This past Saturday was the 7th NYC Drupal Camp, and apparently something I said started a little bit of a twit-storm.

As part of the introduction to the event, I was asked to give a quick introduction to Open Source/Free Software. I've given similar presentations at many of the past camps and other conferences, and it was a busy week so I did not really prepare as well as I should have so I improvised a bit more than I usually do.

I pulled out one of my earlier presentations and gave the fastest possible history of the GPL, Free Software and the relationship between the copyleft nature of the GPL sofware license and the community-centric development process of a tool like Drupal.

Location

Radical Reference is an online reference service provided by volunteer library workers in a collaborative virtual setting using free/open source technology. Come learn more about how you can use this model to deliver services in your own communities (social, political, familial, spiritual, etc.). Presenters will share the five year history of the group and discuss how it collaborates, as well as give an accessible history of free/open source software.

I was contacted today by some folks in Spain that are publishing a book about Media Art Conservation. They found something I posted to the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity last year and want my permission to translate and publish it. I'm really excited.

more info on the IDC can be found at their website http://distributedcreativity.org or on the archive of the mailing list at http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/

It took me a while to dig up the post from my archive so I could decide if I wanted to give permission, I'm posting it here for no particular reason other than procrastinating other things I should be doing.

more info to come soon, this is one of the two panels I'm on at the upcoming LaborTech conference. this one is a discussion of using Open Source internet telephony, sms and other communications technologies for organizing.

Location

more info to come soon, this is one of the two panels I'm on at the upcoming LaborTech conference. this one is another incarnation of my Introduction to Free Software Presentation. This time with a Labor Union focus.

The king of LOL-stuff, I Can Has Cheezburger, is looking for a developer. That would be a fun project, however, their job announcement specifies that the code be done in Microsoft's .NET and not using Free tools.

This has started a bit of a LOL-debate about the use of Free/Open Source Software. I'd participate, but trying to read and write comments about a serious topic using lolspeak makes my head hurt.

The highlight so far:

why doesn’t you use a php flaverd intertube for da kittehs? and a ceiling cat approved apache server? everyone know IIS is the work of basement cat.

I was doing some research today, keeping up on new developments in HIPAA compliant software. (HIPAA is U.S. law which regulates the portability, privacy and security of healthcare information)

On the site of a software company that is selling a "secure email system" that they claim is HIPAA compliant, I found the following completely ignorant statement about the relationship between security and free/open source software

"Why does SafetySend use Proprietary Code and Technology?
Because any code or technology that can be purchased is vulnerable.

Openflows got a nice shout-out from radical reference member (and International Documents Librarian at Stanford University) James Jacobs who, when interviewed by Red Hat Magazine, listed Openflows Community Technology Lab as one of the inspirational forces in the creation of Stanford University's new Open Source Lab.

The Stanford Open Source Lab is an interesting experiment. "The vision of the Open Source Lab is to be a nexus on campus for the discussion, advocacy, and technical support of community-based technologies and information systems."

Being credited with helping to inspire such a project is high praise but to be listed along with groups like the Free Software Foundation, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, Drupal, and MIT’s Open CourseWare, well... that just made me blush.

[[updated feb 17 to include info on redirecting old slashcode urls to the new drupal urls]]

Started as part of a workshop I did at the 3rd NYC Drupal Camp on converting to/from drupal, I have finally finished converting the Autonomedia/Interactivist Info Exchange site from slash to drupal. It will relaunch soon at http://info.interactivist.net

While it might have been somewhat more "correct" for me to have written a php script that bootstrapped drupal and then just grab the data and pass it through drupal's user and node api's, I was stubbornly determined to convert the site by only writing sql queries between the databases.

Part of my reasoning for doing this sql only was that converting thousands of nodes and users via the drupal api can take forever, where direct database manipulation is fast.

While I will write this up better later and post it to drupal.org, I wanted to get it up before I got distracted onto other tasks.

so, without further delay: here are the step by step notes I took as I went through the process.
[much thanks to Blake Carver of LIS News http://www.lisnews.org/ for the motivation to finish and the queries that populate the node and node revisions tables]