B. Mann Consulting

Well, before I knew it, DrupalCamp Vancouver has snuck up on me. I mean it when I say it snuck up on me: I had pretty much zero to do with organizing it -- massive kudos have to go to Dave Olson, Dale McGladdery, and Ariane K (I know there are others, like the guys from Image X Media and jkparker on kick off party duty and and and...).

DrupalCamp Vancouver is this Friday and Saturday, May 9th and 10th, with a kick off party on Thursday night. As with all Drupal events, it's sold out (how are we ever going to fix this? more training!), and it looks like a great group of people are going to be gathering.

I spent this morning with Dale and Ariane reviewing the session submissions. We have a nice mix of newcomer, developer, and soft topics, as well as 2+ double sessions: one on organic groups, and one on design and theming. I say "2+" because we tried to schedule the talks so they "fit" together nicely -- like the back to back views + arguments segueing into panels 2, or the intro to module development that then continues with forms API advanced development. The sessions are up -- but the presenters are still "in progress" of being contacted.

I'll be doing a talk on install profiles with a couple of co-presenters, and leading a close out session on Drupal 6 and beyond. Frankly, I'm more than a little worried about Drupal 6, while at the same time so looking forward to Drupal 7, testing frameworks, and more RDF. It will be interesting to see how the discussion goes.

There are lots of talks to look forward to (I know lots of people have been asking about an intro to SVN). I've got my eye on the infamous heyrocker -- he's coming up to talk about the gnarly issue of staging Drupal between servers. It would be great if we could pool our solutions and get to more *code* in this area. I think drush is likely the proper building block.

Again, thanks so much to the organizing team that pulled this together: we're lucky to have such a great group of motivated people.

If you are missing DrupalCamp here in Vancouver, the next two I know of are DrupalCamp Toronto May 23rd - 24th and DrupalCamp Seattle June 26th - 27th.

First up, I'm going to do the call out of upcoming Vancouver events:

• Wednesday, April 30th (tonight!) is WordPress Camp, put on by the folks at Tazzu - I've got Dad night every other Wednesday so I won't be making it this time. Maybe someone should set up a Vancouver WordPress Users Group and do this regularly? VanWUG!
• May 9th and 10th is DrupalCamp Vancouver - I'll be talking about install profiles and likely a "getting started with Drupal" talk where I go through all the core modules; more on this in a full post
• early June date TBD DemoCampVancouver07 - back to the "regular" format of 30 second pitches and voting on stage for full talks; maybe we'll do this right after the F&F event

Check Miss 604 for another recent event round up.

In general, I'll mostly be doing full descriptions of events that I'm hosting / help organize around startups will be over at the Bootup Labs blog. Coming soon there is a Vancouver Founders and Funders in June after the Toronto event.

OK, on to the topic of "one calendar". Or rather, a consolidated calendar. There really are a lot of events going on in Vancouver, and it's hard to schedule new ones, it's hard to get a central overview of them, and it's hard / annoying to cross post Upcoming / Facebook / wikis / etc. Several people coming to DemoCampVancouver have said something along the lines of "I'm new in town, how do I find out about more events". Answers like "read these 10 peoples' blogs isn't really a solution.

I had lunch with Rob Lewis from TechVibes the other week. TechVibes continues to work on re-vamping their site (they'll be going through a major re-tooling over the summer) and we came around to the subject of events.

TechVibes has an events calendar, but it's painful. Yeah, they know it :P We talked about adding value there, specifically getting the community involved and providing something of value that the wider community could get involved with and rally around (e.g. not a TechVibes direct "property" per se).

I came up with two concepts.

One is for TechVibes to enable cross posting from TechVibes to Upcoming and other sites (Facebook? can anything post an event to Facebook using the API?). Post in one spot, get cross posting goodness "for free", which sounds like a good reason to post to TechVibes for those of us organizing and promoting events.

In general, I'm a fan of Upcoming. As Brendon said, it's great to use in San Francisco, since it's got full coverage of everything from tech events to arts. Here in Vancouver, coverage is a little spotty. I try and enter everything there because it is on the public web with a permalink (as opposed to Facebook...).

The second concept is around TechCouver. Buzz Bishop is leading the media charge to make this another Vancouver nickname - and that's great. So let's make TechCouver a local aggregator of tech-related blog posts and events.

The map is great as well, and we could use both. Basically, have tech companies and bloggers enter a listing for themselves including an RSS feed. We aggregate all the feeds, and run our own TechMeme for Vancouver. Well, minus the secret algorithm -- I'd like to do voting so we can see "best of" posts as well as the "river of news" of recent stuff.

So, one central spot for tech related postings and events, one central spot we can direct people to, to find out what's happening in TechCouver.

What do you think? Is this interesting? Useful to you? Would you visit it? Would you subscribe to it and/or use the OPML file it would generate? Let's use this TechCouver wiki page to discuss features and such, or comment here.

Looks like I'll be on CTV Newsnet at 12:15pm today, talking about Rogers bringing the iPhone to Canada.

Of course, the funny thing here is that there are many many people in Canada who already have the iPhone, in its "unlocked" edition. John Biehler's iPhone category is my source for all the latest in unlocking and cool applications.

The rumour seems to think that part of the delay and secrecy is because of the possibility that we might get the "new" version of the iPhone, with 3G (which is a faster data network connection). The other rumours about the new model (or models? maybe a "business" version to compete with RIM's BlackBerry?) are things like a much upgraded camera, or even a front mounted camera for video calling.

I'm genuinely happy that we're getting the iPhone "for real" in Canada, but I'm worried about a) the price of the contract and b) the length of any contract from Rogers. We're in a monopoly situation here, since there aren't any other GSM providers in Canada. Expect Telus and Bell to start heavily pushing the HTC Touch and various consumer BlackBerry devices like the Pearl.

Update: here's a direct link to my video clip.

Via INSNA and Mark Surman (who is doing seriously cool things with the Shuttleworth Foundation around Open Everything), I was copied on a request to look at prior art around a Microsoft patent application:

Microsoft has a patent application posted on the Peer-to-Patent site for Recommending contacts in a social network.

We are soliciting your help and that of the communities you know in finding prior art that will help the Patent Office to examine this application and determine if it deserves a twenty-year grant of rights to prevent all others from making, using, or selling this invention (this includes any research and R&D that would touch upon the claims of the invention, if patented). Can you let people know about this opportunity? We invite them to submit:

1. prior art
2. to annotate the prior art submitted by others
3. to vote on the relevance of the public submissions, and
4. to suggest fruitful avenues for research for the USPTO when examining this application.

Peer-to-Patent is not just another blog, wiki or website. It is an "extension" of the government institution! Posted information will be forwarded directly to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and be used in the examination process.

Here's a bit more detail about the application and about Peer-to-Patent:

Recommending contacts in a social network

A method and system for recommending potential contacts to a target user is provided. A recommendation system identifies users who are related to the target user through no more than a maximum degree of separation. The recommendation system identifies the users by starting with the contacts of the target user and identifying users who are contacts of the target user's contacts, contacts of those contacts, and so on. The recommendation system then ranks the identified users, who are potential contacts for the target user, based on a likelihood that the target user will want to have a direct relationship with the identified users. The recommendation system then presents to the target user a ranking of the users who have not been filtered out.

After the jump, the email I received from LoadMyTracks -- saying that the Globalsat DG-100 is now supported on Mac OS X with their application. Here are my previous posts about the DG-100.

Yeah, I know, I've been *really* bad about using it. I got busy right when I received it. Now it's time to re-invest some time into using it consistently. I want my Flickr map to have more photos on it (I recently uploaded my 9000th photo).

First, what the heck is CHDK??! Basically, it's a "firmware enhancement" for a whole list of Canon PowerShot cameras (supported camera model list here). You follow a process where you copy some files onto your memory card, and instead of your camera booting the "regular" operating system, it boots from the memory card instead.

OK, so what does all THAT mean? Basically, today's digital cameras have operating systems -- software -- that runs many of their features. In fact, software is some times one of the main difference between "lower end" cameras and the higher end Digital SLRs. By loading this software onto your camera, you get access to a whole host of other features. The CHDK in Brief page has a list of those additional features -- the three of most interest to be so far are 1) enabling RAW mode, 2) exposure times as long as 65 seconds and 3) exposure times as little as 1/10,000 of a second. There are all sorts of other scripts that can actual be loaded and run on the camera as well. I'm interested in checking out the intervalometer aka timelapse scripts.

So, I spent perhaps 3 hours on Friday, cursing and swearing after the first 30 minutes, swapping my SD card between my computer and my camera, trying to get this stuff working. Looks like most people that are messing with this are on Windows or Linux, and getting this working on the Mac presents some special challenges.

Here are the steps (and yak shaving) that I had to do to get CHDK running on my Canon S5 IS. This assumes that you won't run screaming from using the Terminal, and are at least going to be OK cut and pasting commands in.

Just as spring is hitting the east coast, Mother Nature decides to play a trick on us here in Vancouver. I heard that this has been the coldest spring since sometime in the 1950s. This morning the snow is on hedges and building roofs, but has essentially all melted from the ground. But still...

To put this in perspective for how wacky the weather has been, last weekend was spent wearing short sleeved shirts, getting a sunburn on my nose, and finding a place to stop for popsicles. Check out my Pitt Lake set on Flickr to see more.

And now some quotes to think about:

James Russell Lowell - "Fate loves the fearless."

Free Will Astrology (Pisces, April 17th, 2008) - "If you don't articulate your conscious desires, your unconscious patterns will come true."

I hope your spring is going well, wherever in the world you are.

I just got contacted by ComputerWorld Canada, asking for my reaction to the new MySQL release:

I came across your blog and was wondering if you wanted to share thoughts on Sun Microsystems’ announcement that it will release the next version of MySQL (v. 5.1) in Q2 of this year? Do you see the new version as helping further drive adoption of the open source database, and help promote open source technology in general?

Well, this is good timing. TrevorO and I went down to the Sun Labs Open House (here's Trevor's take on a few things we saw at Sun). We were down looking at a lot of the "cloud" and related technologies that are coming up hot these days.

But back to the MySQL release. I think Sun's acquisition and backing of MySQL is great. I like the fact that all across their product line, Sun is committing to open source. They have everything from services to hardware to back it up, which just makes it easier for large enterprises to adopt open source. Maybe I'm biased, because Sun has been supporting the Drupal community for some time now, and have shown a great willingness to learn from open source communities and get better. Open source databases in general (and perhaps MySQL in particular) still do struggle with marketing perception against Oracle and MS SQL, so anything that can help raise the profile is a good thing.

But all is not great with MySQL 5.1. I don't follow the development that closely, but found an interesting post pointing out that when 5.1 is released, it's only 6 months until 5.0 gets end of lifed (EOL).

Let me close by pointing out the three things that I have been consistently saying to any Sun people that I come across:

1. Improve your social media marketing strategy: my feedback to the Sun Startup Essentials system has been that they should a) start a blog and b) publish weekly architectures of cool Sun software and hardware combinations. Yes, there is http://blogs.sun.com, and lots of high profile individuals from Sun like Tim Bray that are doing a great job, but it seems like next to none of this has trickled into the actual marketing departments. Give me an RSS subscribe widget and kill the email harvesting, people!
2. Fix MySQL clustering: it's hard, it's cranky, it needs improvement so that regular people can snap this together.
3. Open an engineering office in Vancouver: does this need a comment? Sure, it may be entirely self serving, but Microsoft is in town now, and I think you'll find a great base here on the left coast to find great people. Our concentration of open source experience in town will help, as well.

Sun is by no means perfect (they are a big co with all that implies), but I'm still really interested in some of the technology they have coming out of the labs, as well as their move to increased openness.

Last night I ended up staying at the Strutta offices until the wee hours of the morning, cheering the team on as they worked towards their launch today.

I worked with Jordan Behan to do a fun spoof of Michael Arrington (and yes, Strutta got a TechCrunch posting) -- I did the Fox news guy voice over. The posting from Jordan is, of course, meant to kick off a competition for the best Michael Arrington impression. Personally, I think someone should get out the sock puppets... :P

We actually ended up dragging Kevin Marks back to the Strutta HQ, in town for Open Web Vancouver. It was great catching up with him in his new role as Developer Advocate at Google -- oh, and a kick ass paper airplane folder, so I expect him and his sons to compete in the Strutta best paper airplane round. Kevin, you wanted me to complain about Google's messed up identity system -- I did this last January and some pieces are better, but the big thing is that I can't use any of my Google Apps for Domains accounts to sign into Google Groups. Since I don't want to use my personal Gmail account to be on random mailing list, this seriously hampers me pretty much every single day. Please fix :P

Congrats to the Strutta team, I know you've got some Beta Bug-lets, but looks like people are having a lot of fun. We've been amusing ourselves flipping the little Flash widgets back and forth -- there are lots of nice touches like this all over the site.

P.S. Yes, it's Drupal. And, oh, look it's multi-lingual: I predict many more interesting multi-lingual sites as people focus beyond North America.

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