weitzman's blog

ever since the oedipus days, leaders have fallen because of their hubris (i.e. arrogance). our current national leader, george bush, has demonstrated extreme arrogance thoughout his term, and i'm certain he will pay for it one day. and that one day might been soon given this current "i am allowed to spy on you without a warrant talk". anyone who has taken a US history class knows that this is not true.

congress recognized the need for spying and setup a court which could convene on a moments notice and give a search warrant when the executive branch needed one. this court has been used many thousands of times and has disallowed only 4 petitiions. still, bush decided he didn't need approval from anyone.

I forgot to announce that my slides from the Amsterdam Drupalcon presentation are online. The topic is unit testing in Drupal. For documentation, see the simpletest docs at drupal.org

Drupal has gained some powerful tools in recent year(s). They are all valid and useful. When used improperly though, they can become dizzying. Consider these misdirections ....

• Rewrite arbitrary SQL queries fom your own module
• Rewrite forms from your own module. Add/remove fields and change the Action attribute
• Alias some system urls so he can't tell what module is handling the page
• Implement some theme() functions so he can't find who is outputting an HTML chunk
• Drop small node-story.tpl.php files in the theme directory so that he can't figure out why stories look different.
• Use menu.module to restructure your Navigation block. Change some link text while you are there.
• Use the 'arbitrary PHP' feature of blocks to show only for certain people on certain pages.
• Implement advanced database prefixing so that he looks at the wrong tables by accident. Ouch!
• Switch themes from some obscure part of your code by changing the global $custom_theme variable.

I didn't realize until today that Tuesday was the 10 year anniversary of jerry's death, and the end of the original grateful dead. 10 years ago, I attended a vigil in center city phildelphia and sang tunes, and hugged, and thanked jerry for all the music. We strummed and sang a killer China Cat => I Know you Ryder => Franklin's.

Although the band keeps playing on, lets pause to remember one of our heroes and leaders. I've learned a lot from Jerry's mischievous and loving ways.

Link of the day: Annotated Grateful Dead lyrics

Update: on shared web hosting accounts, the cache is almost always disabled and customer has no permission to enable it since it is a global variable. Bummer. I guess this is why people go for Virtual Private Server hosting accounts.

Here is a lovely semi-technical article describing MySQL's unique and bestest feature - the query cache. This speeds up SELECT statements in a big way. Mandatory for high volume Drupal sites.

nice lighting in a photo makes all the difference. and there is no better light than sunlight. here is my 15 month old girl, mali.

Matt and I had an IRC brainstorm about re-introducing subproducts into ecommerce module. A subproduct is a red, large t-shirt. T-shirt is the "base product".

The intent is to use vocabularies just like before. Inthis case, we ill have Color and Size vocabularies. These would be affiliated with the 'product' node type.

Here is the table structure that we came up with for ec_product.

[via Monster fish washes up in New Zealand]:

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p>This creature is about as frightening a fish as i've ever seen. If you all remember the post a couple of months ago about the weird Nessie looking creature that washed up near the U.K. Well this thing puts that thing to shame!

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Yeah. The monster fish is gonna get you.

[via Wired 12.10: The Long Tail]:

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p>For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.

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Sensational article describing how the web makes new businesses possible. Examples include NetFlix and Amazon. This is not typical media fluff - this is thoughful analysis using basic economics principles.

[via False Ads: There Oughtta Be A Law! Or -- Maybe Not. - FactCheck.org]:

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p>Here's a fact that may surprise you: candidates have a legal right to lie to voters just about as much as they want.

Turns out, that's a tougher question than you might imagine.

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Fascinating article about political campaign advertising. The author seems to *like our currest state, where one candidate can make bald faced lies against the other without puishment. That doesn't pass the smell text. In england, libel laws would send the offender to jail.