Whine

I love Drupal. It's a great base to start from to build interactive, database-driven sites. All the code was written by unpaid volunteers who are currently active and engaged and constantly developing new features.

I've spent about 20 hours trying to reintegrate the Gallery2 application into my website. Yes, 20 hours - two and a half full days. Trying to integrate a supposedly release ready piece of software into another. Stil not there, though. Maddending. This small applet is supposed to re-theme Gallery2 so it looks the same as the rest of my pages. Not a lot of functionality - you could almost say it's fluff. The german medical student who authored this little peice of code is very helpful in the Drupal support areas, answering similar questions with absurdly long answers and closing out the support tickets as soon as the user stops responding.

The short of it is, this little piece of code doesn't work and I'd probably be further along if I set out to code the module myself.

I got home sorta late tonight and I was trying to check my e-mail and look at the Internet. No dice – the cable tv still works, but the cable modem is going flash flash again. 1:15 AM. Guess they’re stepin on it again. By steping on it, I mean the cable company is doing maintenance or upgrade work and has put my connection out of service while their techician does whatever they need to do.  read more »

I am trying to write some simple ActionScript this morning. I cranked up the copy of Flash in my squeaky-new copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3, wrote a few lines and got nothing - no spinney little graphics, nadda. After a few minutes with Google, I've learned that Adobe has done a 100% overhaul of the Flash IDE. A program that was already unbelieveably difficult to use creatively is now even more so. The Wikipedia page's explaination of the improvements in ActionScript 3.0 is unintentionally humorous - Adobe has improved ActionScript so much after acquiring from Macromedia that it now takes 8 lines of code to do what used to take 2. It's like Adobe designs it's user interface to sell training; you aren't going to figure out how to get 'er done without it.