www.johndbritton.com

This past Saturday was Barcamp Hong Kong (photos). If you've never heard of Barcamp you should check out the Wikipedia article. The event was organized by technologists from the area and was hosted by Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. at their location in Quarry Bay.

There were five rooms available during each of six time slots for a total of 30 possible sessions. I attended six:

• Online Marketing for Consumer Acquisition
• Technology Yesterday, Relevance
• Making iPhone Apps
• Open Culture
• Just What the ____ is SPAM?
• Theming Drupal

I organized the session on Open Culture, and was very happy at the amount of discussion and participation we had. Most of the other sessions were more like lectures but still quite good. The interactivity was mostly thanks to Conrad Benham's idea to make the session an "open space" discussion, it seemed to fit perfectly with the topic. We placed five "hot seats" at the front of the room. To control conversation, only people seated in the designated seats were allowed to talk. Anyone could join the conversation by bumping another person off the floor. The discussion mostly focused on open education and it's practical application, but we hit a few other topics as well.

There were more than 25 Drupalistas at Barcamp HK. It was quite funny to bump into Dave Hansen-Lange from Advomatic again, I met him earlier this year on the other side of the planet at Drupalcon Boston. I took the first few minutes of the "Theming Drupal" session to talk about the Knight Drupal Initiative and answer questions related to the grant process before the other talk begain. There was quite a bit of interest in KDI; let's see those proposals!

After the conference ThoughtWorks and others sponsored a gathering at the East End Brewery.

Many thanks to everyone for such an enlightening day.

Just before the end of the 2008 Spring semester the RPI Game Development Club hosted a Game Jam. Brian McDonald, Peter Mueller and I formed a team to develop a fully functional themed game in eight hours.

The announced theme was "digging"; our answer was Mr. Flatland, a Tetris-esque arcade style game. Mr. Flatland is a digging creature who longs to keep the ground above his head... you guessed it, flat. The game speed (difficulty) increases logarithmically as the player's score increases. Falling bricks, which are "undiggable" at first disrupt the flat horizon. The user gains points and "undiggable" bricks become "diggable" whenever a flat horizon is achieved.

Brian and I spent the first half hour talking about ideas and then another hour fleshing out the details for Mr. Flatland. We developed the game using PyGame, and we started from the example source code from Chimp Line By Line slowly transforming it into our game. When we started developing we used solid color bitmaps as sprites. Four or five hours before the end of the competition Peter (our team artist) arrived and started making real sprites. We used every last minute of the allotted time for development and testing, and I must say it was quite a fun experience. While Peter was drawing, Brian and I chipped away at individual tasks. I found that we frequently used the pair programming technique.

At the end of the competition all the games were judged by a panel comprised of industry professionals. I can't remember individual names but I do remember that representatives from 1st Playable and Vicarious Visions were judging (among others).

I'm happy to share that Mr. Flatland was selected as the winner in the category "Most Fun" and was selected as the "Best Game Overall".

Check out the gameplay demonstration video, and feel free to download and modify the game as you wish... we released it as open source!

This past Tuesday evening Chris Stevenson gave a talk on Continuous Integration at the ThoughtWorks Hong Kong office as part of the Agile Hong Kong series.

The event started off with a short explanation of what Continuous Integration is, citing Martin Fowler's authoritative article. He has written a number of software development books focused on design and has held the title of 'Chief Scientist' at ThoughtWorks since 2000.

During his talk Chris stressed that "Continuous Integration is not a tool, it is a software development process." He hit four major points: revision control, automated testing, automated building, and automated deployment. The idea is integrate as often as possible and check in after completing the smallest testable functionality. Automated builds and tests ensure successful integrations and detect problems while they are still manageable, enabling the product to be automatically deployed.

The talk was followed by a short demo of Cruise, ThoughtWorks' management software to be released next week. It is based upon the open and freely available Cruise Control.

Here's an excerpt from the Cruise website

Cruise is a continuous integration and release management system that enables teams to quickly and confidently release their code from development to production. It provides visibility into the deployment pipeline, allowing new builds to be tested in automated or manual steps in staging environments. The result is lower risk when deploying, fewer production defects, faster release cycles, and empowered teams.

Here are a few photos from the event.

Thanks to Chris and Conrad from ThoughtWorks for hosting the session, I'm looking forward to future events.

As it stands the Drupal FeedBurner module is not yet ready for the 6.x series. A simple workaround is to redirect Drupal feed requests (default: /rss.xml) to FeedBurner based on the useragent using Apache's mod_rewrite. The trick is to redirect all requests for the feed, with the exception of those made by the FeedBurner bot, to the Burned feed. You can repeat this for as many feeds as is necessary. Thanks to ckdake for the tip.

Example .htaccess snippet:

# Rewrite feed URL to FeedBurner
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteRule rss\.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/johndbritton [L]

The Gallery team has announced the selected students for the 2008 Summer of Code on GMC (gallery.menalto.com). I am one of two lucky students to be selected. The other student, Paul Hinze, will be working on Facebook/Flickr Style Image Region Based Tagging.