Blarchive

Asylum Scaremongering

Ever since the explosion on the boat full of Afghani refugees, the news has been full of scaremongering again. They're faithfully reporting how we'll be overrun with asylum seekers because the new goverment has changed policies.  I'm calling it scaremongering because they never report on the actual total number of asylum seekers Australia gets or, for that matter, the relative amount compared to other countries.

Drupal Twitter Module

James Purser from Collaborynth mentioned earlier today that it would be great if the twitter module for Drupal could magically add hash tags (I assume based on node taxonomy terms).

I've also been wanting it to be able to include the node type, so that book reviews on the LUV website don't get announced as 'New post'. With thanks to lyricnz on freenode for the right api call and Josh Hesketh for a non-ugly taxonomy fix.

screencasts

Kattekrab has been fiddling around with recordmydesktop for a while, working on screencasts.

ScreenshotShe was told about the key-status-monitor utility by heathenx, who already does Inkscape screencasts. This utility monitors and displays mouse button and key press status by reading /dev/input/eventX files and displays key presses and mouse clicks in a little window, which can be part of the screencast.

Drupal Events Display

Many community websites run Drupal and use the event module to maintain a calendar of events that they organise or that are of relevance to their members.  I help maintain the website for two such organisations, Linux Australia and LUV.

The event module has one slight drawback, it displays the number of hours, days, weeks or months remaining until an event.