Lately I've been craving buying a new laptop. Work provides me with one, but I've been craving something smaller, lighter, and something of my own. At the moment, there's little chance I will actually act on this craving. There are a lot of bills and other concerns since I bought a house back in October. Instead, it's more of an enjoyable exercise in speculative consumerism.

This morning an article came across my feed that crystallized to me how wrong-headed the tech blogosphere is about the stylus. In this Read-write-web article, the author argues that the iPad isn't a proper drawing surface. I am in complete agreement with this point. A touchable interface is the cornerstone of the Tablet experience. Unfortunately, the Tablet fails when it comes to the production of artistic works.

Earlier this evening a friend sent out a request on Twitter:

@[redacted] needs a new laptop. Any recommendations? She needs win7 and not too expensive.

I found something that met the criteria and quickly sent off a reply. There wasn't much too the request. Desktop Computers (including laptops) haven't changed much for the last few years. Even the specs have for the most part stabilized: 2 to 4 cores, 1.5-2.1 GHz, 4 - 8GB of memory, Hard Drives up to 750GB... Getting a new computer is simply no longer exciting. 

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When looking at Drupal code, it can be hard to know where to start. Dive into any of the directories in a standard installation, and you'll find file after file of PHP code. In the root directory alone, you'll find five files! Where do we start? Determining this is quite simpler than it seems; all you have to do is look at the URL of any Drupal site. 

Click here to read Part 1 of this series.

Overview

This post is intended to be the beginning of a series of regular blog entries exploring the innermost guts of the Drupal CMS. We'll take a copy of Drupal, a mocked up website, and a debugger, and step through initialization and requests. We'll get to the heart of how it really, really works.

The morning is a fertile ground for colliding thoughts. You're still groggy from sleep, and your mind isn't focused enough yet to drown out the noise it usually generates. Often, this state drifts me into the absurd. Laughter can usually be heard from the house bathroom as the bizarre thought collision reaches its zenith while I shower. 

One of my first hobbies -- even before programming and computers -- was Amateur Radio. It was so early in my life that I do not recall how I discovered it. I do remember that I did so independantly. I wasn't introduced to the hobby by an "Elmer", and only was able to read about it in books.