I'm working on a Drupal theme at the minute where I need to work out whether a user is is logged in (or not) and show them a message accordingly. One such scenario is user invitations:

One of my biggest problems with Drupal is that it doesn’t have common solutions for standard problems: Image handling and WYSIWYG editing are just two areas where Drupal fails users.

Newcomers to Drupal will be aware of the hours of research needed to choose an Image management strategy. And for WYSIWYG editors, you have a fairly broad choice: TinyMCE, FCKEditor and many more.

Here's a quickie Firefox hack - there may be quicker ways of doing this, but this is pretty nifty all the same.

Let me explain why I needed to search across all subdomains: on Unreality TV, we have a handful of subdomains, each containing its own installation of WordPress. Now, when I'm writing about a topic for the music blog, I might want to see what else we've written with regard to that person or band or celebrity.

I briefly had a dual boot setup a few years ago. Booting between Linux (I can't remember which distro) and Windows XP was always clunky. Two problems normally come up:

In deciding to run Ubuntu in a Windows environment (I run a Windows server as well as a couple of Windows XP machines), one of my key concerns was being able to connect to those Windows machines.

Now, looking around Ubuntu, you might come across an application called Remote Desktop Viewer. This will happily connect between Ubuntu machines and computers running VNC servers. But it doesn't do RDP (Remote desltop protocol) which you need to connect to Windows.

At the current time, I've been a member of the Drupal.org website for 4 weeks shy of 3 years. I mention this because I had an awkward moment on the Drupal forum when an (obviously long-term) Drupaller showed his disdain for me for not contributing in all the time I'd been using Drupal.

Sputtr is a cool service I've been using recently. It allows you to search across a number of search engines and websites really quickly.

A few years ago, it seemed that there was an endless supply of new and exciting online RSS readers. I started off on Bloglines, then moved with the herd to Google Reader, where I've been happily using their freebie product ever since. Somewhere along the line I had a brief flirtation with the clever hybrid RSS/Digg-style Rojo.com.

Sadly, Rojo got acquired by Six Apart and no longer exists.

Lisa and I had a meeting with somebody the other day. As we sat in her office, the lady nodded toward an ageing PC and bemoaned the fact that "once you buy a new computer these days, it's almost immediately out of date".

It wasn't the time or place to argue, but of course I feel differently.

Sure, if you're locked into a Microsoft based system, you're going to find yourself in a viscious upgrade cycle. You'll constantly be watching for the latest version of Microsoft Office or anxiously wondering what their forthcoming Operating System will mean for you and your business.

Now, my main machine in the house is easily 4 years old. It was a highly specced Dell Dimension XPS system back then. Probably not as wonderful by today's standards, but still a fine system. Its only upgrade has been an additional 2Gb of RAM, and it's still a star performer. So, in my opinion, the hardware platform has stabilised.

The Windows World

In the world of software, things are much different. On Windows XP, I'm mostly committed to Free or Open Source applications: Aptana for web development instead of Dreamweaver, Notepad++ for quick text editing, OpenOffice forword processing and spreadsheet style stuff. Comodo for firewalling and antivirus.

I'm still using a fairly old version of Adobe Photoshop, but it does the job for my needs, even if it is missing some of the features of the newest version. GIMP's an acceptable replacement...I suppose. The only thing that's really tying me to Windows right now is the amazing Windows Live Writer.

I installed a dual-boot configuration during a system rebuild recently and stuck the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu 8.10 on a sizeable partition. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I'm constantly questioning whether Ubuntu Linux is a viable Windows replacement.

One of the key things for me in making a transition of this magnitude is finding a desktop blogging client compatible with Linux and it also being as fully featured as Windows Live Writer - my blogging client of choice and perhaps the leading blog client software. The thing is, the latest version of Live Writer Beta has some pretty hot features, including a link gloassary which allows you to autolink to a page previously linked to: you enter the last anchor text as previously and it automatically creates the link for you.

There isn't a single other blog editor that I know of that can replicate that functionality.