Drupal

Ok, most important things first:

• I've decided to redo this blog into a trilingual site. Starting today, I will try and post every entry in English, French and Spanish. I'll elaborate more on the reasons behind this later on.
• I've dropped all of my professional photography except for my wedding photography; it's the only type of photography I am adept at that can't replace me with an army of prosumer digital-cam waving soccer moms. Yet.
• I chopped off my hair; I spent the better part of this week trying to reach my ponytail, only to realize it's gone. Pics to follow later.

Last week, Cuba announced (article in Spanish) that it was planning on replacing Microsoft Windows with Linux throughout the country. Leaving aside the inevitable "open-source = communism" comparisons that right-wingers and proprietary software cheerleaders will make, this decision - if it is carried through - will have more widespread repercussions than most seem to realize:

• Because the Cuban government is organized in "offices", this decision will be spread throughout the entire infrastructure; all other offices (Public Health, Construction, etc.) will be migrated to the new operating system. This will require a huge mobilization of training throughout every part of the country, and could be the single biggest nation-wide Linux migration ever. Instead of importing Linux professionals, Cuba will train its own computer students in Linux. Because of the nature of Linux/Unix systems, a larger proportion of the Cuban student body will have developed basic and advanced computer skills; the learning curve on Linux is significantly higher than that on Windows.
• Cuba will develop its own Linux distribution, either from scratch or (more likely) as a variant of an existing distro, √
  

A little over 2 years ago, I was doing wireless security and traceability consulting for medium and large corporations. I was waist-deep into commercial wireless networking solutions, RF tech, IPSEC tunnels and lots of other fun techie stuff.

Then one day, a family friend came up to me and said "I heard you do computer stuff. I need some help with a little project I'm working on, can you give me a hand?" "Sure" was my reply, assuming that it was another little mom-and-pop wireless setup.

I was wrong. Dead wrong. Ok ok, just wrong...

Anyways, it turned out that this "little project" was in fact an international government- and institutionally- funded web project to develop a collaborative online community portal for researchers in developing and developed countries. My first reaction was to think "I don't do this kind of stuff." My second reaction was to sit my ass down and start learning.

Now as luck would have it, I conveniently happened to be very good friends with "someone who's kinda involved in this sort of thing... ;)", so I made it a quasi-daily routine to bug'im about all sorts of questions about things like RSS, RDF, usability issues, tagging, folksonomies, and other fun things. Little by little, what seemed in my mind like a very blurry storm cloud of unrelated topics, acronyms and technologies began to give way to a simple "connect the dots" image. "This is the web, these are the tools we have, and this is how they work together." "Brilliant", I thought. I could have learned that in a day, but I never did because I never had anyone explain it to me so clearly and concisely.

Bopuc then also pointed me - almost by accident - towards Drupal... (actually, first to James Seng's Drupal4Bloggers, which powered the first version of this here blog). The rest, as they say, is history. When Drupal 4.5 came out, it had everything I needed in terms of functionality for the aforementioned project, which is still under active development and has also branched out into other exciting potential ventures. I then thought of other areas I work in that could use some Drupalization, and started working on those. The Drupal Community, while smaller than, say, the Mambo or Xoops community - and still suffering from a few sour grapes, but don't they all? - is also a primary reason why I've stuck with it this far.

Another side effect of Drupal has been to force me to learn PHP and MySQL, both of which I knew very little of before I started. I amaze myself daily by actually digging through PHP code and changing stuff without making something else explode, and I am totally at ease destroying working with MySQL databases. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say "Drupal taught me PHP and MySQL."

Of course, it's not perfect. Still suffering from a theme system out of Martha Stewart's worst nightmares, a rather rigid 2/3 column block / content structure, and a versioning system that hates itself, there are alot of things that I'd like to see fixed in Drupal. If I get confident enough, I may even start fixing them myself.

In all, I'd say that maybe 80% of my web work is Drupal-centric. I've also been using WordPress and am very very impressed with how easy it is to use for personal publishing, and I know lots of people who swear by MovableType. It's also completely pointless to compare these tools against each other, because they all serve different (sometimes radically so) purposes. Apples vs. Oranges. Wind vs. Water. Gandalf vs. a Mig-29.

I find that Drupal has carved itself out a nice niche at the crossroads of all these content management systems and blogging tools, and its biggest weakness is also its biggest strength: It's not quite sure what it wants to be. Kind of like a shapeshifter with no control over what it will look like next... hmmmm... [/me writes down pilot episode script for a wacky comedy/sci-fi show starring a lovable shapeshifter who can't control his shapeshifting...]

...

...

[/me throws out script, drinks more beer].

Technorati Tags: blogging, drupal, drupalization

So apparently I haven't quite mastered the interface for ecto 2.3's built-in Technorati tag support, as can be seen in my last post:

Also, I'm, - errrrr, how do you say? - a dumbass.

But yeah, the new ecto is rockalicious... nice slick interface, super-easy to use, tons of new functionality, "just works". Probably the single most valuable app-for-the-money that I use. Now go buy it.

But one question, Adriaan... "puppy"?

Technorati Tags: blogging, puppy, ecto

Drupal.org

After six months of development, the Drupal team is proud to announce the Drupal 4.6.0 release! Thanks to those who contributed to this release, either by contributing code, testing the release candidate, providing support or writing documentation.

The key changes since Drupal 4.5 include:

* PHP5 support.

* Better search usability, improved results and relevancy.

* Personal contact forms for registered users (Cool, replaces private message module).

* Improved multi-site support to run multiple Drupal sites from a single code base (Great, was sorely lacking).

* Extensible RSS 2.0 syndication support for enclosures (e.g. podcasts) and categories.

* Ping Ping-O-Matic, to ping all major ping services.

* Usability improvements for permissions, block configuration, statistics tracking, logs, forum configuration, content administration, etc.

Looks good. I'll prolly wait a bit before upgrading any of my sites, since most of the modules I need don't seem to be listed on the contributed modules page yet. I know it's been talked about to death, but it would be great if there was a tighter workflow between module contributors and Drupal core developers, to lessen confusion among newcomers to Drupal who absolutely need functionality x, see it on the modules page, but then click on it only to find that it's only compatible with 4.5/4.4/4.3/4.2/4.1/a grammophon.

I'm here at Laika on St-Laurent on a quiet day, online via the Ile Sans Fil hotspot. As you can see, it's quite empty today, which is rare...

This post should come up on the Laika portal page according to Mike... hmmm, wonder how Topic Exchange will deal with the above photo.

July 26th, 2016

Howdy everyone! Don't have much time right now as I'm leaving Montreal for the Latin American School of Health in Havana (yes, again!) in a few hours to help upgrade their old 802.16 wireless network in the BioInformatics faculty to something a little faster. It's about time guys!

I managed to hitch a ride on the floating city 'GCS New Mosul' by agreeing to give my presentation 'Safeguarding your cyberprivacy - without slowing down your interface' at the S. Hussein Center for Social Justice, coordinates 7B (just next to the Cuisine Bangkok Thai restaurant). Holomsg me if you happen to be in town on board!

As I sit here in the helicab on the way to the port, I think back and can't believe that just 10 years ago, only the business elite and technorati were able to travel anywhere in the world on a whim. How did they go on about things like how the world was getting smaller or the "Global Village" when you actually had to have money to take advantage of it?

Speaking of which, in Cuba I'll be staying with Mutku Tulu, the 17 year old cryptography prodigy from Ethiopia, who helped me secure my 3-petabyte interface jack when I got it a couple of weeks ago. If you've been following her LifeBlog (who hasn't?), you'll know that she also worked on the Secure Cybernetics Initiative (SCI) at Mcgill University, as well a few other nifty things. Keep up the great work Mutku!

Once my work's done, after a couple weeks biking across Cuba, I'll be off to Cape Town for the "Tolerance Summit", which is an annual meeting among anyone who wants to attend about how to reform the last stubborn pockets of genuine racism still left in the world. It happens to coincide with my vacation time, so I'll be hiking through Southern Africa for the following few months. I won't have my iPhone with me nor will I be jacked into the web, but I will of course be reachable by SMS, Email and Voice (yes, yes, I know...) via my ShareSat implant.

Once I make it back to Cape Town, I'll take the Hovertrain to Tel Aviv (leaving 11pm, Tuesday November 3rd, so I should get there early Wednesday morning) to help work on the joint planetary defense shield at the University of Tel Aviv, with other researchers from the University of Baghdad and the University of Heidelberg. It's totally top-secret stuff, so I can't say more than that... hehehe, I'm kidding, I'm kidding! You can follow all our work on our blog and our wiki - feel free to add your input as well.

Don't forget that the Global Unified Council is holding 3 referendums this week on various issues, the most pressing of which is the recognition of California's independence. I don't need to remind anyone that almost exactly one year ago today, the Republic of California officially declared itself independent from the United States of America. Since then, the American blockade of California has been very harmful - not only to Californians but to the rest of the world as well - and air-to-air skirmishes are occurring ever more frequently. If we (Earth) do decide to recognize California's independence, then it will mean that we will have a responsibility to ensure its security. That, of course, implies that measures will be taken to protect California... I have no idea what the Council will propose, but I sure hope that the USA will back off and that we will explore all other options before invoking the Defense Act and summoning the Global Rapid Reaction Force.

I really wanted to make it to Luna this year (no, I haven't been off-planet yet! stop laughing... ) to catch the 2016 Olympics, but it doesn't look like it's gonna happen... oh well. My real dream, of course, is to teach at the Martian Alpha Colony University-1... we'll see what programs they want to offer when it opens up. The Martian Commune has made huge strides already in sociology, city planning, interplanetary trade and system politics; imagine what they'll be able to do with an actual university.

It's an exciting time for us all. Yes of course, the universe could be better, and we have a responsibility to keep improving it yet. But look at how far we've come; can you remember what the world was like before we were a Direct Democracy, when we were just a bunch of warring, arbitrarily-isolated nations? Of course you can, but you don't want to. Personally, I'm amazed we've made it this far, having put up with capitalism, 'elected representation', brainwashing and marketing, political pressure, and corporate hegemony for so long. How did we even manage before the population existed harmoniously without jealousy, envy or concern for individual advancement? How did we survive before we understood that each works for the improvement of the whole, instead of the desires of the individual?

- posted via my rGlove.

Update: I just read the latest RSS headlines that came through my HUD, and it looks like the Quebec Nordiques are beating the Montreal Canadiens 2 - 1 in this final game of the playoff season. Third period... yes, it's an exciting time indeed.

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Evidently, they think that "Judge denies bid to reinsert [Schiavo's] feeding tube" is a helluva lot more important than "10 die in school shooting". (Click image).

It didn't really make much sense to me, given America's recent experiences with school shootings. At first I thought it was because perhaps the shooting had happened outside of the U.S., but then I read the article; it was Minnesota. Why on earth would they assign this story the same value as "Jennifer Aniston's next film"? Even the the BBC made it the front-page article on its site:

Oh, wait a second... look at the headline on BBC: "US schoolboy shoots dead nine people" - compared to the CNN headline: "Reservation in 'shock': 10 die in school shooting". Now it makes sense, doesn't it? This happened on some Native Indian reservation in Minnesota. Not to real Americans. I bet my life that if this had happened in white suburban fuckin' Bible Belt USA, we'd still be hearing about it this by summertime.

But when it comes to second-class American citizens, they don't deserve much more than second-class press.

"How To Save The Internet" - or rather, how to take control of the Internet and put more money into corporate hands, by CIO magazine... ahem...

Check this out:

Computing on the Net is heading for a fall because security is a joke. So we summoned the best minds to see if we could put Humpty back together again.

Security is a joke because of the lack of competition and inherent narrow-mindedness of the so-called "best-minds" you "summoned". Open-sources and global collaboration have proven to be way more effective at maintaining a level of reason and security on the Internet than closed standards (Microsoft) and go-it-alone attitudes (Sun).

Daniel Wolf, director of the Information Assurance (IA) Directorate at the National Security Agency, believes that while good research is taking place in pockets, a massive undertaking to tame this problem ought to be instituted. "It's gaining legs," he says of his Big Idea. "[The Department of Defense] put together a fairly significant working group to look at this."

Yeah, that's who I want managing the future of the global Internet. The muthafuckin' (pardon my french) Department of Defense, along with the benevolent NSA. Wasn't there a flying saucer crash landing somewhere, Billy-Bob? The Internet, as it is today, is free, open and decentralized (ok, somewhat, to a point), and any attempts to control it should and will fail. You have your own "secure", "impenetrable" (ahem...) network. Leave the rest of ours alone, merci.

The best place to start is with a Big Idea to concentrate and organize all the other big ideasǃ