Record as I Am

The USA's run in the Confederations Cup got the beautiful game some coverage on the Colbert Report.  He asks if its time to care about soccer.

Add it to your aliases, this one liner adds all unrecognized files in the current directory (preceded by ? in svn status) to a svn project.

svn st | grep '^?' | cut -d ' ' -f 7 | xargs svn add

The single easiest improvements you can make to the usability of HTML Forms is to correctly use LABELs. And it helps all users, not just a subset. Its also a nice application of Fitt's Law

s Use the label element to make your HTML forms accessible | 456 Berea Street

When checkboxes and radio buttons have properly associated labels, the label text will also be clickable, thus making the target area much larger and easier to hit.

If you're not familiar with them, anonymous functions seem to be a term of art that very advanced programmers throw around to make others feel dumb.  Until now, my closest experience has been in using them with jQuery and javascript, but tonight I found a use for them in PHP. ...click to continue reading.

Five years after Fox canceled the animated comedy, 20th Century Fox TV has officially struck a deal with Comedy Central to produce 26 original episodes of the Matt Groening series.

We're guilty of using guesses/gut feelings when putting a site together. Nielsen reminds us that even a few data points can help make better design decisions.

The general guideline is to use relative font sizes that let users resize (if they know how), but to display big and legible text as the default. This conclusion is based on numerous observations that show that many older users don't have the skills to resize fonts.

With the World Cup barely a year away, there's a packed slate of results I'll be watching this week.  Will the US continue its relatively straightforward qualification to another appearance?  Can Bolivia maintain the slimmest hopes of qualifying alive?

1. Costa Rica vs USA - Wednesday, June 3rd.  The Americans have never won, a tie would be more than acceptable.
2. Bolivia vs Venezuela - Saturday, June 6th.  Bolivia needs all 3 points from this home match in La Paz, but Venezuela has long ceased being guaranteed easy points.

I finally got around to upgrading my dual-boot desktop PC to running Windows XP.  It was just about time, the version of windows I was running was no longer supported and more and more software requires Windows XP nowadays.  I also wanted to start using my Windows partition for more than World of Warcraft and occasional IE6 Testing.  Mini-rant: One might think that, by now, Windows would play nicely if you are installing it on an existing dual-boot setup and not do rude things like naively overwrite your Master Boot Record.

 Drupal provides a lot of hooks that you can leverage to make it work exactly how you want.  I just finished tracing how some theme preprocessing functions were being executed, and realized that there are some subtle assumptions which I hadn't understood earlier.  These are my notes about two specific preprocessing hooks and when they are executed, which is a valuable lesson learned after spending a day figuring out why some functions were being called twice, and why some variables where being overwritten or lost.

The only other annoyance was how long it took for them to crack down on this practice. FTC nukes "extended warranty" robocallers from orbit - Ars Technica

If you live in the US, you probably got a call—even 911 dispatchers did. That's because the telemarketers, based in Chicago and Florida, used robodialing systems to call through every phone number in an area code, repeatedly.

There are serious scientific studies that refute the whole Vaccines cause Autism myth, so slate asks: Why is Oprah Winfrey promoting vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy? - By Arthur Allen - Slate Magazine

For some reason, Oprah and the rest of the entertainment world treat McCarthy as if she were Mother Theresa kissing lepers or Nelson Mandela denouncing apartheid. She's been proven wrong about vaccines, yet she persists in claiming that they are so dangerous that it's better to get vaccine-preventable diseases than get the shots.

On development, testing, and staging site you normally don't want Drupal's caching, and javascript/css aggregation features enabled.  Drop the following into your sites settings.php file to override these settings.

1.  
2. // disable performance caching
3. $conf['cache'] = 0;
4. $conf['block_cache'] = 0;
5. $conf['preprocess_css'] = 0;
6. $conf['preprocess_js'] = 0;