kelly

From the latest Ubercart Newsletter:

Voting for sessions at Drupalcon San Francisco is now open! Voting lasts
through March 1 -- that's only 2 weeks, counting today! So go vote!
The vote button is in the upper left hand corner of each session (just below
the session title). You have to be logged in to vote, so you need to create
an account or use your drupal.org account.

Allen Berrien

Why Should You Be Using a Mac?

Are you tired of struggling with your PC? Perhaps you’ve heard about the Macintosh computers from Apple. The Mac has been described as “the computer for the rest of us.” With good reason…when you do your computing on a Mac “things just work.”
For starters, Mac hardware is better. Some PC’s seem to be made with components that are swept up off the floor. As someone who has been “under the hood” of many computers, I can honestly say that the build quality of Macs is superior to the PC offerings that are on the market.

Yet as nice as Apple’s hardware is, it’s the software that really shines. The foundation of all Macs is the operating system. It’s called OS X (pronounced oh-ess-ten; not oh-ess-ex, by the way). The latest version is OS 10.6, which is also known as Snow Leopard.

kelly

left-click will have candy and this cool looking pumpkin on hand for halloween! yay!

silas

I spent a bit of time helping somebody on freenode's #drupal-support IRC channel add teaser text to Ubercart's product grid view.

Here's an example of this from a site developed by left-click:
http://www.biolateral.com/catalog/biolateral-cds

It also includes audio, which also usually isn't in the grid display. I've removed that part from the code below to simplify things.

Awhile ago I posted a patch to add a checkbox to Ubercart to allow for this functionality. People seem to like it:
http://www.ubercart.org/contrib/5395

However, that patch modifies core Ubercart, which isn't ideal. Each time you upgrade Ubercart, you'll have to remember to reapply my patch. A better solution is to add a theme override to your theme's template.php file. This is a common practice in Drupal, so if you haven't done it before, now's a good time to learn. Just make sure you're ready to dig into a bit of php.

kelly

The website runs the entire business. I'll try to rattle off most of what it does...

kelly

I got interviewed by Channel 22.

While Windows 7 is a definite improvement over Vista, we are disappointed that Microsoft feels justified in charging so much for this release. Apple just did a similar upgrade to its OS and is only charging $29. Also given such close proximity to the disgusting Vista release, the release of Windows 7 would be better received as a free service pack. Read more for video...

Allen Berrien

Many Mac users don’t know when to let go of a computer. Or, on the other hand, whether or not (and how) to keep an older Mac humming along for a long time after the warranty has run out. I’ve gained a lot of experience at what Macs of what vintage are good for doing what chores.

Depending on the applications you want to run, an older computer can remain perfectly serviceable for quite a while. Sometimes a simple RAM upgrade (to eliminate that spinning beach ball you see, or a hard drive upgrade (to handle a burgeoning photo or music library) can give a computer a new lease on life. Since hard drives always fail eventually, putting a fresh one in your computer also reduces your risk of data loss. (Just the same, a good backup plan is a must.)

kelly

I always suspected this to be possible and I finally got around to doing it. By creating a barcode of my username, a "tab," and my password, I can now login to my website by simply using a barcode scanner. I expect this to be useful as we transition into using UberPOS as our point of sales system at left-click. Cashiers can have an ID card with one of these barcodes on it allowing them to scan it and login. For now, I've affixed my login barcode to my USB stick.

After a lot of searching, and digging too deep into how barcodes are generated, this link was found. There they have an online barcode generator with the special feature of allowing you to have ASCII key codes, such as the Tab key, encoded into the barcode. The winning combo for getting this generator to produce a login barcode was:

Allen Berrien

When it comes out of the box, a new Mac is a rock-solid computing solution. But over time, directories become corrupted, permissions errors pile up, and the data space on the hard drive becomes fragmented. Typically problems like these don’t bring things to a crashing halt. But they do affect the speed and throughput of your computer.
Thankfully, Macs don’t get crufted up with viruses, malware, and spyware the way some other computers do. But a periodic tune-up and survey is a good idea nonetheless. Here’s what it typically entails:

silas

Phew, we just got back from DrupalCon Paris, and we had a great time! More updates coming soon. But for now we have a couple announcements!

If you haven't heard, we're pretty excited about UberPOS, our new open source point-of-sales system for Drupal/Ubercart.

We'll be giving a demo tomorrow, September 8, in Amherst, MA and another one in NYC on September 16.

The UberPOS blog post announcing these presentations is here.