Still, fighting the good green fight can feel pretty lonely, and sometimes you forget not just how many people are on your side in the next office or town, but also of the billions of people who have something to lose to climate change. So as a bit of fun, and to remind ourselves what it’s all about, we’ve recently given the green finger to climate change. Here we are, doing just that:

Want to join in? You can respond to the original YouTube video.

Drupal.org have produced a Licensing FAQ to explain some of the subtler aspects of licensing under the GPL. The questions themselves are Drupal-oriented, but the FAQ itself has been prepared by the SFLC, an independent body, so the answers are broader than that.

I’ve noticed from the slightly confused sidelines that Drupalers have been niggling away at these issues for ages. Their heated exchanges and occasional quarrels are the fuel that has kept this wagon moving, and they’ve finally rolled it into town with a GPL-in-practice primer that’s worth reading, whatever you’re working on, and especially if you’re integrating with web services or third-party libraries. Well done to all involved.

Step forward, Garrett and Victoria, to the camera and the card boxes respectively. Leaving me with more hands to dither with. Thanks, chaps.

Now. [Pats pockets]. What else have I forgotten?

Now, suddenly, it looks like being the best night so far in 2008. We’re starting with two great keynote speakers: Charlton Barreto of OASIS, W3C and Adobe, talking about the takehomes from Web 2.0; Tom Taylor of Headshift talking about the beauty of pointless mashups (such as his Twitter feeds @lowflyingrocks and @towerbridge).

There’s then a full roster of microslot talks covering a crazy range of technologies. My colleagues Matthew and Tom have answered two of the requests that the Oxford geek community themselves put out, and are doing talks on the new technologies of Comet and Google App Engine respectively; Andrew Godwin will be showing off his beautiful if computationally… trying… graphing code for Last.fm; Drew McLellan continues his simultaneous journeys through good web practice and late-70s/early-80s children’s TV shows; Simon Whitaker does some anyone-can-try-it hacking of the OSX address book; and Duncan Parkes discusses the mySociety application PlanningAlerts.

The evening will finish with a book raffle, courtesy of Friends of Ed. So if you stay for the full three hours then you’re in with a good chance of going home one book richer. Disclaimer: the venue seats 140 people and we won’t have a book for everyone.

If you’ve not stuck it in your diary yet then do so: Wednesday June 25; doors open 7.30, entrance free thanks to Torchbox and Google. I’ll be the one panicking, and hotswapping laptop monitor cables.

Cheers, all: see you at OGN7, June 25th.

Gobion Rowlands leads our e-learning procession, with a keynote on “turning hard data into fun.” Red Redemption, Gobion’s company, has recently won an award for its online Flash game about climate change. His keynote neatly segues into microslot (5-minute) talks on e-Learning and technology in archaeology.

Meanwhile, Charlton Barreto will be discussing in his keynote what we can learn from Web 2.0. Charlton has worked with OASIS, W3C and the IEEE on related topics. But his keynote sets the ground for talks about mashups, custom CRM systems, and a possible standard for portable social-network information.

And neatly bridging the two camps of educational outreach and web-2.0 hackery is the Oxford Barcamp microslot. And although I’ll be a bag of nerves on the day, I can’t wait.

I don’t know how much experience Neil Berkett has of bus lanes—I will gladly credit him with enough of it to speak from a position other than that of the pompous, ignorant millionaire who thinks the only way to use a bus lane is to drive a bus—but in my own universe the bus lane is how buses get into the town centre far faster than private transport. If I were a customer looking at Virgin Media right now, to determine whether or not it was worth signing up with them, I’d scarcely pay more for less: that counts for both connection speed and managerial intelligence.

But the eyes of even the most hardened LAMPer would widen, if he were to dip into a conversation to find someone saying the following about something they’ve built over PostgreSQL:

Yeah, I could add the current date/time to the end, so as long as you don’t add more than one [entry] with the same name within 1 second, it’ll be fine.

It might take you a while to work out (a) what that’s referring to (b) what kind of error in thinking it demonstrates and (c) what it implies about the quality of the underlying code. By that time—if you’ve worked at all with that sort of programming—your head may well be in your hands.