David Ayre's blog

Drupal 5: How to process multiple instances of the same form on the same page

dayre — Fri, 11 May 2007 20:41:28 -0700

This problem recently presented itself to me while working on a Drupal site which made heavy use of a non-ajaxed tabbed interface. With Drupal 5’s form API, form handling got a lot more agile, but the solution to this particular problem was not easy to find, though the API was able to solve my problem with a little digging.

The problem ?

Given a page with multiple instances of the same form (which use the same form id), your form submit() function may not receive the anticipated set of form values for the form the user has submitted. The values you get may not be from the form attached to the submit button the user clicked, but values from a different form with different values which is using the same form id.

Freeze or burn

dayre — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:19:33 -0800

Here’s a weird one for all you kooky word nuts… while looking up the etymologies of words ending with “eeze” (a typical pastime these days…), i came across an interesting history for the word “freeze“. Today, we associate the word freeze with a withdrawl of heat, creation of an icy state, a favorite weapon of certain super heros/villians like DC Comics “Mister Freeze”.

According to Skeat’s Etymology , the word freeze can be traced back to:

Jena Osman's hypertext poem back online

dayre — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:11:21 -0800

GTR is happy to announce that Jena Osman's hypertext poem "The Periodic Table As Assembled by Dr.Zhivago, Oculist" created in 2002/2003 is back online and hosted at gtrlabs.org. The poem is a "language laboratory... organized according to the periodc table of elements".

The perl code for the poem was originally developed by Sean O'Donnell and fetched images from a variety of image sources on the internet corresponding to key words within the hypertext poem. Little work was required to revive the poem as Sean did a very good job first time around. I modified the server side code to revive some of the image sources which had dried up over the years + a little client side JavaScript TLC was required. All in all, it's running splendiferously ! Visit it here .

Bruce Andrews is a stand-up guy

dayre — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 10:05:52 -0800

Wow. Bill O'Reilly appreciates poet/professor Bruce Andrews being a "stand-up" guy.... Bill takes "missing the point" to a whole new level.

Cyborg complications: Metalosis Maligna

dayre — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 21:09:32 -0800

Just when you thought it was safe to use that chip implanted in your hands to automatically log into your computer, a new documentary is released illustrating in grim detail the dangers of medical implants (Faster YouTube version available here .)

Inaugural Dorkbot Vancouver a Success !

dayre — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 10:35:06 -0800

Wow ! The inaugural Dorkbot Vancouver meeting was fantastic, a great turnout with a highly eclectic group of individuals. Thanks to Alex Beim and Clive Goodinson for starting the Vancouver chapter of Dorkbot and to Jeremy for putting the word out.

There were sculptors, painters, writers, educators, graphic designers, bio-information visualizers, Flash gurus, Processing pros, RFID hand implant briefcase opening people, crazy concert glow ball creators, WI-FI phone network hackers, interactive narrative theorists, tactile computing conceptualists, RFID based spritzing dolphin creators, audio quilt fabricators, corporate branding wizards and me (heavy backpack computational linguistics guy). Quite a few connections to Emily Carr and to the SIAT program at SFU.

ClearForest lauches a semantic web web service web site

dayre — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 11:14:54 -0700

I just had to throw another "web" in there somewhere.... I haven't seen this type of offering from anyone else yet, but the company ClearForest have made their text analysis and classification system "web enabled" so that others can analyze documents and get results in the form of XML documents.

They are even holding a "mash-up" contest to bring attention to their new service and to see how people can use the results of their system in some creative combination with other web services like Google maps etc.

A web browser for experimental writers ?

dayre — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 00:21:18 -0700

With the release of the open source Firefox browser, numerous spin off projects have been launched building off the core Firefox browsing functionality. Two of the more interesting offshoots are Flock and Songbird.

Flock advertises itself as a "social browser" because of its built in support for many social networking services such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati and others. Songbird describes itself as a mishmash digital jukebox, web browser and media player with some interesting features for "playing the web".

Leonardo Electronic Almanac Discussions

dayre — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 19:31:46 -0700

As an accompaniment to their New Media Poetics and Poetry special issue, LEA will be hosting a series of online discussions .

What is the LEA New Media Poetics Special ?

Guest edited by Tim Peterson, the issue features Loss Pequeño Glazier, John Cayley with Dimitri Lemmerman, Lori Emerson, Phillippe Bootz, Manuel Portela, Stephanie Strickland, Mez, Maria Engberg and Matthias Hillner. Don't forget to scurry over to the equally exciting gallery, exhibiting works by Jason Nelson, Aya Karpinska, Daniel Canazon Howe, mIEKAL aND, CamillE BacoS, Nadine Hilbert and Gast Bouschet.

Google N-gram data released

dayre — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 12:00:41 -0700

Fun times all around ! Google has finally released "version 1" of their N-gram word data sets through the Linguistic Data Consortium. For $150 US, you too can own the following on a 6 DVD set:

File sizes: approx. 24 GB compressed (gzip'ed) text files



Number of tokens:    1,024,908,267,229
Number of sentences:    95,119,665,584
Number of unigrams:         13,588,391
Number of bigrams:         314,843,401
Number of trigrams:        977,069,902
Number of fourgrams:     1,313,818,354
Number of fivegrams:     1,176,470,663