Happy Pixels

The night train and the long walks in the heat of the Hungarian summer had me so tired last night that I skipped the unofficial DrupalCon drinks to get some extra sleep, but this morning

I told people I would share the slides for the intro to testing presentation, so here they are. Also, after talking with Kristof Van Tomme earlier tonight, it seems that the presentation videos should be ready pretty quickly, so check back here for updates!

My first contact with the website JazzForYou.de happened when the owner and jazz guitarist Gunter 'Ruit' Kraus was recommended to me as a teacher for the two months I was to spend in Heidelberg. Despite a decent first impression, a 1997-esque structure and some too common faults very quickly popped up, so after meeting with Gunter for the first time it didn't take long before we agreed on a site redesign.

The monthly Swiss Drupal User Group meeting took place yesterday at the Hochschule für Technik Zürich. This was a good occasion to do a test run of my presentation on SimpleTest, and the questions from participants of diverse level of understanding definitely gave me some insights on points that could be improved. The overall feedback was good, including a short but positive response on rapsli's blog.

I am happy to announce that I will be attending my second DrupalCon. This time, the conference is taking place in Szeged, Hungary on August 27-30 with a one-day coding sprint afterwards.

The problem: you need to turn the values of an HTML select element into a PHP array, and you don't want to do it by hand because it has a lot of entries.

The solution: regular expressions! (using Eclipse's regex search/replace).

1. Copy the HTML code of the select element whose values you want to get.
2. In eclipse, paste the code in your PHP file.
3. Press Ctrl+F to open the find/replace window.
4. Click the "Regular expressions" checkbox.
5. Find: <option value="(\w)">(.)</option>
6. Replace: '$1' => '$2',
7. Click "Replace All".

In an attempt to get rid of stuff in my fridge before I leave, I improvised a strawberry-ginger smoothie which turned out to be awesome. Here's the "recipe":

• a couple strawberries for color and taste
• a banana for texture
• some yogurt (mine was vanilla flavored)
• a spoonful of minced ginger
• some soymilk
• a couple ice cubes

Throw everything in the blender (and a little common sense will tell you to peel the banana and wash the strawberries). Serve.

Rather than surfing the web as I usually do, I decided to take advantage of my last couple days in San Diego to do those things I wanted to try when I got here. Taking a surfing lesson was one of them, so this morning I gave a call to the Pacific Beach Surf School, and scheduled a lesson for this afternoon.

It's been nine months since I moved to San Diego to work for Achieve Internet under the "Optional Practical Training" allowed by my student visa, and my work authorization expires tomorrow.

I'm taking this occasion to move back to Europe for the summer. I'll be working remotely, which gives me the freedom to travel around. June and July will be spent mostly in Germany, with Heidelberg (where my girlfriend is finishing her degree) as my base camp. August and September are a little more vague at the moment, but I'll definitely be in Hungary for DrupalCon.

"Hello World", two words that I've written so many times, in so many languages. Similar to those websites that I made over time. A repeated exercise where every recursion brings something new.

Now, I've made a profession of my passion, and I build websites for a living. I build websites for big companies, for cool people, for good causes, but somehow I didn't have one for myself. So here it is, this website with the name Happy Pixels, a place where I hope to share with the world my passion for web development.