Aaron Winborn

DrupalCamp Cologne will take place on January 17th and 18th, 2009, in Cologne, Germany. Here are pictures of the organization team (known internally as OrgaNicer - say it with a German accent and you’ll get the joke) planning the sessions. We’ve got around 50 sessions and 4 rooms. There are also 12 rooms for groups of 10 people that can be used for spontaneous sessions, lightning talks, BoFs etc.

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Through a presentation from Nicole Sullivan, a former member of Yahoo’s Exceptional Performance Team and co-author of O’Reilly's upcoming book on performance optimization, I came across the following data points:

• Amazon: 100 ms of extra load time caused a 1% drop in sales. (Source: Greg Linden, Amazon)
• Google: 500 ms of extra load time caused 20% fewer searches. (Source: Marrissa Mayer, Google)
• Google: trimming page size by 30% resulted in 30% more map requests. (Source: Marrissa Mayer, Google)
• Yahoo!: 400 ms of extra load time caused a 5 to 9% increase in the number of people that clicked "back" before the page even loaded. (Source: Nicole Sullivan, Yahoo!)

While we all knew this was true (and while I'd like more detail on these tests), it is nice to have some quantitative data from different sources. Long story short: even the smallest delay kills user satisfaction. Let's make Drupal even snappier! (Hat tip: Peter Van Dijck)

Last year I was one of the beta testers for Acquia's Drupal distribution and the Acquia Network.  I was evaluating Acquia's products and services for a potential intranet project at work.  For this particular project, unfortunately, it looks as if Acquia or Drupal wasn't the right solution.  Our regional folks wanted a solution similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint that is more integrated with Microsoft Office and heavily featured in document management.  That's alright though because there are a number of smaller intranet projects at work where Drupal is the perfect solution and a lot of progress is being made in that direction.

Over the weekend, I decided to move CMS Report from Drupal 6 to Acquia Drupal.  In December, I received a message that beta testers would be rolled over into "a Community subscription entitlement that extends through December 31st, 2009".  Placing the Acquia subscription onto CMSReport.com not only will allow the site to receive the benefits of being on Acquia's network, but will also allow me to monitor the evolution of Acquia.  Acquia is still a young company and likely will continue to expand on the products and services it offers.

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On January 17-18, I'll be in Germany to attend DrupalCamp Köln (aka DrupalCamp Cologne) and hang out with the German Drupal community. DrupalCamp Köln is organized by Thomas Narres, Daniel Niehaus, Jürgen Brocke, Torsten Zenk, Florian Latzel, and others in the Köln/Bonn users group.

The venue is sponsored by GFU, a leading German IT training organization. Other sponsors include Host Europe, the Kölner Internet Union, O'Reilly, Packt Publishing, APress, Martinsfeld and Acquia.

With so many good presentation proposals, it's hard to point out just a few. An incomplete list of sessions include SEO, fields in core, Acquia, SimpleTest, Ubercart, performance optimization, installation profiles, Solr, module writing, theming and many more.

This is the first ever Drupal-specific camp (or Drupal un-conference) that Germany has ever seen, and so far a little more than 150 people have signed up. The organizers are expecting to max out the venue with around 180 participants. Prominent German Drupalistas attending and/or presenting include: Konstantin Käfer, Hagen Graf, Daniel Juling, Ben Birkenhagen, Gerhard Killesreiter, and plenty of other great contributors. International Drupalistas coming include: Morten (King of Denmark), Mikkel Høgh (Denmark), Florian Loretan (USA / Switzerland), Roel Demeester (Belgium), Jo Wouters (Belgium), Damien Tournoud (France), Joeri Poesen (Belgium), and many more.

Three people from Acquia will be present; Robert Douglass, Jeffrey McGuire (aka Jam) and myself. I'll do a keynote on Drupal. Robert plans to demonstrate the latest ApacheSolr improvements and will give a first glance at Acquia's hosted search solution. Robert and I will also be holding an Acquia Q&A session, and Jam will be ready to help with your Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 upgrade problems, pesky Views 1 to Views 2 conversions and hosting a moderated discussion on Upgrade as a Barrier, and how to move adoption forward.

Two other things you shouldn't miss are the Drupal.org upgrade and redesign hackathon -- your chance to get your hands dirty with the big Drupal.org redesign project -- and the Ubercart workshop that takes place on January 19 and 20, right after Drupalcamp Köln. The Ubercart workshop is organized by Commerce Guys and AF83.

I've just started reading Clay Shirky's new book Here Comes Everybody which opens by describing the story of a stolen Sidekick which is eventually returned after the owner's friend posts a webpage and an ad hoc group forms to help return it. It's an interesting story and fits nicely into Shirky's thesis.

It took on a new importance this morning when I received an email from my friend Dan telling me about Remi Pinaud, a French guy who'd been subletting his apartment, had stolen three iPods, two external hard drives and a digital camera. The worst part was that Remi is heading to Panama the tomorrow. Dan had been started doing his detective work locating the guy on social networking sites and wondered what I'd do.

My answer was that I'd start emailing everyone I knew about it then get on all the social networking site and start messaging all his friends telling them about it. Then I'd get make a video describing what he'd done and post it on every one of his YouTube videos. Basically an internet wide shaming process.

Dan's been busy today. He files a police report, tracked down a bunch of personal info on Mr. Pinaud, started working on the YouTube response video and started a blog titled: Remi Pinaud is a Thief to document it. The odds of Dan getting his stuff back are pretty remote at this point but I'm hoping that we can Google bomb that blog so that when ever anyone Googles his name they find out he's a thief.

Twitter is viral -- and getting in the way already. Anyway, you can now follow me at http://twitter.com/dries.

Mike Elgan has a good article in ComputerWorld, Why products fail.  He makes a point that many usability tests really miss the entire point of what people really want in a product.

When you ask someone what they really want, they won't tell you the truth because they're not aware of the truth.

Both users and product designers alike talk about user interface (UI) consistency, usability and simplicity, and system attributes like performance and stability. What's missing is that these attributes are means to an end. The real issue is always the user's physiological feeling of being in control.

In the article, he later goes on to support his argument. I think he is right, true usability is all about control. Something for all of us to ponder about the next time we participate in a usability exercise for our content management system.

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Last year, Acquia opened for business, offering commercial support for a defined software distribution called Acquia Drupal. One could purchase commercial support for all the modules in Acquia Drupal. As I mentioned last week in my 2009 predictions for Drupal, one of the things we learned relatively fast is that people wanted more than just Acquia Drupal. They wanted support for all modules, themes and custom code.

No surprise, but when we set out to build Acquia little more than a year ago, we weren't quite sure how we'd go about supporting everything with the limited resources we had available. We have since learned and grew a lot, and we decided that we're finally ready to start providing technical support for all of Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org, as well as custom code.

So last week we rolled out a big release of the Acquia Network, the new Acquia Network connector (available from drupal.org, see Gabor's blog post for details), a 156 page "Getting Started Guide" on Drupal, and a ton of new content on our website. Starting today, we're ready to give many more customers what they want: support for everything Drupal 6.

We'll continue to tweak and experiment with our offering in 2009 so we didn't make a big deal out of this change (i.e. no press release, no analyst briefings). However, I wanted to bring this to your attention because I'm really excited about it. It means it will be easier for us to help take Drupal to the enterprise, and that Acquia will contribute to more and different parts of the Drupal project.

While Acquia Drupal no longer defines our support boundaries, it is still a great on-ramp for people getting started with Drupal. We are continuing to invest in Acquia Drupal so watch this space for more Acquia Drupal announcements.

Kudos to the entire Acquia team for making this milestone happen. Thanks!

From the movie Wall Street, "He wouldn't know the difference between preferred stock and live stock!".

As the entire financial world turned to garbage I found myself getting more and more interested in how that world functioned. I wanted to dig beneath the headlines but kept coming up frustrated as I'd read things and not know what they meant due to lack of vocabulary. I purchased a few stock market books and kept hitting the same wall until I turned up Jason Kelly's book here.

This book has a ery good introductory section about how things work, from setting up a brokerage account to what all the various metrics are. He also does it in a semi-narrative fashin as opposed to offering me a straight out list of terms to memorize (being a student of history who can't memorize dates I really appreciate this).

The second section of the book deals with various strategies for investing in the stock market based on 6 'master investors'. While I am skeptical about the efficacy of some of these, I may be being colored by the fact that the Dow just plummeted over 5000 points. A great quote is, " A Dow company doesn't stay down and out forever." Which may be true, but isn't something I would have clinged to in recent months (See: AIG). It can be a little disconcerting that a Double the Dow strategy was published in January of the same year this happened, however, if you can see past that to what he is saying about investment in general, it will serve you well.

I will say, Mr. Kelly does give a solid, simple system for setting yourself up, and if you did pay attention you'd have cut your losses early in this recent mess. In all, I would recommend this book to anyone looking for an introductory book on stock market investing. Just don't make it your only book on investing. Jason Kelly urges that himself.

VERY recommended reading. 7 pages of common business sense, and a litany of thing I feel should have been questioned by the American people long since.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhorn.html?hp

This article outlines a largely ignored aspect of the recent financial turmoil. It isn't just greedy rich people being corrupt to make more money. That, in fact, isn't a problem at all. That's just human nature, and you'll have as much luck legislating that as you would, say outlawing lust, or envy. No, the issue is that we have constructed a system in which people are being expected, if not outright legally bound to be corrupt.

From the above: "But if any one of them had set himself up as a whistleblower — had stood up and said “this business is irresponsible and we are not going to participate in it” — he would probably have been fired. Not immediately, perhaps. But a few quarters of earnings that lagged behind those of every other Wall Street firm would invite outrage from subordinates, who would flee for other, less responsible firms, and from shareholders, who would call for his resignation. Eventually he’d be replaced by someone willing to make money from the credit bubble."

Right there in black and white. If you don't play the game, you have no business on Wall Street.

Think of it in Darwinian terms. We've set up an environment that weeds out honesty as a trait not suitable for evolution. "Indeed, one of the great social benefits of the Madoff scandal may be to finally reveal the S.E.C. for what it has become. Created to protect investors from financial predators, the commission has somehow evolved into a mechanism for protecting financial predators with political clout from investors. (The task it has performed most diligently during this crisis has been to question, intimidate and impose rules on short-sellers — the only market players who have a financial incentive to expose fraud and abuse.) "

The only solution to the financial situation is a bottom up approach, not a top down approach. Continually propping up failed institutions and saying it's all fine is just postponing the inevitable.

It wraps up with a series of large boldface common sense recommendations like Banks shouldn't pay the credit ratings institutions for their own credit rating, and "Stop making big regulatory decisions with long-term consequences based on their short-term effect on stock prices."

Very well written.

I have never done much cooking in my life. I prepare the occasional spaghetti bolognese, but that is about it. And when I say "prepare", I mean that I heat up pre-cooked bolognese sauce. Well, sue me.

Either way, to start off the new year in style, I set out to make my first soup ever. From scratch. I decided on broccoli cream soup as that is one of my favorite soups, and it only involved vegetables.

Guess what? The soup was delicious. There might be a chef in me! ;-)

During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive.  Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish.  Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal.  Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.

Well, it looks as if Deane Barker has finally decided to get on the Drupal learning curve and find out more about this great CMS.

I’m working with Drupal for the first time on a hobby project I’m doing with Seth Gottlieb (about which you’ll hear much more later…). Adam Kalsey — Drupal ninja that he is — is advising us on the technical implementation, and he’s been a great help.

Why Drupal? Because I didn’t know it, and figured I needed to. Seth and I, after all, had the discussion about how there are people like to feel smart and people that like to feel stupid. Learning Drupal has made me feel plenty stupid, and that’s exciting. And there’s no better time to feel stupid while learning than on a project you’re doing for yourself.

I'm always excited to see very talented content management people discuss their initial experiences with a CMS.  If Deane writes more about Drupal, I suspect his writings will be very similar to the Drupal writings of Sacha Chua.

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Wikipedia Foundation: "With the support of over 125,000 donors from around the world, the Wikimedia Foundation has achieved its goal of raising over $6 million USD to sustain Wikipedia. As of today, the campaign has generated just over $6.2 million USD."

Complete Story

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If you've read other bread recipes from me, and note differences, that is because bread is a constant work in progress for me. Usually, each round turns out better, and I refine my technique, sometimes not so much. This is the current recipe I am going with, but make sure to hit the bread tag above and get the latest to date version, as with all my recipes.

The night before if possible, combine 1/2 cup warm water with about a tablespoon of sugar, cover loosely and set aside. I learned about the importance of yeast viability from my beer making, and to a degree it carries over to bread making as well. If you are like me and keep your yeast in the refrigerator, it takes them a little time to wake up and start eating sugar. Yes, you can get good bread from dry yeast and shorter times. But why bother, drop it into a cup of warm water the night before and forget about it. The yeast will keep in the water for a while as long as it doesn't get contaminated, so if you don't et to it right away the next morning don't worry about it.

Combine Sugar, salt, shortening, eggs, scaled milk, 1/2 cup cold water and a couple handfuls of your flour (preferably sift all dry ingredients). and stir or wisk until all dry ingredients make a smooth batter. The point of this step is to make sure you don't have any lumps of dry goods that will solidify as you form the dough. Think of it as making gravy. Once everything is well mixed add the yeast and stir a while longer.

Hint: Bread yeast love warm but not too hot temperature. The point of adding cold water is to cool down the scalded milk. Test the batter with your finger before adding the yeast, if you think it is too hot, cover it and walk away for a bit... or add an ice cube and wait for it to melt, either would work. But don't kill the yeast by adding them to something too hot. If you can keep your finger in it for 30 seconds, it isn't too hot.

Add flour about a cup or two at a time until dough is stiff and pulls away from the side of the bowl. One of the tricks to making bread is to not gum up your hands doing it. Add about a half cup more of your flour once you think it can't possibly be stirred any more and work at folding the dough off of the side of the bowl, turning the bowl a few turns each time. When you've worked around the bowl once or twice you should be able to push the entire dough bowl out onto a floured surface leaving a nearly dry bowl and never touching the dough with your hands.

Dust the dough with flour and your hands and begin kneading. keep a sited pile of flour nearby to dust the dough and your hands as needed as you go. Once you get good, the dough will never stick to your hands throughout the process. Knead for about 5-10 minutes. You are kneading to build gluten in the flour, so you do need to really work at it, but remember to not tear the dough.

Once done coat the top of the dough with some oil to prevent drying, then leave covered with a towel in a warm place, preferably not too dry. I like to pre heat my oven to 250 with a metal cup of water in it. Then turn the oven off and open the door for a minute and place the dough in a bowl in their, towel and all.

Once the dough has doubled in bulk, punch it down, or squeeze the air out of it, oil again and let it rise a second time. Punch down again and divide into the number of loaves you want (usually 3).

To form the loaves I like to roll the dough into a long cylinder, press flat, then starting at one end, roll up along the short end. I pinch the end in then on either side pull the bottom of the loaf over the end and pinch it in. Place in loaf pan seam side down, split top into whatever pattern you like, coat with oil and let rise a third time.

Bake at 375* for about 20-25 minutes. Pull loaves and rub a stick of butter all over them, bake another 5-10 minutes until loaves are golden brown and sound hollow when you thump them.

This may sound like a lot of work, but once you are good at it you can be doing other things around the house while the loaves are rising and really only spend about 20-40 minutes working on it. The trade off is well worth it.

The site is now bright and Shiny Drupal 6.8. It actually has been for a few weeks, but I'm just getting around to writing a new blog post. The frontpage is now panels, and will soon reflect several 'views' discrete lists in different areas.

I'm taking this site in a new direction. I've basically found that a blog format is somewhat constraining for me some of the time. Particularly times when I don't feel like writing an editorial or a rant, or life update. I've broken things down into thing that I do like to write about and created/am creating a section for each.

Currently the frontpage has 4 columns, of which the two center-most hold my personal blog and my sustainability page. They will soon have a culinary section and a book review section, as well. The frontpage will be a landing page to take you to the various other sections with very brief teasers. The far left sidebar will remain my twitter feed. I don't update this site nearly often enough, but if you are looking for a quick update of what I've been doing, look there. The far right will soon be an array of Open Source logos that power this site. Drupal, Linux, PHP, MySQL, Apache, JQuery, etc, as well as a list of recommended news articles that I have read, and thought worth pointing out to peoples. I might another section for hiking, but lets not get carried away here just yet.

For people who just visit the site normally in a browser, this doesn't mean much to you. IF YOU VIEW THE SITE WITH AN RSS READER, you'll soon have some more options. I will try to keep the current URL that you subscribe to an uber-feed of all of the above sections. However, after the transition you'll be able to pick and choose which feeds you want to be subscribed to. No need for you to be reading my latest Chili recipe if you aren't into culinary pursuits. Feel free to pick and choose, or contact me if you think there is an issue with any of the feeds.

That's about it. Cheers.

What are you doing on January 17th and 18th? Hopefully you'll be coming to DrupalCamp Cologne and hanging out with Drupallers from all over the world! This is the first ever Drupal-specific camp or conference that Germany has ever seen, so it will be quite an event.

Dries Buytaert (Drupal founder and project lead, Acquia co-founder and CTO, Mollom co-founder) will be there to talk about Drupal and his latest projects. I'll be holding an Acquia Q&A session, as well as demonstrating the latest ApacheSolr improvements. Jeffrey McGuire (Acquia's documentation lead) will be there as well, ready to help you with your Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 upgrade problems, including those pesky Views 1 to Views 2 conversions. Also not to miss is the Drupal.org Upgrade and Redesign Hackathon - your chance to get your hands dirty with the big Drupal.org redesign project.

On January 19 and 20, 2009, in Cologne Germany, Commerce Guys and AF83 will be joining forces to offer Drupal Ubercart training (registration link). Drupal is a leading web content management system, and Ubercart is a full e-Commerce solution and shopping cart that is built on top of Drupal.

In the training you will learn how to build a web site for a rock band that features blogs, audio and video content, tour dates and an event calendar, fan forums, and an Ubercart-based store where fans can buy t-shirts and music downloads. The website will be based on Acquia Drupal so you will also get a glimpse into the Acquia Network and learn about the advantages of building your site with the support of Acquia. Everybody who attends will get a free Acquia Network subscription and some Acquia schwag.

The training takes place on the two days following DrupalCamp Cologne and will be held in the same venue as DrupalCamp. If you are already planning on attending DrupalCamp Cologne and want to learn even more, this is a great opportunity. If you weren't sure about making the trip for DrupalCamp Cologne, now you can get even more Drupal and Ubercart action out of your travels.

Commerce Guys are leading Ubercart specialists and were recently selected to build and run the official Drupal store on drupal.org. AF83 are Drupal site-building experts with much experience in providing Drupal training.

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Since Dries blog post about Contributing back to Drupal, there's been a bunch of discussion about how Drupal companies should best do this.

I've only recently started at Zivtech, and although I've done plenty of on-the-job Drupal work, this is my first job at a true Drupal company. Zivtech's policy of giving its developers 20% time to contribute to Drupal was a big incentive for me to take the job.

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Since Dries blog post about Contributing back to Drupal, there's been a bunch of discussion about how Drupal companies should best do this.

I've only recently started at Zivtech, and although I've done plenty of on-the-job Drupal work, this is my first job at a true Drupal company. Zivtech's policy of giving its developers 20% time to contribute to Drupal was a big incentive for me to take the job.

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The number of iPhone apps has exploded over the last year, but its still hard to find much information on how an iPhone app might interface with Drupal. We are roughing out a Drupal iPhone module that will hopefully make it easier to create iPhone apps that talk to Drupal.

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