Rick's Tech Talk

I've been learning about Drupal Module Development the past few weeks. I'm using the venerable "Definitive Guide to Drupal 7" and a few times in the module development chapters (18, 19, 20), author Ben Melançon mentions running Drupal "in an IDE" to see how Drupal creates its various internal arrays.

I've been spending the past few evenings noodling with the HTML5 <canvas> element. I often bring up the HTML Canvas 2D Context Working Draft specification. The spec shows what functions are available to the canvas' context, and the examples are instructive. However, the spec also introduced me to a method for "hiding" HTML text directly inside another HTML file, using the "data URI" technique.

Like a lot of programmers, I've begun to wonder what all the fuss is about regarding HTML5. Casting about, I found Mark Pilgrim's fantastic tutorial on HTML5, appropriately titled "Dive into HTML5". I've been mucking with the canvas element, testing out the basics, and I put together a small web page showing a very simple random but colorful "box" generator.

I finished my version of Tetris, and it's now available for you to try on your PC. I set a goal of finishing the game before Super Bowl XLV, and there turned out to be a lot to.

My implementation of Tetris is nearly finished! It plays pretty decently, which is the measure of any game. There's no sound right now, but there's a help screen and a modest splash screen. My goal is to release it before the Super Bowl XLV (February 6, 2011).

My vanity website reads various RSS feeds, displaying a preview of their content. I use HTML::TokeParser to break apart the HTML inside the RSS feed. One RSS feed is from my sports BLOG, but a recent change (the BLOG moved from one site to another) started causing the preview text to be blank.

While teaching myself Microsoft DirectX, I fell into an issue that is best described as "invisible geometry". This is the unfortunate situation when lines aren't appearing when and where you expect them to. You've told DirectX to draw something, but you don't see it. The difficulties with getting this simple "two-faced triangle" to draw seemed to represent the difficulties with working with DirectX in general.

I added a tag cloud to this BLOG. It looks quite nice, and I was happy with the tags except when I saw that that they didn't accurately reflect my content.

When I first deployed this change, the biggest tag was for "drupal", but when you clicked on that tag, you saw only one story. And conversely, the "c++" tag is smaller than the "drupal" tag, but there are three "c++" stories. Why was the "drupal" tag so large? And why was the "c++" tag so small?