a GUI interface. The list is generated by defining a query against your database - you add attributes to extract; arguments to select what to return; sorting criteria, etc. You can then select how to display the list: a node, a block, as a feed, etc. Pretty cool I think. How do you create one? That’s what I’ll cover.

To get started I’m working with the very latest Drupal code (6.2 at time of writing). I have a pretty basic config - but its completely to do date as of 3-May-2008. I’ve installed Views (6.x-2.0-beta2) and I’ve also installed the Advanced Help module (advanced_help-6.x-1.0-beta2).

To start with Views make sure you have the very latest by checking your adminstration area. Once you’ve done that then go into the page for administrating the Views module. You’ll see a few tabs for Adding and Importing views. Click on the Add choice and you should get a screen like this:

This is the main spot where you create your view. Go ahead and bang in some values and make sure you pick off the “node” choice. What we’re going to do is create a simple “node” type view that will look like a page. We can create a link in the Navigation menu for this afterwards.

Once you fill in some values then hit add and you’ll get this next screen. It looks pretty complicated, but just remember all you’re doing is defining a query.

Start with defining some fields to retrieve - just click on the plus sign. You’ll get an Ajax refresh that listed off the different groupings of fields. You should scroll around in here and see what’s available. Pick a few easy ones from the Node group like Author and Post date. As you pick fields you’ll see that Views is building the query for you and showing you example output:

As you move through the various items in the menu you can easily build some really cool output. The relationships block is used to define keys between fields. Arguments can be used to filter data based on a parameter, for example s returning records based on a date limiter.

After you get done playing around with the data you need to select a display view for your query results. There are several options, but for this example I’ve selected the page display mode. What this will be is create a view of the output in a “page” - gee imagine that. The output will display in the main content area.

The display view can either inherit from the base display or you can pick a new display mode and over ride the base settings with new fields or different sorting options or whatever. Just add a new display and then pick a setting - be sure to save things with the button down the page:

When doing this make sure to watch the button carefully as they are AJAX and change quickly. If you click something and you think nothing has happened, be sure to scroll down and look at the output.

Once you get done screwing around with your view you can then add it to a menu - for the page type just use the page settings. I added mine to my main menu. Experiment with the other display types.

That’s pretty much it. If you start to experiment with Views you can really learn to do some very interesting things. This is especially true for very active group/team sites where a lot of people are contributing content. One interesting things I’ve done with Views is assemble sorted “update” pages that show the latest contributions sorted by dates, or by users. This is a great way to keep up to date on what your teamates are doing.

UPDATE 22-may-2008: Hey I broke 1000 miles - so here’s an update.

Last summer I started looking for a new car to replace my 2003 VW GTI VR6. Some of you might have read my “Two Germans and a Swede” post that talked about my decision. I placed my order for the Turbo-X on the first day possible and since then it has been many months of waiting. Yesterday I headed over to Saab of Hunterdon and picked up the car.

The look of the car is slick and dark. The paint is exceptional and highly polished. Combined with the wheels and the titanium trim, the car really does look like a “Sith roadster”. A turn of the key adds to this with the deep rumble of the exhaust. There are a number of nice exterior details that really set the car off. The rear lip spoiler that looks in pictures like a “glue on”, really looks pretty nice in person. The front lower air intake and the rear end’s exhaust layout make the car really standout. It is a very aggressive look.

Inside the car we’ve all seen pictures of the carbon-trim, the all-black interior, the classic turbo gauge. I’m very impressed with the look and quality of the interior and the comfort of the seats. I also really like the thick steering wheel and the large control stalks. The layout of the dash gives you great visibility of the controls and to the nav/audio system. I’ll have to spend some time figuring out the climate control system and the navigation as they are fairly sophisticated.

As with the exterior of the car, the interior looks much better in person than in any of the pictures on the internet. I always thought the carbon-fiber pieces looked greenish in most pics, but in person they are a very dark black. The plastics are solid and firm, not cheesy. The entire interior is well constructed, sleek, and laid out nicely.

I included a shot with the Nav system. The navigation and audio system is pretty nice. The touch screen interface works quite well and the sound is excellent. With the windows closed the car is very quiet so you can really enjoy the stereo - but you can still hear the exhaust notes and the engine.

There are some strange things however with this car. For example most cars will auto-lock when you go over 7 mph; the cup holders offer an interesting size challenge; and for those of you with small kids the rear windows go all the way down (a plus in my book!). There’s also no interior gas tank lid release. I guess this is because the tank lid is an old-style one that opens from the outside. I’ll have to get a cap with a lock I guess. Another thing about the gas tank - after a fill up it takes about 10 minutes for the needle to get up to the top of the dial.

I did notice one interesting “quirk” with the interior, the driver side running board is labeled with “Turbo-X” and the passenger side (on the right) is labeled with “Vector”. Check it out:

I put about 100 miles on the car yesterday. I got the manual transmission. It is going to take me a while to get used to it. My GTI had a very short shift and clutch. The shifting in the Turbo-X is quite a bit longer. Nevertheless the car has power and from a standing start it can really move. There’s plenty of turbo power. You really feel the car’s acceleration all the way up to 5000 RPM- I can’t say beyond that since I’m in the break in period still.

Handling in the car is really amazing. While I haven’t pushed it too hard yet, I can move through corners and turns easily where my previous ride would be straining and dipping just getting through. There’s plenty of feel in the wheel although it is not heavy. The ride is stiff without being jarring. Road feel is excellent and not damped or mushy. New Jersey’s one-lane country roads present an excellent challenge for the Turbo-X and it delivers.

Overall this is a great car. I haven’t found anything about it that I don’t like - its got personality and funk and it has guts and performance. If Saab keeps producing cars of this quality then there will certainly be a bright future for the company and its enthusiasts.

PS: A shout out to my friends at Saab of Hunterdon for a great buying experience.

For my friends and family sick of my constant “Saab” story about my car not being here, finally the end is near. My dealer gave me the word that my dark Swede is here after many months of waiting (I ordered on day #1 last November). Now of course the only problem is that I’m away for a few days and you are getting as close to my car as me! Although I might just have to sneak out of my meeting to get a peek!

Here’s a great shot of my ride sitting at my dealer - I can’t wait to get in this rig and kick up some pavement.

Many thanks to Scot and Saab of Hunterdon.

I’ll post s full review after I take possession and get some time behind the wheel. I’ll also post a few more pics and closeups. Scot took a bunch, but I”ve got a 12 mpel Cannon that will get some good details. I’ll also try to post an audio of the exhaust note.

You can check out more pics on TrollhattanSaab

beren

I’ve been spending a lot of time with PHP lately thru my Drupal module work. Durpal modules are really an interesting way to learn about the good, the bad, and the ugly of PHP since there are a ton of techniques and varying qualities of code in the modules on drupal.org. I’ve updated my article on key things to remember about PHP based on some of these.

beren

I’ve seen two sites lately that really speak to the power of open-source CMS frameworks. One is based on Drupal and the other on Plone. Both are very nice and really show that these tools are serious power-houses for building sophisticated, modern, and very sexy websites. Enough drool, here they are:

• http://www.myplay.com
• http://nasascience.nasa.gov/

Lots of people don’t like these frameworks citing memory issues, scalability, etc., but I think these sites prove this isn’t the case.

I’ve learned quite a bit about how Drupal works with styles and how pages are rendered. Now I’m looking at how to build modules. What I would like to do is create a few custom modules that can “suck in” and combine information from other sources into a master feed - a feed aggregator on steroids. Similar to a “mashup” server of some kind. This is still a little fuzzy in my mind, but my intent is to look at ways to process and combine data streams from various sources into a “master view”.

As an example if I’m interested in the Saab Turbo-X then I would want to combine data feeds from enthusiast sources, Saab, GM, and a number of other places into a “master view” so that on one page I would have everything that I need to know about this car.

So with this in mind I embark on my trip down “module lane”. I can already see there are a few bends in the road, but before we go there, drupal.org has a great tutorial on module development so you should read this. There’s also a good section on setting up a development environment. For my development environment I’m running on Windows XP Pro, Apache 2.2.8, MySQL 5.x, PHP 5.2.5, and Drupal 6.2. For my actual development tool I am using the very latest Aptana Studio Community Edition - my current rev is 1.1.6.009905.

You should focus on the links above to start - as with my previous articles on Drupal I am not seeking to replace their excellent documentation, but really provide a “newbie” spin on how to get going. I’m not a PHP expert (but I sure am getting there…) and I would not call myself a Drupal guru either.

Using Drupal’s tutorial I was able to easily create a module and get it working, but I did have a few issues:

1. The “.module” thing without a “.php” ending needs to get configured in your IDE too as a PHP file.
2. There are some subtle differences in the .info files that can cause confusion with earlier versions of drupal, for example the dependencies key/value is now an array type. To add multiple dependencies you need to add these to the array one at a time.
3. It is not entirely clear how to enable IDEs to recognize core Drupal libraries and functions so that “intellisense” lookup stuff works. Check this out for Aptana.
4. CVS stinks…I use SVN…so I naturally don’t like posting anything to Drupal’s code managemnet system. You can get a decent CVS GUI client from tigris.org (the same people that make svn and tortoise).

I learned a few things that are very important when building modules:

1. When you are building modules it is very important to not put any HTML formatting directly in the code. Use CSS tags and DIVs or your users will have fits trying to get things working especially if you are creating block type modules.
2. Think of all the possible variables in your module and build an administration interface to make your module as flexible as possible.
3. If things are not showing up and you can’t see any cause, disable and re-enable your module. Clear your cache. Turn off all caching and performance stuff in the administration interface.
4. PHP (not really Druapl per se) has some interesting operators like “.=” that are used quite a bit in code and examples. You need to learn these or at least have a handy cheat sheet. “.=” is roughly equivalent to an “append” function in other languages
5. Drupal then adds confusion a bit with some functions like “t()” and “l()“. These are important to know and understand, but they really should have decent names. Once you are up to speed on these it is ok.

Building modules in Drupal is pretty simple I think. What it takes is a decent IDE (aptana), a good understanding of PHP syntax, and some time studying the Drupal APIs. I’m going to work on a real world example in my next modules post. I’m also going to look at CCK and Views and examine if I can use these instead of a module.