jimmynash's posterous

Robot Bathrooms - I still have to touch stuff

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 12:38:00 -0700

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

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RockMelt

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 22:29:00 -0800

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 :) .

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Limbo

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:48:25 -0700

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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DrupalCamp Colorado

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:09:00 -0700

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.

Day One:

Check-in was a little bit of a free-for-all. Badges were printed before the camp with information from registrant profiles. The information on the badge varied based on how much of your profile you had filled out. Some people had their username on the badge. Others had their full name. Several people had a stack of the badges and were trying to hand them out to people who didn't know if their username was on it or their real name. Surprisingly, it moved along fairly quickly and we were off to the first sessions.

My first session was Creating A New Adminstration Paradigm. After a short welcome statement we were quickly introduced to an add-on module for Panels. The Context Admin Module allows sites utilizing Panels to break Drupal's administrative functions out. Based on the context of the panel variants, a site builder can allow users to have tabs to do things like add nodes or users without giving that user the permissions you would normally be forced to hand out.

The session was pretty high level and the module presented was dependent on Panels which isn't used on every site. I can see this being very valuable to site that plan on using Panels and need to keep tight control over who can do what. It also makes sense when the end user is not super technical and could get lost in Drupal's admin pages. This technique makes the things the user needs to do quickly available from where they already need to be in the site.

Session Two was one that I was really looking forward to. I am way behind on git. What I mean is I don't use it and should be. I use SVN now and since Drupal as a community and project is switching to git the I feel I need to switch too. Unfortunately, this presentation was more about what git is and how it works than how to effectively utilize it. Maybe I misunderstood the title. Introduction. Hmmmm. Yeah, that was appropriate, I read into it too much.

Drupal Multi-sites: Simplifying Site Creation and Management is a subject that I am familiar with as we utilize multi-site with an Aegir server as well as some other single client multi-site set-ups. I was hoping to get some interesting tidbits or tips that I hadn't run across. This session was mostly an introduction as well. The presenter seemed to have only been using multi-site for a relatively short period. He did do a good job of explaining the basics of multi-site and I think anyone who was not experienced definitely knew how to get started when the session was over. This session made me realize that I shouldn't be afraid of submitting sessions next year.

Advanced Views and CCK was very well put together. Doug Vann talked about the next level of CCK and Views. Many people don't realize what they can really do with Drupal until they play with CCK and Views. Then the world opens to them. They use the filters, they use the sorts and maybe even arguments. And then they need to do more. Doug talked about a few techniques, namely the "Exclude From Content" check box on a View field. By bringing in a node field and excluding it from the content, you can then use the token for that field in fields later in the field list. This lets you do things like combining field values and wrapping them in markup using the "Rewrite" area of one of the later fields. He also talked about the View Field module. This module lets you embed a view into a node with a CCK field. I can think of a few times where that would have been handy. Send that view your node id as an argument and *presto!* you have related content. I asked Doug if there was a way he knew of to make Views exposed filters and arguments play nicely together. He didn't have a good answer for me. If you do, I'd love to hear it.

Site Configuration Management (and staging) using Features Module. Features. Seems to be where everything is headed for Drupal. Drupal is great in that it gives us so much freedom to meet a clients needs in so many different ways. Drupal sucks in that it gives us so much freedom to meet a clients needs in so many different ways. Most Drupalers have build a site with some great "Features" only to need that same thing on another site later. Create content type, create view, configure imagecache, etc, etc, etc. Features lets you bundle up all of that work and reuse it as a module. Use it along with Strongarm to gather up all your pieces including site variables. Then on the target site, just amke sure you have all the dependant modules that your feature needs (like CCK and Views etc) as well as Features itself. Drop your new Feature/Module in and turn it on. Content types get created, Views get created all that pointing and clicking you did once before is done for you. The added bonus is that you can version all of that now since it is in code. Yummy.

My favourite session of the day: Drupal Security - Configuration and Process. This was a great precursor to greggles' presentation the next morning on security. Ben from GVS showed us an example of a Cross Site Scripting attack where he dropped malicious jQuery into a comment field that had the Full HTML filter available to the anon user. At first nothing happened. Then he came back through as an admin and viewed that shiny new comment. Instantly the site name has been changed, site slogan is changed, user 1 password is changed, and site is offline and defaced. Pants-load. Drupal does not filter anything on input. It filters on output. Don't let people you don't trust implicitly have access to the Full HTML filter. And don't go adding allowed tags willy nilly to the Filtered HTML filter.

The other important snip I learned: Devel. Devel is awesome. But have you ever given the anonymous user the permission to see Devel information so you could see your dpm() output when logged out? Yeah, take that away when you are done. And turn devel off while you're at it. Users with the Access Devel information permission can access the Devel variable editor and do all sorts of hairy damage to your site.

Great sessions all day. Met some cool people. Shook hands with rszrama and chx and ultimateboy. For me that was pretty cool.
The after party was at Brooklyn's at the Pepsi Center. examiner.com and Volacci sponsored the party with free drinks, food and door prizes. I stayed long enough to have some good conversation and a few cold ones.

Free beer is a hard thing to walk away from.

-nash

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7 is Lucky, 8 Breaks your Callback

Mon, 24 May 2010 19:44:00 -0700

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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Thank you Jeff Eaton

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 22:59:00 -0700

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 <> pager between nodes that are linked to from a View.

I explain....

This site had already had nice Galleria galleries showcasing projects and a simple View to show them all in a listing. The problem was that when viewing the node, I wanted to have a pager somewhere on the screen to allow a user to page between those project nodes.

My first attempt was to build another View of single nodes of the project type with a mini-pager that I would position with css where ever I wanted. The view was set to display one item per page. Then, from the main listings view, rather than link the titles and thumbnails to the nodes themselves I rewrote the link output. On each listing, the links to the node were rewritten to go to the path of the single node view. So the links looked something like this:

/singlenode_view?page=[counter]

The counter was a Global: View result counter token replacement. So when a user clicked on that projects title or thumbnail, it loaded the single node view on the page that corresponded to that node. Sweet! And using ajax on the view allowed the page load to be ajaxy. Sweeter!

Now when someone follows a link from the listings they end up with the correct project and an ajax pager but the url is always /singlenode_view?page=[somenumber].

What about all my nice pathauto urls for each of those project nodes? Fail....

Along comes Jeff Eaton with his nice Custom Pagers module. (I find these things well after I have tried this all on my own...). I was just about to do some custom programming to get my next/previous node id's from my view when I found this module.

Fantastic.

Installed. Enabled. Now I can have a block that displays my next an previous links based off of either custom php code, or an existing View. What do you know, I already have that view. Set, place block, done.

I did run across the 10 items only bug as I had installed the 6.x-1.10-beta1 version. Apparently, if you are using 6.x you want the dev version. After removing the beta version and installing the dev version things were peachy. See the blog post about it here. I did not have to implement the "Pager Node List" code they list on that post with the dev version I downloaded today.

So a huge thanks to Jeff Eaton and Lullabot for all that they do for the Drupal community. You saved my can today and I owe you a beer.

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SC : Conviction Demo Impressions

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:26:00 -0700

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 demo begins with a lengthy video showing some of Sam Fisher's new abilities. The action looks complex and I'm a little worried about the complexity of some of these smooth moves. Not that I balk at complex control schemes, but the action looks so intense, how does the experience hold up when the player hesitates? How does the AI react to retreat? What if I hide in a corner for a full minute? Do they keep repeating the same phrases? What I'm getting at is: If the player isn't Johnny on the Spot with their reactions, and has to muck around a bit, do they miss out on the Bournesque experience that the early video promises?

As the demo puts you into the action, you are slowly introduced to the controls. As compared to the older SC games, these controls seem to be a little simplified. Single buttons are used to handle general actions and in many cases, Sam just takes care of things for you. While this may seem like it takes control away from the player, it really serves to let you plan your strategies and not worry about the little things. Sam will just take your simple button presses and execute what needs to be done. Hand to hand take downs are a simple press of the B button. You just make sure you aren't seen and Sam will make the takedown look sweet.

Cover is similar to Gears of War with holding the left trigger to stay in cover. While in cover, pointing your reticule at another piece of cover will put a small icon on that cover showing you what section of the cover you will hit and what direction Sam will be facing when he gets there. All you do is then hit your A button and Sam takes over moving to the cover and sliding into place.

Combat is a combination of regular over the shoulder shooting and a risk reward game. When you take an enemy down with a hand to hand move, you earn Mark and Execute points. These allow you to smoke multiple enemies in a short amount of time. Once you have some Mark and Execute points you can simply sneak up on some baddies, mark them with the Right Bumper and then just press the Y button. Bang, bang, you're dead. Sam takes out the enemies and makes it look sweet. One trick you can use, is to mark enemies even if you don't have any ME points. With the enemies marked, execute a Hand to Hand Takedown and then hit the Y button. With those enemies already marked, and some fresh ME points in his pocket, Sam takes care of business.

I found that the first few times I ran through the demo I alerted a lot of guards. It was difficult even on the fourth time through to get them all without making any waves. It was very encouraging to see that I was quickly getting better at silently eliminating folks. This means that as you get used to how to handle Sam, you will make those quick decisions under pressure that will result in that Bourne experience as you play.

For as long as this game has been pushed, I'm expecting to see a really polished experience when SC:Conviction releases in April. The demo was a good indicator that this will be the case. I've always loved the SC series and this one looks ready to top all the rest.

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The New Guy Likes Poppins

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:37:55 -0800

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

Bask in the glory that is Mary Poppins!!

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Posterous wins!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:46:51 -0800

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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