February 2011

Internet Explorer (IE) 8's Developer Tools seem to have a strange issue. Every once in a while, it simply refuses to show up on my screen. No matter how many times I click the Developer Tools button in IE's menu, or press F12, the tools simply wont show up on the screen.

Its more confusing because you can see the Developer Tools button in the taskbar, and clicking it multiple times gives the button focused and minimized look as happens normally when clicking taskbar buttons. But still, there's no sign of the Tools window on the screen.

I recently provided Amazon's Product Advertising API integration for one of the sites I did for a client in Drupal (along with iTunes search integration etc). I have to say providing Amazon's Product Advertising API integration was more cumbersome than integration with other such API's available, mainly because of Amazon's requirement of signed url requests (which basically contain SHA hash of the url for authenticating the request to Amazon), and because of far less documentation available on the Product Advertising API's request parameters and response formats.

I needed to remove the default "-None-"/"-Select-" option that Drupal's Form API adds to "select" form elements. Let's take an example. Consider the following "select" element definition for a form:

$element = array (
			'#type' => 'select',
			'#options' => array (
							1 => 'Very poor',
							2 => 'Not that bad',
							3 => 'Average',
							4 => 'Good',
							5 => 'Perfect',
						),
			'#required' => TRUE,
			'#title' => 'Rating',
		);