Gerard McGarry

Ever been stuck with a single, wired internet connection, but needing to connect more than one computer to the internet?

You'll be glad to know that with Ubuntu, it's easy to share an internet connection by creating an ad-hoc wireless network. It happened us recently on holiday - we had a single wired network connection, but two laptops. Both machines were wireless enabled.

Here's how to set up the connection:

You can catch this little tourist train on the Paseo de la Libertad, just beside the markets in Torrevieja. It's incredibly cheap - costs about 2 Euro for an adult and 1 Euro for children - and it takes you right through the coastal part of the city right past Playa Los Locos.

We usually arrived in Torrevieja around the hottest part of the day, and catching this little train with its covered roof was a fantastic way to do some sight-seeing while staying cool! At one point, we passed a group of cyclists while going up a hill, and the kids were really pleased when one grabbed on to the side of the train and hitched a ride to the top!

When I'm in another country, I love to take the occassional photo of everyday things like phone boxes and ticket machines. They're so damned foreign. Like the stuff you might find here, but different. Different colours, and littered with a foreign language. Sometimes you're lucky if there's an English translation.

I thought this bright blue phone box in Torrevieja would be an interesting match for my picture of rail ticket machines in Prague. Maybe if I travelled a bit more, I could make this into a whole series?

Sometimes the first thing you see when you enter a city becomes one of your abiding memories of that place. Bar La Marina in Torrevieja is a building I've never been inside, but it's the first place we saw when we came up from the underground car park nearby.

It's such an odd little building to find in a city like Torrevieja - a bungalow in a jungle of apartment blocks. Gleaming white walls with a rustic terracotta roof. It, along with the building across the road with the beautiful, ornate arches, is one of the first things I think of when I think of that city.

La Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús (or Sacred Heart of Jesus church) is a strikingly modern building in the centre of Torrevieja. I nver got to investigate the interior, because we were on a fleeting trip through the plaza in which it's situated, but the building itself is gorgeous.

I know I've gone on record before as not being a fan of religion, but I do admire church architecture in a perverse way. On one hand, the level of inspiration that religion drives is fascinating to me. On the other, some of the oppulence found in churches scares me when a majority of believers are working class or worse.

The stark white walls of La Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús are dazzling in the midday sun - a beautiful sight in the middle of the sometimes sandy-coloured city of Torrevieja!

If anyone has pictures of the interior, please share them with me and I'll publish them here!

We maintain a couple of Facebook fan pages for Unreality TV and its sister site, Unreality Shout.

Now, I knew that it was possible to set up a vanity URL for your own account on Facebook (mine's facebook.com/gerardmcgarry - don't stalk me, I won't follow you), but I just discovered today that it's quite simple to set up a vanity URL or username for your Facebook fan pages. If you're a publisher this is a godsend, because it makes the URL more concise and easy to share.

I'm a very renegade web developer. I like to exist on the bleeding edge, and I'm waiting with baited breath for the next version of Drupal to be released.

My memory of the last big Drupal release - migrating from version 5 to 6 - was a frustrating affair. Though the new core code was available, very few of the contributed modules were available at the time Drupal 6 came out.

The reason for writing this is because I came across this blog post on Mikkel Høgh's blog, where he talks about supporting Drupal by adopting the latest version as soon as possible. Now, even though that's quite an old post, I admire the principle - upgrade as quickly as possible and help move the Drupal project along.

I'm keen to jump on board with the latest version. There are sites in production that I can afford to experiment with and one's where I'll adopt a "wait and see" attitude, or perform some more in-depth testing first.

This is going to be a strange post. But then it's a strange time, and my head is full of conflicting ideas and emotions and memories. So expect a jumble of words that may not entirely make sense and may not be in exactly the right order....

Last Monday, I found myself in Elstree, the home of Big Brother. On assignment as our roving reporter to meet with 89 potential housemates for the new series. It was brilliantly twisted of the Endemol staff - giving interviews with the possible housemates, but throwing in 75 red herrings to make it almost impossible for the red tops to do any dirt digging.

If anything, it was good for a laugh, I got to see the back of my head (what bald spot?) on Big Brother's Little Brother for about 2 seconds and had some fun chatter on the train back to London with a couple of online journalists about the series.

I've got a couple of Drupal sites I'm planning to tidy up and work on over the coming months. Ideas for these sites are currently in flux, so I'm looking around to see other sites running on Drupal, what their features are and how they've been structured and designed.

As part of my research, I've dug out some galleries that showcase live Drupal websites. Some of these contain excellent screenshots, others merely link to the sites in question. However, if you want to see the breadth of what Drupal can do, and you want to look at real-world solutions, these are great places to start.

I have listed these posts/sites in order of preference, so hopefully you'll hit the most useful resources first. And if you know of any other Drupal showcases that deserve a mention here, leave me a comment and I'll update this post.

If you're a convert to Drupal from a blogging platform like WordPress, you might miss the Previous/Next post links that allow visitors to read through the posts on your site in a chronological manner.

I've been searching for a solution to this for a while, but nothing I've found on Drupal.org has offered an acceptable solution for me. What I'm going to show you here is some code I've put together that retrieves the next and previous posts from the database and displays them for the user. If you are a Drupal guru and have suggestions for how to refine this, please share your knowledge in the comments.