GigaOM Structure 2010 Panels

I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the recent Structure 2010 conference by the GigaOM folks. It was actually a great event, extremely well organized, with a bunch of industry luminaries touching on some of the key issues facing the Cloud computing industry today. The signal to noise ratio was extremely high!

For my part I was originally asked to be on the BigData panel, which given my background makes sense! The panel was actually not too bad, but (as with many of the panels) there was a heavy vendor line up and although I think everyone did a good job in trying not to purely “sell” their company, the discussion inevitably drifted that way sometimes.

More exciting was the Guru panel which was made up of a bunch of folks running some of the biggest and most complex websites in the world. No vendors meant we could get to the crux of some of the meatiest problems out there. This one was a lot of fun!

Jedi Certificate

Jedit Certificate

A while back my wife organized a fantastic Star Wars themed party for Alexander’s 5th birthday. As part of the festivities there were a number of trails that the kids had to do to become “Jedi Knights”. I scoured the web for a certificate that I liked but couldn’t find one so I ended up creating one myself. It turned out pretty well, if I don’t say so myself! Feel free to use it if you’re doing something similar, you can download it here.

Ajax Login module for Drupal

One of the design features for the new Developer Exchange site I’m working on was to allow the users to be able to login from anywhere on the site and not be forced to click through a number of pages to return to where they were previously. This would seem a simple enough proposition and easy to achieve with Ajax.

However, amazingly enough, despite the plethora of extension modules for Drupal there was nothing that simply turned the login process into a modal popup and performed the login via Ajax. Indeed, scanning the search results at the Drupal site showed that I was not the only person who was after this functionality and that it was in quite high demand.

Not to worry though! Drupal is amazingly extensible and very easy to work with, so I set about writing my own module to turn the login process into an Ajax modal dialog. Using the excellent jQuery Thickbox plugin and a smattering of Drupal hooks I was able to quickly put together what I needed. The results is the AjaxLogin module, which can be simply dropped into your Drupal installation and enabled via the Admin interface. When a user clicks on the login link, a modal popup is displayed as show in the picture below.

If you are interested in using the module, then you can download it from here until I am able to get a Drupal CVS account and contribute it to the project.

Warning

Using both the standalone Ajax Module and AjaxLogin at the same time will cause an infinite loop in the browser. Disable the login support in the Ajax module.

A new year, a new wordpress version

I figured it was about time I updated my Wordpress software. 2.7 has been out for a while but I didn’t feel the need to upgrade since 2.6 was working very well for me. I recently had to set up a new blog for a new site I’m working on, so obviously I downloaded and installed 2.7. All I can say is WOW! The admin UI for 2.7 is stunning in its design and incredibly easy to use.

Perhaps it’ll spur me to blog more

One of things that I absolutely love is the new plugin installer. Now there’s really no need to go outside of the admin UI to do pretty much everything I need to keep my site up to date. It does that mean that good ol’ Cyberduck might start to gather dust though!

iPhone Stop Motion movie

So I got a little bored in a meeting this week. One of the new guys I’m working with, Lee, had brought in a bunch of art supplies for a design meeting and I got a bit carried away with the play-dough! The result was this short iPhone stop motion movie. It’s not exactly ground breaking, but was pretty fun to put together. The final movie was created in iMovie, which was ridiculously easy to use.

Bowled Over from Todd Papaioannou on Vimeo.

Damn Time Capsule

I got Time capsule errors again, but this time even my own advice did not work. I was forced to resort to a format and start again. Grr! What a PITA. Plus, the first backup took like 18 hours!

iPhone Battery life

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and one thing that I have noticed is that the battery on my iPhone is really starting to suck. I still have my age old iPhone, bought on day one they were available, so I guess it’s to be expected. But still! I would like it to last a little longer than say 14 hours. I find it especially poor when I’m traveling and therefore using it more than if I was at home base or in the office.

Now, most of the time you would think it’s not a problem and you can just charge it at any outlet. But have you seen how busy these outlets are at commuter airports!?? Good luck in find one to use. So, to the rescue comes a new gadget from IOGear, the pocket sized charger.

All I do is charge this baby up, and when my phone (or any other device for that matter) is running down I have a ready to go charger in my bag. I find this incredibly useful for charging my phone while on a plane so that it’s ready to go when I land. I get 4-5 charges out of it before it needs refilling. Very neat!

Kung Fu Panda T-Shirt

I previously complained about the lack of a good image for my new favorite quote, so putting my money where my mouth is I took a cut at creating my own Kung Fu Panda homage. I think it turned out pretty nicely! I’ve also ordered it as a custom t-shirt from Zazzle, on the American Apparel black. It looks great, although the text came out a little small. I shall try again soon!

“There is no charge for awesomeness!”

I got a chance to see Kung Fu Panda the other day. It was way better than I had expected, especially from the trailers I had seen. Jack Black was great as the voice of Po, the main character. The opening dream sequence has to be one of the best written scenes I’ve heard in a long time! And it’s where the title for this post comes from. Apparently I am not the only one to think so. Shame I can’t find a really good t-shirt with the quote on it. There are a couple of there, but they kinda suck. Still, apparently someone’s making money off it. Good luck to them!

A new family addition: Sienna Grace

The newest addition to our family recently arrived! Sienna Grace, born on 24th July at 9:36 PM. You can find out more details at the Family blog, and with more pictures and videos of how we are all settling in to our new lives.