Today was a very nice spring day in Vancouver, so we went out to Stanley Park to enjoy the air. I captured the following beautiful sunset:

The quality is not 100% as it was taken with a camera phone (my N73), but it still looks nice. I stitched it together with Double Take.

After being confronted by US Homeland Security Threat Level announcements in the SFO airport, I started wondering what the Canadian equivalent would be.

Update: a raw video is now available of (almost) the entire session. Thanks to Jon F Hancock for recording it.

Today I did my second session at OSCMS, which was basically a repeat of the jQuery talk I did at DrupalCon Brussels.

You can download a PDF (2.2MB) of the (slightly tweaked) presentation slides.

I did my OSCMS talk Designer eye for the geek guy today. My main plan for this talk was to blast as much basic graphical design concepts into people's heads as possible and sort of teach some of the principles, vocabulary and methods that a lot of designers take for granted.

The response was great as far as I could tell. I also got the inevitable "How do we deal with Internet Explorer?" spin-off discussion in the questions round at the end ;).

Steven Peck recorded my session on video.

You can download the slides as PDF (36.5 MB), though because of all the graphics it's quite large. I think some sections will not be clear at all without the spoken explanation to go along with it though.

Ugh. So, I just found out that I will be fingerprinted and photographed when I go to the United States next week for the OSCMS conference. For some reason, I was under the impression that visitors with a visa waiver (like EU citizens) were not subject to this rule, and this was why I was still going. Perhaps they changed it recently.

Today was the first time I heard this issue mentioned, so I want to give a clear signal to the US members of the Drupal community: this is unacceptable and hinders development and business. For sure, it's the last time I'll be going into the United States while this continues, and if this trip wasn't so important to me I'd have cancelled my flight already.

Your country's government is messed up beyond belief, and its policies scares away the entire world. It wouldn't be so bad if the US didn't perpetually tout its everlasting respect for personal rights and freedom. As a European who has just moved to North America, I can say for sure that I constantly feel as though my privacy is under assault, because corporate interests, advertising and other annoyances take precedence over the right to be left alone here. It's a huge cultural difference.

This news immediately set in motion plans for subverting the system. I'd be having a little kitchen vegetable slicing accident if it were to help. Unfortunately, my prior experience with US customs a couple years back leads me to believe that any sort of irregularity would only lead to hours of delay and a much more thorough printing and photographing.

For now, the US is reduced to a bizarre, quirky, sad laughing stock for me. My visit will be bathed in the surreal air of stepping into an asylum.

One of the things I do occasionally is collect some of my own statistics on Drupal.org. An interesting one is to look at the size, expressed in nodes, and the growth rate of Drupal.org, expressed as nodes per hour.

Just like rings on a tree trunk, you can see Drupal.org evolve.

Now while the nodes graph (red, left axis) looks exponential at first, it turns out that its growth (blue, right axis) is actually quite stair-stepped. In fact, a remarkable trend can be observed: with every major release of Drupal, Drupal.org's growth rate doubles nearly instantly.

This has been true mostly since Drupal 4.5 and happened recently again with Drupal 5.0. The only exception was a relatively unexpected, but sustained linear growth burst throughout the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2006. There were many high profile projects at that time as well as a lot of anxious waiting for 4.7 (with a long train of betas and release candidates), so it is possible our unnaturally long dev cycle for 4.7 smeared out the growth to a more regular line.

Note that the first year of Drupal is missing, as the statistics were too small to show up.

What's also interesting is that you can clearly see the times when project.module has changed. The first tiny bump is the conversion of projects to nodes, while the other two spikes are the recent conversion of project releases to nodes. For some reason, a huge amount of existing releases got a creation timestamp a while ago, possibly due to some change in project.module housekeeping at that time.

Other noticeable events include the holidays (when activity slows down a lot) as well as the server crash of July 2005, and the subsequent move to OSUOSL.

I've attached the raw Excel Spreadsheet for anyone interested. See if you can match up any other events to the graph.