Living with the me…

Using Drupal to run Warner Bros artist sites. One Drupal install runs many many sites.

50 sites based on same code base and module stack. All code managed with subversion. Still have db synch issues between development and production db’s.

Brainstorming/Discussion about technology and the use of it in politics. Eric Bidwell is presenting, he’s running for SD mayor. (look up Twitter balloon widget)

I need to collect some links and post them here.

Kicking off with talk of nodes and references…I may be in over my head. Yep, in over my head…I need more basic Drupal experience before I get all up in this. Now demoing the use of Panels to layout Drupal pages. I need to study.

I’m excited about this one. I believe it’s the sandwich presentation that I missed at BarCampLA. That might be the best thing about having another BarCamp relatively close…I get to see presentations I missed at BarCampLA.

Be wise in your sandwich construction. How do you stack the ingredients? Don’t make your bread soggy. Think about the various characteristics of your ingredients. A random person has been picked from the audience to build a new sandwich that they have never created. The pressure!

And now, it’s opened to the group to come up and make a sandwich like they have never made.

Rant Radio started out as an indy internet radio station. Wanted to deistribute information so they can do something with it. Sort of an answer to the main stream media type of thing. Their idea is you shouldn’t complain about the media, you should just replace it. They’ve built up a space in SL where they can meet, hold live interviews and broadcast audio. They’ve also built an activist memorial. They’re in the Archer sim (I’ll update with a slurl later)

Interesting fact:
These guys use SL to meetup and the three of them had not met in person until this weekend. They’ve been talking thru SL for months.

I’m attempting to collect my thoughts. I was playing GTA4 til 3am. Oops. And then I slept til about 8ish and woke up with a teensy weensy headache which may or may not have been the result of beer and a little bit of whiskey. (Jason’s fault) But now I have coffee and I gave my presentation even tho my perfect setup that was working last nite was not working this morning. I hate technology.

I adjusted accordingly and held a discussion on OpenSim and Second Life and things surrounding the virtual worlds. I was hoping to demo OpenSim but it’s decided to not let me login to my very own server setup. Ah well, next time. I had about 8 people in my little talk and all but one knew little to nothing of Second Life so it was a good discussion about the world.

Now, I’m hiding in the blogging room until I hit the 12:00 session. Noon came fast. Geez.

Pics are uploading to Flickr and I’ll recap last night’s events a little bit later.

I just skipped the 4:30 session to catch up on the blogging bit. I was taking a lot of notes but I should return the posts and spiff them up a bit.

Cloud computing vs Traditional data center with a lot of number and graphs and such. Plenty of detail to help make the decision on whether or not to use EC2.

S3 is so cheap it’s a no brainer if you can store stuff remotely and latency isn’t a huge deal.

Actual hardware seems to be twice as fast as the EC2 machines in I/O tests however as a webserver the EC2 large and xlarge compare with the Dell PowerEdge he used as a comparison.

Great comparison of EC2 and hosting a server in a datacenter. Cost breakdowns all the way to the hour to compare to Amazon. He projected 3 years on everything. I think there’s a couple of factors not worked in to the charts and graphs like, how many man-hours you save when you use EC2 because you never have to visit a datacenter. He did take into account extraneous hardware like switches, cables, racks and other services like bandwidth and power. Cloud computing is very viable option for a lot of situations. That said, it must be carefully examined when figuring out if it will work for an application.

Great presentation that possibly saved a lot of people a lot of work.

A talk on wireless security.

Most wireless routers come with WEP not only available but enabled by default. As I learned today, WEP is a deprecated standard and shouldn’t even be supported and yet, almost everyone is using WEP at home.

I actually wanted to sit on this so I could tell people I know why they shouldn’t use WEP in their wireless configs.

There was a lot of detailed talk about encryption schemes and how WPA and WPA2 work and why they are so much better mostly due to the use of PSK for generating keys. WEP, as demonstrated, is really horribly weak and if anyone took 10 minutes to learn this stuff they could probably crack any router with WEP.

After a lot of tech talk about WEP’s specs the presenter cracked an access point that he had brought with him in about 30 seconds. He ran a script that sniffed packets and then began inserting its own packets into the wifi signal. After about 15 seconds of that it had the key for that router available. Kind of an impressive demo…looked a little like magic. Black magic of course.

A couple of guys from Devbee where holding a conversation about Drupal. A lot of basic talk about Drupal development not only on the user side but also what the core team is doing and how they’re developing the core much faster than the plugin and addon devs can keep up. The problem is the addons are sort of crucial and not necessarily ready for the revs that come out of the core. Their advice, wait for Drupal 7 (instead of upgrading to 6)

Look up Drupal school for learning the basics of Drupal. Apparently they have lots of nifty video tutorials.

There will be another session on Drupal with these guys to dive into some specific Drupal dev.