Varesano.net

Thanks to the help of jchan, christopher_skauss, whispero and the free time of Christmas Holidays I've been finally able to create two release candidates for Drupal CSS module.

The CSS module is a Drupal module which add inline CSS editing to Drupal nodes. This is pretty useful for Drupal power users / designers which are able to create CSS based complex node designs.

Maybe you already know that, in some countries, the number 13 is associated with bad luck and some people are really frightened of it.

Personally I don't care much of all this stuff.. I don't believe such things.

But seems that Drupal version 5.13 had pretty an unlucky life given that it had been out just for a couple of days and later replaced by the new version 5.14.

The next 3 days I will attend the UPA Europe 2008 which will be held in Torino, my city.

In the last year I've got more and more interested in usability in general. It's really a fascinating research area and I judge it essential in the success of a IT project.

I've been pretty lucky that the conference is held in my city, just at about 30 minutes from my home. Moreover, as a student and a UPA-I member, I got a very cheap price. Cool, isn't?

X.org version 7.4 with xorg-server 1.5 introduces a new way of handling input devices (keyboards, mouses, touchpads, trackball, etc..).

Instead of using some configuration rules in xorg.conf like in Xorg 7.3 and previous versions, input devices are now automatically configured and enabled in Xorg once the system found them.

If you are a web developer, sooner or later, you will have to play (or fight) with HTTP Headers handling.

HTTP Headers, even if hidden in the server-browsers interactions, are a fundamental element of the web.

Also a strong usage of HTTP Headers is done in SEO - Serach engine optimization, where they are used to keep Search Engines Caches updated.

El laberinto del fauno

I don't usually blog about the movies I see.. anyway I think that this one actually worth it.

In order to prepare myself for the DELE superior exam I'm watching a lot of Spanish movies.

I randomly went across Guillermo del Toro's "El laberinto del fauno" (Pan's Labyrinth).

For those who care about me.. I'm back home in Torino, Italy, three weeks ago.

The Las Palmas Erasmus experience was incredible. I've been away for 13 months.. probably the best year of my life.
I plan to write a post about this experience soon.

My plans for next months are: studying, studying, studying.

I want to finish university as soon as possible. I only have 6 exams left to get my MS and I plan to finish for July and start working on a thesis on Summer.

Meanwhile I will have the DELE Superior Exam on November, that's pretty difficult. Let's see what happens.

I'm using Django, a python coded framework to develop web applications, to implement a project for the University.

During the development I needed to have a template tag which, given a path to a file, just returns its basename (just as it do the python os.path.basename).

So I implemented it. Following you have the code for it.

A filter is a Drupal feature, usually implemented by some contributed modules, which substitutes parts of a node text with some other text.

Eg: if you use the Path filter module you can insert links like:

<a href="internal:node/25">hello!</a>

and the string internal:node/25 will be substituted by something like http://www.example.com/node/25 where www.example.com is your website url.

I had to get the parent nid of a book child page for a website which already uses Drupal 6.

Seems that the book module logic has changed deeply between version 5. The new stack implementation of the parent-child relationships is pretty complex, at least for me. I have to say that I did not studied it a lot thought.

So.. this is the code to do that:

<?php

if(isset($node->book)) { // book page
      $parent = book_link_load($node->book['plid']);
      $pid = $parent['nid'];
}

?>

Hope this helps.