Boris Mann added an entry about Barcelona:

Boris Mann visited this place (worth it!)

Boris Mann visited this place (worth it!)

Boris Mann added an entry about Seb's Market Cafe:

People had been telling us about Seb’s for some time. Kate has been for lunch / dinner, but this was our first time for brunch.

The place was packed (a good sign) and we waited about 10 minutes, but there are a lot of things to look at in the meantime—a corner with food stuffs and kitchen supplies, and drooling over the pie case.

Service was good, and the food came relatively quickly. The menu is big, with lots of base options that you can add to or have combinations with—e.g. omelettes, eggs, special eggs benny with your choice of three sauces. I had the eggs any style with a 6oz steak….for under $10.

I asked for the steak medium rare, and it came perfectly prepared: a nice little round chunk of steak, good and tender.

The coffee is about the only thing that could be said to be expensive, at $2.50 for drip…but the coffee is also fantastic, and still an inexpensive meal considering the cheap and filling main dishes.

Homemade jam, toasted sourdough rye, and a selection of hot sauces complete the experience. Highly recommended for breakfast, I definitely want to go back and try out a lunch or dinner.

Boris Mann visited this place (worth it!)

Last night we gathered at the Bryght office for our monthly Vancouver League of Drupaleers user group meeting. Theoretically I help run the group, but Dale McGladdery does most of the heavy lifting.



This month Dale got the guys from the Donat Group to come over and talk about the set of Facebook API modules that they are building to make it easier to build Facebook apps with Drupal.



All I can say is....wow. James and Ross took us through how they built their Opus Player Facebook app, and we had lots of discussion / beta feedback. They've built something very interesting, and I can't wait to see it hit Facebook.



After mainly looking at the app itself (related but not yet integrated into Project Opus, although those are the future plans -- to mirror the functionality in Facebook on the public Project Opus site as well), we dove right into some code. Not yet available in Drupal CVS (soon!), there is some code posted here.



So what does this mean? Well, the Donat Group team built a great Facebook app, and just happened to implement it using Drupal. Along the way (and, um, at least one rewrite / refactor :P) they built a great set of base tools for interacting with Facebook APIs and generating FBML content. The Drupal framework gets another win for being a great flexible base to build all sorts of functionality on top of.

Last night Mark Mayo hosted the first Joyent meetup in Vancouver.

I've been following the Joyent adventures for quite some time. They're a small company, but they're aiming high. A while back, they merged with TextDrive, and became a vertically integrated hosting + applications/product company (and even open-sourced their Rails-based Connector suite -- see you at OSCMS next year!). In many ways, this is what Bryght's partnership with WorkHabit has been about: if we hadn't found such great partners, we would have had to build their expertise as part of our own company. Application hosting is still something that isn't that well understood, and the commodity-shared-hosting-optimized-for-Dreamweaver is in for a rude awakening one of these days.

Yes, it's true, James is moving on from the Bryght team. What's the scoop? As James says, not much to gossip about. It was always tough to be the guy out in the 'burbs half a continent away. True, there's our favorite African, Adrian, but we're working on getting him moved to Vancouver as well.



I have very much enjoyed having James as a partner: thanks. Best of luck in your future adventures. And yes, I imagine Drupal will have a thing or two to do with that.

Wow. 20 projects accepted for Drupal for the 2007 version of Google Summer of Code. Thanks to all the mentors and especially top GSoC wranglers Robert Douglass and Angie Byron for herding us through this application process.



Not only did this pay off in 20 projects, but the folks that help host drupal.org at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab *also* got two projects accepted which are actually working with Drupal: integrating the Google API into Drupal.



There are some really great projects planned out. Here are some of my favourites:

• RSS / Atom integration: I spent an hour or two with some of the guys from Achieve Internet last week on scoping some patches for the core aggregator code...there is lots of work to be done here, and I think we can get far, fast, by doing a bit of coordination
• Jabber / XMPP: yay! my two favourite communities continue to collide
• Scalability, Load Balancing, and High Availability: Vancouver local hadsie got in, which is great; Scott, want to work out of the Bryght offices for the summer?
• SMS Framework: it's clear that mobile users are continuing to become first class citizens of the web, but that SMS is a great tool for easily integrating into virtually any mobile environment; can I hear the phrase "Twitter clone"?

It's been a while since I helped organize a reverse bounty. On the auction block is some great functionality that is likely going to make it's way into Drupal 6, but is super useful for:

• high traffic sites
• ISPs / mass hosting
• enterprise deployments
• people that like having their website instant message them

Today, the watchdog table logs regular system events (e.g. users logging in, creating new accounts, or posting content) as well as error conditions and other explanatory notes. On a high traffic site, the watchdog table must be pruned on a regular basis so that the database table doesn't grow wildly out of control. There is also no way to archive this information.



Enter Khalid's (2bits.com) patch for Drupal 6: instead of only logging to the database, the patch will enable the destination of logging to be configurable. Raw text file, syslog, and email logging are all modules that have been implemented as proof of concept using this new system.



But seeing this, many of us immediately wanted this functionality for Drupal 5. Much like Bryght's system included free tagging of categories and configurable RSS feed support in our hosted 4.6 version, functions in future versions of Drupal can be backported. That's what this reverse bounty is for – we've spoken with Khalid, and he's willing to make this functionality available via a patch to Drupal 5, including the porting of the support modules such as syslog and email notification. How can you help? Well, we're gathering funds using ChipIn -- click on the Flash widget below to contribute. If you really want to help promote, grab the ChipIn widget and post it on your own blog or website.

I just got back from Galiano Island, one of the Southern Gulf Islands between Vancouver and Victoria/Vancouver Island. Theoretically it was a Drupal geek thing hosted by Christian Nally, and we did spend a fair amount of time thinking about install profiles for Drupal 6 core.

But really, it was a chance to get out of the city, and it ended up being a great place to connect with a lot of people. Did you know, for instance, that Avi Bryant has bought a place there? I've been doing my own thinking about how to get over Vancouver housing crisis/prices pain without doing a suburb, and Galiano is not a bad compromise.

I was lucky enough to get a ride from Bill of WorkSpace, and it turns out Josli is actually from Galiano. I'm an islander myself, having grown up on Bowen Island.

Actually, the Bill / WorkSpace connection is interesting, since Nally would really like to have a "WorkSpace Galiano". So, how do you grow/spread/franchise the concept/name and have it continue to succeed? Do alternate systems a la OpenCoffee plug into this? I have more on this rolling around, and I hope that something real/with money behind it comes of it. More soon.

P.S. Dear blogosphere: what's happening in Facebook is very important. More of the bits over there need to be dragged out here...and a lot of it is about this identity layer that's just not quite built yet out here.

P.P.S. Another great find over the weekend was Unfuddle. Raincity Studios have been using it for a while and have found it good (we use Trac, which is a lot like it only...harder for humans). I'm still kicking tires, AND I wish the codebase was open (just do the hosted service thing, guys....) but it seems very good. I still need to write up and/or do a training course on "Best Practices for Drupal Development using Subversion", and Unfuddle would be a good part of it. 

OK, WWDC is on its way and we need to guess what might be announced. Here are some data points:

• a Macbook rev has been announced
• a Macbook Pro rev has been announced
• the iPhone is out and is supercoolawesome already 
• we don't know everything about Leopard
• usually something "cool" gets announced at WWDC

So, by that logic, we might see something not so exciting like "brushed steel iMacs" (rumor passing on credit to Dave Shea).

But, I'm going to take a stab at predicting what we might see: I think we're in for a 12" Macbook Pro (or a different name?). But with a difference. No keyboard. The entire surface will be a touchpad / tablet / screen thingie, kind of like the iPhone. You can use a virtual keyboard, or you can do crazy touch sensitive actions.

There are reports of patents going back a while (and yes, that might just be iPhone related), and then there is that crazy virtual keyboard company that I can't find a link to now, that Apple bought some time ago. 

There. That's it. That's my guess. I hope I'm right :P

Update: I found a link to a "leaked" outline for the WWDC keynote tomorrow -- talking about a 10" iPhone at Home...which is pretty close to the "tablet / non computer" that I've been thinking Apple would launch for quite some time.

My dad, Horst Mann, turned 70 yesterday. He has an old Canon digital camera, my hand me down 15" Powerbook G4, and talks to his daughter and grand daughter in Italy using Skype and video.

He is an "Old Skool" Flickr member. I kicked him off my home server hosting using Gallery, and he's been a Flickr community member since about March 2004. Yep, that's '04, March. On Flickr, he's known as Opa, which means "grandpa" in German.

As of yesterday, he and my mom both have Facebook accounts. They both use NetNewsWire to keep up to date via RSS with a variety of sites, including this one. Subscribing to new sources is hard, but then clicking through every link in a blog entry and reading every resulting page takes some time, so I'm not sure they have room for more. They blog occasionally, but uploading pictures to Flickr seems the easiest way to tell a story.

Dad has a cellphone, some sort of Motorola from Telus. His phone number is actually set to 100 Mile House, since my parents have a cabin up there, and it lets him do a few things like (painfully) text people and make phone calls using a cell phone antenna on the roof. He's seen me using a variety of Nokia phones to easily take pictures and upload them directly to Flickr on the go using ShoZu. But, we know all about Canadian mobile data rates and how that's impossible for "regular people" to afford. 

In the office today, we talked more Facebook. It's an important component of the industry we play in.

Here's a little analogy that we think is right:

Facebook is to the Internet as the Mall of America is to the rest of the world: there are a lot of people, activity and commerce on the inside, and you definitely want a stall/shop/exhibit there, but your warehouse, your home base, is always going to be on the outside.

Sure is fun thinking about how all these things intertwingle.... 

Why yes, I am continuing the tradition of not-real-blogging-its-just-about-event-posting :P

 

 

 

So, the first DemoCampVancouver01, held at WorkSpace, is over. And no blog post ahead of time from me!

But that, in part, is what this post is about.

See, I procrastinated making a post. I used a bunch of channels to get the word out about this event. I added some subtle links in earlier posts to this blog, I made an entry on Upcoming.org, we made a mailing list, and then....and then I decided to experiment with Facebook.

I created a DemoCampVancouver group, and I made an event posting, and I invited all my friends. And Facebook has this built in ability to pass on these type of postings/notifications, and it spread even further. As of today, there are almost 100 members in the Facebook group.

So, Facebook works. It helped that WorkSpace promoted the event "live" to all its members, who are naturally an entrepreneurial group of people. But...well, even with the talk of Facebook as platform, it's inherently closed nature, it's non-participation in the open web...bugs me.

Isn't this why I'm working on identity? So we can build Facebook in a distributed matter, everywhere?

...but I digress. The evening was great, we had about 50 people out, way more interest in presenting that there was time for, and a really engaged/interesting/awesome group of people. Look to the various channels of the Internet universe for more info, check out the DemoCampVancouver tag, and we'll update the wiki with more information. Thanks to all for coming out, tell all your many tribes about this, and let's get prepped for some Powerpoint Karaoke for next time...