lukehearn's blog

The Paper Cinema at Toynbee Studios was just one of the events during this years East London Festival And it was probably the best £5 I’ve spent so far this year.

Technorati Profile

For many years it has been reported that open source philosophies inspire increased transparency and liberty. There are certainly indications that commercial organisations have moved towards an open source culture particularly in software industries. And now there is increasing business potential for open source software ventures. People often think of open source as something you do for altruistic purposes (=for free) but Drupal may just be an indication that open source is evolving.

The Drupal CMS, has been a distinguished figure in open source software developments, allowing geographically-separated individuals or communities to easily publish website content. Since its beginnings in 2000, Drupal’s ideology has been heavily focused on community and collaboration, adopting an open policy on its source code, free for anyone to modify. No-one at Drupal could have ever anticipated the scale to which code has been reused/remixed/recycled in the creation of new modules and new functionality. And here lies Drupal’s uniqueness: it is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers communicating via forums and IRC channels. Community and collaboration are Drupal’s lifeblood.

Peter Brownell is just one of the developers who have been instrumental within the Drupal community, contributing to numerous modules and running the London Drupal Users Group. He also runs his own Drupal consultancy (Code Positive) and for this reason he came to Ravensbourne College to share with students and staff some Drupal wizardry.

In 1962 the author Arthur C. Clarke proposed the following three "laws" (MA students might like to bear this in mind):

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

A while ago I wrote about how updating my ipod (4g clickwheel) to itunes 7 had killed my ipod (itunes killed my ipod!), falling victim to the sad ipod symbol which has become all too common occurrence for ipod users worldwide. If your ipod is out of warranty there is not a lot that can be done about it, unless you want to spend £166.29 having it repaired (quoted from apple site) or ebay-ing it for its spare parts (or taking a hammer and smashing it to pieces!)…or so I thought…

…such drastic action is probably not necessary. There is every chance you may be able to fix it, as I did, by taking some some rather bizarre actions….

To all Rave students, staff and friends:

The MA Students are delighted to invite you to the MA Expo 2007.

It's taking place at the Cave Atrium

Wed 17 Jan (5 to 7pm) launch drinks party;
Thur 18 Jan (12 to 5pm);
Fri 19 Jan (12 to 3pm).

We look forward to seeing you all there.