Varesano.net

Some time ago I wrote about the Web Design Survey organized by A List Apart.

Now the results of that survey are now available. Really interesting are the comments to the article.

I moved to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain.

I'm here for studying at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria as an Erasmus student.

This are my new contact informations:
phone: +34693254427
address: Calle Secretario Padilla 121 Planta 2, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 35010, Spain

Living here is really incredible. We have a wonderful weather every day and the ocean just at 30 meters from home.

Youtube recently added a new feature to the video player used to embed Youtube videos on other website.

The new default player, once the video completes playing, will display a list of related videos.

While this feature could be useful for some users it is probably not wanted on Youtube video aggregation websites.

Fortunately it's possible to disable related videos.
Let's see how.

In the years before MySQL 4.1, the first MySQL version which provided a complete and good support to different character encodings, developers who needed their databases to store UTF8 encoded data used different encodings (usually latin1) for table and databases while still storing real UTF8 data inside.

While the DB and tables were, as an example latin1 encoded, inside there were actually UTF8 encoded data.

The work on the new version of the video module continue.

I'm at a good point in the development and I think I will be ready to release the new version soon.

I attach here the current development version.

The code is still really unstable so.. do not use this on production. The update from previous versions still does not work.. so use this on a clean drupal install.

I usually use Vim for command line text file editing.

Some days ago, probably due to a change in /etc/vimrc after a system update, the behavior of the mouse changed.

Selecting some text with the mouse automatically enter visual mode. I rarely use the visual feature and when I use it I prefer using the v keyboard command.

I found this new setting pretty annoying. So I decided to disable it.

PHP is a very good programming language for creating web application. As an example Drupal is written using PHP.

Unfortunately, while already 3 years ago the PHP version 5 has been released, this version is still not yet supported by most of web hosts.

This is really bad because web developers have to stuck with PHP 4 witch is now 7 years old and obviously has few and ugly features compared to PHP 5.

To solve a really ugly bug of the video module I had to track down, in a very detailed way, what was the hook execution order in the Drupal 5.x hook_nodeapi. Unfortunately I didn't found any detailed documentation of this neither on the handbooks nor in the developer documentation (on CVS).

This is why, armed with a lot of patience, I wrote down what happens at every content submission/previewing/loading.

Those are my results:

node submit (validation successfull):
prepare form validate submit insert

I'm currently working on a major rewrite of the video module. It was absolutely needed as the code was pretty ugly and buggy.

The rewrite tries to simplify the UI and the content submission process.

Attached you can find my latest version, is super development code but it's there only to let you have an idea of the path I'm following.

The only modules which I tested are: video, video_ffmpeg_helper, google video, weblink video, upload_video, url video, youtube video. Any other will not work.

The last version (at the time of this post) is attached below.

I just completed the development of a flash plugin for the Advertisement module. The plugin is available here.

With this plugin you can add flash ads to you Drupal website and track different stats for it.

It is also able to override hardcoded urls in the swf files. Then is it possible to track clicks on those files. This feature uses some swf url convertion code from the Openads project.