Misty thoughts

Getting session ID in Drupal 6

Kfir — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:49:22 +0000

Drupal saves its sessions in the sessions table. One can always query they table to get the session ID. There is however a faster way.
If the user is logged it, the session id can be found with the following code:

global $user;
$user->sid;

In any case the session id can also be read from the cookie:

$_COOKIE[session_name()];

Theming a form in Drupal 6

Kfir — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:07:19 +0000

Form theming in drupal 6 is quite flexible. One of the nicest tricks is the ability to theme the form in stages. Calling drupal_render on a part of the form will not only return the rendered version of it, but it will also mark that part as rendered so that when you call the final drupal_render over the whole form, it will not re-render the parts already rendered.

Remember that in order for the form to function correctly there are some hidden fields in every form that must be added to the form. Also drupal needs to generate the form tag. Therefore it is my advise, after doing the custom rendering of the parts you want, add a general render of the form. this will reduce the chance of problems with form submission.

Special thanks to Rolf van de Krol, for this tip.

Sir Richard Francis Burton

Kfir — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:52:42 +0000

Sir Richard Francis Burton: "'The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.'"

(Via Quotes of the Day.)

The history of Johnnie Walker in 6min

Kfir — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 07:28:59 +0000

The first whiskey I ever drank was a Johnnie Walker Red Label. It was horrible. Burned my mouth completely. I was, as can be expected young and knew nothing about whiskey, aside form the name. And that it was apparently "cool" to drink. So I tried. After that one sip I stayed of whiskey for over two years.

The second tim eI tasted whiskey, it was a Johnnie Walker Black label. It was strong, burning, and delightful. I do not know what has changed in those two years or if something changed at all. Maybe if I had tried the black first instead of the red, I would be set right off the start. For the next three years or so I only drank Johnnie Blacks.

As my taste evolved I stated trying more whiskeys. Like most people I started to value the single malts more and more. Eventually completely abandoning the blended sorts, of which Johnnie was my darling. Nowadays I have at home a small collection of singles, out of which I drink a glass almost daily. Whiskey has definitely become my favorite strong drink. Johnnie had a lot to do with it

That is why I was so delighted to see this 6 minute film over the history of Johnnie Walker. Even if you are not a fan of the drink, or the brand, it is worth 6 minutes of your time

Update: Unfortunatley the film was removed due to copy-write violations. quite unfortunate

Byline review

Kfir — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 07:18:43 +0000

For a while now I have been using Google Reader as my rss reader. Managing feeds was simple, though not ideal and it was accessible from just about any computer. Better yet, I did not need to find way to sync between all my different rss readers, which was starting to get tiresome. On the iPhone the situation was a bit different. Even though Google Reader on the iPhone is reasonable, it felt slugish and not very natural. Running in mobile safari, that was of course, to be expected.

I decided it was time to look for a dedicated rss reader for the iPhone. I was looking for an application that offered syncing with Google Reader, and that was about it. I decided to try Byline from Phantom Fish. I have been using Byline for a month now and am very happy with it. So much so I decided to write my first app review about it. Let me give you a closer look at it.

The icon: Clear and unique enough to not be confused with other apps. The icon is definitely beautiful, though in my opinion it could have been a bit more abstract.
Setting up: Setting up is as simple as logging into your google account. Works well.
Usage: The app is responsive and slick. It feels fast and the UI is very natural. I cant imagine going back to Google Reader.
Sync: Syncing works really well. I can't remember having any kind of trouble with it.

As I mentioned before, Byline also caches the feeds so that you can read while offline. Traveling around europe regularly, it is possible for me to use my rss reader without the need to pay ridiculous amounts of money for roaming data (1 voor 100kb).

All in all I am very happy with Byline. It does everything I wanted it to do, and it does it well. What I am missing is the ability to view entries per feed instead of per group. However this is a minor complain seeing the overall experience.
In fact I liked the use of Byline so much, I switched back to an rss reader app on my computers as well. Readers that sync with Google Reader that is. Look at Phantom Fishs Byline page for screenshots and video demo. Or use the link bellow to go directly to the app store.

Opposite directions

Kfir — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:54:47 +0000

You probably heard about justice Scalia of the American supreme court saying executing an innocent man is not unlawful because he was found guilty in a legal trial. New findings which can acquit said innocent man, are, for justice Scalia, no reason not not proceed with what a court has found to be just.
That may sound strange, even scary coming from a supreme court justice. The thing is, I have seen this kind of thinking before from people who give service to society. Sometimes they seem to loose sight of what is actually the grand reason for them being there. They stop seeing their system as a system that gives service to society, but that society is there so obey their wonderful system.

This I believe is exactly what happened to justice Scalia. He lost sight of the reason he is there. To serve society. Executing an innocent man does not do that in any way. Look at it from the other direction, and you can see how he reasons.

One must ask himself if someone who completely lost sight of what its all about could, or should, remain in his position.

For more information on this case read this.

Bolt’s new world record at the Berlin world championship

Kfir — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:57:11 +0000

Look carefully at Usain as he moves. There is a lot of side movement still present. If he can improve his technique, I believe he might break the 9.5 sec barrier. How wonderful it is to see this man run!

Cool longboard video

Kfir — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:34:21 +0000

For a while now I have been thinking about buying along board. It looks a like a lot of fun and I am sure it will improve my snowboarding. For some inspiration, here is one amazing longboard video

How to truly disable drupal cache

Kfir — Fri, 29 May 2009 10:26:05 +0000

Drupal, like most CMSes uses cache intensively to speed things up. In a production site that is exactly what you what. However when developing, cache can cause you much pain.

If your an expert in drupal you probably already realized when you need to clear the cache in order to see changes and when not too. the developer module even makes it quite easy to do. However for me, and I am quite sure to quite a lot of other people it is not that clear.

"Wait", you might say. "Drupal has a disable cache setting". You would be right to say that. Only it doesn't completely disable the cache, only part of the cache, namely the page caching. To truly disable cache you need to do a bit of a hacking to the cache code. Yes I know they say to never hack core (cache is part of the core drupal release). for me this was worth it. I figure as long as you remember its there and don't use it in production you should be fine. The following piece of code needs to be added in include/cache.inc. There are two functions there that you need to edit:

cache_get
cache_set

In cache_get place the code right after the global $user. In cache_set place it at the start of the function. Here is the code that you need to add.
if(variable_get('cache', CACHE_DISABLED) == CACHE_DISABLED) { return 0; }
Kudos for this hack goes to Rolf van der Krol. Cheers mate.

A few more pictures

Kfir — Sun, 24 May 2009 19:49:14 +0000

This posts cover a few days worth of picture.

The 20/5 I took my camera with me to work to make some pictures of the vila and its surrounding. This gate is the starting point of the path I jog on regularly. The sun was just coming up, it was all really wonderful to watch.

The next picture is for the 21/5. That was a Thursday and Eran arrived for a visit. Made a mas out of Aharale and Mine plans to go climbing in France. Totally worth it though. Its great seeing Eran, which I have not seen for a very long time.

The picture for the 22 is not dramatic. Unfortunately I have had little time to actually take pictures that day, so I stuck the camera outside the living room picture and snapped a few shots.

On Saturday the 23, Paula returned from her hiking vacation in the lake district. While I was waiting for her ship to dock up, I came across this sign. I just had to take a picture of it. Quite brilliant if you ask me.

Today Ellen, Eran Paula and I went hiking in the dunes to the west of Den Haag. It was a beautiful day and we really enjoyed the landscape. It changes from city to forest to dunes to beach, all within a few km walk. I snapped this in one of out breaks, just before we broke out of the forest and into the dunes. I love the way the water and the light play with each other in this picture.