I got home this weekend to find a box from Apress waiting for me. My author copies of Pro Drupal Development had arrived! Up until this point almost everything about the book had been virtual, which usually consisted of email, word processing documents and illustrations. Was this really going to happen?

I've been nervous about the book coming out. What will it look like? Will it do more harm than good? Will this create more Drupal developers?

Inside that box from Apress was 10 shiny copies of the book. I could finally physically touch the thing John and I had been working on for the last year or so. After flipping through the book and seeing how it's all laid out, I discovered a new appreciation for the illustrations, screenshots and code snippets. My nervousness has subsided. It's beautiful and captivating and I'm proud to have it out there. This is my reference book for Drupal and I hope you too have the same feeling. I tell ya, Forms API never looked so good!

You can find out more about the book here.

With every fiber of your being you are god. You've known this all along. And you've never had more potential than right now to stand up and introduce yourself to the universe again. I know, I know, "it's silly to talk to a mirror", but's let's have some fun anyway.

You are open and flowing, a bottomless vessel through which life continuously pours through. You have nothing to take and thus everything to give, and you do. And to even try to cling to the love that is given back to you would smother you like an ocean. You are the ocean.

However you do hold the worlds suffering in the palms of your hands. That's your suffering too, and you choose this and embrace it with extended arms. You help others remember who they are. What is this 'other' you would run from anyway? You're quite the joker these days!

You are the change you want to see in the world. You are the grace that reveals compassion. You are the secret that's never been hidden, the fragile buddha waiting to come home.

It's so good to see you again. I've missed you.

After I installed Adobe Acrobat on my Mac, it overwrote the PDF preference for Safari and became the default application to open all PDFs within the browser. This is a pain becase Acrobat is a resource hog, slow, and more likely to crash than Preview.app. It took me awhile to trace down how to restore the default functionality since it's not in Safari preferences as one would think.

It's actually in Adobe Acrobat. Open Acrobat and choose _Acrobat > Preferences_ and select the _Internet_ catagory. Uncheck all the boxes as shown above and restart your web browser. Once again Preview.app is happliy opening PDFs within Safari! This has been tested on Acrobat 7 and OS X.

wget is great command line *nix program for grabbing things from the web, but it doesn’t ship with macs. It’s also not a part of the developer tools package. Here’s the steps I used to build and install wget on my mac.

Grab the wget source code from http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.9.1.tar.gz (or get the latest here) . Open a terminal window and follow along:

tar xzf wget-1.9.1.tar.gz
cd wget-1.9.1
./configure
make
sudo make install

The wget binary should now be in your /usr/local/bin folder. Let’s also put /usr/local/bin in the shell path so we can type wget from the command line rather than the tedious /usr/local/bin/wget when we want to run the program. This is accomplished by editing ~/.bash_profile to add the following line:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin; export PATH

To get the shell to re-read this file again, type source ~/.bash_profile. Now whenever you start the terminal, /usr/local/bin will be in the path.

The other part of installing wget that needs a tweak is wget’s manual page isn’t found when running man wget from the terminal. To resolve this we need to edit the man configuration file.

sudo nano /usr/share/misc/man.conf

Scroll down a bit and below all the other lines beginning with MANPATH, add:

MANPATH /usr/local/man

You’ll have to logout and login again for this change to take effect, but once you do you’ll have a fully functioning copy of wget installed on your mac!

With the book being officially done (available in May) I’m taking a little break from the hustle and bustle that has been my life for the past year. Between the launch of Lullabot and writing, I haven’t had much time to take on all the other projects dear to my heart. I’m marking this transition with a song I put together this evening aptly named Content. Enjoy.