Patrick Sullivan
Web Developer at Pickering Creative Group
Giant fan of all things Drupal
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Robot Bathrooms - I still have to touch stuff
Dear Mr. Establishment Owner,
When you decided to buy those Robot Faucet heads for your restroom, why did you decide to pass on the automated soap dispenser, towel dispenser and exit door?
Did the Robot Bathroom Rep forget to pitch these items to you? Were they too expensive? Maybe you have them on layaway.
I appreciate the fact that I didn't have to touch the faucet handle to wash my hands even though they weren't clean yet. I think that the sanitary savings were lost when I had to pump the soap, spin the towel dispenser and touch the door handle on the way out. Good effort, but half-assed.
If you are serious about having a sanitary bathroom, go the full nine yards. Make me wave for everything. I want to feel like a beauty queen in the back of a cadillac by the time I leave your restroom.
Otherwise, don't bother and spend the money on other things that will make me want to come back to your place.
And if you are the manufacturer of bathroom fixtures with eyes?
If I have to touch the eye to make it work, you're doing it wrong.
--nash
RockMelt
All this social stuff just kindof comes and goes for me. Sometimes I'm interested, sometimes I could care less. So I won't blogzor or twitner or bookface for days or even weeks at a time. And then I do it all for a few days. The cycle repeateth.
Most times I just don't have anything all that interesting to say. I try not to fill the internet with any more useless crap than there already is. No one really needs to know that I'm at Laundryland spin cycling my drawers (I'm not, ever. Not a fan of that place.). Even if I was who cares? So I twatter/fakebuch/blogner when I actually want to share.
And there is the issue of finding the app I want, when it is time to do that sharing. Smartphone? Sure, pick the app and go. At the desk? Go to the website, login, or open tweetdeck or whatever to get mah share on. It sure would be nice if they were all in one place. Enter RockMelt.
Rockmelt is a browser built on Google Chrome that loads all of your social crapola in the sidebars. Facebook Friends on the left according to login status, configurable feeds on the right. Chat with people right from the friend icons. Write on their walls. Tweet from your twitter feed. One button to share the site you are currently looking at in the center to your configured social networks.
It also has one of the cooler search features I've seen. There is a search bar to the right of the address bar (pretty standard) but searching in it drops down a list of the hits. Clicking on one previews the result in the main browser window. Click another and it will change. Click out of the search area and stay on the site you just previewed. Each search result also gives you a small button to open that result in a new tab. All browsers should take a hint from this functionality.
RockMelt is available for PC and Mac right now. It is still in beta and you have to connect through Facebook to download it (free). Once downloaded and installed, you have to connect to Facebook to start it up. It asks you to allow it access to a LOT of your Facebook data. That made me pause a little. If that bothers you, then maybe RockMelt isn't for you. I assumed that it wants the access to let you do cool things in your browser experience. So far, I have not been disappointed.
It lets me do the things that I want to do easier than I could do them before. Other apps have tried to do that for me but this is the first that I am digging. I spend my day in a browser doing web development. Now I can keep up without switching focus.
Nice work Team RockMelt. Keep it up and don't be evil with my Facebook info :) .
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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!!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
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