Happy Pixels

Like many PHP developers who use Eclipse PDT, your first step after creating a new PHP file is probably to remove the closing ?> tag that Eclipse puts in it for you. Today I did those same three keystrokes (or more if you don't use keyboard shortcuts) to remove the damn closing PHP tag (whose absence is part of many coding standards), and decided to never do it again manually. The solution is quite simple:

I got an e-mail from Gunter Kraus this morning, letting me know that my USB stick had been found. I lost it last June after going to a jazz guitar lesson / website redesign meeting. Five months later, someone found it down the street, looked at its content, recognized the location of the portraits for the website which had been taken in front of Gunter's studio, and brought it there. Not only I will have my USB stick back when I visit Heidelberg again in a few weeks, but now it will have a story of its own.

After multiple iterations, the Intro to SimpleTest session has gotten pretty good at teaching people how to write a test, but one of the questions that were often asked during the testing sprint that followed the session was: what do I need to test?

It seems that the last DrupalCon in Szeged just happened, and the next one is already open for registration! If you haven't bought your tickets, you can buy them on the DrupalCon website. There is a limited amount of cheaper tickets (I got mine for $125!), so hurry up before they get more expensive. It also seems that the conference sites get better and better; registering was painless and browsing the different sections was incredibly intuitive.

The second edition of the BADCamp (Bay Area Drupal Camp) that took place in Berkeley this week-end seems to have been a success in many aspects. Even if the number of registered attendees was higher than last year, the event felt comparable in size. However, we got to attract a few more Drupal celebrities such as Earl Miles and Charlie Negyesi (who was surprised to see me on this part of the globe). The number of presentations proposed was also twice as big, which forced the organisers to only accept the most demanded ones and resulted in a higher quality average.

93 hours, or close to 4 days spent sitting in a train since I came back to Europe at the end of May. No commuting, just traveling, going places where I actually wanted to go. Compared to doing the same with a car (and I never drove for over an hour during the whole summer), I saved time by being able to do stuff while traveling, I saved money, I reduced my share of carbon dioxide emissions, and I got to spend a good time with my fellow travelers!

Here are the details, if you care about them:

OpenExpo is an open source conference taking place twice a year in different locations in Switzerland. The second 2008 edition is taking place in Wintherthur in canton Zurich, and my visit from yesterday left me with some thoughts that I wanted to share here.

The last 8 entries in this blog were related to Drupal, so for a little diversity I'll write something related to my other obsession: music!

As you may have noticed, I redesigned the theme of my blog. It's still based on the same idea, but I started everything from scratch again so that I could do it right. The Happy Pixels theme is now a proper Garland sub-theme, and the base image for the color module integration is much cleaner, with more subtle effects.

Kudos to Development Seed and Matthew Slater for making the first Drupal User Group meeting happen in Geneva!

The meeting took place in a little café near the train station, and the relative quietness of the location was definitely a plus; no need to scream to hear each other. Eric and Bonnie from Development Seed also brought their experience organizing this kind of meetings in Washington DC, and their proposed structure made networking with the right people a lot easier.