As I posted before, I'm super excited about the upcoming Drupalcon in Hungary. I've never been further east than Barcelona, and I never imagined I'd get to spend my first anniversary with Christina in Budapest... I'm definitely up for any sightseeing recommendations for our time there.

The Uberdevs have set some goals for Ubercart at Drupalcon, and one of them is to present and share as much information and knowledge as possible. To that end, we've proposed two sessions and a BoF that I hope folks will find useful (and vote for accordingly).

I'll be doing my Introducing Ubercart session for the third time running, presenting attendees with a brief overview of Ubercart, a look at some advanced feature configuration, and an update on Drupal 6 development (with an eager eye toward the future).

Lyle and I are also planning to present A Hands-On Guide to Module Development aimed at beginner and intermediate developers. We're looking to walk through our module development "best practices" that go beyond coding and security standards into the things we've done wrong and are starting to do right when it comes to structuring/writing code and using Drupal and contributed module APIs. Code samples will be provided... check out the description for more info on the format.

Lastly, we've scheduled a BoF to talk about Ubercart in Drupal 6. We're looking to brief folks on where things stand and where we hope to be in the coming months. Hopefully there will be some good brainstorming and collaboration to make Ubercart's core more solid, consistent, and easy to work with on Drupal 6 and beyond.

We're eager to share and to learn, and we're looking forward to a good time once again.

I made an earlier limited announcement about this event to gauge interest and availability, and now I'm casting the net a little further. Plans have been laid for an Ubercamp on July 25th - 27th to be hosted by the Ubercart team in Louisville, KY and at Lake Cumberland (ideally enjoying Andy's houseboat and some water sports).

The tentative schedule includes a pre-camp hackathon at the Ubercart office during the day on Friday. In the evening, depending on crowd size and wireless availability, we'll head down to the lake and spend the weekend sharing, learning, discussing, and hacking on Ubercart.

While our primary focus will be Ubercart planning/development and testing the Drupal 6 port (codenamed Uber Tuber), Drupallers looking to learn and help where they can are welcome to join us. If you're interested, you can find more scheduling/pricing information and RSVP in the Ubercamp thread. Mike O'Connor will be coordinating things through there as the plans unfold.

We're excited about the chance to meet and spend time with the folks who can make it. We had a great time with other Drupallers interested in and working with Ubercart in Boston and hope to have a wonderful time at the Ubercamp. No official word on the Camp Song yet, but I bet it involves haiku...

Ahh, for once in my life I've registered early for an event. I spent a couple hours over the last few days nailing down the details of an Ubercart excursion to Drupalcon Szeged and am happy to report that the new company credit card works just fine.

Registration on the Drupalcon website is quite an experience. It took me a few minutes to orient myself to the whole process (lots of pages to flip through), but once I got it down I was able to register myself and the other Ubercart devs for the event at the awesome discounted rate. Not only that, I got us rooms in a hostel a few blocks away from the venue (no 2 mile hike a la Boston ) and easy travel between Budapest and Szeged at the same time. The organizers were even able to accommodate the trouble I'm causing by bringing my wife along who needs a shuttle bus ticket but won't be attending the conference.

Of course the best part... Christina will be joining me again, and we'll celebrate our first anniversary in Budapest before shuttling down to hang out in Drupaltown. We're totally excited, and I can't wait to see the folks I know and the new people I'll meet in Szeged.

So, I've been working with setting up a virtual environment on a server at work that I can use for development. Particularly, I'm using it to do my testing and work on Ubercart in Drupal 6. While I enjoy learning new things, the whole experience has been quite a hassle. My container kept hitting a memory limit (which I thought was sufficient) every time I tried to install something new with yum, causing things to go awry. It's been a long two days.

Anyways, I just figured I'd share solutions to difficulties I encounter in case anyone else out there has the same troubles.

This post will briefly cover the locate command. I'm quite green when it comes to grokking the file structure of a Linux install. Not a huge deal... I should be able to find anything I want with the locate command. Unfortunately, I kept running into this wall...

My server admin didn't have any quick ideas, but Google usually turns up nice results. I found a few pages with tips, and the second one did the trick. I have to run updatedb to build that database. I recommend running it as a background process, since it may take a while for the initial construction... I believe it has to index all the files on disk.

There... I hope that helps someone else and saves them some frustration.

Ahh, the sweet smell of a fresh release... if I could turn it into a drink, it would be a pumpkin spice latte (or perhaps a caramel frappuccino which doesn't smell as good but tastes great!). Today, 15 months after the initial alpha release, we've released Ubercart 1.0 for Drupal 5. As I said in our announcement, reaching the milestone is quite an achievement, but doing the work alongside a worldwide community of Drupal/Ubercart users and contributors has been a real joy. Many thanks to the countless folks who have made a 1.0 release possible.

My lesson tonight at the Transformation House was based on chapter 33 in John Piper's book The Passion of Jesus Christ. Its primary text was Galatians 6:14, and the premise is that Christ died on the cross so that all the boasting we do as believers might be a boasting in the cross. It's quite clear in Scripture that boasting in ourselves, what we have or do, is contrary to God's plan for the world. Boasting in ourselves over such things is misplaced praise, as if we are responsible for our very lives and the things we have been able to do. The Bible teaches instead that God is the giver of life and the one who enables us to do all things, and His desire is that as we come to understand this, we would render praise to God as is fitting for all the good things we enjoy in this life and all the bad things God uses for good in our lives.

This sort of life is only possible through the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. He received in his flesh willingly, according to the plan of God, the penalty for our self-centered sin. All who trust in this substitution no longer stand condemned and are freed from an essentially self-centered life, so it makes sense that the cross would become the Christian's greatest treasure. According to the Bible, it frees a man or woman to live life as God intended which is by nature the most satisfying thing for him or her to do and the most honoring to God.

I've largely stayed out of the discussion in regards to global warming and particularly Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. However, two YouTube videos about the movie made me want to check it out, even just to see if it's as outrageous as they claim. Check out the commentaries below and let me know how it stacks up to what you've seen and heard regarding Al Gore's end of the world scenario.

At least I hope it's landing. It would be a shame for another one of these to simply crash. You should check out the article and the video presentation in this news article. It's pretty incredible stuff!

Maybe I can get on a mission to Mars if they need a minister.

UPDATE: It landed!

UPDATE 2: More pictures.

UPDATE 3: My dad also sent me a link to this article with a picture of the probe during its parachute descent as seen by one of our Mars orbiters.

A new website called Eureka! Science News uses Drupal to serve up late breaking news stories in various categories, including Space.

The site is impressive in its presentation and in its technical implementation. The best part? It's all automated. Not a single story is found, added, categorized, or otherwise edited by a human at Eureka!

The write-up on how the site was put together is inspiring. This site is a polished testament to the power of Drupal and ingenuity of the developers taking advantage of Drupal to build their web applications. I'd recommend reading the write-up and possibly bookmarking your new source for science news.

If so, you might have used Ubercart unknowingly. Or maybe you did know it and didn't really care.

While Ubercart has plenty of blemishes, it's encouraging to see that both Top Notch Themes and the new Theme Artists sites have found Ubercart to be a workable solution for peddling their wares. Lyle and I will readily confess our lack of theme mojo, and there are plenty of forum threads pointing out our mistakes to prove it. Now after many months of development and patience from the themers patrolling the forums, Ubercart is at a point where Steph et al from Top Notch are actually comfortable enough to offer Drupal themes designed for Ubercart sites. Very cool.