One of my most popular Drupal modules - Global Redirect - has just had an update from 1.2 to 1.3. This update includes several fixes for the following:

I've just committed another module - Node Quick Find. That brings my projects to a nice round 10!

This module is a pretty basic one though. It simply provides a block which has an autocomplete field. This field is linked to the Node Title field. You start typing the Node Title and it will start suggesting possible nodes you might be interested in - sort of like a primitive search box.

It features primitive configuration, allowing an administrator to easil configure the title of the prompt, the size and the types of nodes returned in the autocomplete list (eg, you may want to limit the list to blogs only).

It has come to my attention, thanks to Hass, that GlobalRedirect apears to have issues when running under Windows web server, IIS. Unfortunately, I do not use IIS but I am aware that a few members of the community do.

Recently at work we had been having issues with spiking server load. One of the potential suspects was the Apache configuration as it was allowing 256 MaxClients. Combine that with Drupal eating RAM for breakfast (say a minimum of 12Mb per page) and you have a recipe for disaster - too many visitors cause a RAM shortage, lots of swapping and eventually a server meltdown. After speaking the Rackspace Technical Support Team, one of the guys there (Daniel) wrote a VERY useful script for us to run on the server to monitor Apache usage.

Following on from my Numbering Rows in MySQL article, today I needed to populate the weight column of the term_data table for about a hundred terms so that they incremented in alphabetical order. This was, on the face of it, a very tedious task; click edit, select weight from drop-down, submit, 'goto 1'.

As I said in my Numbering Rows in MySQL article, I don't like tedious - but I do like over-complicated methods which actually make my life more interesting and less tedious... Enter a nifty MySQL script!

I recently launched a Drupal Codebase site for a programming community and wanted to have the user profiles to be more than just a "signed up on..." and a Tracker Tab. I wanted them to have structured and customisable blocks, dynamic content, a Peer to Peer Message Board (almost finished)... I can have my dreams cant I?!

I recently wrote a book page on how to programmatically create a view. I wanted to do this as it would allow to me control almost an entire website with multiple content types, terms and users (as well as combinations of the three) along with RSS feeds - all powered by the Views Module + a bolt on module consisting mostly of a menu callback and a function to make and configure a view. This worked pretty well for a first try and principle test!

I then realised - hey, if you can do this with Views - why cant you do it with Panels too? Panels are fantastically useful for structuring multiple blocks, views and nodes onto a page. So I tried… And you can!

With some help from a good friend, I took my first steps into game-making using C++ last night. I used a graphics engine called Ogre3D and tried to mimic a game I started making in Dark Basic Pro a few weeks ago. To my astonishment, within a few hours I'd managed to replicate the basic layout of the game using tools which cost absolutely nothing!

I've recently been receiving some spam from some Russian IP's. As each spam attempt was from a different IP, blocking individual ones was a little futile and time consuming. I did a quick google and ended up at Deekayen's website as it seem's he has had similar issues. His solution was an Apache level "Deny"… My sollution uses iptables.

I've just released a new game - its a VERY simple adaptation of the classic, pong, but it has a twist in the form of tennis. You must rally the ball back and forth - the ball gaining speed slightly on every return. Players win points (and serve) by knocking the ball past their opponent, either through a cunning move or by making them lose out in a game of reactions.

Checkout the game here - Pongis - Where Pong Meets Tennis

I found this site with loads of funny and appropriate (for any programmer or developer) quotes on it.

Programming Quotations

There are some absolutely fantastic quotes on it…

Find it at The Games Creators

As many of you may know, I'm a BIG fan of Dark Basic Pro and this christmas the coding challenges are doing something a little different - a challenge that's allowed to use MEDIA an also has a prize other than setting the next challenge… A custom bitmap designed by a professional designer!

The only media that you're allowed to use is this festive smily…

About the screensaver

This is a game I started earlier this year (about June 2006) and - as is usual for me - I didn't finish it. Well now its certainly closer to being finished! A working screensaver with mesmorizing balls whooshing everywhere.

This morning I am faced with a task that will involve repeatedly dropping and reimporting a lot of data. MySQL has DROP TABLE and DROP DATABASE but there is no command to drop all tables or truncate the database.

About the game

GraviKill started out as an experiment with the effect of a gravity field on a moving item. When I found you could get really cool sling-shots from the formula, I thought "What if I tried to fire something from A to B but it got effected by pushes and pulls in between?"… and thus GraviKill was born!

About the game

This is a game I started over a year ago and never really got around to finishing. Well now I decided to actually try to finish a game! With the help of The Game Creators forum (a special thanks to "Freddix" for compiling The Ultimate Shader Pack AND creating the eXtends plugin for Dark Basic Professional) I have managed to not only improve the games efficiency but I have also given it quite a bit more eye candy too!