Group 42

Greg Knaddison has done a great screen cast of the new features in Drupal 6: New features in Drupal 6. From a little things like sticky table headers as you scroll to big things like the built-in multilingual, there's some cool stuff coming.

What were the site updates blocked by the re-theming? - Glad you asked!

The page http://www.group42.ca/drupal formerly known as the Drupal Compendium has now been replaced. I was doing it as a straight HTML page, and it was getting tedious. It's now generated using a CCK node type and a View with a Taxonomy vocabulary determining where a specific item winds up. Along the way I changed the name to Drupal Notes, a title more in keeping with the page's humble scope.

The project didn't start as a new look.....

Unless you're telling a particularly good story, short and sweet is best. But as Mark Twain said, "If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare." Though short and sweet isn't easy, people have created presentation formats that challenge presenters to achieve just that!

I first heard of pecha-kucha via Anil Dash's comments on this Wired post: Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down. From the Wired post:

"pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter"), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That's it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down"

This discipline is awesome, and amazingly doesn't have to cramp your style. Check out this pecha-kucha demo by Dan Pink of Fast Company fame (which is interesting in its own right).

Good ideas have other expressions. Although Vancouver doesn't have pecha-kucha, we do have DemoCamp:

There are three minutes for delivery and three minutes for discussion (or 6 minutes to use however you see fit...previous attendees highly recommend time for interaction, questions, etc.). The time limit is strict so if you take two and a half minutes to setup your laptop, you only get thirty seconds to present (the gong hath no mercy).

DemoCampVancouver03 coming up shortly: DemoCampVancouver03 -- September 13th or October 4th?. And they're not kidding about the gong.

In the "nice segue from global to local" department, saw this Web 2.0 Map on Richard's Just a Gwai Lo blog and Darren Barefoot's blog.

Seen via gnucitizen.org via planet-websecurity.org: Information Architects Japan have produced a cool looking "Web Trend Map" and blogged about it at: Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0. They've made both downloadable and online versions available.

Be sure to scroll down to the Less Japanese Jokes and More Revealing Coincidences sections where you'll read comments like:

"Google has moved from Shibuya, a humming place for young people, to Shinjuku, a suspicious, messy, Yakuza-controlled, but still a pretty cool place to hang out (Golden Gaya)"

"Skype has conquered a place that doesn’t exist."

This is very cool: Programatic CCK Now Possible! (http://groups.drupal.org/node/5272)

I just wanted to point out a very important change to content_copy.module that makes it much more fasible to create CCK field programatically as part of an install profile.

Kudos to joshk.

Seen on Infocult, the Social Software Timeline.

I'd forgotten how much "text only" computing history there is.

Scary, I actually used The Michigan Terminal System. Everyone called it MTS and it was a trivia question answer to know what MTS stood for. I think the only major competing three letter acronym of the day, at least in Canada, was Manitoba Telephone System.

MTS was used for academic computing by Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the University of BC (UBC). I worked at SFU in the early 80's. I don't remember ever using CONFER but a programmer at UBC (Alan Ballard, I think) wrote a program called Forum that took off like wild fire. I hope I'm not mis-remembering but I believe he wrote it over a weekend. The user interface completely blew away any bulletin board software of the day.

Elastic Path is a Vancouver based commerce vendor who not only "get" business blogging but prove it by doing it well on their Get Elastic blog. They recently did a video-cast on their thoughts at the close at the Book Expo of America: Breaking Down the Book Expo. Book publishing is a topic I've loosely followed for quite a few years, so it was very interesting to hear their take.

A large part of their discussion involved changing distribution channels. Their comments resonated with my memories of this playing out in the computer industry as computers became cheaper. The established companies struggled with whether or not they should use sales channels that allowed them compete with their own distributors. The book industry has many notable differences from the computing industry of 20 years ago, so direct comparison isn't useful. However, I suspect there's some useful lessons buried in the past!

And I can't help but think, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or is it same crap, different day?

First seen in Stephen Downe's fire hose of an aggregation feed at www.downes.ca:

Podcasting Legal Guide for Canada

Now, Creative Commons Canada is proud to present the Podcasting Legal Guide for Canada! More than just an adaptation of the original U.S. Guide, this version required an almost complete rewrite of the copyright sections to describe Canadian law, as well as substantial changes to the discussions of trade-marks and publicity rights.

Podcasting Legal Guide For Canada: Online (HTML) Version | PDF Version

I haven't read it in detail, but the sections I did read were very understandable. Definitely a great reference.