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The following is a posting of my code from this month's Boise Drupal User Group presentation I did on Drupal's Batch API as it exists in Drupal 6. It also showcases a simple technique one could use for firing off batch operations via Drupal's admin interface. It's light on prose, and heavy on code.

If programmers wanted to be technical writers, they probably would be technical writers and not programmers. You can see that tautology played out in many a Drupal module where the documentation (most likely a README.txt) is on the light side, and the code is on the heavy side. Don't get me wrong, there's some great documentation out there, and many valiant efforts on the part of developers, but you just can't always depend on extensive documentation - especially when you're looking at a module that's not particularly mature.

I'm setting up a new MacBook Pro for development work. Thought it might be nice to have a list of programs installed and customizations made. Perhaps others will find it helpful, too. This setup is fairly well road-tested by this Drupal and web application developer.

Firefox

Find these via https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

• Firebug (Developer tool. Great for CSS and Javascript work.)
• Web Developer Toolbar (Developer tool. You should know it. Great for turning off Javascript, messing with cookies, measuring parts of a page.)

Until recently, I worked for the Idaho Commission for Libraries as a web developer engaged with a number of projects based on Drupal and a few custom coded apps. It was a job I held for about eight years, starting as a part time grant funded assistant to the library networking consultant. As my skills increased, the agency's needs grew, and the Internet germinated, and it became a full-blown web designer and state employee position. A few years later I was reclassified as a developer.

Sometimes you want to measure how much you've contributed to Drupal.

Sometimes you want to measure someone else - perhaps you're considering hiring this person.

Try the following Google search (where "username" is the person's Drupal.org username):

That's it. Not scientific or anything, but it'll let you get a handle on how often a person's username appears on http://cvs.drupal.org.

Here's me for instance.

Today I caught an NPR interview from a few days ago with Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody." I was installing a new Drupal site, and so listening with divided attention. Nothing in the interview jumped out at me until the last minute when Shirky mentioned social media has a tendency to favor phatic communication, a mode of communication with the goal of opening social channels between people.

I received an email that ended thusly from my friend Alejandro Adams, mentioning his in-development film Babnik:

"I hope Babnik lives up to the (ahem, your) hype and pulls one out for the 'plot' team (but not at the expense of character!)."

My reply, in slightly edited form (and intended as a treatise on story and not to be misconstrued as a chastisement):

The conversation went like this:

"E, would you like lasagna for dinner?"

"No! I want macaroni and cheese!"

"Have you ever had lasagna?"

"I want macaroni and cheese! Macaroni and cheese!"

Five minutes later...

"So, E, we're out of macaroni noodles. What if we made it with spiral noodles?"

"Yeah! Spiral noodles!"

"Or, hey, we could make macaroni and cheese with long flat noodles. Does that sound good?"

"Yeah! Macaroni and cheese! Noodles!"

"What if we mixed some tomatoes in?"

"Yay!"

"And maybe some hamburger?"

When there are no rules, the second law of thermodynamics will come into play and the entropy of the system will increase. One way in which entropy increases is that, without any restrictions on communications among subsystems, communication will occur in an unrestricted way...

from Code Complete, 2nd ed. by Steve McConnell

The above statement pertains, in context, to software development, yet "Twitter" is what popped into my mind when I read it.

I came into the office from a three-day weekend (I work a compressed four-day week) to find my phone blinking. In my job I consort with a lot with libraries and this message was from a librarian who called to ask if I had any recommendations on what to look for when interviewing an IT manager. The answer was, not really - I'm a web programmer, and haven't spent much time around IT managers - but I know some interviewing tricks.

I gave her three questions. The last was my favorite: