I’m beginning to become a Drupal convert

I had this discussion today with our QA lead for a Drupal project. I’ll try to translate it in english the best way I can

QA: lola (a term we call each other)
QA: parang wla na akong nakitang error (I think I did not encounter any error)
Me: WOW
QA: kasi drupal functionalities namn ginamit nyo (just because you used drupal functionalities)
QA: hehehe
Me: achievement yan lola!!! (That’s an achievement lola!!!)
QA: maliban na lng sa sizes ng navigation box (except for the navigation box sizes)
QA: hahaha
QA: at links na may page not found (and pages not found)
Me: meron? (there was?)
QA: uu (yes)
Me: san? (where?)
QA: yung xx page sa xx affiliate (on the page for xx affiliate)
Me: ah ok
Me: nagcleanup ako ng xx pages (I cleaned up the xx pages)
QA: ahhhh
QA: maganda yung reason ko no? wlang errors kasi drupal functionalities yung ginamit (My reasoning is good, right? that there were no errors because you used drupal functionalities, right?)
QA: =))
Me: di ko n nkita ung last statement (I actually did not see your last statement)
Me: n record lang ung una (the only recorded part for me was the first [statement])
Me: =))
QA: kaya kng ako sa inyo (that’s why if I were you)
QA: drupal na lng gamitin nyo? (use drupal instead)
Me: mag drupal n lang for life (use drupal for life)
Me: =))
Me: pag iisipan ko yang mabuti (i’ll think carefully about that)
QA: wag ka na mag cake php (don’t use cakephp anymore)
Me: bihira lang ako ma 0 error eh (I rarely get 0 errors)
QA: nyahaha
QA: pero mag te test pa rin ako (I’ll still make some tests though)
Me: hahahah
QA: malay mo…may error (You’ll never know, there are still errors)
Me: cge lang.. para may reason nmn ako n di solid ang drupal (go on, so that atleast I have a reason not to use drupal)
Me:
QA: hahaha

I never heard any bug reports from her today though. For the record, I did extend a module for that project which took me a week or more to finish. But still, thanks to drupal we were able to create this project in just 2 weeks! It could probably took us like a month if I had to do it using cakephp.

Pidgin over Digsby, why?

I like digsby eversince I installed it in my pc but I rarely use it now after a few days of testing and went back to my pidgin.

Digsby is really cool! It is one of the tools I’ve been wanting. It is a multiprotocol IM client that lets you chat with all your friends on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber with one simple to manage buddy list. It is also an email notification tool that alerts you of new email and lets you perform actions such as ‘Delete’ or ‘Report Spam’ with just one click. And one of the coolest feature this toy has, it is a social networking tool that alerts you of events like new messages and gives you a live Newsfeed of what your friends are up to. I just use twitter on this one though. It has also an alert feature when someone logs in and that is what is missing in pidgin. Yeah it has the buddy pounce but I like it if was more of the ym or digsby type.

Digsby needs users to register first so that they can save all client’s settings, accounts and password in their server. One thing that my friends questioned me when they installed it, is it secure? The digsby team made an effort to answer that. There has also been a lot of discussion from users questioning why this software needs to store their accounts and password in the digsby server but that was already answered in the forum too and I think it will be far from too soon that they will change that.

The above issue is a lesser concern for me though. Compared to the benefit it gives me, i actually did not worry. I do not enter my important accounts in softwares like these. What moved me to use my ol’ pidgin is the total memory it consumes. It’s big and I experienced lag times when I used digsby. My firefox crashes more often than what I was experiencing before. I already feel irritated when firefox crashes and how do you think I felt more when it did more often than the usual? Miserable! I also notice when I am chatting, the time I send my message, it does not automatically reflects in the textarea which sometimes confuses me. I hate that!

I still look forward to this software’s updates. I still want it because it just amazes me! Hope they can fix those issues sooner…

The New Thing in Web … Again

Web 3.0? Web 4.0? What???

After the AJAX hit, Web 2.0 buzzword and Facebook API’s, another new word popped out somewhere when I was surfing. Adobe AIR. They say it is the new thing now! Oh my! I haven’t even mastered AJAX nor the APIs yet!

Now, now, now, what’s Adobe AIR again?

The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. AIR stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime

Does that mean I can run this kind of app on and offline? Yes indeed. According to this very helpful article by BlueClock, AIR finds the best of both worlds. It can interact with online resources if connected or use local storage (via SQLite) and synchronise data when next connected. It runs well in Windows, Linux and OS X (isn’t that nice..).

I downloaded Google Analytics Reporting Suite to test what kind of application this technology has brought. Looks very cool. I quite actually liked this app compared to the web version. It’s fast and I do not have to worry about Firefox crashing again. And most of all, I do not have to worry cluttering my browser again with pages from analytics. In years, I have thought about this technology, and now look, it’s just a single download away from us. Try it!

After this, what’s next? Can you just please wait for me to study this app before coming up with another new technology????? Hehe.. how I wish *roll eyes*

PDF Vista reader Sucks!!

It was just last night that I gave up using PDF vista. Simple word search and jumping from one link to another doesn’t work correctly. Adobe Reder is just the best! It saved me a lot of trouble going round and round the files. I did not know why I had waited for such long before deciding PDF vista isn’t just right. d*rn!

** ranting ** just another bad day **

The Software Developer’s Prayer

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace
where there is code that I should have completed
where there are defects that I should have fixed
where there are deadlines that I should have met.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much as seek as
to be understood as to understand irate clients
to be supported as to support difficult applications
to be valued as to value quality software design.

For it is in debugging that we find errors,
it is in requirements that we find clarity,
and it is in camaraderie that we find harmony in work.

Amen.

I don’t know if Neri wrote it by herself but one thing for sure I CAN RELATE! I love it!

Microsoft IE8 passed Acid2

Wow this is nice and hot news! Finally IE is taking the standards seriously. The lawsuit of Opera to IE might have an effect afterall..

As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.

Now, with all that context, I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release. We will blog more on these topics. Here’s a relevant video.

For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations. We’re posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we’re confident about delivering it in the final product. We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. Now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information.

Ok, you might be wondering what is Acid2 Test. I myself was not familiar with it until now.

The Acid2 test was developed by the Web Standards Project (WaSP) as a challenge to browser developers. In a single page, the test makes use of a broad range of features from several different web standards that developers have wanted to have in browsers for some time, and it uses them to display a deceptively simple smiley face.

Now we can sleep real tight that in the coming future, developers and designers will have less headache making their website CSS based Happy New Year IE!

A glimpse to the shiflett.org look

I’ve been a fan of Chris Shiflett’s site since late last year. One thing that really made me come back to this site was not the content but the design - I am not an RSS fan :D. I tried to mimic it and got a very poor outcome. The site is very easy on the eyes. Even the color is gray, I like how he played it with orange so it does not look so boring. The background images looks like wallpaper but it just complements everything. It looks so neat with the metal like surface. I like the fonts — I am a fan of Arial and Verdana - and specially the icons. I love the spacing and alignment of the content! I could not find a thing that I don’t like.

When I read the About section of his website the more I respect him. Shame on me I tried to mimic his site without really considering the background story. Everything was well planned - xhtml validity, accessibility, icons, content, GUI… Just to give you a snippet of what he said:

Accessibility was a baseline design ethic. The markup is ordered logically. The contrast should be sufficient for most users, and text resizing is accommodated as far as possible in the default style; relative values are used for everything. There’s an additional single-column “light” style (linked via the utilities menu above the search form). The site has been manually checked to Priority 2 plus conformance to the WCAG 1.0 with extra screen reader checks for critical objects like the calendar.

I haven’t seen really someone discusses this but he is an expert so I think that should just be really taken into consideration, right? Not everyone I guess but it is a good starting point for me to take notice. I’ll be a little more aware now when I design the next petixe look. If you notice, I am doing some experimentation with my site. I will be releasing this to the public anyway so I’ll try to make it a little close to perfect with the accessibility chu chu… (chu chu means etc.)

Why use twitter?

This one is something to think about why you would want to use twitter. Much more convincing than what Shiflett has discussed.

Wordpress template

Finally, I have uploaded the template. It’s not 100% working yet, I am still working on the coding part as I don’t have much time to tinker on it, there are specific functionality I want to achieve and I’ve search for current plugins on that unfortunately I have not found one but for sure this week this one is done. Please feel free to comment on it, I’d appreciate any comment

Another good news for today. I will be releasing a new free version of this. Check out for that soon!

New template for Petixe!

While having a week vacation - 4days of no work due to the Halloween season and 3 days of sick leave - I was able to complete my design. I’m quite happy about the result. Let me know what you think. I’m coding it now to wordpress template and will release it as free as a beer when I have another one.. lol..

I was inspired to work on it more by an article that says talents are not showered by God alone, it takes a lot of hard work and I truly agree on that! This work, I think, is more than a month in the making. Ofcourse I only do this when I have spare time but the concept of creating one already begun last year, getting inspirations from other sites, doing a lot of drafts, etc. Thankfully the image from vikifloki is awesomely great and it’s perfect for what I have foreseen. Image is really one of my most important ingredient because I mostly refer to that for the colors and structure of the site. It may not be an award winning design but I am truly happy that FINALLY there is an outcome of all those information gathering, drafting and tinkering I have done and I am very much satisfied of it. Well, even if I am satisfied, I would greatly appreciate any comment on it so that I can improve my work in my future projects