Grep is a really powerful tool for finding things in files. I often use it to scan for plugins in the Drupal codebase or to scan through a CSV or log file for data.

For example, to scan for user centric ViewsFilter plugins in the Drupal core directory use this command (assuming you are relative to the core directory).

grep "@ViewsFilter(\"user" -r core

The -r flag here recursively scans the 'core' directory. This command returns the following output.

After looking at Conway's game of life I have been looking at other forms of cellular automata. This lead me to discover Langton's ant, which is a different kind of cellular automata where an agent (namely an ant) is used to turn the squares on or off as it travels around a grid.

The rules of Langton's ant are quite simple. The ant simply follows two rules as it moves around the grid.

Something I've been writing long hand for a number of years is wrap around increments. This is essentially adding to a value that has an upper limit, and wrapping back to 0 when that max value is reached. This can be done with an if statement.

The other day I was tasked with creating the weekly quiz for my family. I decided it would be good to do a section that would consist of 10 words that were spelled using symbols of the chemical elements. The questions would be presented as a list of element names, like this.

Barium Carbon Potassium Tungsten Argon Darmstadtium

This breaks down to the element symbols in the following way.

Barium = Ba
Carbon = C
Potassium = K
Tungsten = W
Argon = Ar
Darmstadtium = Ds

Putting that all together we spell out a word.

BaCKWArDs

Backwards!

After a bit of thinking about what words I could use I decided to write a program that would help me. The questions in the quiz did not go down very well, but I thought I would put the code that I used here.

The first thing I did was to set up an array of elements that I could use to compare parts of words with.

Drupal 9 will be released on June 3rd, 2020 so with this just around the corner I thought I'd put together a post about how to check if your site is ready. The transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was more of an upheaval than an upgrade. Updating a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8 requires a lot of effort involving code changes and migration steps. Drupal 7 modules are not compatible with Drupal 8 and so any custom code written needs to be adapted to the new structure of Drupal. The difficulty of this change made the Drupal community take notice and think about how future versions of Drupal are introduced.

Deployer is a PHP based deployment tool that I have been using very successfully for a number of months now. It comes with a number of different recipes to deploy a variety of PHP based applications, including Laravel, Symfony, Yii, and Drupal.

I first found Deployer when looking for a deployment package that suited my needs. Phing had been my tool of choice for a number of years, but it had proved problematic trying to debug the XML syntax when things needed tweaking. As I was deploying PHP applications it made sense to me to use a PHP based system to do the deployment. I looked at tools like Capistrano, but as I wasn't that familiar with Ruby I was worried that I wouldn't be able to debug mistakes or customise the deployment process easily.

Having a chat feature on your website (commonly called 'live chat') is useful when helping your users overcome any difficulties they are having. You can pop up a little chat window in the page and ask if they need any help finding what they need. This can be especially useful on large commerce sites where users might get stuck looking for things.

The addition of a chatbot also allows you to automatically answer some of more common questions. For example, if a user asks where they can find the delivery and returns policy then a chatbot can automatically respond with a response. These rules can get more complicated, but it depends on what you instruct the bot to answer to.

The other day I was trying to print some output to the command line and then overwrite the output afterwards. It turns out that there are a couple of ways to do this so I thought I would detail a few of them here.

By far the simplest way of doing this is to run the "clear" command, which we can run via the system() function in PHP. This will clear the output of the command line ready for you to print out whatever you need. The downside to this is that the entire terminal window is cleared. Another downside is that once the output is complete scrolling up will reveal the output that was cleared out.

I was saddened to hear of the passing of the Mathematician John Horton Conway today so I decided to put together a post on his 'game of life' simulator.

This game of life, more commonly called 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.

Creating branches in git basically free and is easy to do. This has lead to the development of techniques like git flow and other branch related work streams, which are now commonplace in development.

If you have a project being worked on by many developers you can get into the situation where there are many branches in the project. Some will be merged, some will be worked on currently and some more will be branches that were worked on, but never finished (for one reason or another). This can lead to some confusion over what branches are being worked on, especially if you want an oversight on the current health of the project.