am i the girl, the bat or the heart? you decide!

I’ve been working on a site that uses Drupal for a few months now. And I’m living dangerously with CCK, Views and, as of last week, Organic Groups.

I found this sharp moderation module (Modr8) last week, and then quickly realized that I wanted to be able to provide this moderation tool any conferences that wanted it! Enter the Organic Groups.

I’m using PostgreSQL for the back-end database, and so I’m used to being a second-class database citizen in Druplandia. This means that I frequently have to patch modules so that they use SEQUENCE instead of AUTO_INCREMENT, or get rid of the (8) after an INT type. So, when Organic Groups and the og_modr8 modules caused this bug to rear up, and I suddenly had a full-scale “blogs running backwards” problem on my hands, I wasn’t surprised.

Thank goodness for Brenda Wallace’s patch, which fixed everything up a short while later. What got me, however, was that the problem has had a fix (although not Brenda’s ultimate patch) for over a year, but it hasn’t been added to core. Particularly when the problem causes nodes to be presented out of order, site-wide.

Apparently there’s a shortage of PostgreSQL reviewers in the Drupal community.

Fortunately, if you’d like to help get patches applied to core, there’s a page of Patches To Be Reviewed, and a few people are trying to add a postgresql tag to bugs. If you’re a Drupaler and use PostgreSQL, please take a few minutes to review a patch.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Peat has already mentioned his newfound love of Plurk, a quirky new social networking site that I’ve been playing with. Now that Leo Laporte has endorsed it, they’ve experienced their first Twitter-style growth!

What I like most about Plurk is that it takes the great feeling of chatter you get in a lively IRC channel, and combines it with awesome threading - something that Twitter users have complained about for a long time. Hash-tagging has solved some of the problem, but I have to say that I enjoy a return to real threading.

So far, using plurk is immersive, silly and very fun. The service is still young (periodic 500 errors!), and there are a couple UI issues (too much clicking!). But, using it last night was fast and easy. There’s a definite difference between Plurk and Twitter in terms of attention-demand. I liked @brampitoyo’s plurk about it being “high-maintenance.” I totally agree, but it encourages for short bursts of creative conversation. There’s an intense, good intimacy created with the threads that I don’t see as often with Twitter.

In the first 24-hours, here are a few tips I’ve gleaned for getting the most out of plurk:

• Check out the Mobile edition: http://www.plurk.com/m
• Use Plurk with IM: Go to My Account, and then Instant Messaging to set up Plurk with your favorite IM client
• Follow ‘amix‘ for updates on changes to Plurk’s interface
• Create ‘cliques’ to only share your plurks with certain people. Then choose that clique when posting your plurk. Create a clique by going to ‘My Friends’, and then the Cliques tab. If you want me to add you to my #postgresql clique, let me know!
• Find people by their Twitter handle, by just typing it in at http://www.plurk.com/users/[handle]
• Respond to other’s plurks in the thread! You can do this on your main timeline page by clicking on the plurk, or you can go to the webpage for each plurk and submit a comment there — example: http://www.plurk.com/p/3bu0
• Check out the Plurk karma trends: plurk.ryanlim.com
• Read the Plurk FAQ: http://www.plurk.com/faq
• Check out ryanlim’s FAQ: http://plurk.ryanlim.com/help/index.php (includes a comprehensive emoticon dictionary :D)
• Got a suggestion for Plurk? Contact them!
• Of course, there’s already a Plurktionary!
• A Share On Plurk bookmarklet

A few features I wish Plurk had:

• A way to ‘favorite’ plurks I enjoy
• A way to ‘pin’ plurks on higher my timeline to give them more visual priority when they are updated
• A way to give feedback directly to Plurk.com through the plurk interface — why can’t I just plurk @plurk or @feedback to let them know what I think?
• More ways to post between services - although @shiny already has a drupal-powered twitter/plurk gateway!

Have fun, and feel free to Plurk me!

Please submit a talk! The call will be open for 2 weeks and proposals are due June 20th. Follow the link for details on submitting.

http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/400

PDXPUG PgDay will be on July 20, 2008. This is a one-day conference happening the day before OSCON at the Oregon Convention Center.

We are inviting anyone who has something interesting to share about PostgreSQL to send us a proposal!

We’d like to have at least one 1.5 hour tutorial and up to five 45-minute talks.

We welcome talks in any of the following areas:

* Case studies involving interesting and innovative uses of PostgreSQL from an application developer, PostgreSQL developer or administrative user perspective
* Converting from other databases to PostgreSQL
* Howtos for database administration tasks (partitioning, backups, replication, writing stored procedures)
* Practical advice on configuration, monitoring and database management

The biggest announcement for me was that the PostgreSQL Europe is finally a non-profit organization! I made a slide for my lightning talk with Magnus, Gabriele, Jean-Paul and Andreas on it:

I got a ton of great feedback about the User Groupalooza slides. I also enjoyed meeting Jean-Paul Argudo, a fellow Drupaler.

There were a bunch of community-focused conversations, some focused inward on developers, some looking out to the rest of the world from inside Pg, and others from the outside looking in:

• Bruce Momjian’s Keynote - Bruce looked at the future of Pg development from the perspective of a 12-year veteran. This was an inspirational talk, and many people referenced his thoughts throughout the rest of the conference.
• Andrew Sullivan’s Pg Project management - Andrew started a conversation among Pg developers about how development is *supposed* to happen, how it actually happens, and what the dev community might do to change things or leave them as they are
• Susanne Ebrecht’s talk on what PostgreSQL could learn from MySQL
• Lightning Talks - I did the lightning talk on User Groups
• Peter Eisenstraut’s talk on Release Management. This talk was a lot about the infrastructure and an overview of how the project manages software releases. It included a list of active developers, overview of what -core actually does, and descriptions of various duties people are performing to maintain postgresql.org and the associated services.

All the talks were recorded, so I look forward to listening to them again - without the distraction of Twitter!

A couple talks I thought were really great for web developers were:

• Magnus Hagander’s search.postgresql.org talk gave some great examples and code showing how to use PostgreSQL’s tsearch capabilities with a PHP-based website.
• Clark Evan’s talk on HTSQL, a REST-ful web inteface application. It looks pretty cool and I’m interested in trying it out. They are using it for medical records report generation and have even given the ability to generate queries to the end users.

Thanks so much to Dan who got me to the conference this year! I learned a lot, and really enjoyed meeting so many people that I’ve only communicated with over email for the past three years.

Lightning talks are some of my favorite sessions. I got to announce the incorporation of PostgreSQL-EU! We had a talk about DBIx::Cache (which you should all check out!), a cool open source lab in Japan that Hiroshi Saito works for (only for Japanese, but very cool), Gavin Roy talked about Staplr and a new benchmarking tool called Playr that was just released on Thursday, and six more talks! We hope to publish the rest of the slides shortly.

Magnus posted some photos already!

Summary of last night:

We had a great time last night at the pub for registration, and then over to the Yahoo! party. We had fun talking databases, beer, and the difficulty in trying to understand Australian accents. I learned from Tom (not Tom Lane) that Adelaide, Australia has a fantastic wine-growing region. Alvarro once again recommended that Jeff commit his time interval data type. I think Jeff was convinced to do this for 8.4. Now I have to update the documentation!

We have a few people who’ve joined Twitter in the last couple months and are posting their thoughts through the conference. Try following @crad, @fuzzychef, @franciscojunior and @selenamarie (me) for our up-to-the-minute updates!

I’ll be giving a lightning talk this afternoon around 5:30pm about user groups and PostgreSQL.

I’m still buzzing from BarCampPortland. I loved every minute of it, and managed to learn a ton from all the amazing people in Portland. I met a ton of new people, and started several more projects

Over the course of two days, I ran two sessions. The first was about PostgreSQL:

We had a fantastic discussion, totally filled the room up with people curious about what PostgreSQL can do. We had several requests for MySQL -> PostgreSQL “rosetta stone” documentation.

The second session was How to raise or eat chickens sustainably:

We had an incredible conversation - ranging from getting and raising chickens for the first time, to digging up your lawn and planting food, to gentrification, to obsessive local eating.

I also attended these others: DSLR, Bikes and Geeks Collide, Project Management, My Other Thing, Women in Tech, and a session at WordCamp.

I think it’s finally time to go to sleep. Check out a ton of pictures. Thanks so much everyone who attended, led sessions and volunteered this weekend!

In the meantime, I gave a presentation on lolcode to the Portland PerlMongers in April:

• PDXPUG - Portland PostgreSQL Users Group. I just spent the weekend with @markwkm and @gorthx at LinuxFest NW, a fantastic Linux conference. We met tons of people, made some new friends, and got a list of 15 people who want to be part of a new PostgreSQL User Group in Seattle! Also, there was a Tesla Coil. PDXPUG will host PGDay on July 20th, just before OSCON. It will be a day of talks, followed by a great party!
• User Group Liaison, PostgreSQL Global Development Group - I’m running pugs.postgresql.org. Our community is adding about 2 new user groups a month throughout the world. I’ve given 6 talks in the last month, and will be giving two talks about people and user groups at OSCON.
• PgUS - The United States PostgreSQL Association. I am Director, Treasurer and chief Guerrilla Marketing Campaigner (self-assigned title).
• Legion of Tech - Board member, and part of the Finance committee.
• BarCamp Portland - Fundraising coordinator, and trying to set up a long-term repository for conference notes, audio and video. We’ve got hosting of a super fast server from the Open Source Lab. Now I just need to finish configuring the website!
• Gardening. I really like gardening. I had great compost this spring from compostable food, chicken manure, lawn debris and dirt/grass we’d dug up from our front yard. We removed the last of the grass from the front yard, and I’m hoping to get some tomatoes up there soon.
• Chickens. I keep two chickens in my backyard and they are each laying 1 egg/day.
• ptop. I help hack on ptop, a postgresql monitoring tool written in C.
• PerlMongers. I regularly attend the Portland Perl Mongers and recently gave a talk on PL/lolcode - a lolcode implementation for the stored procedure engine inside of PostgreSQL.
• Code-n-splode. I helped found code-n-splode, a coding group dedicated to getting more women involved in programming.

What about you?