h0bbel.p0ggel.org

This weekend most of the Gallery developers and other team members were gathered in Amsterdam, Holland, for the yearly meetup.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend this year, as I missed the last two meetups in Las Vegas and in San Francisco. I did go to New York for the first ever meetup back in 2005 though, which certainly left me with a hope of meeting up with this great group of people again some time in the future.

Since this was the first meetup in Europe, or even outside the US, it would have been a real shame if I was unable to attend. As it turned out, I was not only able to attend this year, I also got to take my wife with me.

It was great introducing her to the Gallery people, finally she got to see that a bunch of "semi-random" people I've interacted with on teh intarweb are seemingly normal people.

The event itself lasted from Friday until Sunday, with some of the attendees staying for longer periods. I can certainly understand that some of the Americans wanted to spend more than a weekend after traveling all the way to Europe. Especially with my own experience with going from Bergen, Norway to New York for a weekend three years ago. Traveling that far a distance for a weekend only is a sure way to slowly kill yourself with jetlag, even if you try to compensate by consuming large amounts of Gin Tonics.

We arrived on Friday, and was picked up by Jens and Bharat at the airport. They had great fun running the "Gallery Shuttle" from Schipol to the Hotel, changing the language on the GPS based on who they picked up. Naturally the GPS was turned to Norwegian when they picked us up, though I'm pretty sure that neither one of them understood a word it said.

We all stayed at Mercure Hotel Amsterdam Aan de Amstel a great modern hotel just outside of the Amsterdam city center. Their rooms were nice and breakfast was great, all in all the hotel was just what we needed for a great weekend out in Amsterdam.

On Friday we had a fun dinner at the Hotel, and headed downtown for a "Ghostwalk". While we didn't see any ghosts, we did get a great tour of old Amsterdam with a guide who looked like some kind of Gestapo officer with his big black coat and cane.

Saturday me and my wife spent about 5 hours walking around downtown Amsterdam looking at whatever we could. We didn't really want to see most tourist attractions, but rather try to see as much of normal Amsterdam city life as possible. My feet will definitely testify that we did a lot of walking, and I ended up having to buy some new shoes to try and limit the damage done. My feet are in such a state that I'm still not walking properly. Without having to go into to much detail, I'm really glad a got some Compeed blister patches.

The main event of the weekend was the Gallery dinner and subsequent bar round on Saturday. We had made reservations at Nomads. Dinner was an interesting event, very different from what I had anticipated. Lots of different food, and I'm still not sure what all the different serving we had was. All I know is that the food was great, and so were the cocktails. Exotic food, combined with belly dancing and general Gallery fun, the dinner actually lasted for five hours before we headed out searching for a new venue.

We ended up in a Irish Pub, The Tara, where we spent the rest of the evening until we were actually thrown out due to them closing. The search for further venues for continued beverage consumation was fruitless and me and my wife headed back to the hotel together with Joan, who made a surprise visit from London. We were greeted by a friendly "Good Morning" from the hotel staff when we entered the lobby. I guess that means we were pretty late, or even very early.

Sunday we had the "official" Gallery meeting, discussing the current state of the project and it's future. I'm sure the discussions started there will continue, and I really do hope that events like this help us stay on track and work even harder to make a better product. There were some really interesting discussions going on this year, time will tell what the results of them are. These are interesting times on teh intarwebs.

Pictures from the event:

• My Own
• Pierre-Luc Paour's
• Michael Schultheiss
• Chris Kelly pictures and blog post

The list will get updated as more pictures are posted.

We had a great weekend, and we're really happy we got to meet (almost) everyone again.

I think the slogan for this weekend would have to be Good Times, right Bharat?

Ever wondered what would happen if you let the whole of #habari (on freenode.net) "collaborate" on skrbl? I doubt anyone has, but in case you ever wondered the screenshot below show what happened when we tried. Advance warning, it's not pretty.

Apparently there are some rather strange traditions at VMWare.

Would you betrust your enterprise datacenter to these guys? I know I would, as I do, but make your own call. ;-)

Thanks to NTPro

Is it just me, or is Stop Wasting Time Online / Wired How To's a prime example of what you shouldn't be wasting your time on?

While hacking my sandbox Habari install, I installed both Chris J. Davis Quickpost plugin as well as Matt Reads Habminbar.

Quickposts enables you to bring up a very lightweight post interface instead of loading the full admin area to write an entry. Habminbar adds an admin bar to the top of every page for easy access.

With both these enabled, it seemed natural to try and combine the two. Doing so was suprisingly simple, and the combination works really well.
In habminbar/habminbar.plugin.php, find the following (line 92 in v0.2):

private function get_menu()
        {
                $bar= '
';
                $bar.= '
' 
                          . Options::get('title') . '
';
                $bar.= '
';

and replace it with

 private function get_menu()
        {
                $bar= '
';
                $bar.= '
' 
                          . Options::get('title') . '
';
                if (function_exists('action_auth_ajax_cjd_post_quickie')) {
                        $bar.= 'Quickpost';
                }
                $bar.= '
';

This will add a small Quickpost button on the left hand side of the Habminbar which will bring up the Quickpost interface.

Pretty nifty: