I knew about the ooextras Sourceforge site that has plenty of fun stuff macro but there are some really pretty templates for presentations at The Linux Box' templates page. My favorite by far is the Squares template, but the chalkboard has a fun feel as well.

In his weekly article Robert Cringely decided to skewer Sun Microsostems:

[...]Sun is simply doomed. Their software isn't better, their hardware isn't better, and they can't see themselves as anything but a maker of hardware or software, so my simple recommendation is that they take the rest of their cash and try entering a hot new field like -- say -- space flight. Or making really fine cakes. The world will always need fine baked goods. Or just give it back to the shareholders. Really.

How many miles is it from Denver International Airport to LAX with a continuing flight to San Salvador?

According to WebFlyer, it's 6,360 miles roundtrip. And yes, we're going to El Salvador and Hondars this summer for a little vacation :)

I can't believe this is the first time I'm writing about this, but google did not return any docuents (though it will in a few days...).

This past weekend while I was out of town, the several bicyclists in the Denver Critical Mass ride got into a bit of trouble with the police. It's a little frustrating, as one rider pointed out, that 75,000 protestors blocking major roads in Denver had no problem, but a group of ~100 bicyclists exercising their right to be on the road got tickets.

Without further discussion - Westword's take on the subject

I've been asked several times:

"I have data in a database and want to display it in Drupal and probably in a Drupal node. How do I do that?"

Well, here are some thoughts on that question. The answer may depend on the kind of data that you've got. Is it static or do you occasionally update it? Do you want users to be able to edit that data inside of Drupal and have the changes saved back to your database? Do you need Drupal to handle access control?

Just use a node

One solution is to simply use Drupal nodes. Write a script that takes your data and creates a new node - record for record - from your current data. If you have a few columns of data that are selections from a limited set you could convert those to taxonomies: e.g. you have a list of restaurant names with descriptions, a ranking (good/bad/fair) and a restaurant genre (Thai, Chinese, French, B-B-Q) then you could map the name into the title, the description into the body, the ranking into either a taxonomy category or as votes using the vote api, and the genre into a taxonomy category. This is ideally suited to relatively simple data.

Use Flexinode/CCK

Flexinode/CCK allow you to create somewhat more complex nodes where you create the necessary fields and Flexinode/CCK create the underlying database and HTML forms to be able to edit those fields. Then you create a few test nodes manually through the Drupal interface to see how fields get stored in the database and finally write a script to take your data and insert it into the database. It might make sense to make use of the fields-to-taxonomy system described above in addition to Flexinode/CCK.

Qcodo

QCodo is a code generation tool that can be used to create the "CRUD" (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete). I know of someone working on a way to integrated Qcodo into Drupal. If you're interested in that idea, let me know.

Synchronizing

If it is updated occasionally, you could keep a reference table from your data to the node ID value and create a script that not only creates the nodes but also can update them as necessary.

Drupal 4.7 has been released. Here's the announcement on Drupal.org, and here's the story on Digg.

Very exciting stuff. It's more of an evolutionary released than a revolutionary one in my opinion, but there's enough evolution that it's headed towards lots and lots of fun. I've been implementing sites based on the nightly cvs and betas and release candidates for a while. Now I'll have to start upgrading sites.