2022 marks 20 years since I started my MSc in computer science degree at the University of Aberystwyth. So, I thought I would take a look back at my thesis for the degree and see how far I have come since then.

The title of my thesis was "Using The Java3D API To Visualise Molecular Compounds". I used a system called Java3D to create ball and stick models of molecules. A second requirement was to allow the application to compare two molecules together.

The course I did was known as a conversion course and was designed to compress the three years of the undergraduate computer science degree into a single year, along with an introduction to Java programming bootcamp the summer before the course started. This was a year of hard work with 12 hour days and weekends of constant study. The drop out rate for the course was about 80%, with most of that being in the first few weeks.

Adding a progress bar to the top of the page is a simple way of showing the user how far down the page they have read. There is a scroll bar on the right hand side of the page on my current device, but that isn't always present on all devices. It is possible to hide the scroll bar on Macs and mobile devices so that they are only shown as the page is being scrolled.

Putting this piece of information at the top of the page can be a useful indicator that augments already existing technologies.

Drupal 9.3.0 came with a new feature called entity bundle classes. This allows more control of entity bundles within Drupal and provides a number of benefits over the previous mechanism of using hooks to control everything.

Drupal makes extensive use of entities to manage content and configuration. User details, pages of content and taxonomy terms just a few of the things that are represented in a Drupal site as content entities. Different types of similar configuration are called configuration entities, which would include things like text format settings or even date formats.

Content entities are normally fieldable, and in the case of content types and taxonomy terms Drupal allows users to generate their own variants. These different variants of entities are called bundles. Entities define the types of objects found in a Drupal site, bundles represent the different sub-types of these entities.

Inspired by a YouTube video I saw on awesome Numberphile channel about how to draw hitomezashi stitch patterns I decided to recreate them in Python with the aid of the Tkinter Canvas element. The pattern is quite simple and is an example of simple rules creating complex patterns, which I have an interest in.

The idea behind hitomezashi stitch patterns is to take two sets of numbers and draw lines on a grid. One set of numbers is the horizontal and one set is the vertical lines of the grid. The lines drawn are dashed but the key difference is that each start of the line is offset from the start depending on a certain factor. In the video Ayliean MacDonald uses letters of a phrase and offsets the start of the line if the letter is a vowel. She also uses the numbers of pi and offsets if the line if the number is odd.

PHP 8.1 comes with a few new additions to the language, and one that I have seen get the most attention is fibers. This is a feature that allows PHP code to be executed in a concurrent thread, with the ability to pause and resume that code at will.

Using fibers doesn't mean that the code runs in parallel, rather that the code is executed away from the main thread in a virtual or green thread. These are threads create by and executed by the PHP VM, rather than being executed by the CPU and managed by the underlying OS. This lightweight thread of execution is also called a coroutine and are executed in sequence, rather than being parallel.

Fibers are intended to eliminate the distinction between synchronous and asynchronous functions in PHP and provide a petter mechanism to manage blocking code.

Drupal has had the ability to use oEmbed in core since version 8.6.0. It was included along with the other media changes that went into core in that version. 

I have used some of the Drupal core oEmbed functionality to include YouTube videos into content, but I've never dug deeper to see what else I could do with it. Although Drupal comes with Vimeo and YouTube services available there are many more services to include, you just need to enable them.

In this article I will show what oEmbed is, how to use it out of the box, and then how to add more services to your system.

I was working on a user dashboard recently and decided to add some more signposting to values being updated.  Users were able to select different parameters in order to produce different values, but I thought that the values being updated weren't clear enough.

I had the idea to add some animation to the number as it was updated. This would show the user what items changed as they updated the dashboard. As the dashboard project had jQuery installed this gave me a nice animation system to use.

The HTML of the dashboard was quite simple and contained a number of div elements that contained numbers. Each of the different numbers had a id so that it could be updated independently.

Conway's game of life, was devised by John Conway in 1970 and is a way of modelling very simple cell population dynamics. The game takes place on a two dimensional board containing a grid of orthogonal cells. The game is technically a zero player game in that the initial setup of the game dictates the eventual evolution of the board.

The rules of the game (taken from wikipedia) are as follows.

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

For every 'tick' of the game board the rules are evaluated and each cell is kept alive, given life or killed. Through these simple rules a great deal of complexity can be generated.

I'm not a fan of the summary option on body fields in Drupal. I've never really got on with how users interact with it or the content is produces.

The field type I'm talking about is called "Text (formatted, long, with summary)" and it appears as an add-on summary field to a normal content editor area. It comes as standard on Drupal installs and appears on all body fields. The field type has it's uses, but I often find that the content it produces is unpredictable and doesn't have a great editing experience. I have even written articles in the past about swapping the summary field to a fully fledged wysiwyg area for Drupal 7, which worked on the project I implemented it on.

Let's look at the body summary field in Drupal and see why I have a few problems with it.

I have been a web developer for quite a few years, and one constant that is an unfortunate story in the industry is the rescue project. This is a web project that has been mismanaged by an agency or developer in some way so that the site is at a critical point. Either, the site is unable to launch or it has already been launched and suffers from serious issues. Projects in this state are caused by a variety of factors, and can be challenging and difficult to turn around.

Some agencies, quite understandably, won't go near rescue projects as they can be extremely tricky to manage. The client will have already invested money in getting the site in the first place, so spending money to fix the site can be a little painful for them. This is especially the case for small business sites, clubs or charities without any extra funds.