articles
#webbands - twitterings
OK, I don't normally do trends on Twitter, but this one on #webbands is sort of up my street and some of them genuinely made me spoil my cheap-ass keyboard with cold tea. They've just started to get a bit lame/obscure/overdone (delete as appropriate) but here's some of my faves, attributed where I can:
New, wider theme!
I've updated this site's theme- wait, scrap that. I've completely replaced the old, aging theme with a new one based on Framework. Just like Vision Express, Framework allowed me to finish the theme "in about an hour", simply copying what CSS was needed from the old theme with a fair bit of poking with Firebug. To quote @berkes, "I can hardly believe there ever was a time I did CSS-ing without #firebug. How on earth?" I am inclined to agree.
Anyway, Framework is a great theme to build on - thanks andregriffin!
Role Weights gets Token support and a 6.x branch
Role Weights finally gets a bit of loving in the form of a 5.x-1.4 release with a couple of new features, namely Token support for a user's lightest and heaviest roles and the optional re-ordering of /admin/user/roles and /admin/user/access forms by role weight. These features were introduced in 5.x-1.3, however 5.x-1.4 also fixes a bug which left orphaned entries in the role_weights table after roles got deleted.
I've also branched for 6.x compatibility (at last) - snapshots from 6.x-1.x-dev should be functional and in line feature-wise with 5.x-1.4, bar Views 2 support. I'd love to improve Role Weights for 6.x: re-writing support for Views 2 and adding drag and drop re-ordering of roles being two areas that need some attention, but I'm just too darn short on time at the moment. As always, patches and reviews are welcome in the issue queue!
As a side note, I found this reference pretty useful regarding some function/API changes not mentioned elsewhere.
Dropping the x
With just three days to go before the official launch of Ubuntu 8.10 and its variants, I've switched from Xubuntu (yet another Drupal site!) one to plain old Ubuntu. This is mostly because I spent an evening last week blitzing my laptop's hard drive and installing a vanilla Ubuntu 8.10 beta.
Xfce and Thunar were faves of mine way back when running SomeRandomDistro, which led me to using it on my Dell Inspiron 1501. Kudos should be given here to redDEAD over at Ubuntu on Dell Inspiron 1501 for all the tips. Things were reasonably good, but there seemed to always be issues. Broken ATI drivers, naff in-built Wi-Fi card, me being a mong, etc etc...
So far the beta (its now RC, folks) has been awesome. Pretty much all those niggles I had previously on this 'top have been fixed/addressed/alleviated/vanisherated:
- Compiz, or probably the ATI/fglrx drivers, work without fuss or having something weird like one X session within another going on
- volume control works, via the Fn keys or a panel icon
- screen brightness adjustments works, via the Fn keys or a panel icon
- network/wireless set up was easy, but I've yet to try WPA again (something was seriously afoot here with the inbuilt Wifi card)
- Flash player for Firefox seems less crashy, was an issue getting this to work on an amd64
Depending on one's point of view, these could be down to (a) various things being fixed in the latest release; or perhaps more likely (b) me still being a bit of a noobus when it comes to Linux's innards and running a bodged up distribution on a piece of crap Dell.
