InnoDB on Ubuntu?

May 3, 2011 — vkareh
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I'm currently working on a Drupal 6.x website that recently changed its database storage engine to InnoDB. I was not very aware at the time, but it does have some issues while running on Ubuntu.

Of course, I do all my development locally and I recently upgraded to the shiny new Ubuntu 11.04. For a while I blamed the ridiculously slow speed of this particular database to the OS upgrade, as, for some reason, I had to re-install my entire LAMP stack after the upgrade; the MyISAM to InnoDB switch happened around the same time.

Render Arrays

February 2, 2011 — vkareh
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It seems that documentation on renderable arrays for Drupal 7 is lacking.

I was working on upgrading the Multistep module to Drupal 7, and turns out that the navigation/progress-bar block was still returning an HTML string. Unacceptable. I need to fix that by returning Render Arrays instead.

nid in $form_state

December 7, 2010 — vkareh
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The other day I had an interesting "chicken-and-egg" problem. I'm creating a new module that does the following:

  1. A user creates a node
  2. The node creation generates a list of follow-up nodes (with references to itself) to be created by the user at a later date
  3. When the user goes to create these follow-up nodes, the list should be updated to include the nid of both nodes, and which follow-up sequence this was for

Eclipse for Drupal in Ubuntu

October 30, 2010 — vkareh
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It took me a while to finally break down and install Eclipse and actually use it for Drupal development. In my mind it was one of those daunting tasks that I never thought I'd complete. Once you start using it for real, though, it feels like you finally got the Swiss Army knife you've always wanted, but now it's too big to fit in your pocket.

Drupal development in Linux

October 2, 2010 — vkareh
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I am a happy Linux user. I have been using different flavors of Linux for almost a decade now, and haven't seen Windows since the days of XP Service Pack 1. All my coworkers use Apple products (am I the only web developer that has never owned an Apple product, ever?)

I eventually settled on Ubuntu for desktop use, although my web server runs CentOS.

In any case, I swear by vi. And for most tasks, it's all I need for Drupal module development.

Module development and other things

September 11, 2010 — vkareh

After almost 9 months working for Switchback, I finally sat down to publish another module on the Drupal website.

During my time there, I've developed countless modules, and (hopefully) helped improve a lot more, but the web development world can be busy enough that we don't get time to do a lot of contrib work.

CodeBreaker

December 21, 2009 — vkareh

CodeBreaker is a MasterMind(tm) clone. I decided to program this on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I was tired of the lack of configuration of the gnome-mastermind client (which I love, nevertheless), and my knowledge of GTK is limited to less than nothing, so I programmed this one to allow the user to configure the number of holes, the number of colors, how many turns the user has, and if you want to repeat colors in the code or not.

As it stands, it has no real colors. It's all represented by numbers using drop-down boxes. All through Drupal's Form API. Maybe some other lazy Sunday afternoon I'll program a nicer jQuery interface.

You can play it here: http://www.vkareh.net/codebreaker

Drupal Training - Beginner Level

November 4, 2009 — vkareh
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Apart from the Ann Arbor Drupal User Group, in which we meet every month to discuss all things Drupal, we've been wanting actual Drupal training for a while. Whether it is a class, a seminar, DrupalCamp, or the official DrupalCon, there's always something new to learn. Weeks ago I learned of a Drupal workshop in town organized by one of our very own A2DUG members, Jim. I could not attend the first session, last Wednesday, due to being out of town, so I don't know what happened.

My name on Date.module!

September 21, 2009 — vkareh

I was checking my Drupal issue queue and saw an update to an issue on which I gave a possible solution around 3 months ago. It was marked as fixed by the the maintainer, KarenS, known to pretty much everyone in the active Drupal community for her Date and Calendar modules. So, my solution actually made it to the official release!

DrupalCon 2009: Here I Go!

February 12, 2009 — vkareh
Good fortune is on my side. This was more evident when I found out that the DrupalCon guys were starting a wait-list, starting in order from those that posted a request for a ticket.. The fortunate part was that I was one of the very first in the forum. Phew! Still, I didn't get my ticket thanks to that wait-list, but because someone that couldn't make it to the conference did the same. I will assume that he went, one by one, FIFO-style, through the list of those who posted in the forum, until he found the next one in line without a ticket.