Jitter-Free, my butt…

So wiredgeek tried some inkos tea and liked it. So, he called the company and said, “hey, I’m organizing a tech conference, could you provide some free drinks?”

They sent 8 cases of the stuff. Now it claims to be “jitter-free”, suggesting that the caffeine content is low enough that it does not induce the near nausea experience that other energy drinks do. After all, it’s white tea. White tea is all the rage these days.

I stand here as a testament that inkos tea is indeed NOT “jitter-free”. Several other fellow geeks at the conference and I concurred that, in fact, after about a half-can of the stuff we were wired up and ready to bounce off the walls.

Of course, my solution to this was to finish the first can and move directly to a second. I drank the first can around noon or so, and the second can wore off around 4AM. Oy, vey.

This could all be explained by my very low tolerance for caffeine, but I suspect it has less to do with it than one might think.

Drupal Camp NYC 3 wrapup

Whew, Drupal Camp was like taking a drink from a waterhose. I met all kinds of folks from all levels of expertise. There were even Rails people there (gasp!). Anyway, I caught the tail-end of the performance discussion, attended an advanced theming session, and debated the downsides of server-side browser sniffing.

Overall, it was a great experience, and I’m pretty psyched about developing some new features for my own Drupal-based sites. In fact, I’m in the midst of redesigning therac25.net in Drupal. So, wiredgeek and I came up with a little rhyme that really succinctly states how I feel about Drupal:

Rose are red,
Drupal is blue.
PHP sucks,
but what can you do?

Session 2

1:21PM – Beginning modules. Finally some meat. I have been interested in developing my own modules for a while, but never knew where to get started. Here we go:

  • use api.drupal.org
  • hooks – create a dir for the module
  • create module_name.info file
  • create module_name.module file (no closing php tag, start with it, but don’t end with it)
  • if you’re creating something that makes new tables, you need a .install file. When you install and enable a module the first time, Drupal runs the hooks in the install file. The hook name is the name of the module file
  • in the uninstall file, free any variables you create
  • hook_nodeapi – operations on nodes that your module does NOT manage (on pre-existing node types) you can change weight to change execution order
  • hook_form_alter – cool

First Session

12:00 PM – CiviCRM – a few guys sitting in a room talking about CiviCRM, led by a guy who works for a competing CRM product. No one really knows a lot about CiviCRM, but we’re talking about various features and “what is it?” kind of stuff.

Drupal Camp NYC 3

10:19 AM – This is my first “unconference”. So far, we’ve had bagels and are now signing up/creating sessions for the day. It’s pretty chaotic, but that’s the beauty of it. Ken and I were thinking of doing this for a Rails Camp. Call it RuBarCamp or something.