walkah striving towards mediocrity

Just wanted to drop a quick note to say that I'll be in Vancouver next week to help run four days of drupal training. We (Bryght) are helping put on the event with our partners Raincity Studios. More info is available in the official announcement.

I'm told there is still space available, so if you're in Vancouver (or willing to travel) and interested in learning more about designing with or developing for drupal, sign up! I'll see you there

Last week, after getting smacked by a nasty bill from my good friends at rogers, I chatted with Boris briefly and decided to sign up for a vonage line. Well, late this afternoon my equipment arrived! In just works(tm) fashion, I plugged in the little D-Link device and I was making calls. $40/month unlimited calling in north america, here I come!

Now I have to figure out a handset. I want a bluetooth enabled handset that syncs with my addressbook and will pause iTunes while I'm on the phone... is that too much to ask?

I read this morning over on bopuc's blog that Flickr is patenting "interestingness". I realize this was probably yahoo's lawyers' idea... but I have to say it sucks. -1 Yahoo.

Why does it suck? Well, in general I don't believe in patents - I don't think they serve the intended purpose of "protecting" the idea and have several negative side effects. However, this particular patent hits a bit closer to home for me. I have been closely involved in the Terminus 1525 project since its inception. In it's latest revision, Terminus 1525 introduced "terminosity" as a method for better finding good artwork on the site that we felt was otherwise getting lost in the noise. It was one of the main features of the new explore tool.

Now, it's perhaps premature... it's not like Yahoo! has served terminus1525 with cease and desist orders or anything and, realistically, they're not likely to. But in a web2.0 world where we need to get better at filtering through all the "stuff" (call it media) that we've gotten good at getting out there, I don't see a whole lot of good coming from this one.

A week ago today I was just wrapping up at seneca's free software and open source symposium. My talk, "Why Drupal can kick your CMS' ass", was a lot of fun and well received. Overall, I thought the event was really well done, and I look forward to taking part again next year!

For those who missed it and/or are interested: the slides from my talk are available here and video is available here. Enjoy!

I don't usually blog much... and certainly not about things like releases of new PHP versions. However, I think it's worth noting that php 5.2 has been released. From the sounds of things, and certainly from my minimal experiments with it, it seems that php 5 may have finally arrived.

Anyone out there running php5 in heavy (large scale) production? Is it time to move beyond the safe "known entity" comforts of php4?

Happy Halloween everyone : Drupal 5 beta1 has been released!

Amongst the several changes in Drupal 5, there is officially a new default core theme. After years and years of looking at bluemarine day after day, my eyes have been granted quite a treat. What's better: the new theme, "garland" comes with "color" module which allows you to easily customize the color scheme used.

To celebrate, I've switched this site to use garland - with the old walkah.net color scheme. Like it?

In their issue released today, now magazine honoured two projects in the city that i've enjoyed being (albeit a small) part of in their best of toronto: tech section.

BarcampToronto (and the related events such as DemoCamp won for "best do-it-yourself conference".

Wireless toronto won "Best WiFi spot" for their location at Yonge and Dundas square.

Congrats to all the people involved in both groups, thanks for making toronto just a little bit cooler

i just refreshed again and it looks like its official : firefox 2 has been released

truth be known, I've been using firefox 2 for a while (off and on through betas and exclusively since RC1) but i thought i'd wait to post about it so that i didn't overload the mozilla.org servers with my referral traffic.

version 2 is a pretty solid (although arguably subtle) upgrade. performance feels much snappier and the UI update is nice... but my favourite improvements are:

• tab updates: close buttons on each tab, and the new tab scrolling feature is very handy for those of us with typically 30+ tabs open.
• built in "session saver": firefox restarts to your last set of tabs - great for those rare crashes.
• inline spellchecking : makes me look smrt
• configurable feed subscription handling: since i prefer using external feed readers

looking at that list, i realize what firefox 2 really means is I don't need nearly as many extensions as I used to to get my firefox the way i like it. go get it (or check the full list of changes).

i love live music. i've made sort of a commitment to myself to see a lot more of it. but, here's the thing: i want the internet to tell me when and where the concerts i want to see are.

i think i'm not alone... there are a bunch of "getting close" options. first, is this mashup of two of my favourite sites/services, upcoming and last.fm. this is a good start (apart from the "rough" interface), last.fm knows a whole lot about my listening habits. however, the results are less than satisfactory since upcoming only contains the concerts that people have posted - and, while it's great for tech conferences, upcoming just hasn't attracted bands, labels, etc.

next, i stumbled upon ontour. this is nice - there is actually a dashboard widget that scans your itunes library and matches against upcoming concerts in its impressive (albeit apparently closed / proprietary) list of concert information. my beef here? my music collection isn't actually in my local itunes library. my music collection doesn't fit on my powerbook. truth is, last.fm knows best what i'm listening to these days.

the most complete concert listings still seem to be in local weekly magazines. problem is - at least here in toronto, the two main weeklies: now and eye don't actually export or syndicate their concert listings in a usable format (for a last.fm mashup). hell, i can't even get a feed of new concert announcements. consider that a call out.

apparently, last.fm has had some of the same ideas - their latest beta includes events! the cool thing here is last.fm is pretty good with recommendations - they might actually be able to tell me something *new* to see. time will tell how complete the listings will end up being. i am hopeful, though, since last.fm does actively recruit music labels.

am i missing something? where else are people watching online for local concert listings?

At the end of this month, I will be taking part in the free software & open source symposium at York university. I'll be leading a workshop on Thursday, Oct 26th and am giving a presentation on Friday, Oct. 27th.

I'm there primarily to discuss drupal (of course), but am looking forward to hanging out with other free software developers and enthusiasts. The confirmed speaker list is fairly impressive, several folks there I've followed with interest for a while. Hope to see you there!