walkah: striving towards mediocrity

The third annual Drupal Camp Toronto event is coming soon. On Friday May 23rd and Saturday May 24th join the Toronto Drupal Users Group in celebrating two days of Drupal at the University of Toronto!

We're putting together an exciting event this year. We have John Resig coming to talk about jQuery and ActiveState will be giving away prize packages. Plus we'll have two full days of information - tips, tricks, case studies and howtos. Make sure to register soon! We already have over 100 people signed up!

Also, we are actively seeking both speakers and sponsors. Propose a session or contact us if you're interested in sponsoring or have other questions.

Hope to see you there!

I was just in the midst of a Sunday morning podcast & RSS catchup stint, when I caught Episode #131 of commandN where Jeff was outlining some Front Row tips and tricks. It reminded me that I came across a great one recently that I thought I'd share.

As Jeff mentioned, Perian is a great (indispensible) tool to allow QuickTime to play non-QT file formats (particularly AVI/DivX). And, while it's true that Front Row will then play any AVI files in your Movies folder, I've long wanted to go one step further - specifically for TV Shows. See, iTunes will keep TV Shows separately and mark ones that are "unwatched", etc.

Enter Movie2iTunes. This droplet allows you to simply drop Movie & TV Shows on it and it will add them to iTunes. In fact, if your TV Show files use the given file naming convention, the TV Show metadata (show name, season, episode) will be completed correctly as well. The script works by creating a QuickTime media link to the original video - which has the nice benefit of having all your movies and TV shows in iTunes (hence front row) but they can still reside on, say, an external HD. I love it!

Summer is coming - which means it's time for Google's Summer of Code. This is the fourth year of the project (and the fourth year that Drupal has been involved). We continue to be one of Google's favourite open source projects this year grabbing 21 spots - which means a $105,000 investment in Drupal development this summer!

I'm excited as this will be my third year as a mentor and my project this year will be OpenID Attribute Exchange support for Drupal. Attribute Exchange is one of the next important pieces in digital identity and one that I'm pretty excited about. My student, Anshu Prateek, has shown a lot of enthusiasm. I think it's gonna be a good summer!

Last week I added a new continent under my travel belt when a bunch of us Lullabots headed to Australia to run some Drupal Workshops. I will say, the trip across the Pacific is a much longer journey than the relative short hop across the Atlantic. My body still isn't quite sure what time it is. Jet-lag aside, I had an absolutely wonderful time. The people of Melbourne were wonderfully kind and helpful. On our one non-work day, we had a fantastic brunch (on a recommendation) where the locals at the table next to us kindly recommended activities for the afternoon and even took our picture.

Since it was a work trip, I didn't get to see nearly as much of Australia as I would have liked. No kangaroos. No dingos. No koala bears. But the people of Australia were awesome enough that I am just going to have to go back someday. Thank you all!

I know it's late notice, but I'll be hosting a free workshop tomorrow night, April 2nd at 7pm as part of the PHUG + RMI free workshops.

For those of you here in Toronto that are unaware, PHUG is the new local PHP User Group. They have a lot of momentum and are an exciting group - I look forward to more collaboration in the future betweeh PHUG and DUG-TO.

The workshop will be Drupal Basics - a crash course in everyone's favourite CMS. We'll look at the core Drupal concepts, how building sites in Drupal works, and some basic theming tricks.

It's a free event, but space is limited so please register. Looking forward to meeting some new faces!

UPDATE: P.S. this isn't an April Fool's joke ;)

Dries finally took the wraps off his other new Drupal related venture: Mollom.

I've been amongst the beta testers on mollom (I'm uid #8!) for a long time now, here on this blog and with some other projects. I have to say, it's impressive. It's sort of like Akismet but has some interesting goals that are slightly different. The key is in calling it "content monitoring" rather than just "spam blocking" (which it already does effectively). Think: high powered moderation tools - with network intelligence.

Congrats, Dries, on another one! (When do you sleep?!)

Dear Canada, you're doing it all wrong!

OK, so I love my adopted nation. I do. But, what's a guy (or gal) got to do to get affordable, unmolested bandwidth in this country?!?

I've written before about the abysmal mobile data situation in this country. Canada has one GSM network - and we pay the price for it.

But, until recently, my internets were safe at home. See, I'm a very happy subscriber of TekSavvy residential DSL: clean, clear, reliable, affordable bandwidth. Well, that's until Canada's copper monopoly decided to start throttling my bandwidth.

People have been talking and blogging about the events. You can follow the events at Free Our Bandwidth and, if you haven't before, read more about net neutrality. It's time for some real change. CRTC, where are you???

Canada, I'm fed up. Oh, and ketchup chips suck too.

A few of us Lullabots flew directly from DrupalCon Boston to Austin for SXSW Interactive. It was actually my first trip down to Austin (sadly), and despite some general road weariness, I had a rockin' good time. Personal highlights included:

Worst. Website. Ever.: Aside from being a who's who of the internet famous, it was an awesome format, completely hilarious and really well presented. I'm inspired to bring it to a future DrupalCon :-)

A Critical Look At OpenID: It was nice to watch other OpenID experts field the same questions I tend to - and give similar answers. Mostly, I hit this panel because I hadn't yet met David or Simon. We had lunch together after... I should really get myself out to more identity events. IIW 2008?

CMS Roundup: Obviously, I went to support fellow 'bot, Jeff Eaton, but was blown away by the packed audience (for a 10am session) and the overwhelming Drupal love!

Otherwise, it was great to hang out with friends like Colin and Andy, seeing TorCamp friends everywhere, and meeting a whackload of new people. Looking forward to next year already!

With almost a week gone by since I left Boston, it's high time to do a quick recap of DrupalCon Boston 2008. Despite spending most of the week battling a nasty stomach flu, making two trips to the Apple Store in Cambridge, and being without my laptop (which suffered a failed keyboard and trackpad), I had a great time and want to offer my congrats to the organizing team for a solid event!

Although I took part in 6 sessions, I only presented one of them on my own: OpenID and Identity in Drupal. I was pleased with how the session went - packed room with lots of great feedback and discussion. For those interested, check out the slides on slideshare.

Otherwise, it was really great to see all the old faces and meet some new ones. For anyone who missed it, the Acquia party was a blast (Orbit rocks!). Looking forward to the next!

Good Morning, Boston! We're just an hour away from getting this thing rolling - it's gonna be a crazy week. Here's the sessions where you'll be able to find me:

• Drupal Multimedia
• OpenID and Identity in Drupal: the future of user.module
• Drupal Security - Best Practices and Process Discussion
• Zen and the Art of Drupal
• Fast Company Case Study
• The Drupal Association Panel
• Drupal Podcast Live

I'll be doing updates here and from twitter. Don't forget to follow walkah :)