HornCologne.com Fast, Good and Cheap ... pick two.

The excellent folks over at Schmap guides, producers of very interesting interactive travel guides both online and as a desktop app, have shortlisted one of my photos for the next edition of their guide to Cologne! Yay my camera! Yay my shutter finger!

Even if it doesn't make the final editorial cut, I am flattered. I'm further inspired to keep snapping and posting.

Thank you, Schmap!

A couple of questions came up in our users group get together last night and I thought I should probably post the answers here again for everyone to see.

"We know exactly what you've been searching for!"

A couple of photos from the Cologne "Street" Carnival that exploded into five days of beery, costumey goodness and action today.

We have a long-running dispute with the *stupidly noisy* residents of the apartment below our bedrooms. They have no sense of day and night. We have asked them nicely to be quiet, we pound on our floor and we have had screaming matches with them about it at three a.m. on the stairs of the building. They don't get it.

Well, happy holidays people!

Edit: Note the quality difference between the first and the second image. Although I uploaded both of them from the same large source jpg file using IMCE, the Image Toolkit settings are different. It turns out that Drupal's out of the box, standard compression quality setting (using php's GD2 image toolkit) is 75%.

The first one was scaled using the 75% setting and it gave me a bunch of ugly jpeg artifacts (especially in the red area), yuck!

On Rogier van Bekel's blog I found this post about a poster commissioned and paid for by the London Metropolitan Police ... also a related post about a similar poster done by the design-impaired, but equally moronic Chicago Police Force.

This stuff upsets me so much ... but we don't need my take on this today. Rogier sums it up better than I ever could:

So I wanted one of those nice "tag clouds" of key words from my site. No problem! Drupal has the Tagadelic module. Once downloaded and unzipped to my /sites/all/modules folder, module activated, I was ready to go! ... Right? Well, no. This thing is so simple, no one seems to have documented the on switch ... I found a lot of code samples for various interesting implementations. I found its settings in my Drupal installation, but no how-to.

So having gone from Drupal 5.2 to 5.3 only last week, Drupal 5.4 came out this week and I thought I had better streamline my update process, putting some stuff in place to make the process smooth, quick, easy and *reversible* ... just in case. Since Drupal 5.5 came out while I was sleeping last night, I can now test my own instructions and time the entire update process ... see below for the results.

Well ... this hovered near the top of my inbox for couple of days waiting for my bi-weekly routine skim/delete process. When I scanned it, something seems awry:

"Dear customer!
Other customers who purchased or reviewed Getting Things Done, the Art of Stress-Free Productivity also bought Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer. So we are certain you will be thrilled to know that Eclipse is now available. Order your copy today!"

So far so good ... then I read the synopsis under the cover illustration. Have a look:

Images on the contact page! Always tricky getting the Drupal contact page to look like the rest of the site, but I found a nice workaround for simple themes.