Blogs

I have just posted my first repo of artwork on GitHub. You can find it here https://github.com/johnvsc/Digital-Paintings .

Today at Design4Drupal at MIT, I gave a presentation about Strategies for Design for Drupal where I condensed many thoughts that I have had over the past year into a cohesive presentation. 

A dynamic that has troubled me for a long time is this: why hasn't the Front End Development community taken advantage of tools and strategies that the Back End Developers know are proven to make their life easier. Why are Agile practices (like Scrum, Sprints and Pair Programming) not reflected as standard on the design front? Why are there not Design Design Patterns?

Other than the obvious reality of my own shortcomings, my most perpetual foe has been Time.

The mis-directed of all activities has been the unwarranted attention to the duration of time to complete a task. This slippery slope of intangibility become evident once personal dependencies set in; once a person relies on you, the boundaries of freedom contract like a shrinky-dink.

Throughout my life, I am continuously amazed at people's responses to my paintings. No matter from what status in life, the gesture remains constant and the expression crosses cultures.

For example, today I participated in the cosmopolitan festival of relocation. At  indeterminate annual junctures, New York's cultural paradigm encourages us to pack our earthly belongings into rented, industrial mules, migrate into unknown lands and lay claim to a dwelling for one to two years. 

This year my schedule prevented me in securing professional revelers, so I had to venture to get my own mule and pick up some ad hoc participants that usually hang outside the Home Depot. My three tough Ecuadorian friends were mens men: guys who didn't know what the day would hold for them but tackled whatever may come without hesitation. 

If you are having a hella time trying to get your FTP program to find and use an alias to a directory on a server, you are trying to use the alias in the wrong way. What you are looking to do is mount a directory and bind it to another directory.  

The Problem

Say you have shell (SSH) access to a server. Logging in (scp username@server_address) you are taken to your personal user folder on that server (say "/home/johnvsc").  

Introduction

If you are a developer building, playing and thinking in modules, then you will be comfortable with working with Object and Arrays. However if you are a designer getting deeper into the Theme layer, you might not be so hunky dory with them. Making peace with Arrays in Drupal Development goes a great way to getting to Super Ninja Themer status; below, we are going to give peace a chance. 

John Zavocki has been merging Art and Technology since the late 80s, his early days of college. His diverse abilities have lead him to make art in Tuscany, develop Flash applications for telecom behemoths, teach web design to college students, construct multimedia installations for the perfume industry and build websites for rock stars.

1. In the phpMyAdmin interface for your site, navigate to the correct table
2. Click the SQL tab, and in the SQL query box...
3. Using this code and replacing the ** with correct information, test to see if you are replacing the correct string
   

   SELECT replace(*rowName*,'*original string*','*new string*'), *rowName* FROM `*table name*`   

4. if this checks out, then use this code to replace the string:
   

   update *table name* set *rowName*= replace(*rowName*,'*original string*','*new string*');  

5. Check the results

I really love Flashnode ! The way that it makes adding Flash to your drupal site is a no brainer. Also, the fact that you can do two essentail things with it; makes it a killer module:

1. Flash node input filter
2. Passing Flashvars to your Flash movie