From today's OLPC news a TEDxIIT talk by Laura Hosman, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Illinois Institute of Technology. Drawing from her experiences on numerous One Laptop Per Child deployments, Hosman explains our short sighted ways in thinking we can solve already ill defined and misguided problem sets by pouring technology on it. I think it's a lesson worth considering especially if you're involved in delivering technology solutions to solve a problem at any level.

I wasn't actually at this presentation but I am studying this module as I consider what my ideal workflow/state-machine module might look like. Check out the presentation here http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/workbench-managing-content-manage...

Demo 1 - "My Content" page for content management relevant to the user

"Obscures Drupal" so users don't have to learn how to use Drupal, they just see the content they are in charge of managing. This is similar to the Jen Lampton's Total Control Admin Dashboard module but from the screenshots but Workbench's "My Content" tab is user specific as opposed to a broad overview for administrators of the site.

Demo 2 - Hierarchical editorial groups

This is similar to what we've been tring to accomplish with subgroups. Because subgroups has never been proven (as far as I know, anyone using it with OG Spaces module?) we've had to rely on a flat group structure that does not allow us to represent hierarchical group structures. One of the reason we've needed such a sructure is not only to show users what the hierarchy of managed groups on users/content are, but to allow cascading permissions on content and also allow users to see content aggregated to the level in hierarchy in which they are viewing. For example, if a user has access to content in child group, user has access to content in parent group. I'm not sure if this kind of cascading permissions is possible with the Workbench Access module but it sounds like it does.

"Senators Charles Schumer and Joe Manchin are pressing officials to take action against Bitcoin... expressed their concerns in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Drug Enforcement Administration chief Michele Leonhart"

As the quote above describes, the news started breaking yesterday that US Congresspeoples have noticed the BitCoin currency. There is some noise about how the government will never be able to truely shut down the the BitCoin currency, I'm no expert to say yay or nay to this. I'm more concerned about something said in the comments of the post above: "Clearly won't be hard to destroy confidence in Bitcoin though, which will have pretty much the same effect." There are two assumptions made in that sentence, 1) If you destroy confidence in BitCoin, you destroy the currency; and 2) It is easy for a government to destroy confidence in the BitCoin currency. The first statement, could not be more true. Trust is the foundation of any currency, currency is afterall worth nothing when no one you know will exchange it for actual goods and services. The second statement, I'm on the fence about.

If the US government were to wage propaganda war on the reputation of BitCoin would they be successful? The effectiveness of such a propaganda campaign may be dramatically different depending on whether or not a government can find a way to manipulate/fuddle with the BitCoin currency. If a government can manipulate the BitCoin currency, whether that be with overbearing regulation or outright electronically attacking the BitCoin network, I have strong hunch that a government could choke the BitCoin currency enough to make the government's own currency an artificially more economical currency to use. Despite the risk of government fuddling, I'm particularly interested in what the outcome of an information war would be on a BitCoin type system that a government cannot manipulate. If the current BitCoin system cannot be touched by a government, could a propaganda campaign be powerful enough to dissuade its use? If so, how would that propaganda campaign look like? Who might be involved? Or, would the truth inevitably bubble to the top as people like me would like to believe is the case on the Internet?

Prompted by my Chris Bryant's blog post, Giving Back and Contributing to Drupal and Other Open Source Projects, I finally clicked the link on my Drupal profile to become a Drupal Association member. I noticed my profile's life was just over 3 years and I knew that wasn't right... I went for a password reset on an old email address and low and behold, rsteiner125 is the old me at the ripe old age of 4 years and 16 weeks! The user id on that account is #109263, and the rjstatic account I created a year later is #238054. The community DOUBLED in size the year I joined! Obviously, thanks to me ;). So what was I up to in my infancy year other than making the Garland theme look ugly? Apparently making money and Facebook apps.

The past four years have been absolutely wonderful and it's all thanks to the Drupal community. Thanks to all those working so hard at making Drupal even more fun to work with every day. And congratulations to Jacine who Dries announced yesterday will be leading the HTML5 Drupal 8 Initiative! It's such a pleasure to be working with a team like Gravitek Labs who have a great respect and understanding of what open source really means. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again at DrupalCon London this coming August! See you there!

*Note: ThinkTech.ca has gone down since I started writing this :-/. Good thing I grabbed the files and posted them at the bottom of this post :).

Occasionally I look into how to create diagrams in Linux and I have either been disappointed in the complexity (BOUML) or found the solution to be too simplistic (Inkscape's connectors only have arrows as an option). Today I ran across a good solution on Canada's ThinkTek's website that allows you to express cardinality in OpenOffice Draw. I found the directions in the article titled, "Crow's Feet Arrows in OpenOffice.org" to be a bit fuzzy so I've expanded on them here.

Here's an example of the entity relationships involved in Drupal's Organic Groups:

Step 1 - Download the shapes in an ODG file

Think Tech has provided them here.

Step 2 - Open the file, right click on one of the shapes, and go to "Line"

Step 3 - Go to Arrow Styles tab, click Add, enter name for this shape

• Note the picture in the background will not change to the shape you have selected until you press OK.
  

Step 3 - In the Line options for a line created by Connector tool will now have your new definition in Arrow Styles for each end of the line

Step 4 - repeat this for each shape

I would also like to give a shout out to Creately.com for making a great online tool for just this and more:

I came across an interesting post on news.ycombinator.com today about how Git will inconsistently apply patches depending on how you merge them.

The example script (see "a shell script") shows two examples where the same two commits when merged separately vs. at same time will produce different results:

Result when merged separately:

Result when merged at the same time:

While it seems like an unlikely scenario in code, it's definitely possible.

Graphing data in Drupal has been around for years in various forms but with Drupal 7 now on the scene we have some choices to make on how to move forward. All those who are interested in using Drupal to graph data, I propose we sit down and see if we can combine efforts by sharing what projects we are working on.

Even if you are not familiar with the current state of graphing data in Drupal your input is appreciated.

I hope to see you there and bring your lunch! :)

The BoF is scheduled on March 10th, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, in the Missouri room.

http://chicago2011.drupal.org/conference/bof/charts-graphs-drupal-lunch-...