Well, the time has come. I am now sitting in my hotel room, counting the minutes until it is time for me to give my first talk.

I am very excited for the conference this week, as there are some very interesting topics being talked about. I am looking forward to a lot of the talks including the following:

• Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python
• Python 3000
• How to Herd Cats and Influence People
• Who Gets to Decide What Open Source Means?
• PHP: Bigger and Faster
• Hello? Is There a User in the House?
• GPLv3 for People Who Aren't Lawyers
• VIM for PHP Programmers
• Super-sizing YouTube
• When Interface Design Attacks!
• Next Generation Version Control Systems
• Writing Big Apps with Google Web Toolkit
• Subversion Worst Practices

I really would like to attend the Django Master Class, but it is during the same time as my tutorial. If anyone going to that would be willing to take good notes, please let me know. Thanks a lot!

Overall, I am very excited for the conference. On top of all of the smart people that will be around, all of the cool topics being talked about, and all of the great connections that can be made, I happen to be turning 21 on Thursday(7/26), so it will cap the entire week of with a lot of fun.

Woo! Time to have some fun!

I want to keep this short, but first off, I just have to say woot! My new B3 XO(don't know what this is? Check out http://www.laptop.org) came today, and it is beautiful. I thought I would take a little time and put up some pictures since I haven't seen any around quite yet.

The first thing I noticed immediately that is different is the outside of the case. The previous plain, white 'XO' character is now brightly colored! Check this out:

After I opened it up and got it started, I noticed immediately how much faster it is. Startup time was a fraction of what it took before, and getting into X was much faster. All around *everything* is faster about the laptop.

Being a developer of the Watch & Listen activity, I had to see how our media player did on the new hardware. After loading up Watch & Listen, and getting some content on the machine, all I have to say is one word. Amazing. The new hardware enables us to play videos at a *much* higher bitrate than we could before, and newer codecs that we couldn't even think about using before. Also, the new hardware fixed some X driver issues we were running into before. Look at this:

I am very excited about what opportunities the new hardware brings the Watch & Listen team.

I will try and get more photos up when I find a better camera. I happened to get lucky with these two.

Real quick, I have been hacking on the Drupal OpenID module some more. I have some new features committed and working due to multiple requests. The two major features I added are MyOpenID Affiliate support and allowing users to have multiple OpenIDs associated with their account. I still have a bit more testing to do on the latter, but currently it seems to be working great!

Please feel free to pull the code down from git(http://jirwin.net/git/openid.git), and try things out. If you just want to pull the latest package, feel free to grab it at http://jirwin.net/git/index.php?p=DrupalOpenID.git&dl=targz.

Cheers!

Update 1:
It would seem that I have i-names working correctly. If you have one, feel free to try logging in with =name, and let me know how it goes. If you already have an account, just try adding =name to your OpenID list under your account settings. Woot!

Update 2:
As per request, there is now a checkbox in the module settings to skip the user registration part, and just set the username to the OpenID, and attempt to pull an email address from the persona. Enjoy!

A few days ago in CS 419, a fellow student gave a presentation on how to setup Drupal 5, and showed some of its cooler features. After seeing it used in action, I knew that I wanted to move to it, for the sole reason of being able to incorporate my photo gallery into the same theme as my blog. And as you may be able to tell, here it is.

Well, it has been quite an adventure to get from good ole Corvallis to the beautiful Sydney. After 16 hours in a plane, we finally landed, and started our expedition in the 'down under'.

Right now, I am sitting here in the Gnome Mini-conference listening to Nigel Tao go through some of the lesser known interface features of Gnome. Fun times!

Throughout the conference look for a lot of these little short posts as I don't have internet access in my hotel room, and I don't want to spend much time on the computer during talks.