Group 42

The last Drupal Vancouver meet up proved an interesting buffet of different things. I didn't take notes, but here is a list of things still lingering in my brain:

• DrupalCon Brussels Review, including:
  - discussions of new Drupal 5 features
  - the Drupal Association
  - Walkah's presentation explaining the infamous Pants module
• Massoud presented an overview of his Asterix billing module
• New Drupal sites released into the wild
• “Stump the Drupal Ninjas” - A Q&A session of “how would I implement function/feature x”
  Joking aside, these are incredibly useful. Drupal is so feature rich and new modules are coming on the scene regularly enough I always walk away with some useful tidbits of information, whether I'm looking for them or not. Some of the topics:
  - A discussion of online payment options
  - Mapping options
  - Forum options

This meeting was one of our longer ones, with discussion taking us late enough there wasn't time to adjourn to other environs.

The next meeting of the Vancouver Python/Zope Users Group is:

Among the many ISO standards there's a set focused on security and governance, with ISO17799 being the big one. Wikipedia's article is here: ISO/IEC 17799. Just received notice that a local security user group is being formed for security knowledge sharing of the ISO kind.

Full announcement follows.

Well, I tried to get the Talk Like a Pirate module in for yesterday but it didn't come off. Next year.

Richard Erikson posted a great set of notes from the August Drupal meetup: Notes from August 24th Vancouver Drupal User's Group.

I have no one to blame but myself. When a device the size of a thumb holds many, many, many hours of work, backing up is good practice and cheap insurance. I know this. Knowledge and action aren't one and the same.

I'd gotten into a great rhythm with my thumb drive. It was just so easy working across multiple computers; being able to write on the notebook when I was out and about and seamlessly taking the work back to my desktop, and vice versa. Losing the thumb drive knocked the wind out of me, metaphorically at least. And I was bummed.

I had a great time at the Vancouver Python Workshop. Kudo's and thanks to the organizers and sponsors.

Everything is back! Also upgraded to the latest Drupal security release.

I have a set of backup/restore shell scripts for making command line backups of the database and file system easy. One command and less than 60 seconds later my site is backed up or restored. It makes site moves and safety backups for upgrades extremely easy. I contributed them to Drupal project there: Backup and restore using bash shell scripts.

Arrrr, thar be comments on deck! (Sorry, getting in practice for Talk Like a Pirate Day).

Thanks to the anti-spam power of Akismet and the coding prowess of Markus Petrux at phpMiX.org I feel comfortable enabling comments.

It's the Vancouver Python Workshop 2006! Friday night opening keynotes with Python creator Guido van Rossum and IronPython/Jython creator Jim Hugunin were held at the SFU Downtown campus.

Van Rossum's keynote was an overview of Python 3000, a.k.a. Python 3.0. Python 3000 is a major departure from previous major versions because it breaks backward compatibility. Van Rossum explained there are many things he's wanted to clean up but couldn't because Python 2 worked hard, bugs aside, not to introduce incompatibilities. While not wanting to alienate the community because of core changes he wanted to fix design bugs introduced early on in the project. Python 3000 is all about fixing problems and will not incorporate a lot of new features. Design decisions are based on the best choice going forward, not compatibility.