I set up a couple of things last year to help organize my online activities. I might have some newer readers here who haven’t seen them yet, so here’s a recap.

One of them is a combined feed from this blog, Twitter, Vimeo, Ma.gnolia, and a few other services. I don’t always get around to blogging about whatever I’m working on, and not everyone reads Twitter, but you can subscribe to the amalgam at http://feeds.feedburner.com/spinnerin_tumblr (note: it says Tumblr, but I recently moved to Soup.io). This is the same feed that powers the front page of lifeofaudrey.com.

The other thing is a wiki page listing the online accounts I try to pay attention to (and ways to reach me, like email and IM): http://aeschright.pbwiki.com/HowToFindMeOnline. As the page says, they’re not the only ones I’m on, but if it isn’t listed, it’s a lower priority.

And then you’ll know things like the video about making cultured butter I made earlier this week.

I recently purchased a DSLR, something I’ve been interested in for quite a while (a Canon Digital Rebel xsi). I also finally remembered to develop two rolls of film from the Holga that had been sitting in the fridge a while. The contrast is amusing.

Here’s Robin dodging the camera flash on the DSLR:

A dinosaur in Arizona:

The Oregon coast:

Also the Oregon coast:

I’m not entirely sure what went wrong with the focus on the Holga in those images. I usually keep it set at infinity, but you can’t exactly look through the lens to know what you’re getting.

Much better focus, but the distortion at the edges is more Holga fun:

I can’t imagine having only one camera. I could put a weird lens on the SLR, but using film is part of what makes the Holga interesting. I like that some of the result is completely out of my hands—I’ll get what the camera and film decide. But I want sharp, clear, images too. I’ve been learning to work with RAW files. It’s a fun process.

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One OSCON session that made me think was “Does Open Source need to be organic?” The panel contained Brian Aker (MySQL), Rob Lanphier (Linden Lab), Stephen O’Grady (Redmonk), Theodore Ts’o (Linux Foundation). The session was less about business vs. community, and more about how to increase community involvement in your projects.

Brian Aker mentioned Launchpad, and the way that it handles code forks. Forks are integrated into the system using a new revision control system - Bazaar. The forks are front and center - allowing all developers on the project to add forks and update them, incorporating them in with the primary code distribution point. This model reinforces the idea that forks are natural and can be positive evolutions in open source projects.

My big take-away: If you want to increase community contribution to open source projects, provide public and easy-to use interfaces. Publish your API early and create pluggable interfaces! Let developers add functionality and publish their add-ons easily, both in your project’s development space and on their own.

The same principal can be applied to the people side of open source projects. In your organization, make roles, tasks and responsibilities transparent. Let everyone - inside AND outside the project - know what they could be doing to get things done. The mistake that many projects make is assuming that people know what they could be doing.

Think of the people-side of projects the same way as you think about the code. Documented APIs are the same as public mailing lists, blog entries and wikis that reveal what your organization is actually doing, and how new people can get involved. Roles and titles that are meaningful let people know who they should bring their ideas to. And that lowers barriers to participation.

Leadership is not just telling people what to do - it’s inspiring, facilitating and then getting out of the way of people who are willing and capable of doing things on their own. Community grown from inspiration, and then fed by encouragement, fun and recognition of accomplishment, are the ones that last. And these communities are the ones that I want to be part of.

One of the things I realized during OSCON was that I had yet to see a central place to point people to for info on running user groups and tech events, that wasn’t specific to a particular place or technology. There are sites on how to start an Apple User Group, and for Portland we’ve gathered notes on our local tech scene, but we could use something a little broader.

The Open Community wiki is a stab at addressing this. I’m particularly interested in collecting “how we did it” articles from people who have run successful groups and events, and resources like user group book programs that a newcomer might not know to look for. If you have something like this, please go and add a link. And forward the info along to any user group leaders and event planners you might know. I want everyone to be able to get out there and do something they’re excited about, without having to reinvent the wheel as to how to get a space, solicit sponsors, order food, keep a meeting running, etc.

I survived. I am mostly caught up on sleep. I have a whole Sunday left to lounge around playing Mario Kart and eating pancakes!

So here’s some of the fun from the week.

Schwern’s People for Geeks tutorial had everything from introductory etiquette to manager-speak to running a user group. I think I’ll be using the concept of tact filters frequently, to explain where geek / everyone else communications go wrong.

One of the presenters, Kirrily Roberts of the Geek Etiquette blog, has also just started a Geek Feminism wiki to track information related to women in technology/gaming/sf. This, combined with Geek Speakr make great starting points for anyone wondering how to get more women involved with their conference or tech events.

Ben Bleything’s Ruby and electronics projects always make me wonder why I still don’t have an Arduino. There’s links to most of what he talked about on his blog.

Selena and Gabrielle gave an intro to running a user group, complete with a short illustrated handbook for attendees (you can download it at the link above). I liked that they had us model some of the techniques discussed as we went.

I really enjoyed leading the panel on Tools for Local Communities. Thanks to Selena Deckelmann, Sulamita Garcia, and Michael Dexter for participating. If you missed it, you can download an audio recording.

This year’s FOSCON, Cooking with Ruby, was entertaining as always. Reid, Igal, and I gave a lightning talk on the Calagator development process. Notes here. The Rails team won the coding competition, with PHP/Symphony coming in second.

I gave a lightning talk on anarchy during the Art of Community session on Thursday.

Emma Jane Hogbin’s “Form an orderly queue, ladies” blew me away. There were so many things in there that I’ve been trying to formulate into coherent thoughts—now I can just tell you to check out her talk and join in the quest for open source world domination. Slides here and video from the version she did at LUGRadio Live.

Finally, on Friday morning I spoke on OPB Radio’s Think Out Loud, as part of an entire hour on open source. You can download the podcast if you’d like to listen. I’m on about 40 minutes in, but Raven Zachary and Rick Turoczy participated throughout the hour. Reading the comments on Twitter afterward was pretty entertaining.

After the People For Geeks talk, I presented “Running a Successful User Group” with Gabrielle Roth on Wednesday. You can find our slides and our presentation handout over on Bacon and Tech. The handout is pretty cool, take a minute and print it out!

I saw Dawn’s post about her Art of Community session tomorrow, and realized that not only is it already the week of OSCON, but I really ought to tell people about the things I’m participating in. How did we get to the middle of July already?

Wednesday (that’s today) at 5:20 I’m moderating a panel called Tools for Local Communities. We’ll be talking about our local open source groups and communities (spanning the US, Brazil, and Latvia) and what we’ve learned about making them go.

Tonight, I’m participating in FOSCON 2008, Cooking With Ruby, which starts at 6pm at CubeSpace. The highlight of the evening is a web frameworks cookoff between Ruby on Rails, PHP, Seaside, and Drupal. We’ll also have a fun set of lightning talks by local Rubyists.

Then tomorrow, I’m giving a lightning talk at the Art of Community session called “Friendly Anarchy”, about what I’m learned from participating in pdx.rb.

I’ll also be helping staff the pdx.rb booth in the exhibit hall, so stop by and say hello.

Here’s my slide deck from People for Geeks. Will be uploading to slideshare soon!

The talk is about leading user groups and steps for managing volunteers, and how to have fun!

The Portland Ruby Brigade is cooking up a great FOSCON this year, hosted at Cubespace. It’s all happening on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 from 6pm-9pm.

I’m going to miss some of FOSCON this year, but I’m hoping to catch some of the Live Coding Competition. In Drupal’s corner, Jakob Perry (of Ubercart fame) is leading the charge with Joshua Brauer. Ruby on Rails will be represented, as will a couple other web frameworks or content management system.

Rumor has it, Jakob and Joshua are going to rock this competition. If you’re a Drupal enthusiast, see if you can make it over to Cubespace to cheer them on Wednesday.

photo courtesy of Dan Browning

Registration for PDXPUG Day on July 20, 2008 is open! Please sign up and let us know what size t-shirt you’d like. We’re requesting a $20 donation (by cash or check) at the door. All proceeds to to Software in the Public Interest, a 501(c)3 organization that is used to fund PostgreSQL advocacy.

Registration for OSCON is not required to attend.

Registering also gets you in the door at the Gotham Tavern, our after-party location close to the convention center!

Our line-up of talks includes:

PostgreSQL Unit Testing with pgTAP - David Wheeler
Inside the PostgreSQL Shared Buffer Cache - Greg Smith
Muldis D - Portable Databases At Full Power - Darren Duncan
A Streaming Database Talk - Rafael J. Fernández-Moctezuma
Using GLORP to connect Squeak Smalltalk to PostgreSQL - RandalSchwartz
Fighting Disease with PostgreSQL Full Text Search and JRuby on Rails - Mike Herrick
All Your GIS Are Belong to You - Abe Gillespie
What’s PgUS - Joshua Drake

Sign up today!

So busy I haven’t updated my blog since May.

Since the last post: I co-organized Ignite Portland 3.
I staffed the pdx.rb booth at RailsConf.
I’ve been participating in biweekly Calagator code sprints (we’re hoping to have our 1.0 release in just a couple weeks).
I set up a few local Labyrinth training sessions for The Lost Ring, an ongoing ARG.
And then there’s the day job. No wonder I’m feeling exhausted and a little burned out.

What’s up for July?
Finishing the Calagator 1.0 roadmap.
OSCON. (I’m leading a panel on Tools for Local Communities and I need more participants. Know anyone doing interesting things with their local open source group? Send ‘em my way.)
A trip to the coast with Lucas to celebrate our fifth (!!!) anniversary. (Mom, can you catsit while we’re gone? It’s .. um, this weekend.)
My birthday is next week, which means I need to make more than vague plans if I want anyone to come do stuff with me … pub crawl on the 19th, anyone? (wishlist here if you were wondering).
Getting WhereCamp PDX planning off the ground.
Playing with my new camera.
Five-zillion other unfinished projects I am likely to forget.

In August? I plan to sleep. A lot. And stare blankly at the ceiling.

Download mp3 (2.23 MB) (or subscribe)

Embarrassingly, it took a lot longer for me to realize that the first song on Reconstruction Site is a sonnet than it took for me to write one.

Another day’s insistent rays incite
my grudging eyes to open, blurring red
dawn-glow with blood. I stumble from the bed;
I squint; I groan; I try to stand upright.
What drug, what magic spell makes sun less bright?
This water glass will have to do, instead.
One sip, and stars explode inside my head.
I blink; I stall; I drink it all in spite.
But when I’m done and set it down at last,
I see that it was magic all along:
a thousand rainbows dance across the wall.
The morning sun, refracting through the glass!
Both optimists and pessimists are wrong.
The glass, all empty, turns out to be full.

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.

I’ll keep updating this as I find new things!

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!

(Photo from PgDay 2007)

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

In 2004, by some unbelievable stroke of luck, my band got to play a show opening for John Vanderslice at Gardner Lounge. Gardner, if you’re not familiar, has a rich and Pabst-steeped history: the Smashing Pumpkins were there in 1990, opening for the Lemonheads on what I think must have been their first actual tour outside of Chicago; the Reputation played an eight-song set there in 2003 that launched my long love affair with them; the Mountain Goats came through last year. Every Gardner show is free, all-ages, and open to the public. Truly, we were standing on the shoulders of giants.

We kind of sucked.

But it’s okay! Because a month ago, I asked you a question: “Should I post an embarrassing video of my band on YouTube?” And you, dear reader, answered with a resounding “hell yes”. So here we are. And here we were:

And there you go. And because this is kind of a cop-out and not a real Shoebox Full of Tapes update, to tide you over until next time here’s another video in which I play music. Sort of.

PgCon was a very exciting conference, with a lot of people from Europe, Asia, Australia and South America traveling to be part of it. I read that 175 people attended, and based on how crowded both parties were, it’s not hard to believe!

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.

• @gorthx happy birthday! #
• @br3nda i don’t! but i will see if i can track one down here. #
• i may have gotten one twitter convert this evening. pg folks keep asking me how it is different from IRC. i ask them where the RSS feed is. #
• @SharonG you crazy! #
• @PortlandPolice might be into this postgres talk - http://is.gd/k3e - if they were into that sort of thing. #
• @markwkm i love cutting my own mats. #
• @petdance whatevs! excuses! #
• @Crad I’m going to use that one tomorrow! #
• so sleepy. @Crad: you’re on! c u in the morning. #
• Headed out 4 breakfast #pgcon #
• watching bruce momjian give the keynote at #pgcon #
• if you’re interested in more #pgcon coverage, follow @crad, @franciscojunior and @fuzzychef #
• there were 26 people at the postgresql developer meeting yesterday, many of whom have been part of the project for 7 years or more #pgcon #
• in andrew sullivan’s talk about postgresql development and project management #
• lots of software development is about taste. so arguments happen about ‘ugly code’ #pgcon #
• alan cox: by the time the code is written you already need the feature. OSS is always late! (OLS keynote from 1999) #pgcon #
• just got info for a cool postgres community announcement, more this afternoon! #
• a. sullivan sez postgresql core code is good, good ansi compliance and good code review (although we need more reviewers!) #pgcon #
• “postgresql is code with a bald spot, it’s getting old!” a. sullivan #pgcon #
• “postgres needs users…” some companies are willing to implement features that we may not want, but lots of users want them #pgcon #
• wishing @eggyknap could be in ottawa! you could be giving me a lolcode tutorial on all the new features #
• if we started the pgsql-roadmap mailing list, it would be a flamewar #pgcon #
• part of what makes the project is good is that flamewars are avoided - maybe because we avoid big, vague feature discussions #pgcon #
• @fuzzychef oh, it’s not so bad! better tools!! #
• in horizontal scalability with postgresql by jack orenstein from Hitachi #pgcon #
• talk is about a fixed content storage system, HCAP, originally created by Archivas #
• @Crad great minds think alike #
• jack’s architecture overview slide says “not drawn to scale” #pgcon #
• @aurynn that is some serious twinsight! #
• @aurynn wish you were here at pgcon. i’ve been chatting with others about how twitter has filled a void many of us have had re: peers #
• @Crad @fuzzychef you should all follow @hashtags and mark your tweets with #pgcon #
• @Crad @fuzzychef then your posts will show up here http://www.hashtags.org/tag/pgcon/ #
• in susanne ebrecht’s “what postgresql could learn from mysql” talk #pgcon #
• how did mysql get market share? early versions available on windows, great interoperability with PHP #pgcon #
• loving the eierlegende wollmilchsau in susanne’s slides #pgcon #
• @theory OMG. i never realized @petdance was trying to be a moose. *slapping forehead* #
• i don’t agree that marketing is an attempt to sell bugs as features #pgcon #
• in synchronous log shipping replication by ITAGAKI Takahiro #pgcon #
• had a great convo with @decibel about tracking user questions and problems on pgsql-general and the irc channel #
• oh cool! the NTT guys are talking about releasing their log shipping tools as open source modules for postgresql #pgcon #
• @xolotl try http://is.gd/kr6 #
• in magnus hagander’s search.postgresql.org talk #pgcon #
• Retweeting @amyrsward: WomenWhoTech Portland Potluck Picnic in the Park! 6/22, 11 - 2. Mark your calendars, ladies! http://snurl.com/2a5ek #
• used PHP for http://www.postgresql.org because you can totally ignore encodings #pgcon #
• @verso you totally can! i wish they had an upcoming event instead of facebook, but maybe we can just put it in the Calagator #
• search.postgresql.org doesn’t map email addresses, but you can search on full names from the email headers #pgcon #
• @amyrsward is it cool if we put the event in the calagator? #
• @theory yeah, they are broken. but i think that there are too many pages that are broken to bother fixing it. #
• @theory but we’re volunteers! #
• lightning talks were awesome!! #pgcon going to enterprisedb party shortly. #

I gave a Lightning talk today about PostgreSQL User Groups. I wasn’t able to get through ALL my slides - but I only had to rush through the last three. (click on the cat below to download - 5MB)

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.

One of my favorite blogs right now is The Runcible Bin, because each post is a small brain-dump of what the author is working on and thinking about. If I were to do such a thing, today’s would look like:

The Lost Ring!

Now that MetroFi officially gave up, can we have Meraki instead?

Calagator. Now with fewer memory leaks caused by bad parser code (vpim. again.).

If I said I’d give a presentation on fun with location tracking next week, does that mean I’ll actually manage to build a working demo in time?

Julia Nunes is the best cure for a grouchy morning.