Harry Slaughter's blog

The following is a guest post by Mitchel Xavier

One of the challenges of developing with Drupal is to understand Drupal’s structure. Until now, when working with the DOM structure, the DOM inspector has been the best tool for viewing the structure. A new tool has been created to make the visualization of the DOM structure much easier to interpret. It is a Firefox add-on and is called Tilt 3D. It creates 3 dimensional interactive representation of the DOM elements as a layered visual image.

A requirement to use Tilt 3D is that your browser supports WebGL. WebGL is a Javascript software library which allows for the creation of 3D graphics very quickly and without the requirement for additional plugins. Currently Firefox is the only browser to support this tool. Firefox has supported WebGL since version 4. The other requirement for Tilt 3D is that it is supported with a capable graphics card.

I have only tried this on my HTC EVO, and it works wonderfully.

I was just working on a client site and had an epiphany as to why working with Drupal continues to be a frustrating experience for me.

As flexible and powerful as Drupal truly is, there is still an unacceptable level of non-determinism involved in working with Drupal whether it be in working with existing modules, theming or doing custom development.

When I'm away from home, I use my Windows laptop as a dev server. I use the factory distributions of MySQL, PHP, and Apache. They run surprisingly well on Windows.

I've very seldom had any serious problems running drupal under Windows. That is definitely not to say that I'd rely on Windows in a production environment. But it is suitable for a dev server.

I did just spend several hours, however, finding out that if you enable CSS or JS compression in this environment, it can cause Apache to die.

I just can't take it anymore. I'm turning off anonymous commenting completely.

I've tried Akisment, Captcha, Mollom, all of them. Nothing works.

I believe the only way a site can prevent spam altogether is by requiring accountability. 

I don't recall the name of it at the moment, but Google was working on some sort of verified web identity tool. Only if a user comes to a site with some sort of valid 'credentials' do I think he should be trusted.