Christmas Break

is finally here! Yeah. Two weeks off.

Det finns inga ord för det, på det här jävla språket

Front Page Slide show for Drupal using Views Slideshow

After weeks of research into how to create a dynamic slide show with thumbnails as navigation I finally found a module for Drupal that seems to do what I need it to. Enter Views Slideshow. Using views I fairly easily set up a slide show for my front page, using thumbnails as navigation. One issue that I've run into is that for some reason when being logged in I cannot see the navigation of the slide show. This caused a bit of head scratching until I just logged out and saw that things actually were working. The look and feel of the thing will take some CSS tweaking but at least I've finally found a working solution. If a module is integrated with Views that is certainly a big plus, seeing that this is the direction things are heading with Drupal.

Other modules I looked at:
Views Carousel - Really cool but not quite what I was looking for. Here is an excellent video podcast from Mustardseed Media
Quick Tabs - Neat module but it did not seem to support thumbnail navigation, at least not out of the box.

Considering the time and research spent on this I do support the effort to consolidate and improve the multitude of modules offering some kind of rotator or slide show functionality. For a good starting point see http://drupal.org/node/418616

My brother just sent me this, and I thought it was funny enough to warrant repeating

Folgers Commercial

In the new Folgers commercial, the guy coming home from Iraq / band camp / two years of living in a diner drinking nothing but old dishwater spiked with soy sauce / all of the above, exclaims happily when seeing a canister of Folgers: "Real Coffee!". Enough said.

Be careful what you wish for

Home with a cold

And looking for something to read. Maybe Chaim Potok's "My name is Asher Lev". Wish I had an unread Pratchett book.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala a slow starter

So I updated from Ubuntu 9.04 to the latest release code named Karmic Koala, 9.10 in numbers. The process of updating, as opposed to reinstalling, went by without any hick ups. This is just a short list of mostly cons but also some pros.

So let's start with the cons:

1. It's a lot slower to boot up. Not sure why this is but the 9.04 release had a boot time that was pretty impressive. The Karmic Koala on the other hand is a real slow starter.
2. The default colour scheme is ugly. Sure you can change the theme, but that initial brown is just plain old ugly.
3. I've had several weird crash reports so far. Not a big issue and I'm sure it's being worked on.

Ok, enough with the complaining. So what do I like?
1. The sound. Pulse Audio has finally come through on it's effort to create some kind of centralized sound support for Ubuntu. Thank you. I'm currently running my Turtle Beach Riviera sound card with digital out to our Onkyo receiver and it sounds good. For you that are still running plain old analog output: sure it works and you'll get decent sound, but the digital out is so much nicer! Trust me.

Another Year

So it's time to add one more year on top of the other 31. When I was in my early 20s it seemed that life would end, or at least go down hill rapidly, at 25. I was wrong.

Ps. I had oyster shots yesterday. And yes it was just as horrible as you probably imagine.