pratul dot in /home/lut4rp

Adobe’s Flash has always had a love-hate relationship with the Internet community. On one end, it allowed web publishers to display beautiful, interactive (and sometimes garish) animated content on their websites. On the other end, it crashed browsers, leaked memory and irritated a lot of people. However, its popularity has still been not shaken by other alternatives, like Microsoft’s Silverlight.

I have personally seen and admired a lot of Drupal websites with Flash powered content. Notable ones have been Mission Metallica (http://www.missionmetallica.com/) and Leadel (http://www.leadel.net/). However, The power and flexibility of the Drupal and Flash combo shouldn’t intimidate you anymore. Travis Tidwell’s “Flash with Drupal” from Packt Publishing is an amazing step by step guide for your journey.

I’m not a very experienced Flash or ActionScript programmer myself. However, just the initial chapters of the book were enough to give me a confidence boost. This isn’t as hard as it seems after all! The book succinctly covers the use of various contributed modules over its 350+ pages. It goes through the trickeries of asynchronous programming and REST. It takes you through the most asked questions around Drupal: Views, CCK, audio and video widgets etc. That said, this is not an introduction to Drupal. In fact, if you’re just starting out with Drupal, this book is not for you. The author assumes you’re comfortable with Drupal and its concepts. You should know your way in and out of Drupal. Not ready? Get hold of Packt’s “Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6”.

Flash seems to be feeling the heat with HTML5, but until that happens and cross-browser support stabilizes, Flash isn’t going anywhere. Now with this book, I expect to see a rise in the Flash and Drupal combination and more powerfully delivered content.

(Note: I was sent a free copy of the book by Packt for a review.)

Here's the Almost Monokai theme (based on the original Monokai) that I recently ported to Xcode. 5 minute job, but I like it already :-)

I'm looking for fellow open source Mac programmers from India. Is there anybody out there?

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook introduced a "lighter, faster alternative" called Facebook Lite. Though initially, it was aimed at users from countries with slow internet connections and marginal broadband penetration (like India :-) they soon realized a lot of people liked the Lite way of working. I agree, Lite is fast and slick, but it doesn't have apps >:) That to me at least was a major switch point.

I was one of those "privileged souls" who had the good fortune to beta test Facebook Lite. So I can switch to Lite if I use the lite.facebook.com URL or use the full thingy if I go to facebook.com. But, ever since Facebook finally rolled out Lite to sections of users across India (dunno if they did so elsewhere as well), the users who accepted the "Try Facebook Lite" message can *NOT* go back.

People (including my sister and hordes from college :-p) have tried to manually change the URL to facebook.com, tried to check account settings, tried flaming the Lite fan page (see below), tried doing everything plainly possible without any avail. Tried logging in again but it just redirects to lite.facebook.com. Oh, and no official word from Facebook on this yet. Are you listening, Facebook?

Stranger: where are the bodies
     You: they are right here.
     You: you may look at them
Stranger: what are you planning
     You: I think I should dispose them
     You: if found, i could be in trouble
Stranger: why did you kill them
     You: i had to! 
     You: I HAD TO!
     You: I was meant to kill them! That's my purpose!
Stranger: where are you
     You: Its a secret, I can't tell you
     You: the others know about this already?
Stranger: it's been in 4chan
Stranger: we're currently tracking you down
     You: oh no.
     You: this is not right!
Stranger: you can't run
Stranger: don't run
     You: i can't run
     You: you can't find me
Stranger: we will need to
Stranger: it's called justice

-- Your conversational partner has disconnected.

[18:59]         sid0 : lut4rp: well everyone knows that drupal sucks, so...
[18:59]          jai : yes
[18:59]          jai : but their community is awesome
[19:00]          jai : contributors are insanely motivated
[19:00]          jai : to the point of nausea

jai (GSoC 2009 student and FFmpeg developer) and sid0 (GSoC 2008 student, Mozilla developer and intern) during a random rant on Drupal caching and the bot module.