I finally broke down and bought a cellphone.

Nothing fancy, just a Sanyo SCP-3200 with Sprint as the carrier. There is nothing spectacular about this phone; it's got basic functionality, it's small and lightweight, and is a good solution for someone who doesn't like to talk on the phone in the first place.

Sadly, this phone had an unfortunate interaction with the inside of a toilet bowl, resulting in the white screen of death. Despite having been submerged in water for less than two seconds, the screen was completely shot, a victim of "massive water damage."

Fortunately, the screen was the only part of the phone that was damaged, but it could not be repaired, so I purchased a new phone of the same model. My new problem was how to get my contacts and other data off the old phone. Stupidly, I went to Radio Shack to purchase a data cable for $9.99. The data cable came with the HandsetManager software, which the manager at RadioShack said would help me retrieve my data from the broken cell phone.

Much to my dismay, the manager did not know the product he sold me, or else he would have known that the software does not support my phone. After searching the internet for a few hours, it became clear that a lot of people did not know how to connect their computer to the SCP-3200.

One tip led me to DataPilot, which is not free. Despite paying for a data cable and software, I had to shell out another $39.95 for the DataPilot software, which was risky considering the fact that I had no idea if it would work or not. Out of the box, this software did not support my phone. I had to update the software several times and from several different places before I could finally connect to my phone. Once I was able to do that, the software did a good job of reading the data from the phone, allowing me to edit the data and save it to my computer, and then send the data to the new cell phone.

The user interface is not the best, being neither intuitive nor visually appealing. However, it is very functional software, except it does not support ringtone editing on my phone, or photo editing. These pieces of missing functionality don't bother me though, as I use neither function on my phone.

So the bottom line is, if you need to connect to a Sanyo SCP-3200 cell phone, one solution is to purchase a data cable and DataPilot, and make sure you update the software after purchasing it.

[tags]cell+phone, DataPilot, HandsetManager, RadioShack, Sanyo, SCP-3200, Sprint, water+damage[/tags]

I recently built my first module for Drupal, which exposes data from the Userpoints module to Views. There was some talk with the CEO of my company about releasing the module to the community as a contributed module, and some hedging about whether to release it or not.

Releasing modules shouldn't even be a topic of discussion within a company. The work I did on this module was built off the many, many, many hours others have spent on Userpoints and Views. In addition, thousands of developers contributed to, and continue to contribute to Drupal. For a company to even consider taking an Open Source project, developing a feature on top of it and then not releasing it, is rude and insulting to all the developers that have work on this OSS project.

Companies who use Drupal and other open source software have directly benefited from the work of thousands. These companies have saved gobs and gobs of cash by stating with Drupal as a base and then building on top. That base was built by ordinary people, and that base depends upon people contributing their code.

Credit should be given where it is due and if your company has sponsored the development of Drupal modules by paying your salary, that should be mentioned. At the very least, your company's name can be in the module itself with the README file and within the code.

Again, this should not even be a topic of discussion. If you work with Drupal and extend its functionality, release the code to the community.

Drupal, PHP, modules, extend, oss, open-source, software, philosophy, release, community

Drupal is a fairly flexible system as far as CMS applications go, and is even more flexible as a development platform. The Views module gives developers ways to dynamically build queries of data, and display that data in many different ways. Sometimes, however, you want to display views in ways not supported through the admin interface. Fortunately, there are other ways to get the job done.

For example, I have a block in my sidebar where I want to display a list of the latest blog post, latest forum topic, and latest user poll. Each of these lists can be created as separate views. However, there doesn't seem to be any functionality, either in the Views module or another third-party module, that allows you to display multiple unrelated views in a single block. So, we turn to the code. The Views API provides a mechanism for building and displaying your views anywhere in your templates:

and

Clearly, the views_get_view() function retrieves the view definition from the database, while the views_build_view() function renders it.

Back to my example - I simply created a new block, and set the input format to PHP. Then, I used the following code to populate the block with the views:

The above code shows the rendered view. However, there are times where you want or need to do some additional processing on the values returned by the view. Fortunately, the Views module is incredibly powerful, and has a ton of options for retrieving the views.

In the above example, the first argument to the views_build_view() function is 'embed'. There are several other options:

• page - Produces output as a page, sent through the theme. The only real difference between this and block is that a page uses drupal_set_title to change the page title.
• block - Produces output as a block, sent through the theme
• embed - Use this if you want to embed a view onto another page, and don't want any block or page specific things to happen to it.
• result - Returns an array of information, including a database object that you can use db_fetch_object() on
• items - Returns an array like resul, however, it contains an array of objects found by the queries, so you don't have to fetch the objects yourself.
• queries - returns an array, summarizing the queries, but does not run them

This information comes directly from the code, and hopefully, it will be of some assistance to people who are looking for this kind of functionality.

[tags]block, cms, development, drupal, php, templates, Views[/tags]

NH-based hard rock band Mindset X has just released their fifth CD entitled "Bipolar".

This five-song EP is musically different from the band's previous efforts, and is a bit more in the vein of traditional hard rock. What remains unchanged however is the incredible lyrics; intelligent and thought-provoking.

I did the artwork for this CD, along with the artwork for all of the band's other releases, and the work was done with Photoshop. I'm quite proud of the artwork, and I hope that you like it as well.

Support local music, and support Mindset X by purchasing this CD!

[tags]artwork, band, beyrent, bipolar, cd, metal, mindset+x, music, nh, photoshop, release, rock[/tags]