blake's blog

Couldn't have been said any better. I'm honestly sorry for anyone that can watch this and be proud of voting yes on Prop 8.

Naomi Klein will be in Madison giving a talk tonight (7:30 3650 Humanities Bldg if you're interested). I've been a fan of her work since I first read No Logo. On a trip to London in August I picked up a copy of her latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Maybe it's just because I'm excited for the talk, but I couldn't help noticing a quote from Rahm Emanuel in today's New York Times article Obama, Assembling Team, Turns to the Economy:

“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview.

Looks like both parties are at least subconsciously agree with Klein's thesis.

[I'll attempt to update this entry with photos, and a summary of the event for those of you who can't make it.]

Since I can't post the victory speech Obama hasn't given yet, this will have to do:

Now let's just hope the Dems can get to 60 too

I've been meaning to write up a review of the Acer Aspire One since I purchased one in August. All in all, it's a good thing I waited...

Since upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 several of my would-be complaints have vanished. Gone is the wifi (wpa) instability, boot times appear a bit quicker as well. The guide on the Ubuntu Community Wiki proved invaluable during the initial setup process. (As Pete said at BCMKE3 "who wants to use an OS called Linpus... just say it out loud once").

[Photo: Tapps on flickr]

So far there are two things I've found disappointing. First, the battery life under Ubuntu sucks. If I'm lucky, it will hang in there for a shade under two hours before I need to find an outlet. I've seen the new 6-cell battery, but $119 battery for a $350 computer just doesn't make any sense. (If anyone has any ideas for maximizing battery performance I'm all ears) Also the system drags to a crawl when I have too many programs / tabs open. Swapping is obviously never a good thing, especially with only a half gig of ram. I'm obviously spoiled spending most of my time working on an iMac with 4GB of ram (compared to the measly 512MB in the spire). To remedy the situation I've got another 1GB on the way from Crucial.com.

Since Firefox has proven to be a memory hog, I've used it as an excuse to brush up on some command line tools. I've been spending a lot of time in vim, irssi, and mutt. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues when the system has more memory at it's disposal. I'm still not convinced the netbook will stand up to a week long trip to DrupalCon; I might have to swipe the MacBookPro from Jeni in March. For most of my daily needs though, as long as I have shell access to a development server and/or wifi this Acer seems to do alright. All things considered, I'm happy with the purchase, and glad to have an ultraportable laptop at my disposal.

Wow

On Friday I'm making the trek up 94 to the Twin Cities with some of my pals from Web414 for the F1 Overn1ght Webs1te Challenge to defend cheesehead honor. We've been challenged to a bowling duel by Kyle Drake the night before the challenge. The event actually gets underway on Saturday March 1st, at 8:30 a.m. Here's a link to the flickr stream, the media page , and a youtube video all for your enjoyment.

Hopefully we'll be able to hold similar events in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago in the future. I know lots of nonprofits with small budgets that could use some help. I'm actually leaving the event a little early to catch my flight to DrupalCon 2008 -- Boston. I'll try and post some photos, and a writeup if I don't pass out on the plane.

While drupal-related work occupies a large chunk of my time, I don't always feel like I'm a "contributor" to the project.

I try to balance my drupalkarma with things like DrupalCampWI, and the Madison Drupal Users Group.

Reading the various Drupal 6 release announcements, I came across one from webchick that credits all the contributions to the latest version of drupal. Curious, I checked out greggles contributor calculation, and the results.

With 3 patches I'm # 79 :P

Hopefully I'll see some fellow Wisconsinites on the list for Drupal 7, and maybe I can break the top 50.

After almost a years worth of work, by thousands of developers around the globe Drupal 6 has been released.

This version of Drupal has many UI improvements (especially for site administrators) that are pretty exciting. The block and menu pages now utilize drag and drop for reordering (no more weight system -- at least from the UI). The "sticky" table headers are are a big help on site permission pages.

Now it's time to help module and theme developers upgrade their contributions to Drupal 6, and help with testing (at least that's where I"ll be spending a good chunk of time before DrupalCon Boston).

If you're near Madison, drop by the Drupal Meetup tonight. The event announcment is cross posted at groups.drupal.org/wisconsin and thePHP Meetup group.

I gave my first Drupal talk at the first BarCampMilwaukee, then again at BarCampMadison. By the time BarCampMilwaukee2 rolled around we had 17 participants who tagged themselves with drupal, and two more sessions. In Milwaukee we decided that we might just have the critical mass to have a *Camp dedicated to drupal, and DrupalCampWisconsin was born.

Now we're ten days away, and have 41 folks signed up on the wiki, sponsors to cover the food costs (thanks again Web414, Fresh Coast Ventures, 2XL Networks, Palantir, Cruiskeen Consulting LLC, and EC Connection), and some great sessions lined up. As far as I'm concerned the 19th can't get here fast enough.

So what's next?

I gave a talk at the Madison PHP Meetup Group in November on drupal which drew a good sized crowd. After the talk several folks expressed interest in having a regular Madison-based Drupal User Group (or meetup). I figured it wouldn't be too hard to organize a drupal-related talk once a month, so we're going to give it a shot. The first official gathering of this new group will be another joint-meeting with the PHP group (January meeting info on meetup.com). Hopefully by February, after a successful DrupalCamp we'll be able to spin off and start separate meetings. If you're interested in the group shoot me an email (blake # blakehall * org), or leave a comment.

And don't forget to Sign up for DrupalCampWisconsin if you haven't already!!!

The drop is (finally!) coming to Wisconsin. We've got space secured for a DrupalCamp in Milwaukee on January 19th, 2008. While I've been batting the idea around for quite awhile, I've also done a fair amount of foot-dragging. There were a lot of questions to be answered:

• Can we find space?
• Can we find sponsors?
• Can we find enough people willing to lead sessions?
• Will people show up?

There's definitely some work to be done on some of these fronts, but so far things look pretty encouraging. We've got great space (and wifi) at Milwaukee School of Engineering.

If you're a Drupal ninja, or just wanting to learn more about using Drupal to maintain your web site, I'm sure DrupalCamp will be a good time. You can sign-up here, and since it's free you don't have much reason not to!