Tuxkids

Have you ever been tempted to re-gift that sweater from your favorite aunt Phyllis? Ever re-gifted a book that didn't fit your political identity? Maybe you didn't even bother removing the wrapping paper before giving it away?

 Allie over at the Screwed Up Texan blog would like to hear your story and is giving away a Philips Digital Picture Frame to one lucky confessor.

 Find out more at http://www.screweduptexan.com

I'd like to invite you all to check out my latest Drupal site at trinityriverinterchange.com I created the site for the Lone Star Region of the NMRA 2009 convention in Irving, TX in Drupal 6. I decided to use the Image Module for it's ease of uploading hundreds of photos into galleries. Also, I used the 5-star module and created a poll using the voting API to solicit preferences for prototype tours.

Because of my use of the Image Module, when it came timeinstall Ubercart, there was a conflict between the Image Cache module required by Ubercart and the Image module. My solution was to host the shopping cart system on another Drupal 6 install at trinityriverrails.com.

Both sites use the free Sky theme found on the drupal.org site, and the menues are the same in order to give the impression of 1 cohisive site. 

I sent this letter to Apple after finding out that the refused to admit the application Podcaster into the iTunes App Store:

I am very disappointed that Apple would arbitrarily not allow the application Podcaster into the iTunes App Store. This functionality should have been built into the the iPhone already since it has WiFi and a 3G internet connection. I believe Podcaster is the killer app for the iPhone, and would increase its functionality 100 fold. This is mainly because the syncing functionality of the iPhone takes a ridiculously long time, and almost always fails at least once.

As far as Apple's excuse for rejecting Podcaster, I believe "duplicating functionality of iTunes" is an empty argument. Obviously, there are many programs available in the App Store that duplicate iTunes functionality: Last FM, Pandora, Stitcher, WeatherBug, are a few I have installed. However, I believe the application Simplify is the most extreme case of duplicating iTunes functionality. With it, you can listen to your own music library or without even installing iTunes.

I believe John Gruber hit the nail on the head in his Daring Fireball article: http://daringfireball.net/2008/09/app_store_exclusion As an engineer, I can't fathom spending my blood, sweat and tears working on a product in order to have it rejected from the only avenue of distribution. This guarantees the exclusion of quality, original applications and encourages the duplication of a few "safe" apps. Ultimately, this is going to hurt sales of the iPhone.

I've decided to not buy any more applications from the iTunes App Store until Apple becomes more transparent in admitting applications and Podcaster is admitted.

Thanks for your time,

Chris Atkins

BTW, if you would also like to complain to Apple, more information about the Apple Walled Garden Petition can be found at http://fdossantos.tumblr.com/post/49954917/apples-walled-garden-petition . 

TinyMCE is a great WYSIWYG editor for Drupal, but there are a couple things that it doesn't do right out of the box. First, you have to enable the Firefox spell checking. This seems like an obvious feature, and I'm not sure why it is turned off by default.

This topic was covered in the Drupal forums. To enable spell checking in Firefox, navigate to modules/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/spellchecker/config.php and change the line $spellCheckerConfig['enabled'] = false; to true.

A second great feature that can be added to TinyMCE is integration with the Drupal module image assist. Specifically, this allows you to easily upload and add inline images through a button in TinyMCE.

If you don't have TinyMCE installed and running, here is a great tutorial on installing TinyMCE. In the tutorial, there is a section on adding image assist. These instructions are for Drupal 5, but are also valid for Drupal 6 except that the plugins folder for image assist has changed to modules/tinymce/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/ Since there are several plugins folders in the tinymce directory structure, this can be confusing. An excellent resource is the INSTALL.txt file in the image assist directory.

When the image assist is working, you will see a camera in the toolbar. As you enter content in the TinyMCE window, you can place the cursor at the point you want to place an image and click the camera. This will bring up a window where you can choose an image that has been loaded previously or upload a new one. When you upload the images make sure you de-select the check box to promote the images to the frontpage.