jimmynash’s posterous
Patrick Sullivan

Web Developer at Pickering Creative Group
Giant fan of all things Drupal
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July 26th, 7:48pm 1 comment

Limbo

I have a thing for artsy concept games. One of my favorites of all time is Shadow Of the Colossus. Not only did it have fantastic gameplay, it achieved a level of immersion that is hard to come by. It also struck a great balance between making you work for it and being frustratingly difficult.

Limbo is very much this way. The game rarely hands you the answer to a situation but if you can think out of the box just a bit, it will reward you. And it always feels good. Like finding 5 bucks in your pocket. Even though the environments and characters are all grainy light and silhouette, you quickly find connection with the Boy.

The Boy has no back story as far as I can tell but you instantly recognize his plight. Sort of like when you were lost in the mall when you were a kid. You need to help him find his way. You need to protect him. And when he dies, and he WILL die (because of you) it will be jarring. You will feel like you have failed him every time. And yet you will continue into the wee hours of the morning.

The environment is subtle, ever changing and devious in it's redirection. Many times you will ask yourself how you missed that trap or that jump. You were most likely meant to miss it. And not because they put it right in front of you.

If you enjoy adventure games, this is one to not miss. It excels in its presentation, gameplay and cleverness. You may not play it over and over again but like Shadow of the Colossus it's one you definitely MUST play.
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Posted 1 month ago
July 7th, 9:09pm 0 comments

DrupalCamp Colorado

DrupalCamp Colorado was a few weekends ago in Denver CO. I attended both days and it was again, a fantastic experience. There were more sessions than I could attend but I will attempt to give a wrap-up of what I was able to absorb. I will make this a two part post so this isn't a novel.

 
Enjoy.
 

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Posted 1 month ago
May 24th, 7:44pm 0 comments

7 is Lucky, 8 Breaks your Callback

I only seem to feel like writing after I've spent the afternoon bashing my head against a keyboard. Otherwise the day might only be worth a tweet.

While working on a flash component controller module today, I ran into another thing I did not know about Drupal's internals. The module required several screens for creating and editing parts of a flash banner, allowing for file uploads and re-ordering of the elements. Not the most complex thing ever, just a lot of administrative parts. I was happily crunching along when I began working on an edit screen for the elements. The path to that part of the module was:

admin/settings/splash3/element/edit/%/%splash3_banner/%splash3_element (see the 8 pieces?)

When visiting that path, the module would fall back to a path that it already knew:

admin/settings/splash3

?? - The game is afoot...

After trying several different callbacks and other changes to the module's hook_menu I finally hit on something. Things only started to get weird if I was passing an eighth menu arg to the callback. Shortening the path allowed them to work.

davereid confirmed my suspicions on the #drupal-nebraska IRC channel. Drupal can only accept seven parts of a path for a callback. See: http://api.drupal.org/api/constant/MENU_MAX_PARTS/6

Nice. So, all you aspiring module builders out there, don't get to crazy with your paths. You might just run into this little limitation in D6. If you are working in D7 already rest easy, you have nine menu parts to work with.
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Posted 3 months ago
March 25th, 10:59pm 0 comments

Thank you Jeff Eaton

Not a week goes by where I'm not trying to solve some issue that a particular site needs. In this case it was the need for a <<Previous Next>> pager between nodes that are linked to from a View.

I explain....

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Filed under drupal eaton lullabot
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Posted 5 months ago
March 21st, 7:26pm 0 comments

SC : Conviction Demo Impressions

Splinter Cell: Conviction is one of my most looked forward to titles of 2010. Ubisoft released a short demo for the game last week. It weighs in at a hefty 1.19 GB so it takes a bit to download. The time is worth it though. A demo can make or break your decision to pick up a title. While I was pretty sure I was going to get this game when it came out, this demo has cemented that.

 

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Posted 5 months ago
March 11th, 12:37pm 0 comments

The New Guy Likes Poppins

Nick got to go to the AMA monthly meeting today. He got a swag bag.

Bask in the glory that is Mary Poppins!!

Filed under pickering poppins swag
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Posted 5 months ago
March 10th, 8:46pm 0 comments

Posterous wins!

Alright!

After a major fail at westhost and sites being down for days, I've decided I no longer need to have a VPS account. No slam on westhost, they really do a great job.
This was one hiccup (albeit a BIG hiccup!) in the service that they have provided me for the past year.

So,
Bloggin' will be here at posterous, and if I really feel the need to fire up a server, I may just be doing that with the Rackspace Cloud.

I'll bring over some of my older stuff and maybe repost the things that aren't to stupid.

Here's to simplifying your life.

-nash

Filed under 404 simplify
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Posted 5 months ago