Sometimes a module comes out of nowhere, and blows away everything else. I believe Navigate is one of those modules.

There are lot of factors that make it awesome:

• It doesn't get in your way... it stays nearly hidden, as a little circle in the top left corner til you click it. Think designs that didn't foresee the need for massive admin functionality.

If you do click the the top left circle (I think its a steering wheel), you see this:

Dude, its so hardcore, it has a screencast.

• You can add a single menu tree to a "block" and name it in under 8 seconds.
• It introduces the concept of "favorites". You are on a page, and type into a field, it saves the link with that name. You can even reorder them at will!
• You can insert arbitrary blocks of custom php code.
• All in all, its perfect for setting up an interface for clients who don't want to spend a 2 day retreat learning about CCK and Views.

Do check it out. You will not be disappointed.

Tears of joy. Yes we can. Its really a surreal feeling for the progressively minded in America. We're suspended in a state that oscillates between crying and cheering. I can't really communicate the extent of shame that we've felt for our country's attitude both domestically and internationally. I feel like I'm beginning to release a sort of toxic buildup -- I can't figure out why else tears are coming from my eyes tonight.

I was 18 when George W. Bush came to office. As I matured, I felt shame from being an American: I was morally, and spiritually opposed to him and everything he stood for. It wasn't til tonight that I've felt pride in America -- for the first time, I've been able to appreciate the poetry of our national anthem.

Oh, say, can you see,
by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd
at the twilight's last gleaming?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars,
thro' the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd,
were so gallantly streaming?

And the rockets' red glare,
the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night
that our flag was still there.

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

The best musical version I found was wordless, and arranged by none other than none other than Sergei Rachmaninoff: the great composer, who recorded this on a piano role in 1919 around the time when the United States granted him asylum from the the soviets. Later versions of the marine corp band's rendition were quite similar in their reverent interpretation.

Listen

No, listening to our national anthem is not a regular passtime of mine, but I felt its a microscopic example of how unusual tonight actually was. Today wakes a completely different America.

I'm still traumatized from 2000, but it looks like this is real. I just said "President Obama" to myself, and felt a sudden surge of joy.

Excerpt from Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell

As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.

It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say "In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption" that than to say "I think".

When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like "a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind" or "a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent" will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump.

By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words, he is not really thinking.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble.

You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

Read more from George Orwell's Politics and the English Language

The new president also should signal that we will no longer confront problems just by blowing them up. The military toolbox is essential, but it shouldn’t be the first option for 21st-century challenges. You can’t bomb climate change.

Nicholas Kristof -- NYT

Its getting close to the election, and I'm getting nervous. I live in Texas, so I feel powerless in every presidential election. My first course of action was to give money to Barack; I've given his campaign $150.00 so far (just saying so you can benchmark yours). In a weird way, it seems like a really low price to pay... I want to wake up on Novermber to a world of hope -- something that has been taken away from me since 2000. Obama strikes me as a Lincoln, a F. Roosevelt, a Washington.

You don't need a crazy CSS framework to make multi-column CSS layouts easy. They already *are* easy.

If you feel skeptical about my claim, I don't blame you. Like many web developers I too have tried to create 3 column layouts using the various types witchcraft found on web developer blogs:

• The byzantine two column layout wrapped within a two column layout technique
• The arcane negative margin trick
• The absolutely positioned nightmare
• The include a different CSS file for every browser, or else challenge (this one feels like a game sometimes...)
• ...and a variety of crude negative-margin + absolute-nightmare + nested-2-columns-within-two-columns combos

I'll call this technique the "float everything and clear" approach. I don't claim to have invented it, its just the way I've learned to do it over 4 years.

It works predictably in Safari, Firefox, IE7, IE6. It belly laughs at the the task of switching from a 4 column, to 3 column to 2 column layout. ITS NO FUSS! It contains no hacks, no browser specific code, no positioning, no negative margins. Just give your columns a width, make sure they add up to the total width of the container, and move on.

Here's a demo, and explanation. The demo demonstrates the the technique with 4 layouts: 2 column left, 2 column right, 3 column, and 4 column. It also demonstrates those 4 layouts surviving fluid width, 1000px, 800px, 600px respectively. The demo site files are attached at the bottom. Enjoy.

When Bad Hosts (Yahoo Small Business) Happen to Good Drupal Sites

Time and again, I work for a client who is stuck with a horrid server environment -- say -- Yahoo Small Business.* Surely you must think that a company like Yahoo -- who employs none other than Rasmus Lerdorf -- would offer a decent environment. That's where you'd be wrong.

Its so bad that Drupal 6 won't even allow itself to ATTEMPT an installation. And with good reason. Consider the facts:

• PHP version 4.3.11 -- (I wonder if there have been any important security fixes since that version came out?)
• MYSQL version 3.23.49 (Remember 2002?)
• Register globals is ON -- this is a "feature" and there ain't a damn thing I can do about it.
• No support for mod_rewrite [meaning all pages on the site have to begin with "?q="]
• 20m Memory limit (32 pushes it depending on what image handling modules you have on... views and panels seem to want more than 32 too)

It seems like its not even worth the effort to try to get drupal to run there. Since the site has to be live on monday, I employed a crude method that gathers all URL aliases, and a few more paths, and generates a full tree of directories and index.php files to mirror the pathauto links. Break the glass, and use this in case of emergency. [its best to run this on a local machine, btw -- it takes a while, and you'll want to turn up max page execution time up to near 120 seconds and beyond for most sites in the php.ini files.

File this little gem under damn useful.

The author pitched menu blocks better than I could:

So if you’re only using your theme’s Primary links feature, you can add and configure a “Primary links (levels 2+)” block. That block would appear once you were on one of the Primary links’ pages and would show the menu tree for the 2nd level (and deeper) of your Primary links menu and would expand as you traversed down the tree... Pretty simple, eh? (I’m actually shocked this module didn’t exist before.)

This is a comment I submitted on my localhost site, with full HTML allowed for anonymous users. The fact that "XSS" came up in an alert means I'm vulnerable to attack.

If you want your skin to crawl more, visit the XSS Cheatsheet, which offers a number of techniques for XSS attacks. If you're ever in doubt, no better test than to attempt to hack yourself.