Blogs

I spent last week in San Francisco, attending DrupalCon. Like many geeks, I prefer to have a laptop with me at conferences, so I can take notes, check email and work on stuff if I need or want to.

My laptop is a rather lovely HP 6730b with a lot of RAM that does a whopping 1680 x 1050 as native resolution. Great for graphics and having lots of terminals open - less great for portability. HP also seems to have taken the 12 cell add-on battery for it off the market, so it only gives me about 2½ to 3 hours of run-time (with wi-fi enabled) as well.

At DrupalCon I developed netbook envy, so upon arriving home I decided I needed something a lot more portable and with far better battery life.

I did a bit of research and found that all manufacturers offer virtually identically spec'd netbooks that contain an Atom N450, 1GB RAM, 250GB HDD and a 10.1" screen. The only point of difference seems to be the battery size, which ranges from 3 cell to 6 cell Li-ion.

A friend told me he'd just bought an Eeepc 1005P for just over $400, which is actually much cheaper than the competition. Sadly that was with a 10% discount campaign, which is no longer running. Still, the 1005P was at least $30 cheaper than the closest competitor and it does come with a 6 cell battery.

I was just asked if I was going to write a blog for Ada Lovelace day this year. And yes, yes I am.

Earlier this year I actually met a bunch of really cool women who work in technology jobs!

In no particular order (apart from alphabetically) I'd like to mention Angela Byron, Liz Henry, Emma Jane Hogbin and Brenda Wallace.

When you meet any of them, buy them a $beverage; they deserve it :-)

Well, I finally got a revision 1.0 out the door for one of my Drupal modules.  A fact I thought I'd celebrate with a blog.

The module with this honour is the most recent one I started, userpoints_evaporate, just over a week ago.

I guess it's a nice example of why open source is cool. Someone on the #drupal-support channel on Freenode asked if anyone knew whether an existing module could do what he wanted, which was essentially use the UserPoints module (which works kind of like karma on Launchpad) to automatically expire a set number of points for all users every hour or day (again, kind of like karma on Launchpad).