I am a conference junkie. I love attending them, organizing them, speaking at them, planning to attend them, seeing my friends at conferences, making friends with the nice (but often stressed) people who run conferences and so on. I even like eating the (often bad) food - kvetching about it builds a sense of camaraderie with the other participants.

Given how much time and money I spend on conferences already, it might be hard for you to be able to get more money directly out of me. However, here is one small tip on a way that you might be able to do this.

When you send me email about upcoming events, send me links to useful feed as well. Many of you are technologists who run technology conferences for other technologists. For Zarquon’s sake, use the common pieces of technology that many of us use.

What would such feeds look like? Well, to answer my own rhetorical question …
…

Imagine you and your friends have a project and a website each. You are likely to look for ways to increase the number of visitors on your site that are actually interested in your project. And you don't want to spend a lot of money on it. Additionally, you probably don't mind helping your friend's projects along the way (since you have been blogging about it anyway).

Suits you? Thought so. Read on, this is for you. Ad Mates revives the old idea of web-rings (remember 1997?) and gives it a modern polish as well as fundamental change in thought. It works like this:

• You all join a group (signup is free),
• create advertisements for you projects,
• add a bit of code to your websites and
• Boom, you show each other's ads on your sites.

So far so easy, but why is this noteworthy? Because Ad Mates is based on the idea of …

The titles of the videos look very much like “must watch”. Found via ThinkPHP, thanks.

I'll be speaking on using Drupal with Adobe technologies such as Flex, AIR, and Flash. The event is totally free but you must register.

DrupalCampLA - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/221082/

Last weekend, Damien committed the results of a few weeks worth of intensive work on CouchDb to the public Subversion repository.

Fabric is no longer

To speedily gain access to your documents in CouchDb, you create views that define a certain structure. Up to now, Damien's home-grown Fabric language was used to describe the views. This is no longer the case. You now simply use Javascript functions to do it.

XML's gone too (thank god)

For a couple of months now, we were discussing the merit of switching from XML to JSON for transferring data from and to CouchDb. The only advantage of XML was that it was in already. JSON, on the other hand, would add so much goodness that we just …

I've too been to FrOSCon last weekend. Considering that I announced to give a talk there, this should not surprise anyone. FrOSCon is a two-day event at the university of applied science of Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. It is very well organized (a multitude of volunteers guaranteed that everything went smoothly) has a friendly atmosphere that makes it very likeable.

Apart from meeting some friends I haven't seen in quite a while (there was a lot of catching up to do), I gave a talk about CouchDb. It didn't went as well as I wished but I think it was okay. I even got a few people interested and playing with it.

The FrOSCon officials counted around 1,100 attendees over the weekend, but at no point the conference seemed crowded. This was only the second instalment, but they apparently already found their key to success. FrOSCon is a valuable …

Last weekend saw the second installment of the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) in Sankt Augustin. The conference revolved around a rich schedule of talks, highlighting current topics in Free Software and Open Source. Moreover, Open Source projects took the opportunity to organize their own meetings or even their own lineup of events. Just like last year, the PHP usergroups of Dortmund and …

I came across this issue sometime last year, got the solution from the resident Emacs wizard and forgot about it. Last week, it happened again. I'm recording it now so I don't forget about it.

Emacs lets you search and replace in a buffer with regular expressions. So far so cool. I needed to replace a part of a lot of HTML links in a file.

<a href="/path/to/file" title="some title">Go!</a>

was to become

<a href="/path/to/file" title="other title">Go!</a>

with varying values for the title attribute obviously. So I searched for

    <a href="/path/to/file" title="([^\"]*)">Go!</a>

and Emacs complained about some invalid regex. Darn. I double and triple checked all necessary escape sequences (which I omitted here for clarity) and finally asked the wizard.

Easy, Emacs doesn't konw the * quantifier. Do …

Sysadmins love top. Now it's time for mod_top. From the homepage:

mod_top is a production monitoring tool for LAMP applications with user interfaces modeled after the popular unix top. mod_top plans to support PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, mySQL, Postgres, Apache1+2 on Linux.

mod_top is a PHP extension that is able to monitor PHP 4.4.x and PHP 5.x based applications. Sounds cool. Unfortunately it seems there's no source available, but the FAQ says that mod_top is free.

I'll be giving a condensed version of my Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDb-talk next sunday (26.08.2007) at FrOSCon. The fine folks of the PHP Usergroup Dortmund got assigned a room to present all things PHP over the weekend, including a set of presentations. This is where I talk, this is not the main presentation track of the conference.

Condensed, eh? — Yeah, In Dortmund and Zurich before, I had plenty of time to talk and …