Graceful Exits

Graceful Exits goes straight-edge with Straight Edge, a minimalist theme written by yours truly.

Workflows of Drupal’s user load and save functionality: spot the hooks and win a programmatical prize.

As a result of building a website for a Torchbox client, I came up with a Drupal 5.x module to query the Postcode Anywhere and MailBuild webservices (if they look like an unlikely mix, don’t worry: they’re not coupled together generally, so you can use one without the other). I’ve been meaning to make it [...]

I’ve built something, just in time for me to crowbar it awkwardly into conversations at OKCon.
Matthew Somerville is well known for his accessible takes on rubbish websites: most useful is Traintimes, a layer on top of one of the equally poor commercial British rail sites; most notorious is Accessible Odeon, a fixing of the Odeon [...]

Back from a rather physical near-week of team building with work, I’ve been listening to Last.fm today to recuperate and nurse my tired muscles. But with the music playing on our crusty, trusty old purple iMac in one corner, and me in the other reading, drinking tea or otherwise recuperating, how can I tell at [...]

Drupal 6.0 released. The smoothness of D6’s interaction with both user and developer is really breathtaking these days: as close to one-click installation as you’re likely to get on shared hosting; modules to help you port your own modules over from D5; and even automatically downloaded updates to (unhacked!) core. I had a look at [...]

Carbon rationing action groups (CRAGs) are groups of people who agree to measure their carbon (dioxide) use. They also agree on an upper limit for the year, and a per-tonne levy for anyone exceeding it. As the twelve months pass them by, they meet, chat, swap tips and advice, and generally try to meet the [...]

Now that Gutsy Gibbon is fairly mature, I’ve managed to upgrade my machine to it and am now running the 2.6.22-14-386 kernel. More importantly, with a minimum of fuss I now have video, wireless and sound!
Long-term readers of Graceful Exits might remember that the too-new hardware in my Dell Precision M4300 needed some rather nasty [...]

Steve Yegge on code’s worst enemy:
… This brings us to the second obviously-bad thing that can go wrong with code bases: copy and paste. It doesn’t take very long for programmers to learn this lesson the hard way. It’s not so much a rule you have to memorize as a scar you’re going to get [...]

Stones and Bones is being produced this weekend. Want a copy? Be quick and stick your details down here. I’ll print extras, of course, but only up to a round number.
Here’s a preview, with an excerpt from each story. The final lineup is largely unchanged from the table of contents agreed previously, although titles have [...]