This coverage of BarCampDC is Part 2 of 2. For coverage of the morning sessions, check out BarCampDC 2007 - Part 1.

Update:  Some of the presentations are available on the BarCampDC Wiki.

The first session after lunch (fifth overall) was a joint session between Jackson Wilkinson (pictured left) of Viget Labs and me (pictured right) on the "Mobile Web". We talked about some of the context and development issues that go along with mobile development and it turned in a lively discussion about the state of the industry, especially compared to other nations. The question that kept coming up related to how people currently use the mobile web and the sheer cost of it. We handed the discuss back and forth as we went and the questions were asked. Overall, I think we managed to balance the discussion well between the strategy considerations from Jackson and the development considerations from me. After reading a few reviews and comments, it appears that others liked the discussion handoff as well.

My coverage of BarCampDC turned into an incredibly long post so I've split it into two with the first today and the second part tomorrow. Once the wiki has more of the presentation notes, I'll link directly to each of them. Stay tuned.

Update: Added pictures of presenters.

Update 2:  Some of the presentations are available on the BarCampDC Wiki. and the second portion of the coverage is available here:  BarCampDC 2007 - Part 2.

Before I made it onsite, I stopped by a nearby coffee shop and ran into some of the waiting list. Yes, since there were only 110 slots available onsite, there were literally dozens of people who wouldn't be allowed in. A handful of them were waiting here with their cell numbers on file with the registration desk. I could already tell it would be an interesting day.

The initial presentation scheduling was chaotic at best but somehow it worked. Wow. Presenters signed up for slots/rooms and then we scrambled to sign up for what interested us. There were a handful of sessions on productivity, general design principles, mobile web, ruby, python, and even on the Black Art of Perl (my working title, not theirs).

Recently on Slashdot, this article - Do we still need LUGs?- came up and it raised an interesting point:

A few years ago, LUGs enjoyed a heady heyday. If you were lucky enough to have a LUG close enough to drive to, you probably attended meetings regularly. Enthusiasm, both for Linux and the ideals for which it stands, drove an agenda full of exciting presentations, nights dedicated to getting a new distribution installed on your desktop, and lots of free stuff from companies like Red Hat, Corel, and SUSE, who wanted us to catch the fever.

UPDATE:  Actually, it looks like the bulk of the events/fun should be on Saturday the 11th.  Update your calendars.

I missed it last time around, but it's about that time again...

This year BarCampDC is being hosted by the PR firm Fleishman-Hillard, Inc. on August 10 and 11 2007. Yes, there is going to be a lot geekery, code, munging, and probably more js, css, and xhtml than you will ever care to consider. If you're a geek and want to meet other smart people, you should be there. If you're not a geek but would like to see some of the things lurking out there, you should be there. If you want to sell something to a bunch of geeks trapped in an office after hours, you shouldn't be there.

Over the Christmas Holiday, I was back in Northern Illinois visiting friends and family like I always do. Since I grew up in the area, I know it like the back of my hand, but I noticed something else. Even for areas which I had never been or paid much attention to, there was a simple pattern. Check out this map and see if you see it (click for a larger view).

That's right, the entire city (and even the county) is laid out in a very simple grid. Therefore, no matter where you are in the entire county, you have a set of Cartesian coordinates which can pinpoint your location relative to the origin. With the exception of just a few roads, it can be further represented by nearly every road in the county. 9000N designates the road 9 miles north of the origin. Anyone care to guess the distance between 9000N and 6000N?

It seems like pretty regularly, I hear from people - more often in person - asking one of two questions:

a) Why would someone get involved in an Open Source Project?
b) How do I get involved in an Open Source Project?

Both are pretty good questions, so here I go..

After a poorly timed layoff - is there ever a well-timed one? - I was looking for a job. I had some great experience with a handful of major Federal agencies and projects and had worked in a variety of roles ranging from developer to project manager. I had some experience on the commercial side of things with ecommerce, shopping carts, standard stuff. Despite all of this, I had nothing to show for myself. I could tell potential employers and other developers about the projects, but I had no code, no system architectures, and no database schemas to actually show. I had a handful of dated User Interfaces and that was about it. That's when it all clicked for me.

It seems like in the past year or so, security has come to the forefront of everyone's mind. Prior to this, most developers and organizations seemed to see it as a "nice to have" instead of a "must have". While I think this naivety hurt the community as a whole, we have the opportunity to redeem ourselves. Therefore, I offer an updated .htaccess for all dotProject users:

A new .htaccess file.

Just download this, place it in the root of your dotProject install, and rename to ".htaccess".*

As I've been looking at improvements to dotProject, I looked at the root of our two security problems and there were two common threads: First, they were both dependent on inappropriate access to files outside the normal structure. Second, they were both dependent on register globals. I don't know of any additional dotProject security issues open at the moment, but I wanted to head them off...