One full week. That's how long it took me to recover from COSSFEST 2009. Mainly because of all the effort that went into setting up the event. The Friday night dinner/karaoke/drink-a-thon didn't help any either.

As one of the planners, I saw the inner workings of the event. I saw a number of things that just fell together right, and a few that didn't work at all. Luckily most of the latter type were not visible to the attendees, and have been identified as issues to address next year.

Making my living working with computers requires me to be aware of various security issues and how to handle them. Everything from viruses, to spam, and even to encryption. But sometimes I'm fortunate enough to observe the humanity behind the computers. And sometimes this humanity itself is a security issue. Humans are mostly social creatures. They want to interact with each other and share information. Humans can also be parasites trying to better themselves or their environment at the expense of others. This dual nature of us humans leads to some interesting situations. We trust.

Working with LDAP servers from within a PHP based application can be a very handy trick to have up your sleeve. But the path to acquiring the know-how for this can be filled with mis-steps and confusing issues. Having recently worked through this, and finding the online documentation unhelpful for a relative LDAP novice, I'd like to document what I have found and help rectify that situation.

CLUG recently asked me if I could do a presentation on some topic. I said "of course!" and selected Inkscape as the subject. For those not in the know, Inkscape is a free, cross platform vector graphics tool that is great for creating images from scratch. It is useful for logos, web images (buttons, themes, etc.), as well as more mundane things such as signs, banners, and business cards. Or any image you can think of, you can probably do in Inkscape.

I've been puttzing around playing with my Freerunner over the weekend. Since my last post, I've installed an OS on the thing about 10 different times. I've tried the 2008.8 distro, as well as the Debian install. I picked up an 8 GB microSD card for Debian, though it took me a time or two to get it right. Lastly I tried the Qtopia distro. But, in all my efforts I stumbled across one HUGE problem for the FreeRunner. And that was a power problem.