Black Dog Blog

Archive for the ‘GeekUp’ Category

Droople Droople Droople? Drupe Drupe Drupe! *waves flag*

I'm back from DrupalCamp UK, where I was helping out – partly because I'm interested in Drupal (it and I will do Great Things together, yes, my pretty), partly because it was held at my workplace and partly because I know Ian and some of the other GeekUprs who organised it. It was nothing to do with the pizzas (70 of them. Seriously. Between just over 80 attendees), although those were nice, and provided an… interesting challenge trying to get enough people who would take the leftovers home.

Really, really good weekend. I have a stressball in the shape of the Drupal droplet and a USB stick with DAMP on it. Those plus a couple of stickers are about it for schwag, although there was also a prize draw giveaway thing for lots of books. (All fully compliant with BBC competition guidelines, of course.) I've also been lionised and ego-stroked by slightly drunk developers, which my psyche apparently interprets as a Good Thing. In fact I'm evidently so awesome that everyone's desperate for me to help out at the next northern Droople event. Provisionally yes, depending how I feel tomorrow morning and what becomes of the one or two blister startups on my feet.

So, I've learned a lot from the (parts of) talks I saw, even when some things were over my head, met lots of neat people whose names I of course instantly forgot, and generally Organised Things. This meant everything from chucking a napkin in the direction of a spilled pint, through whisking round with spray cleaner on the morning of Day Two, via making sure windows and doors were open to counteract the broken air con and roomsful of sweaty geeks, to telling people which talk was happening where and what they were likely to be about. Also seen some coooool modules and stuff in action, such as Administration Menu.

I'm all fired up about making Profusion work niceynicey on Drupe now. If only there were a halfway house between Drupal and a messageboard system (that ISN'T a phpBB clone *blech*), that would really be ideal. Either that or we could stand to reimagine our play-by-message-board dynamic, and, well, Change is Scary.

Forays into Twitter don't seem to have harmed my usual pointless verbosity.

Poetry!!1!

And now I'm tired. And it's a normal work week starting tomorrow!

*droops*

A tip from some folks on GeekUp. I've just heard of this, am very excited and intend to try it with the hard disk that suffered a head crash just as my backup Maxtor OneTouch II (boo, hiss! Do not buy!) simultaneously died the death.

Freeze (yes, in a freezer) your hard drive to recover data. (It's worth reading some of the comments, too, at least until you get far enough that everyone's repeating what everyone else says.)

It would be so awesome to get the data off that clickity drive! The source files from my little foray into Inform! Old Profusion/Proelium stuff! And even, I think, a few working graphics files… like that brown-on-red cat creature I drew once for Ree. I think the PSD for that was also lost on there.

I used to back up the documents folder (which contained most or all of my important stuff) to a WinZip file on the same partition, then copy that zip to the Maxtor. So even if I only got a few minutes out of the thing, I could at least snag that.

I'll let you know how I get on if I attempt this…

Work Christmas lunch yesterday, at a place in Castlefield called The Ox. It was tasty, the place was not crowded and the service was good. Also, apple and melon J₂O is too delicious (albeit a bit too sweet) and should be banned.

So. BBC Backstage/GeekUp party on Saturday at the Pitcher and Piano in Deansgate Locks. A great deal of fun. I helped out with BBCish stuff for a few minutes, but I was really there as a guest and had a good time. There were drinks paid for by Cubic Garden (yay!) and food laid on by the Beeb. There was a Wii that a room full of geeks couldn't get working properly (oh how I LOLd) and a Skype/Twitter link-up to London, where the other Backstage bash was happening simultaneously.

We were also invaded by Santas in the form of a fancy dress charity pub crawl.

edit: Pictures here. I don't see any of me, thank dog.

So I hung out with GeekUpprs and had free non-alcohol cocktails (Apple Mint, MMMM) and life was good. I sneaked my GeekUp Secret Santa gift/s in and left them by the food, anticipating that this would get them found quickly. The main gift was a picture of the recipient being mauled by Gemma's polecat, which apparently really happened. I found the details in the GeekUp archives. (I do my research, you see.) I didn't go over and introduce myself, but I saw the picture being passed around to general amusement, along with the little rhyme I wrote for the tag. I had help laminating these beforehand, which was a wise precaution. Plastic-wrapped is good when alcohol and free food are flowing.

Speaking of free food, yes, the diet is on hold and I am back in the grip of Brute Hunger. :-/ Have already bounced back up to 80kg. I must carry on the rest of this week as though I'm still on the sachets/green veg regime, or, knowing too well the raging animal that's under my skin, I'll just balloon. And that would be shit. Very, very shit. Because, to be honest, I like being less fat. I like it a lot.

My Secret Santa also gave me my gift on Saturday night, anonymously delivered in a jiffy bag by one of the employees. It is a Diet Coke bottle top and a roll of Mentos. XD If you don't know what happens when you put Mentos in Diet Coke, YouTube it.

Also, my hair is now short again. A bit shorter than I'd intended, even. That doesn't matter. It'll grow back – all too fast, no doubt.

What else? Finishing off birthday present for father. Almost all other presents are done. It's just the ones coming from overseas that I've still to receive and wrap.

I read somewhere that happiness is contagious, so take this! Ker-pow, right in the kisser!

I now fit a 36 waist comfortably. (Even smaller, if I hadn't inherited my figure from my father's side.)

I have a beautifully-wrapped present on the desk next to me, ready to send to the Laaaaahndoners. It contains dark chocolate ginger (grandmother's fave) and something-coated crystallised pineapple from health food shop, plus slices of fruit cakes and some posh crisps from the posh bak'ry along Oxford Road, in a nest of shredded letters and bank statements for protection. Classy.

I'm acing work just now, dropping good ideas left right and centre and generally making pages nicer whenever I touch 'em.

I've made a good start on the thing for dad, found an absolutely perfect public domain photo I can use for reference for the back part, and I still have lots of time, including this weekend, to finish it.

Speaking of this weekend, Backstage/GeekUp party on Saturday. Then Multiplatform team christmas lunch on Monday and Religion team christmas lunch on Tuesday. Also, I might go along to the Drupal UG this Thursday… although I haven't played with my installation at all, not even upgraded to 6.

I've had two responses so far to my offer of free piccies. Sadly both from kitty lovers, but what can you do… ;)

Life is pretty good. And I've just remembered I forgot to take my meds this morning, so it isn't even the chemicals talking.

I just joined the GeekUp secret santa thingy. Much fun.

You can guess roughly what my gift's likely to be. It's a £5 suggested value and I typically spend 2+ hours on a piece of gift art, not counting the sneaky research I do beforehand, so it's great value for my victim recipient.

I'm a lot less comfortable with receiving presents than with giving, actually! I'm not sure why. I think my profile's clear enough: "I like daft things, gadgetty things and things pertaining to dogs, red pandas or pangolins. Home-made things like mix CDs are cool. Comestibles would need to be suitable for a veggie non-caffeine non-alcohol drinker."

Herm Baskerville wrote:

[of an HTML form page] P.S. Thom, you have my inf^H^H^Heternal goodwill for including an "Other" option for gender. Hit one of my pet pedantries on the head, that did.

Fiona Burrows wrote:

Curious, pray tell exactly -what- did you put into the text box?

Herm Baskerville wrote:

"Neuter-creature from the planet Zog", naturally. :)

Fiona Burrows wrote:

Mystery solved!

Herm Baskerville wrote:

Teehee.

And more seriously (not that I don't seriously identify as neuter, although AFAIK I was born in Chester, UK, Earth), "gender" on forms really is one of my bugbears. It's just so… silly to use it as a polite word because, ooh dear, we don't want to say "sex" on government forms! ;) Inaccurate, too, because in modern usage it's a distinct term (e.g. one dictionary gives it as "sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture") and there are more than two options out there.

Of course, formwriters really can't win. Even "sex" isn't as simple as it seems, because what do you go on? Body parts – well, some folks are born intersexed. Chromosomes – lots of minority conditions there too, Klinefelter syndrome for example (XXY chromosomes). (Aneuploidy truly is a fabulous word, even though it can cause less-than-pleasant conditions.)

Oh, and I'm not on a campaign or owt; I just find this stuff, without wanting to sound too patronising, really goshdarn fascinating.

(quotations end)

Sorry to all activists, all right, but I have no intention of playing the mouthy, humourless "you must all be educated and stop being narrow-minded RIGHT NOW" gender animal. The above's the most you will get, and more than I intended to say.

Moral: On the internet, nobody knows you're a neuter-creature from the planet Zog. (And yes. That really is the phrase I use when asked. Except in more serious contexts, when "neuter" will suffice.)

*collapses in embarrassment*

Bye bye to the RSI that I haven't developed yet and don't want to! Sometime this week I'll probably be converting my preciousssss Model M to Dvorak and learning to type on it. This was my plan for a while and a discussion on GeekUp reminded me of it. Wish me uncharacteristically steady hands for the duration, folks, thanks.

This is at home, for work has quieter, flimsier Dell keybs and Clicky is not welcome there. I still type on QWERTY at work, of course, so will be developing that brain-partition thing. Also, the internet computer at home is the shared family one, so I may need some kind of hardware switch while I'm learning to touch-type (though hopefully XP Home can cope with 'hot-plugging' PS/2 keybs; I seem to remember it does. Come to think of it, isn't the stupid flimsy keyb on Bluewing USB anyway?).

I've found two sites: Dvorak Flash-based lessons and Dvorak text-based lessons. (Not tried either yet.) The latter at least should work offline so I could use it on my Win98 laptop if needed.

In unrelated news, my coworker's ex-battery hens have arrived. They look quite healthy, all told; I was half-expecting scruffy POWs with filed beaks. It looks like they've been out of the cage for a little while. An article in the RSPCA magazine I get sent for giving them money says that unhealthily enlarged combs are normal in ex-battery hens, and shrink after a while.

More about rescue hens: Battery Hen Welfare Trust

Well, most importantly, I learned that it's pronounced "droople". ;)

(Also that I'm in the minority by saying "micicle" where most people say "my-sequel". I can't resist it, though; it's too much fun to say.)

Other than that, while chatting to the organiser I brought up (what I guessed, from brief reading, to be) the main requirement I have of a CMS that could cause problems with Drupal's way of viewing the world. Thanks to having read through drupal.org in advance, I was able to convey this intelligently and ask the right sorts of questions.

*waits for disbelief to die down*

In brief, building on my last entry, this potentially problematic thing is creating sub-users as part of a user profile:

• a user can post as themselves (their main profile) on every type of node
• on some types of node, a user can post as any of their sub-users
• sub-users are switchable using a simple interface (with UI design issues here too, obviously)
• the switcher interface is only visible on the appropriate node types (this much I know should be easily done with *blanks and looks up the term* blocks or something similar)
• some site features are organised per user (user role/permissions, sitewide communication)
• some site features are organised per sub-user (though the main user gets one too) (blogs, 'profiles' which are also encyclopaedia entries)

For sub-user, of course, read "character". Aha, Ceiling Dog sees where I'm going with this.

I was told that I'm the first person to ask about this. Whee, I'm special! However, I'm also told that it should be possible, and that a module called Node Profile is what I need to look for.

Other random features I'll need — list may be updated as I think more:

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