Drupal developer's tools

Smashing Magazine is one of my favorite sites when it comes to design. The site is always insightful, and has an abundance of tips, links and ideas that you can be inspired by.

A few days ago they published a Drupal Developer's Toolbox. It has a lot of tips, tools and ideas, from novice and basic to the expert and customized.

I think that any drupal developer can find useful information and ideas in the article itself and the links attached to it.

Firefox Addons

There are many good addons to use with Firefox. There have also been many lists containing the top 10/20 addons to use.

Over the past several years, I've come to appreciate several addons. Here is a list of some of the more useful addons I've found so far:

NoScript - prevents any scripts from running unless you okey the domain from which they originate.

DownloadThemAll - help to batch download elements from a webpage.

PDFDownload - helps dealing with PDF docs that you want to view/download while surfing the web.

DownloadStatusBar - an amazing feature, one that comes so natural you'll have a hard time thinking how things were before it. It displays the downloaded file and its information in the bottom part of the browser.

FlashBlock - prevents any flash content from downloading or running unless you okey the domain.

Noia 2.0 Extreme - a nice theme with great looking buttons.

Wizz RSS - an RSS extention.

FaviconizeTab - a usefull tool for the firefox poweruser that enables one to minimize the size of the tab in the tab bar to the size of the favicon.

RSS Ticker - an RSS ticker that runs your live bookmarks in the bottom part of the browser.

Coloful Tabs - colors each tab in a different color.

Bookmark Duplicate Detector - warns you when you are about to create a duplicate bookmark.


That's the list so far. I'll probably add a few later on.

another Pixel Art creation

Reddit spawned another Pixel Art creation, described as "Probably The Best Pixel Art on the Web". I highly disagree with such a statement.

Sure, the huge picture (broken into several medium sized ones) is nice, its total size is huge, but just that by itself does not qualify, in my view, as supreme over other Pixel Art projects out there.

There are many styles of Pixel Art. And I will credit the creators of this one as doing a most elaborate job (which takes a bit too long to download, if you don't mind me saying), which probably took many hundreds or even thousands of hours of work to get done.

That being said, I encourage such work and creations, as they are rather rare to find, even on the web.

I will add, however, that I find I like the works of the people at www.eboy.com a bit more to my taste, and not just the fact that they let you download their images (different elements).

You be the judge, check them out both.

Star Trek's PADD revisited

Will new eReaders bring the long lost hope to see a PADD sometime in our lifetime to mainstream life? A news article in the New York Times talks about new E-Newspaper Reader that will enable readers to view news and other contents from the electronics device. The device might mimic the look of paper, but it is yet another attempt of real-life to get a hold of a pure sci-fi piece of technology.

Star Trek has had it's own information reader, in form of the PADD. Besides being a Personal Access Display Device, the PADD was a portable method to move information around, a convenient way to carry it, and a mechanism of dictating and recording information.

You can read more about the debate at Digg about it.

More information on the PADD and also here.

Wordle

I found Wordle mentioned in a Wired article that, amongst other things, tries to represent text in a new way, to shed some light on the texts we take for granted.

By using this tool, one is able to get a different representation to the important and repeated words that there are in a text, be it a speech or any other text, something like a "word cloud".

I've done three examples with it, all very interesting, using my posts on the World of Warcraft Shadow Priests:

Part1


Part2


Part3

The Shadow Priest - Part 3

Shadow priests play a versatile roll in levels 60-70 in World of Warcraft. In the previous parts (part 1,part 2) we discussed how a Shadow Priest can both DPS and heal, sometimes at the same time, using abilities unique to him. In this third part we will review some of the better uses and abilities of the Shadow Priests in Outland as levels 60-70.

Shadow Priests are a proper DPS class casters. That means that the damage they do is by using magic spells. There are many different spells at their dissposal, but safice us to say that they are casters (unlike hunters, rogues or paladins who can DPS without casting).

When leveling 60-70, either by questing or by doing a lot of dungeons, the Shadow Priest is a sought after party member as a DPS. As a healer, the Shadow Priest has many rivals who are proper healers (holy priests, healer paladins, druids and more). Therefore, the Shadow Priests' uniqueness is in their ability to DPS, and aid the main healer as a secondary healer to heal all the group via Vampiric Embrace, at the same time as dealing damage.

While questing, the DPS role is vastly superior. It is also preferable when doing most dungeons, but there could be instances when a Shadow Priest will be main healer. This can be achieved by the Shadow Priest having a high healing bonus, and able to properly heal the tank. Sometimes, Vampiric Embrace can also be useful, but when healing a tank the healing bonus takes more affect.

More information can be read at WoWWiki on their post about the Shadow Priests.

The Muppet Show cake

The Muppets was one of the better TV shows of the 1980s. Featuring rememberable muppets from the great hands of Jim Hanson's workshop, we remember Kermit the frog, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Fossie Bear, and many more.

Digg's got a link to an amazingly detailed Muppet cake that has nearly 20 unique characters on it (direct link to the flickr slideshow). The cake is part of Adam Newbold's slideshow.

I'm sure it's taken a lot of hard work to make all those characters for the cake, and it sure look like they've made an effort.