Bevan Rudge on drupal, usability, open source, tech...

Together with some friends and colleagues we have been working hard to organise, finalize and publish details of what will be the two most important days for Drupal in New Zealand:

DrupalSouth: The New Zealand Drupal Event for 2008

DrupalSouth is the New Zealand Drupal Event for 2008. DrupalSouth will bring NZ's Drupal community together for the first nation-wide Drupal event and the first ever Drupal camp in NZ.

Due to high rank in google search results for queries about unlocked iPhone upgrades to v2 firmware and my recent article about my own experiences. A number of people in Christchurch have contacted me about unlocking their first-generation iPhones that have become locked after upgrading. This is not my trade, and not something I would consider myself a professional in. However I am confident enough to do this without bricking (rendering it permanently useless) the phone.
While I'd prefer to help others to do it themselves, I understand this is too much to learn or too overwhelming for many people.

Mozilla has finally announced Firefox 3's launch date; this Tuesday 17 June. (Note that's probably US time, so it will be Wednesday in NZ).

Mozilla wants to break a guiness world record for number of downloads in one day and I'm sure they'll achieve it. You can go pledge on spreadfirefox.com (A drupal site): http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

I created a "FF3 launch party" event in Christchurch for kicks on mozillaparty.com: http://mozillaparty.com/en-US/events/view/101

I think we get some free gear if enough people come or something.

On a road Trip to the West Coast (New Zealand), we found the merchandise, prices and marketing rather peculiar. This store had a particular broad but limited range of products and services:

While the petrol in Ikamatua seemed just a little over-priced:

This article about SilverStripe "giving away their product" completely misses the point of open source. I think that like most of the general public here in NZ (perhaps worldwide?), the author understands that "open source is free" (like free beer), but misses the point that SilverStripe's software, and open source in general, is not free because it costs nothing, but because the code that is written to create the software, is open for anyone to use, look at, modify, enhance, learn from, redistribute, sell, print out and use as toilet paper, or glorify in a nice picture frame above their mantlepiece. Because the code has been freed from the restrictions typical of commercial software licensing.

Online retailers BWMsnow and SKATEgear require the professional services of a Drupal vendor or developer to take over the maintenance and future development their websites.

BWMsnow is NZ's largest online retailer of snowboard gear and has been operating for more than 4 years internationally, focussing more heavily on the NZ market in recent years. BWMsnow was NZ's only online retailer of snowboard gear until recently. BWMsnow is a NZ limited company which continues to grows significantly every selling season (March to June).

So I found an obscure bug on TradeMe, but there is no way to report it. The contact us section just led to an unhelpful help page. The only email address I could find was mediaenquiries@trademe.co.nz on the Corporate enquiries page. So in order to report the bug I have to blog about it, so I can pass it off as media.

After yesterday's siting and all the related discussion, the firkin Google car was parked right outside our house today! Well not right outside, but on the other side of the park next to our house -- less than 100 metres away. Celeste called me with the news and I ran out of the house with the camera, socks, no keys, no shoes, front door wide open. A bloke was sitting at a picnic table in the park. He looked like he might be the driver on his lunch break:
"Excuse me. Are you the driver of the google car?". But no, he was a fellow geek waiting to see if the driver came back to the car. I chatted to him briefly until the driver did return to the car;

"Excuse me. Are you the driver of the google car?"
"Yep"
"Gidday I'm Bevan"
"Hi I'm Michael"
[handshake]
"Do you mind if I take some photos...."
[Snap Snap Snap]

Google will pay high school kids aged 13 to 18 up to $500 for their participation in GHOP. The first round is a bit of a trial and has only ten projects involved, and Drupal is one of them! The others are;

• Apache Software Foundation
• GNOME
• Joomla!
• MoinMoin
• Mono
• Moodle
• Plone
• Python
• SilverStripe

It is both impressive and interesting how many of them are web-content tools (CMS, web-application frameworks, wikis etc). I also need to congratulate SilverStripe, a locally-grown-and-nutured CMS. Kudos to the Wellington whanau.