fen's blog

I attended a CiviCRM Developers Training on the 9th and 10th of September in New York City along with about 20 others including four members of the CiviCRM core team (Donald Lobo, Kurand Jalmi, David Greenberg and Yashodha Chaku).  The sessions were a mix of existing site presentations, new CiviCRM v3.0 feature demonstrations, and hands on configuration and coding.

At DrupalCon DC 2009 I co-presented a talk on Quality Assurance and the Drupal Development Process with fellow CivicActions' team member Nathaniel Catchpole. Here is our slide deck from the presentation, and a link to the Presentation video. We covered some of the ways that techniques such as User Stories, Acceptance Tests and SimpleTests can be used pro-actively, before trouble is discovered.

This Friday the 13th at 3:31:30pm PST, it's time to party like it's 1234567890 - 'cause it is! (UNIX time) Basically, most computer count time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 UTC. If u r geeky enough, throw a party! See 1234567890day.com for more. (Since I'm in Pittsburgh, I'll be partying at 6:31pm EST.)

Data mining systems like Google Analytics (used by some of our sites) that collect and analyze vast amounts of user data raise privacy concerns that need to be carefully considered when building community and social networking sites. As societal interactions rely on trust or reputation, it's important that this trust can be accumulated and even measured in a safe and secure way.

I've been wondering why Sarah Palin has been such a game changer as she's really a female McCain: anti-abortion, anti-environment, the list goes on. Why would people accept her, flock to her? Then I read this article by George Lakoff and it started to all fall into place. As with Bush, gut feelings are attracting people more than rational thought.

Google is announcing Friend Connect tonight, a service advertised to "help website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors." Friend Connect employs OpenID and oAuth which is a good start, but how it puts them together is lacking vision and, disturbingly, may raise significant privacy concerns.

Last year when we moved to Pittsburgh, PA we never thought that Pennsylvania would be so crucial in this year's democratic nomination process. We're an "Obama" family, so we decided to do what we could to help. I created a blog MamasForObama.net for my wife the writer and she's been having a great time with it.

From The Huffington Post:

The recent senate votes against restoring habeas corpus and for the Lieberman-Kyl amendment (which provides an open back-door for military action against Iran) make it clear that even with a democratic majority, you just can't trust any of them.

The writ of Habeas Corpus has long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard of the liberty of the subject (see, e.g. wikipedia and LectLaw). A brief history of its recent demise: