November 7, 2009

Social Experiment for Prizes! Yellow ribbons and red balloons (messin’ with DARPA)

DARPA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia
Image via Wikipedia

So; someone pointed me to a rather interesting contest by DARPA, the DARPA Network Challenge. Now, I appreciate what DARPA tries to do as much as the next guy (basically throwing money at problems hoping someone finds the solution).  But, this context in particular struck my fancy; socially organizing a way to find, locate and then tell the government where something is for a prize.  Granted a bit of big-brother outsourcing, but I found the idea curious nonetheless.

Basically, DARPA is going to place 10, 8′, red, anchored weather balloons around the US; and thenwants people to use social networking to find them all and report in for a prize.  One thing I instantly thought of, is “hey, I want to do another social experiment”.  So, here’s the skinny: For each person that hangs up (within their local laws, legally) an 8′ red weather balloon somewhere visible in the US and provides a photo I’ll list you here and send you $15 US via PayPal to cover your expenses and buy a fancy coffee (up to a max 15 entries).

What’s the point?

  1. To give DARPA another angle to deal with, dealing with extraneous data… it is social networking after all :)
  2. To show just how fast ordinary people can get out there and organize when needed.
  3. Hey, it’ll be funny too ;)

Let the balloonigans begin!

Edit: Yes, things that look similar to 8′ red weather balloons do count, including painting a similarly sized white balloon red.
[and just one more note to do this legally, don't go setting up the balloons on someone's else lawn without permission, etc]

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January 16, 2009

Admin Role: Another Drupal Module That Just Makes Sense!

If you’ve been using Drupal for any amount of time you’ve probably ran into the problem of needing to go to the access page each time you enable a module to ensure the admin users have permission to make full use of it.  This is a module that I was planning to write, but then I discovered JacobSingh had already made it; Admin Role is another Drupal module that everyone needs, because it solves this basic but anonying–and sometimes time-consuming–problem.  

Admin Role creates an “Administrator” user role, that it then manages to ensure that this role always has all permissions.    Admin Role is a light and very clean module available for both Drupal 5.x and Drupal 6.x sites.  You can pick up the latest versions by visiting its project page at drupal.org.

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November 11, 2008

Drupal Core Diaries: The 6-pass patch review | webchick.net

Lullabodies

I came accross this today on Angie’s blog, and had to share!

I would love to see a series of blog posts from Drupal developers on patch review strategies they employ, so we can share some tips and tricks and ramp up our collective review IQs. I’ll start it off with mine. I call it “The 6-Pass Patch Review” (wittier names welcome! ;) )

Read the rest of Drupal Core Diaries: The 6-pass patch review @ webchick.net!

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September 11, 2008

All not well in the world of Drupal themes?

A graphical depiction of a very simple css doc...Image via Wikipedia

It seems Template Monster is now offering Drupal themes as part of it’s collection (it also previously offered Joomla themes).  Top Notch Themes was hot on their case, and showed some horrific tables-based markup and hard coded block CSS selectors in one of the Template Monster themes.

drupal4hu also brought up Template Monster themes, twice.  Looks like Template Monster is going to need to step it up a notch if they want to applease the Drupal community.  CSS based markup would be a nice start :)
And also, non-themeing related, if you want a humorous journey of browser identification themes, ending with Google Chrome, you’ll need to check this out!

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August 22, 2008

Security theater #1 – Using SSL for login | Heine

Heine from Drupal IRC was kind enough to explain the SSL issues that I mentioned here and here in much greater detail. Head to his blog for the full article. Thanks Heine!

Security spikes protect a gated community in t...Image via Wikipedia

A quite popular activity among Drupal site owners and extension developers (drupal, firefox) is to make sure certain page requests happen over a secure HTTPS connection, whereas the majority of request is still done over an unencrypted HTTP connection. User logins are typically the target of this effort.

Now, unless your really value your password (because you happen to be Ben Bernanke and use the same password for the documents holding the future interest rate), this is only going to give you a false sense of security. I know, it is still a very warm and comfy feeling, but it won’t be so comforting when some clown sees Mike Perry’s presentation and takes away your site.

Security theater #1 – Using SSL for login | Heine.

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August 20, 2008

GMking.org Blog » GMking.org and Teambuilding

Be sure to check out my post at the GMking Blog titled “GMking.org and Teambuilding“.  It’s a great read (imho), and provides some insights into the GMking team decision process.

April 11, 2008

My Latest Project; Podhurl preparing to launch into beta

It\'s a pod :o)I’d happy that I can now announce to the general community the project that I’ve been working on for the last month or so. It’s Podhurl. It’s a bit like Bryght, or the previous CivicSpace offering I worked on; a hosted, maintained, stable Drupal service. There are some very major differences however:

  1. When its launch into beta shortly, the option of Drupal 6 or 5 will be included.
  2. You’ll be able to install your own modules and themes, you won’t be locked out of the functionally that makes Drupal great.
  3. When the service comes out of beta, pricing will be tiered to be fair for smaller sites and Non-Profit Organizations.

You can register on the mailing list over at podhurl.com now to be informed when limited, free beta accounts will be available.

Note: subscription issue has been fixed.
April 9, 2008

If You Use SpeedPass, SpeedPay, Or PayPass – Beware Of Risks

SpeedpassImage via Wikipedia

Quite frankly, I can’t believe that I have to explain how insecure SpeedPass, or other similar programs, really are. This should be a complete no brainer for most consumers, but the population continues to be sucked into this scheme….

read more | digg story

March 13, 2008


My post on the future of Drupal QA is up on the g.d.o QA group:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/9727#comment-30480

Please read it over and comment!

March 10, 2008

Dries’ newly released Usability Testing first results (here) are in, and it does reinforce my previous point that even as we make the code and patch testing better (via unit tests), many other parts of quality have been overlooked for some time, and developers shouldn’t be the ones to force it on. (you can read that previous post here)

In fact, between this and some valuable feedback I received from those in #drupal, I’ve decided to outline a full proposal for moving Drupal’s Quality Assurance forward. As Karoly was kind enough to mention, just posting about this on my development blog isn’t enough :) . I’m writing that proposal now, and will be posting it in the Quality Assurance group at groups.drupal.org sometime tomorrow.

I should also note that contrary to some feedback I received from #drupal, I do think unit testing is a great thing, and I do think Drupal is doing good, and I do think we’re making progress (one of the (very) few downsides of open source communities is that people take criticism very personally, since everyone who works on Drupal does in a way feel it’s a bit of them ;) ) I was, in no way, saying that anyone wasn’t doing their jobs, just that we hadn’t recognized some of these QA areas as even being needed before. Alright, enough apologizing, I’ll see you all tomorrow!

(If there is anything you think the proposal should include, give me a heads up)

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