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Exciting times for the Semantic Web in Drupal...

Harvard IIC and SCF

Today is my first day at Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing where I'll work on the Drupal based Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) project with Tim Clark, Sudeshna Das and Benjamin Melançon. I had the chance to meet Tim last year when he visited DERI and presented the SCF project. We'll work on aligning the efforts which were put into SCF with the efforts of the Drupal community in terms of RDF. We will see what requirements are emerging from a project such as SCF and contribute them back to the Drupal community.

The first Irish Drupal meetup happened in Galway in January 07. Since then, Alan and myself have tried to convinced the Drupal users based in Dublin to get together and organize a Drupal event in Dublin. It was great to have this happen last Saturday with such a high number of attendees: 74 people! Thanks to Stella and Heather for all the marketing work!

All sorts of people came out to the event: folks from Google, IBM, Ericsson, some civil servants, many students from the various Dublin universities and freelance developers. We even had people visiting from the UK. Some were experts in PHP or other languages and were interested in learning about Drupal itself in order to contribute their expertise in coding and security. Some others were keen on creating new ties with the Open Source world in general. The gender ratio was better balanced than the regular 10% that we have come to expect at Drupal events.

I spent most of the night in the Airport, mainly working on an idea I had to improve Drupal core and allow the developers to hide the database server address and username when a database connection problem occurs. At the moment these are displayed as it helps the user to find what's wrong with the database settings. But I do think it's not a good idea to display these on a production site. An option should allow people to hide this type of information. I am hoping to get the chance to suggest this patch to the security team within the next days; Drupalcon is surely one of the best opportunity to meet and talk!
My flight was in the morning. Even though the weather was cold, it was very clear, and you could easily spot the Sugar Loaf in the green Wicklow Mountains. This reminded me of enjoyable hiking adventure :) We flew over Wicklow, and I managed to take a few shots, even though the mountains look quite flat from so high.