be the change you want to see in the world

If you are like me and have a grossly shortened attention span, browser tabs have proven to be a really great thing.

The clickpath just as often leads you astray as it does to your destination. Of that there is no doubt. Having a web browser open is a recipe for a nearly infinite depth of field when it comes to mental focus. I catch myself so far afield sometimes I am shocked.

However, by opening new browser windows in tabs, I find myself closing one tab to reveal another that was related to something else I was doing, at which point there is a couple seconds of embarassment, but then I get back to the task at hand.

Use your tabs.

Thanks to Sarah Pullman for posting a good GarageBand beginners link in her del.icio.us links yesterday. It lead to one of those doh! moments of realization for me regarding GarageBand and what it is capable of. Like the other day when I was complaining about only being able to have one volume throughout the entire track and my friend pointed out the tab at the trackhead that allows volume and panning to be adjusted throughout the timeline. Duh.

Anyway, the thing I didn’t know, that the tutorial showed me, was that any music created with a software instrument can be converted to any other software instrument. In other words, if you have a melody you like, and it is in a loop that is a bassline, you can change it to a saxamaphone. This means that, in addition to all the effects and filters you can apply to your tracks, digital instruments can be changed to any other digital instrument. That’s huge. It increases the raw materials at your fingertips by an exponential amount. Duh, again.

Times like these, the debate about the nature of war, just war, war profiteering and other war-related subjects heats up. Here’s what I consider to be a really good blog on the subject of Pacifism.

I don’t think I am a pacifist. If I could see a trajectory that had my way of life and future in desperate jeopardy from a ruthless and uncaring enemy bent on my extinction, I might even start a war. But, as the article points out, here I am talking about war without ever having been there.

Not new, but new to me.

Sometimes when you buy property they construct a big building in front of your view and the value of your investment decreases. Other times, they demolish a big obstacle and you are left with a million-dollar view that pays a huge return on your initial investment. This is what has happened with Drupal. Those of us who invested time and effort in learning Drupal in the past are now being rewarded as the community delivers more and more powerful functionality.

Case in point: the Views Module pioneered by merlinofchaos was recently upgraded to include a Views Theme Wizard. This is a genius bit of programming that implodes a big obstacle for Drupal site builders. From the instructions that come up when you click the Theme Wizard tab in the Views admin interface:

The views theming wizard generates code that you can use in your phptemplate theme to help you customize the output of a view. Simply select a theme and it will generate code for your template.php as well as template files for the individual views.

At this time this code assumes your view is a list type view! It may not generate effective code for other types of views. Future versions of this program will be smarter, and give more options, but this wizard is still a huge start.

This works for every view, so even if you have cloned 100 views from the same parameters, they can all have a different look and feel based on easy edits to the view’s Theme which is generated by the wizard. It might look a little scary at first, but just play around with it on a test site. Make changes and watch the effect. You will get it, and when you do, working with Drupal will never be the same.

If you build websites with Drupal and you are not yet using the Views Module, please check it out and support the development by sending in bug reports and feature requests. This is one sweet piece of technology that helps puts Drupal over the top in terms of flexibility and function for content display.