Willy Dobbe blogs

Brecht met schaar

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:42:44 +0200

Komt mijn dochter Brecht (4) binnen met een grote glimlach en een schaar in hand. Of ze zo ook mooi is...

Ik kon niet anders dan lachen toen ik haar goudgele lokken op de grond zag liggen.

KPN bashing iPhone (je wordt niet groot door anderen te kleineren)

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 08:44:09 +0200

Ik begrijp KPN niet. Ze maken de mooiste reclame campagnes van Nederland, melken het precies ver genoeg uit. Neem bijvoorbeeld de goedemoggel campagne; een hit over heel Nederland!

En toen deze net niet meer kon, werd hij van de buis gehaald. Maar na een paar maanden -precies op tijd- gewoon versie twee:

Ook andere uitingen van KPN zijn altijd goed. Zo rijden er duizenden autos rond van KPN met campagne teksten, hebben ze mooie namen voor diensten ("flexibel") en weet men gewoon al jaren hoe men B2B en B2C marketing moet bedrijven: echte marketeers met verstand!

Wat ik dan niet begrijp is dat er schijnbaar sub afdelingkjes zijn die zelf autonoom wat mogen aankloten in de marge. En dan krijg je dus dit soort advertenties online:

(adwords op Google)

(reclame op Amazon)

en op duizenden andere plekken vond je en week of twee geleden anti reclames tegen KPN, want zo zal de gemiddelde cosument het zien. Negatieve reclames worden geassocieerd met de aanbieder, niet met de concurrent.

De iPhone is een fantastisch apparaat, dat kan je niet afzeiken. Als je dat wel doet, dan plas je tegen de wind in terwijl je probeert te mikken op de digital bohemian. Twee keer dom, toppers moet je niet afzeiken, ze bepalen de maat en opmaat. En tegen de wind in plassen, dat maakt dat je raar gaat ruiken (heb ik me laten vertellen :-) )

Dus KPN, niet huilebalken dat je de geweldige iPhone deal niet hebt gekregen, maar gewoon goede dingen doen.

Lots of twitter tools

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:40:15 +0200

Over at twitter.start4all.com you can find lots and lots of relevant twitter links, API's uses, media coverage and other relevant links like this mashup of my timeline.

And you can find a list with "famous twitter people" in different countries. And guess what?

Yes, all famous people... and me

Google's Birthday and Drupal

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:14:44 +0200

It seems that Google is -more or less- 10 years old. To celebrate this, they have a timeline (more on that later ) and a project to do good; 10^100. Drupal.org was just around the corner, I registerd it in later 2001 it seems:
krokodil-boerland-home:~ bert$ whois drupal.org | grep -i created Created On:26-Apr-2001 11:42:11 UTC

But the real drupal site was drop.org (after "dorp" -village in Dutch- as the myth goes) and it 2001 it looked like this. Yes we needed a redesign back then as well

Google also has the Search 2001 site up, where you can -ego- surf and find results from 2001. Try drupal, the results are from January 2001. The first hit is an article on the PHPNuke site. Yek... I actually used that before switching to Drupal in those days. 5 pages of Drupal hits, 5! And most of them porn. Now you will find a lot more and more relevant hits (Results 1 - 10 of about 22,100,000 for drupal).

Looking back is fun. Some things you can laugh at retrospective, some things you can learn from. For example, the mission statement at that time was:
To develop a leading edge open-source content management system that implements the latest thinking in community publishing, knowledge management, and software design. We value flexibility, simplicity, and utility in our product; teamwork, innovation, and openness in our community; and modularity, extensibility and maintainability in our code.

Long as it might be, it was exact to the point and right, better then our mission. And I hereby plea to let it be our mission again!

Drupal and godaddy.com

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:17:16 +0200

Over at consumerist is some bad press on Drupal

GoDaddy demanded $6,579 from Adam Fendelman after his disk usage skyrocketed to over 250 GB without warning, vastly exceeding his account's 150 GB allowance. GoDaddy's security department launched a "full-scale investigation" and quickly determined that Adam was responsible for both the data binge and the extraordinary bill. Adam refused to let the matter drop...

The massive data splurge was apparently caused by a bug in the widely-used open source website management software Drupal, which, like a cancerous tumor, was unstoppably copying thousands of temporary files into Adam's account.

Short story: someone used lots of local disk space on godaddy's hosting service caused by a bug in Drupal? Apart from the fact that GoDaddy should have set a quota, should have had procedures and transparent billing / monitoring mechanisms, Drupal a "cancerous tumour"?

Anyone knows what was happening here? Is GoDaddy blaming Drupal and why? Core? Module? I sure as hell /never/ saw Drupal eat 250GB harddisk space and I would like to know what was happening and if it has nothing to do with Drupal- as would be the case I think- that this news should be corrected ASAP.

BTW: 100GB of storage is 6.000 Dollar over at GoDaddy? Another reason to stay away from GoDaddy like "the plague"!

Dries on the Advisory Council of the Open Source Lab

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:15:52 +0200

What do Apache, Perl, Drupal, the Linux operating system, Google, Novell, Acquia and Joost have in common?

Leaders of these companies / Open Source projects are now all on the advisory council of the OSUOSL as you can read on the advisory page at OSUOSL and Oregonlive.com

OSUOSL is -for those who don't know- the hosting and housing party of many open source projects, such as Linux (the kernel), MythTV, Mozilla, Apache, Gnome and yes... Drupal!

Dries on the advisory council is great recognition of his talents but more, important for Drupal. We -the Drupal community- now have a more direct line towards the OSUOSL, more the "just" on the operational level we now have a line towards a more tactical / strategical level. That and Dries (and thereby the Drupal community) now has an even better connection towards Apache, Perl, the Linux operating system, Google, Novell and Joost.

I have been in datacentre and Internet routing for a bigger part of my career and the service we get from OSUOSL is worth a couple of k's per month, and we get that for free! So you might want to sponsor rack 2 of OSUOSL and thereby getting even closure to Drupal!

Congrats to Dries (well deserved) and good news for Drupal as well!

Renew your Drupal Association Membership

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:53:27 +0200

If you are a member of the Drupal Association (and thereby helping the community and showing off you care about the community) you might want to check if you should renew your yearly membershipssfee! If it has been more then a year since you have paid, you should remove the cool "member" badges from your site! Or.... you could renew your membership at the association site!

Please do check to see if your membership is up for renewal and wear your badge with pride! Your financial support is important for the community.

Drupal Trademark policy in progress, please provide feedback

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 18:55:14 +0200

As anyone who visits Drupal.org more then one a year will know, Dries owns the trademark of "Drupal". Dries want this mark to be protected from The Bad People and to be used by The Good People. Since law doesn't really "see" good or bad people but good or bad actions, he had to write a policy on how and when you can use the word Drupal in a service.

For example, you are not allowed to say that you provide "Drupal Certification" programs, but if your company is called ACME, you are allowed to use "ACME Drupal Certification". This makes sense, we are not a MySQL AB or RedHat Inc; we are a passionate Open Source community. So you are encouraged to build your own brand "ACME" and lean on the shoulder of the Open Source giant Drupal, fair enough I think. Mind you: if you spot a "Official Drupal Certification program", you are encouraged to contact the Drupal Association and file a trademark issue. Also note that as an engineer you are probably better of a taring center that does not claim to have "Drupal Certifications".

Some might ask why it took so long to create this policy For those Dries / Kieran created an timeline explaining all steps. My own answer to questions with "when" in it, would have been "done is a four letter word". So if you want to make this policy better by asking question, hinting, dropping suggestions, please point your browser towards http://groups.drupal.org/node/15023 and read the post, the comments, the answers and step if if you think you can add anything to the discussion.

Woordenwolk Troonrede 2009

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:52:52 +0200

(Woordenwolk / tagcloud van de troonrede 2009. Groter op flickr. Volledige tekst van troonrede oa op ad.nl.)
Ik blijf me afvragen waarom "traditionele" media dit soort nieuwe technieken van visualisatie online niet meer toepassen. Zie ook Regaeerakoord 2007 in een woordenwolk en de krantenoplage in een tagcloud.

U bent minder grafisch ingesteld en wilt de raw breakdown (noisewords deleted)?

27 regering
15 zijn
13 worden
12 wordt
11 ons
11 mensen
11 meer
11 burgers

10 land
10 kunnen
10 jaar
9 zal
9 wil
9 dat
8 zorg
8 onze
8 2009
7 vertrouwen
7 niet
7 nederland
7 krijgen
7 goed
7 daarom
6 samen
6 nederlandse
6 komt
6 groei
6 goede
6 economische
6 deze

5 wij
5 vergroten
5 veiligheid
5 u
5 samenwerking
5 onderwijs
5 nodig
5 leefomgeving
5 kinderen
5 jongeren
4 werken
4 vrijheid

update: ik bedoelde natuurlijk: troonrede /voor/ 2009, niet van 2009

Drupal Association presentation from DrupalCon Szeged 2008

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:16:02 +0200

If you missed the Drupal Association session during last DrupalCon Szeged, see the video of Dries, Larry and me at archive.org. The presentation handles some of the basics of the Association and Larry answers many questions regarding the GPL and Drupal. Be sure to check this out and provide feedback on what you would like to know more about the association (for example in this posting).

Maastricht, DrupalTown 2009?

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:24:52 +0200

What made Szeged a very good place for the EU DrupalCon? Not the fact that it was a 2 hour train ride from the airport. Not the fact that it was in Hungary, DrupalCountry, region 4, language 2 on Google Trends. But the fact that is was a nice warm small town, you could walk almost everywhere, the fact that 1/3 of the population is younger then 25, the fact there was a nice festival happening, the fact that every 100 meters you could spot a Drupal nerd: the fact that a town could become a Drupal Town!

If you live in the Netherlands and want to make sure that the next DrupalCon EU edition will be as good, make sure you join our effort to let Maastricht become DrupalTown 2009! See our Drupal Nederland group posting "DrupalCon Maastricht 2009"

(more flickr shots)

Maastricht is located in the south of the Netherlands, close to Germany and Belgium. It is a nice old town, see the wiki entry, not too big and with a young population.

If you are from Germany, Belgium or The Netherlands, please help us out to nominate Maastricht to the Drupal Association by raising your hand in this node!

DrupalCon, planes, URL's, 10% and everything

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:50:48 +0200

This story start with a one dollar bill I found the last day during the DrupalCon Szeged 2008.

A dollar, I thought! This must be my lucky day! So I took it with me and decided it was my lucky Dollar. Little did I know.

We took the train from Szeged to Budapest at 10 a clock, 2 hours later we were at the airport and went for a small snack. We had plenty of time, yet - I am not going in details here - it was very frustrating to see the plane leave, to see the gate getting closed, with you at the wrong side of it. It became a very expensive snack, a bit more then a dollar.

We tried to get the next plane towards Amsterdam, it was fully booked. The next one was overbooked. So we got a flight to Vienna and then to Amsterdam. After checking in, going through customs again, waiting 2 hours, we found out it was cancelled. We got rerouted towards Muchen and then to Amsterdam. After 3 hours waiting the plane actually left the ground, one hour late. We missed our connection to Amsterdam and slept at an 4 star hotel nearby. Not that we enjoyed the hotel because we had to get up at 5 AM to catch the next flight. Only to find out ...

...it was cancelled. 28 hours after we left Szeged, we were at home. Most west coast Americans attending the DrupalCon were probably already in bed. It thought me however a couple of lessons. One of them I wanted to share. There was no single airline that was responsible for the chain of events or knew about it. Sabre

(the independent computer network that all airlines use) is great, they can realtime reroute any passenger over any airline towards any destination. Yet, it is not in use a trouble-ticketing system, airline B knew nothing about my history and when failing to deliver they happily transferred me to airline C. Nobody saw my complete chain of events, from A-Z.

This is a lesson I need to pickup; whenever you fail to deliver a service to a customer, try to place it in the chain of events the customer already experienced. It will not make the delivery better, but you will understand the feelings of the customer better.

Now regarding DrupalCon. Here is a small update. I really REALLY liked the conference. I talked to lots of people, attended more sessions then I planned, got active in a couple of BoF's and co-presented one with Larry and Dries. So here is a small update on stuff I found.

It is great to see that the -on the spot during DrupalCon Barcelona- made up number of 7% female is broken!

With 10% of XX chromosomes during the Con we do represent the number of females on Drupal.org versus the number of males. Sure, it should have been 50%, but as the great Rop Gonggrijp once said, if you are female and want to become a computer geek, you better start electrocuting your Barby when you were 5 years old. And not many girls do so hence the ICT sector could use some more females. With webchick being the co-maintainer of D7, the Open Source community also shows there is no glass ceiling for females.

But hold on, we might have hit 10% XX chromosomes, but can you see what is wrong with this picture?

10% female, but 99,9% white! I am not the pro-positive discriminating kind of person. But I think I saw 1 (one!) black person during the complete conference. If you want to break barriers, we really should look at this as well. 90% of all people active in Drupal are white males, 10% white females. So, lets make sure that the next DrupalCon will be more representative for the population using Drupal! After all, Open Source is there as the big equaliser; there are no secrets (only information that you dont have).

Some other thoughts on the DrupalCon. I really like the talk of Mark Boulton who will be doing the redesign of "d.org", see the video on the Association site. A right balance of humour and content can be very powerful. I loved the story Mark and Leisa Reichelt
pulled together. Leisa is however (see the video) very wrong on one part. And it is a classic mistake to make showing there is still a big gap between designers of code and UI.

Leisa claims that she was amazed to see that most experienced Drupal users typed the URL on drupal.org instead of navigating through the site with a mouse. Now, I am not claiming that the UI of Drupal.org is good, not at all. Mark and Leisa have lots of work to do to make it better navigable and we -as the community- a lot to keep it clean by having some kind of styleguide on how to address the user and a better policy on how and when to promote a story to the frontpage (if there is going to be a frontpage in the classical sense after the redesign).

However, graphical designers only look on how to navigate through a site within the site, this since they are CMS agnostic. What they do not count as usability is the browser chrome, you do not control it as a website and you do not need to emulate the browsers functions. However there is one small part of the browsers chrome that is related to usability; the address bar! It is used by the person on the site just as much as the mouse is, it infleunces the page and hence is part of usability. The fact that graphical designers -and this is not to bash Leisa in any way- do not think of it as usability only shows there is still a huge gap to be bridged between code and design monkeys. The address bar is part of usability and the fact that the functionality of a site is reflected in useful predictable URL's like /node/add shows this. We all have to learn here to help the user navigate what is best for him or her and we should be aware that most some people type faster then they can click: bofhmode]" The world's only useful point and click interface is a .44 Magnum" [/bofhmode].

BTW: someone wants a dollar? Free shiping!

Sign up for the Symfony Camp at DOP

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:03:19 +0200

If you are in to Symfony (think Ruby on Rails in PHP if you like that kind of lingo ) be sure to register for the Symfonecamp.com . A lot of good speakers, and excellent location and lots of fun. See sympfony camp snaps on Flickr. . And be sure to bring 42 towels since the pool is open!

"Dries is selling out!", all follow the New Leader

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:23:25 +0200

Open Source. Simple in principle yet can become very complex. For example Open Source is build by volunteers who do it for many reasons but for most "ego" is one of the important reasons. And since the value that created is so high, "money" is often another reason to use (and contribute) to open source. Ego, Money and Open Source, a match made in a very warm place.

Acquia is one of the companies that is acting within the triangle money, ego and Open Source / community. Not that Dries has a big ego, but he is a person / icon in the Drupal community and hence people look at him and his "ego". And the moment you are in this triangle -despite the fact that you have been working "for free" for 7 years in such a community- people will try to seek ugly things.

Take for example this wordpress blog entry. It is full of nonsense and maybe I should turn my head and look the other way and not comment on it per point since the complete point is nonsense, but then again, if people keep writing nonsense without being put straight, other people might actually hear the echo of "nonsense" as "sense".

Let me start commenting on some of the nonsense:

Acquia then announced Certifications and Partner Program. But now the most recent job postings show they are getting into Professional Services. This clearly shows that Dries and Acquia has started to find any possible avenue to monetize the brand Drupal. And as they add more offerings, the community feels more and more cheated!

Great detective work, and yes, the WP blogger is speaking on behalf of "the community" and (s)he feels cheated on. I would say, If you feel cheated on, talk to your partner.First, if there is a brand "Drupal" then I can not see why monetizing it would be bad. I know lots and lots of companies that make money with Drupal without ever giving anything back, code wise or money wise. They are free to do so, but the moment ego Dries does it, it is a problem. Once again, talk to your partner if you feel cheated on but do not talk for the community from your anonymous WP blog

Why does the community continue to improve and contribute code back when Acquia having bigger marketing budgets and despite being relatively new is being projected as the goto Drupal shop.

Because Acquia is -like al OSS shops- the shoulders of the community. And it is in the interest of Acquia to make this community better, faster and bigger so Acquia will raise as well. Acquia stands on the shoulders of giants, but is not pissing down its neck.

Where would Acquia have been had there been no Dries?

No Dries in Acquia? Then it would be a company (like it is now). No Dries in Drupal, then maybe within another OSS project. Where would Acqia be if the parents of Dries never met? I can not see what rhetorical questions like these ad anything to the discussion. And think about this for one minute: what if Dries decided NOT to work full time proffsional on Drupal but on another proprietary JAVA CMS?

Will Acquia release all the code they are building to the community? Can there be another “Carbon” like product if someone else puts in $10mm investment and compete with Acquia?

Yes and yes. Mind you, Acquia sells services, not code. The "Give away the recipe, open up a restaurant" model. Up to now, Dries made very clear that all code that is distributed (!) is under the GPLicense, copyrighted by Acquia or not, and they will distribute it under the GPL, see also the excellent license FAQ. I would say, raise 10M and compete with Acquia, you are free to do so.

Dries owns the “Drupal” trademark and also is a key stakeholder in Acquia. Will this not create a conflict in community who now see Acquia as a threat on any work they do?

The trademark "Drupal" is owned by Dries and protected by th Drupal Association. The upcoming policy for trademark policy will be the same for Acquia as it will be for SmallDrupalShop.

There are many Drupal Local User Groups where lot of innovation is planned, architected as well as later released back. Will this slow down? Why has there been no stable Drupal 6 upgrades of many good Drupal 5 contributed modules even months after Drupal 6 release? Has the community lost interest?

Once again, totally irrelevant for the Dries-is-in-Acquia-and-now-the-sky-falls-on-our-head discussion. CCK, Views2 and the D6 discussion have nothing todo with this. You know about CCK right?

Joomla was forked from Mambo. Will we see a new leader in Drupal who truely has interest in product and not get swayed away with commercial interests?

If Dries would piss down the neck of the Drupal Community this will happen, Darwin! And you are free to become The Leader With True Interest in the Product, please do so all the lemmings will follow you Great Leader. Since Dries is /clearly/ selling out and not working many many hours per week for "nothing" on Drupal (code, association and community)

Dries now does not seem to have time for Drupal.

Yes, only 21 status updates the last 24 hours despite Drupal Association meetings, attending a full DrupalCon, running his company and talking to dozen of people. Clearly no time for Drupal.

Please, stop trying pissing down on others with your zipper still up, it smells bad and makes you look funny.

Mail this to a friend, stupid functionality!

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:32:38 +0200

Every now and then, I get customers for my employer Dutch Open Projects that have the weirdest functional requirements. Do not get me wrong, the customer is always right but it helps some time if we can discuss and ask why they want certain functionality.

Take for example the "mail this to a friend" function that is still popular in many designs. First of all, it is stupid functionality. If I want to notify a friend about a page, I bookmark it to delicious. If I really want to make sure (s)he sees it, I use instant messaging and as a last resort, mail.

But I'll never use the mailservice of the website, I have to give my and his email address and I do not think that giving aways another persons email address is a good thing to do, and will never give away my address if there is no need to. Then there is spam.

All User Generated Content suffers from:

IP right problems
Trolls
and spam

Anything that can be used by spammers, WILL be used by spammers, including the "mail this to a friend" functionality.

To proof my point, see this mail I got. There is room for some remarks hence that is were the spam goes. And now, the "good" name of GE is associated with the spam and they did in fact send it to me. Stupid functionality (no-one uses it), stupid functionality (everyone can abuse it).

Mail-this-to-a-friend must die!