DrupalCon San Francisco has been great. Yes, its been only one day but I love the atmosphere.

There are several tracks going on at the same time during the day, so its impossible to see every talk. I hope that they publish videos of the ones I couldn’t attend. There’s about 3,000 attendees so the place is packed.

I’ve been a bit distant on Drupal development for a while, but its interesting to me to see that most if not all of the talks are about Drupal 7, the next stable release. I guess that the move to this new version is going to be a lot faster than the version 5 to 6 adoption. Yes, it was mainly because many of the cool modules were ported very slowly, but it appears that most of them are going to be ready for the version 7 release.

So for the ones who like me were disconnected from Drupal, here are some of the new features it will have:

• CCK will be in core, called Fields
• Improved usability and accesibilty
• Database connector is now PHP PDO
• Multiple database support
• Testing framework
• RDF support

Here’s a more detailed list of all Drupal 7 features.

There’s no official release yet, but there’s only 114 bugs left and for a big project like this its not so bad. So with enough help that can happen very soon. Get involved and contribute!

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1. Going to DrupalCon 2010
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So thanks to Justia, I’ve spent the last week at Mountain View, or what is known as the Silicon Valley area. Next week I’ll be attending the Drupal Conference, Drupalcon 2010, in San Francisco, California.

Its been great working and hanging out in this area, specially when things in Mexico are not as easy these days. Its good to have peace and tranquility in a nice safe neighborhood for a while.

I’m really looking forward to all the Drupal sessions. I’ve been away from Drupal development for a little more than 6 months now, so its going to be interesting to get back into the mindset. I’ve been doing a lot of scripting lately and its been also good because I went back to the basics. I’ve also made things even more interesting or challenging by going back into using old tools like GNU Sed, GNU Awk and the like. I say they are old because nowadays I don’t see much people commenting about using them.

Sometimes developers forget about all these great tools, or new programmers never learn them. A task that nowadays someone would normally write a whole script to execute it, it has taken me one line of a bash command. This is a huge productivity boost, so I’ll be posting some of these old but often forgotten tools and tips I’ve picked up.

So if someone else is going to attend the DrupalCon in San Francisco, I’d be glad to say hi and maybe have a beer or two and hang around the town, I’ve heard its fascinating.

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First of all, the place was crowded with more than 1,300 attendees. That’s the largest audience I’ve addressed on a free software talk! Everyone was great, from the staff to the people who attended.

I was there to promote KDE and also helped out promoting Firefox along with Ricardo Meza.

The funny part is that we were treated like rockstars or something. People took like a thousand pictures of us and even asked us for autographs! It was funny and I enjoyed the whole thing anyway. Also, took the opportunity to promote this blog and my identi.ca account on the autographs, so it turned out useful.

What was a surprise, at least for all us that were invited to give talks, was the musical performances during the event. Every chat was separated by one or two performances. For most of us it was the first free software conference with musical performances. Here’s one of those musical performances:

You can see more musical performances of FISOL at my blip.tv page. Hope other conferences do the same. That makes it a fully cultural event.

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The talks were great, with very interesting subjects, and there seems to be a lot of interest in virtualization this time. Rolman gave his talk about virtualization with KVM and the basics of virtualization technology and how it all works. Then Gunnar Wolf gave his talk about virtualization techniques and recommendations.

I gave an introductory talk about Git and for the first time talked about Emacs. Also had an Emacs vs. Vi debate with Rolman, and it really went well. It turned out to be a very civilized talk with no flames going on at any time. I think people got somewhat disappointed that it went so well.

The new KDE Mexico team, or part of it, got together to catch up, unfortunately Guillermo Amaral had a plane to catch just before the party begun.

For the first time I tried the famous Duff beer, from the Simpsons. This is a mexican brand that makes it a reality.

And Gladys showed up with an ethernet cable as an improvised belt.

I had a great time and it was a very nice experience. Hope to see everyone again soon.

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I had the opportunity to attend to LibrePlanet 2009, the annual Free Software Foundation members meeting that was held in Boston.

It was a great experience and I was very happy to meet lots of FSF members, something I don’t get to see very often here in Mexico. I met with Evan Prodromou, the creator of Identi.ca and he told me that soon laconi.ca will have OAuth authentication, so that OpenID users can access the API. That means that OpenID users can now use Emacs identica-mode to post and access their dents. There was a lot of talking about Free Network Services and hope that soon we’ll be seeing more of this kind of projects getting done.

Met with Matt Lee, Mako Hill, Rob Myers and many others. I also had the great opportunity to meet and chat with Richard Stallman. Not every day you get to chat with a person who has influenced your life.

Met with Alex Oliva from the FSF Latinamerica, and we talked about its current status. I’ll get involved to see if we can reactivate the organization and push it forward.

Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for the unconference day, had to catch my plane back home, but I’ll plan to go next year and stay for the whole event. Definately worth it.

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