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.)

[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.

From someone already acclaimed as quite awesome, came this nice (yaay) Lullabot t-shirt today! Hugs, hugs and more hugs to Addi! Thank you!

As per the road map to World Domination, the Universe has come together and handed me this totally brilliant opportunity to be a part of Google Summer of Code 2009. After much jubilation and happiness, I figured I have a responsibility to thank some very special people who helped me reach this point, and here they are in no apparent order :-)

- my mum and dad (and perhaps, sister) for raging an unending battle against my obsession for everything geek. And in process, pushing me to my limits :-)
- dear friend, co-drupal-evangelist, co-contributor, co-have-phun-everywhere Gurpartap, who has been a major source of inspiration in my contributions to Drupal.
- my mentor, Simon Roberts (lyricnz), for supporting Vote Up/Down even before I had thought of GSoC.
- countless IRC channel inhabitants from navya, linux-india and drupal for all the pointless talks (which do turn useful at times)

... and a hearty congrats and ^5 to the other 100 awesome participants this year from India. We rock!

Announcing the first edition of the great Delhi Drupal Meetup! DDM1 will be held on 1st March 2009 at IIT Delhi (Block II, LT1) 1PM onwards. This isn't going to be a beginner meetup, we're going to try and hack some code (module or a theme). We even have prizes for best on-the-spot module and theme!
Please carry your laptop with a Drupal development environment with you.

For all the other details, and to sign up for the meetup, visit http://www.lug-iitd.org/Delhi_Drupal_Meetup
See ya there!

Come 12th February, and IIT Kanpur will hold FOSSkriti (under its Techkriti technical festival's banner). As the name quite well puts it, FOSSkriti deals with all Free and Open Source Software. And this time in 2009, we'll see workshops and sessions on Mozilla technologies, HTML 5, Sahana, YUI and yes, Drupal!

Me and Gurpartap will be leading a Drupal sprint on 13th February, 10PM onwards, focussed on Drupal 7 Usability. For those who follow the Drupal community, know that a formal D7 usability testing will be conducted at the University of Baltimore, 10 days before Drupalcon DC starts. We hope to help out the Usability team by reviewing and hacking on their patches before the formal testing begins. Also, we will be helping new contributors learn their way around and explain how the Drupal core machinery works :-) After all, even something as awesome as Drupal needs thousands of man-hours of work before it ships!

To participate in the sprint, you need:

• A computer with any CVS client (*nix people have CVS, Windows has TortoiseCVS)
• Some knowledge of PHP and MySQL (more than hello-world ;-)
• An interest in Drupal!
• Willingness to hack and pursue world domination.

We hope the hackathon is a great success and hope you have tons of fun! Do join us if you can!