Greggles, Gregorybeans, Frijoles, Beans
Submitted by greggles on
Let's say that you live in Denver and you have an old bike that you're getting rid of. Or, let's say that you don't really like our petroleum-economy. Or, both! The solution is, frankly, quite simple: Derailer Bicycle Collective.
As you can read from their own website, the organization is based on the idea that
Submitted by greggles on
While the rest of this post looks back at 2007, I'd like to throw some attention to the security presentation at DrupalCon Boston.
2007 was a busy year for the Drupal Security Team. That's not to say that Drupal is unsafe but that security requires a lot of work. The nature of the work makes it hard to communicate exactly what is going on. So here is an attempt to share some information about the past year for the security team.
The team issued 37 Security Announcements (SAs), representing more than 100 patches released. Each SA requires at least 1 patch and 2 reviews (review before the patch is made to find other security holes and a second review to ensure that the hole has actually been fixed). Most issues involve multiple patches and multiple reviews. Each also requires the SA to be written and reviewed, the patches to be committed, release nodes created, published, drafts copied from security.drupal.org to drupal.org, and flipping publish/status bits on a few nodes around our infrastructure. All of that work was done 37 times last year or approximately once every 10 days. For comparison, 2006 totaled 32 SAs.
For each issue, there are more problems reported which turn out not to be issues. See Howto report a security issue and My Site Was Defaced ("hacked") What Should I do Now? for more information about how to report issues properly and with sufficient information. You can get a sense for the amount of discussion of security related topics and also of false reports based on the volume of emails to the internal mailing list:
Individual mails to the security team:
Submitted by greggles on
At the DrupalCon Barcelona one of the panels I lead was about (Dis)Organizing Local User Group Events. I still haven't decided what to talk about at the upcoming Boston Drupalcon but I'm sure it will be Roxxorz. I've been roped pursuaded into discussing SEO in Drupal and Userpoints. Personally, I think Prediction Markets are interesting enough to merit their own presentation (now to see about getting them ready to demo).
Now, that plug out of the way, what I really want to discuss is a problem that faces most Drupal User Groups.
About 2 years ago I started reaching out to folks in Denver to start the Denver/Boulder Drupal User Group (DBUG for short). From the first meeting it seemed clear: the skill levels were grouped around two distinct and competing centers:
Lots of people were still trying to figure out how to pronounce Drupal - we knew them from the second they showed up "Is this the drooo-PAWL meeting?" And then there was a nother group at the other end, the "Yeah, I just patched the form.inc so I could thrombulate the widgetizer." There were relatively few people in the middle or at either extreme.
Submitted by greggles on
Recently the folks from the Democract Convention Committee were looking to hire a Web/Drupal savvy person in the Denver area. They posted to Craigslist, I added it to Groups.Drupal.org but what else can you do?
There are several good places in Denver to find tech-savvy employees (likewise, if you are looking for work, pay attention to these places that advertise jobs):
Submitted by greggles on
If you ask to become my friend on facebook and I respond by assigning some strange social map characteristics, I'm sorry. The thing is, when that little "How do you know...?" box pops up I just have this amazing urge to select the wrong thing.
I'm not entirely sure why I get this urge. I mean, in general I like having structured data about the world that is accurate. Is it just an immature joke like "it's funny cause it's not true"?
Submitted by greggles on
If you liked the Drupal Digest, you've probably been sad the last few months wondering what happened. Well, Drupal Dashboard is finally here to fill in the hole that was left in your hearts when DrupalDigest.com was usurped.
It's a simple concept: if you try to pay attention to all the sources of information coming from Drupal you will quickly die of information overload. Instead, we will have a few people paying attention to these information feeds and then summarizing them for you. For now, there is a Important CVS Commit feed and an Important Module Releases feed. If you would like to add a filtered version of something (the development mailing list? drupal.org/planet?) please contact me. You can read more information about Drupal Dashboard like how it was built in the About Drupal Dashboard page.
My favorite tag lines for the Dashboard: "All wheat, no chaff" or "Essential information for busy professionals" or "We read everything so you don't have to." Yeah. If you notice any problems with the site I'd love to hear about those too - it's an infant still. There's plenty left on the todo list not least of which is "fix all bugs."
Submitted by greggles on
WebWorkerDaily (which I read and love for the inspiration it gives to tech nomads) has an article today about how Zoho is offering an offline mode for document editing and how this is great and how it's lame that Google docs doesn't have this feature.
I started to leave a comment for them but 1) their comment system ate my comment and 2) I wanted to make a picture to explain my point which I can't insert into their comments.
This feels pretty intuitive to me, but apparently it's not that intuitive since Zoho didn't figure it out (and they're smart).
So, at the top left are situations like basic email, basic text editing. Think about your 10 year old kid writing a paper for school. If she uses Microsoft Word to do that it's a waste of time and money. No one will argue the money aspect, but online document editing will be faster in terms of his time since it is simpler to learn and do what she needs.
In the middle imagine something like a spreadsheet for keeping track of your expenses or for adding up and assigning costs on a trip among a group of friends. If you use an online spreadsheet anyone can add to it and you get the sharing benefits. However, if you're a spreadsheet jockey it's tedious to use the online editors and you are prohibited from more complex capabilities built into desktop applications (monte carlo analysis? macros?).
