Global Telelanguage Resources - programming

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.

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".

Why ALG is hard: interdisciplinarity

dayre — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 16:29:19 -0700

Over at Jim Carpenter's blog, he has a series building on why aesthetic language generation (ALG) is difficult. There are plenty of discussions on the nature of working with aesthetic text generation systems from a writer/reader perspective, but very little on the challenges and questions raised in the actual construction of these systems (outside of the purely technical discussions within fields like Computational Linguistics). Jim has constructed a large scale electronic text composition system entitled "Erica T. Carter" and knows first hand the issues involved. Anyone interested in this area should keep an eye on his posts.

Perl for poets

dayre — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 10:29:20 -0700

Perl is a programming language that has been around since the late 80’s. In that time it has established a loyal following and reputation as a useful tool for the manipulation and analysis of textual data. For those new to programming, the syntax of Perl is relatively simple. It is also a very tolerant language in that there are many ways in the language to perform a desired task. Because of these facts, Perl is an ideal language for poets interested in using the computer to transform, analyse and generate text.

Below are links to information about the language, books on learning and using Perl, links to various distributions for download and a long list of various Perl modules one can download to add functionality to their programs. Experiment and have fun !