When creating a Drupal theme it is tempting to start with one of the existing themes (Zen and Garland are often used) but I would argue against this approach.

If you start from another theme it feels good at the beginning; after all you start from a position where your site looks good. But the more customisations you make, the more you find that the old theme just adds complexity to your existing theme.

The way Drupal works is that each module can add it’s own CSS: so tabs, menu trees, filters and so on all come with some sensible styling by default. If you want it to look different you not only have to create the CSS to make it look how you want - you have to make sure this overrides the default rules.

So CSS in Drupal isn’t simple - don’t add to the complexity more than you need to.

Interesting report on the state of mobile internet

We offer that mobile Internet is today at a point of sufficient mass to sustain a chain reaction of rapid growth in consumer adoption and, in turn, mobile Internet marketing.

According to this in the UK 16% of mobile phone users use their phones to access the internet.

Well the new version of Eclipse (3.4 or Ganymede) is out and I’ve been trying it out. So far I’ve just installed it, adding in the components I want; and generally trying to see what’s new.

SimpleTest is a great testing framework for PHP, with a Drupal module available too.

Many tests are based on assert statements, but this patterns doesn’t work for functions which are expected to throw Exceptions. As at the time of writing Drupal’s simpletest module doesn’t catch exceptions and so the whole test run stalls.

In that case the following patterns are often useful.

I’ve just been trying to get a paged query working with Drupal, and after a frustrating hour I realise the problem is that the function is case sensitive: see http://drupal.org/node/211925

Normally SQL keywords can be in any mixture of upper and lower case letters, Drupal has additional coding conventions which is great.

To configure the Squid proxy server to work for subversion access you will need to tell it to recognise some non-standard methods.

Add the following to squid.conf

This is a very old blog post which has lost

The audio controls for the Dell hardware are less than obvious; I didn’t even notice that there is a built in microphone.

Below are screen grabs of the settings that work for me - giving audio at the right levels for Skype calls.

On the settings tab; ensure “capture” is enabled, “digital” seems to control the mic level - I found midway to be about right - higher levels caused distortion.

To set up squid to allow password authenticated access add the following to your squid.conf file.

auth_param basic program /usr/lib/squid3/ncsa_auth /etc/squid3/squid_passwords.txt
auth_param basic children 5
auth_param basic realm Squid proxy-caching web server
auth_param basic credentialsttl 2 hours

acl my_passwords proxy_auth REQUIRED

http_access allow my_password

Sometimes you want to look at the contents of a package without installing it.

Sometimes you want to compare your installed version with the original package.

Run the following commands

If you try to access a subversion repository over http while using a 3G connection from three.co.uk you may receive an error message like.

svn: PROPFIND request failed on ‘/repos’ svn: Processing PROPFIND request response failed: Premature end of file. (/repos)

This is because three.co.uk uses a proxy to interecept web traffic on their network.