No, not the knights who say "Gee!"
The fragrant Natbat, my co-worker and fellow cheese-eater, is organising an Oxford(-shire)-based geek evening:
Oxford GeekNights #1
Wednesday, February 7, 2007 @ 8.00pm
Jericho Tavern, Jericho, Oxford
Every productivity tool is a blessing and a curse, or rather: for extended periods of time a given tool can chime perfectly with your way of working and thinking; when it doesn’t, it ceases to be a machine for converting your energy into accomplishment and becomes a wastebin for everything you throw at it.
Blogging from Oxford Geek Nights #3, and it doesn’t look like the weather has dampened the Oxonian geek ardour. We reckon we’ve got around 120 people here tonight, which is fantastic (especially given the circumstances). Standing room only in the Jericho Tavern, sort of like Botley Road right now but without waders. I can’t say the level of fashion sense is any higher, though.
Drupal, along with Plone and dotnetnuke, beat some monumentally big playas to the first awards of the OpenID bounty. This is awarded to projects which implement a number of requirements which, together, constitute agreed OpenID functionality.
Natalie and Simon are leaving us to move to Brighton, which is a real shame but also an excuse to go to Barcamp Brighton. Tickets went on sale at 11am today, and I’ve managed to nab one before they sold out.
Drupal has a built-in form abstraction system called Form API (or FAPI), which like the Atom protocol consists of two complementary halves. The first is an abstraction of forms to structured data, and is dealt with very well by both online documentation and the excellent Pro Drupal Development. The second is a workflow for turning this data into forms, validating form submissions, and processing valid submissions onto output streams such as the database, the browser or emails to the user.
I have a new laptop: a Dell Precision M4300. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback to my request for recommendations about laptops.
A comment on Ask the Wizard’s post about obviousness bemoans the non-obviousness of a particular social network’s use:
You wouldn’t happen to have a video you could link to of that person who showed you Twitter being valuable. Why? Because I (still) don’t get it…
Last-minute planning for Barcamp Brighton now begins in earnest. I've got Andrew printing off links in the other office, and I'm currently working out how we're going to get there in time to register by 11am. Hopefully an emergency phone call to Natbat will secure us a place.
This will be my first unconference, and I am petrified. I do have a talk of sorts in the pipeline, but it's all raggedy and all over the place.
Assaf writes about, among other things, REST as a simplifier of development against an existing system:
REST plays the same role as open source and open APIs: It eliminates tooling and vendoring as artificial barriers to adoption.