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Sad to see that there are no woman on the list, but still a nice list: Most Influential People In Open Source.

As part of MindTouch’s 2009 open source best practices research, we asked C and VP level Open Source Executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. Over 50 votes from Executives in Europe and North America were cast to determine the 2009 edition (note: they could not vote for anyone in their own company). What makes this list remarkable is that industry insiders were the judges.

And on number 5 we have Dries: Dries Buytaert created Drupal in 2001 and has led the software project ever since. He has guided it through rapid growth and to widespread acclaim. Dries is able to motivate the burgeoning community of users and developers by communicating ‘the big picture’ while paying careful and measured attention to the technical details essential to good software development. These two factors have been crucial to Drupal’s popularity and success to date.

While I do think that this list -like any other list- is debatable and biased to end users applications (with MySQL as an exception) and is missing people (Mark Shuttleworth should be on the first spot), it is good for Dries ego but far more important, good for Drupal.

How do you spell momentum?

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"Chocolate City"
Uh, what's happening CC?
They still call it the White House
But that's a temporary condition, too.
Can you dig it, CC?

(Chocolate City lyrics by Parliament, 1975 -pfunk at its best).

It turns out that CC became brown then blue. whitehouse.gov switched to Drupal. Anyone up for a photoshopped-mashup between Drulicon and the whitehouse? :-)

For the real deal, checkout Dries' site, that I found via

Not a great design (to put it mildly), but a great new name, HP Linux Community Portal on Drupal.

Via h-online.com

When you visit the DrupalCon Paris and have an iPhone you need to pack more then your suitcase and laptopbag. Do not forget to fill up your iPhone with some goodies. I shopped around and I do think that these apps are worth putting on your phone: (from left to right, up to down)

• , including integration with Google Maps and SMS services about delays
• , one of the best independent TV stations, in French and English, free app. (note: Do disable data roaming on your phone and watch this only when on WiFi).
• , information, maps, districts (arrondissements) information, photo's.
• , same as above but too expensive, don't buy.
• , Offline maps, handy.
• , Paris City Guide from Lonely planet. Expensive but good.
• (Skiping French, I should be able to order a beer or two in French, something like "deux biere s'il vous plaît")
• , if you are from Burma, Liberia, and the United States or some kingdom and you are not familiar with kilometers, euro's, celcius and liters, you might want to use this free app.
• Next on the list is a must have if you a free (aka jailbroken) iPhone, the ability to capture video n first and second generations iPhones. Just look for cycorder in cydia.
• , where to? is a great application to find restaurants and other places if you hav a GSM on your iPhone.
• , Flight Track pro is a great application for making sure you catch your flight.
• , Flickup is a flickr uploader from your iPhone.
• , Twitterrific is a handy application to keep track on your friends and follow tags. I hope the wifi will survive the 1000+ IP enabled devices on the DrupalCon.

At the conference the official tag(s) to used will be given out for your tweets, flickrs and other social networks contributions, but I do think i will be dcp09 so you might want to use that when twittering about the Druaplcon before day 1.

A word of warning. Please disables your ssh deamon on your jailbroken iPhone unless you think it is funny to walk around hunderds of nerds with a default root/alpine giving someone full control on your iPhone. And no matter how friendly the community is on many con's (in the city or even at the conference) hardware has been stolen, mine 3 years ago as well. So do keep an eye out on the security of your systems, both software and physical wise. Also make sure you now what the costs are of roaming and if you dont, disable data roaming on your phone!

Some time ago I saw Layar, a Dutch product from SPRX Mobile; a mobile uugmented reality browser. It basically is an application for a phone with a GPS, camera and compass where you can add a layer of information on top of your real world view; the camera. Right now it is out for the Android platform and soon it will hit the iPhones' appstore (3GS). By combing digital information on top of your real world view you can see geotagged information, for example prices of houses in front of you, ATM's or friends at a festival as is demo-ed in this youtube movie.

The possibilities of combining geo tagged information in combination with your real world view might not be new, but this application sure makes the most of the combination by using the GPS, compass and camera.

So I started wondering, apart from the application on the phone, this could potentially be rather easy in Drupal. You could expose your database / content via a webservice to the phone that displays them. All you need is Drupal core and CCK to add a longitude and latitude information in a content type and maybe use the services module. It is rather easy to do and I would love to work on something like this for a customer.

Oooh. And you need lots of information. Lots of local information since content seems to be king for this kind of functionality. But it sure would be nice for a DrupalCon to find your friends, get information about what is the current and next track in a room by pointing at it or get more information about the sponsors booth. The possibilities are endless, also outside DrupalCon's. This since DrupalCons should probably be held outside due to the lack of GPS reach inside :-)

But then again, if all rooms and people were tagged with the mobile codes the problem would be solved :-) And even the first gen iPhone can read them. Something to keep in mind for the next con... But first: vive la France!