This post is a bit late, DrupalCon London closed its door already two weeks ago. It seems that being a week away from my desk created such a task queue that took two weeks to handle.

Anyhow, the DrupalCon was a blast. I didn’t attend to any sessions, as I was busy standing on our booth, meeting people, and discussing about various topics. I did go to the keynotes, and besides Dries’ State of Drupal they could have been better. Topics were interesting, speakers were good, but somehow they didn’t click. On the other hand, I was relieved that finally Drupal community is pushed to think about marketing, brand, image, and other softer assets — that the community is sorely lacking.

The best part of the week was the first presentation in Drupal CXO meeting by Mark Taylor. I didn’t agree to all of his topics, especially the self-development part was a bit over the top for me, but the business development part really rocked (my boat). There was a lot of stuff that I mulled over while flying back to Helsinki, and found them useful for both me personally and for my company.

The week was well spent. The next day we went to our summer house to chop some wood and spend time with the family. Weather was excellent, really atypical situation for end of August in Finland.

My company, www.exove.com, is focused strongly on Drupal, and thus I’m going to London next week to attend to DrupalCon.

I visited the US based DrupalCon in Chicago in March, and it was a really good trip — both in personal sense and business-wise. I’m expecting even more from this trip.

If you are interested in Drupal, then pop over to our booth (#11) to have a chat.

I spent the previous weekend in Brussels, mingling with other CEOs, CTOs and other “C-level people” of Drupal shops in DrupalCXO meeting, organised by a few active CEOs. Bulk of the work was carried out by Kristof Van Tomme — thanks for all the hard work, it was really appreciated. The mini-conference was held in Microsoft premises — a surprise host for a LAMP open source project people — and the arrangements were very good.

I flew in with a couple of other Finnish Drupal shop CEOs on Friday, had a good dinner with about half of the participants later in the evening, and then hit the bunk at Radisson Blu. Saturday was spent in the conference and then in probably one of the slowest dinners that I’ve encountered. The diners were active, but it took more than two hours to get the appetisers served, and the total length of the dinner was more than four hours. Insane.

On Sunday we continued with the same topic until mid-afternoon, and the rest of the day was spent at the airport. I managed to crunch a few issues out from a project, shopped some Belgian chocolate, and then had peaceful flight back to Finland.

After working ten days in a row, I’m anxiously waiting for the next weekend and some time off — I and Aapo are going to visit a Lego building fair in Pohjanmaa, some 350 kilometers north of Helsinki.

Issues with my Mac continued, and the backup failed several times — I checked the problematic file, deleted it, and then tried again. No avail.

On Tuesday, I made a full copy of my working files to a server in the network. Then I continued to rescue my hard disk, finally getting into situation in which my Mac would not boot — except into single mode. Apple’s disk “repair” program “repaired” my disk into an unusable state. It was readable in single user mode, but OS X’s graphical front-end was broken on the disk, due to a bad block.

I had to purchase a new hard drive, that fortunately was available in 24 hours, and install the whole system again. This took most part of Wednesday afternoon and evening. I got the system up and running just before midnight, when the Time Machine backup was restored.

I installed OS X first from scratch, and then restored the backup. This resulted a situation that some of the settings, such as contents of /etc directory were not restored. Some settings, like my custom keyboard was restored with no issues. I copied the old contents of /etc to my desktop, and I have since then copied stuff to the current /etc when something is not working as expected.

I would probably have avoided this issue by running restore while installing the OS. When everything was done, it was too late to start from scratch.

My computer is now faster than earlier, so probably the disk has been somewhat broken for some time.

This is now third or fourth disk trouble that we’ve experienced in the company during this autumn. Either we have had really bad luck, or Apple’s quality is deteriorating. I suspect the latter, as some of my friends have experienced similar issues with their laptops.

Further, HFS+ sucks as a file system. It cannot recover itself from a bad block, and the tools to fix disk issues are really bad. They cannot do much and then they don’t tell you anything informative. Time Machine is extremely bad in the latter sense. There’s never any reasons why the backup failed. Is it so hard to make a couple of informative error messages.

It’s sad that ZFS project went bust, as Apple needs to have a better filesystem. And they should also invest a bit more money to have better quality hard drives. These issues — along other hardware issues that we’ve experienced in the past — should not occur with hardware priced like Apple’s.

I’ve updated the website of my company, Exove, last Thursday.

After spending three months of getting the design and the implementation just right, the site has been finally released. I never thought that making a company website for a company that makes websites for other companies would be this hard. But we are more engineers than copywriters…

During the development, I implemented a specific plugin to WordPress to create some dynamic parts of the site, such as carousels and accordions. They pick their content from a set of other pages, so your textual content does not get crowded with HTML.

The site is bilingual and for that I needed to reimplement quite a big portion of functionality of WordPress theme tags. These are in a specific class that gets instantiated using Singleton pattern in every theme file, and then provides site menus and other similar content in a proper language.

I found a lot of limitations in the current thinking of WordPress themes. Someone should reimplement the theme support with Smarty to allow better flexibility and control of the content. Now, WordPress provides too much HTML from inside.

Maybe I’ll roll my sleeves when Exove updates their website next time…

A new travel service with Web 2.0 twists was launched yesterday. Check it out at www.tripsay.com for more information.

I happen to know a couple persons in the company behind the service, and have been discussing with them about the system along the years. Yesterday there was a launch party in their premises, located in the design district of Helsinki.

Unfortunately I hadn’t enough time to mingle with all friends and acquittances, but meeting people even for a small amount of time was uplifting — need to do more of that in the future.

Wednesday seemed to be one of those normal hectic days at the office; emails were flowing and people were calling me at such a pace that I barely got myself out of the office to grab a sub for lunch.

The atmosphere changed drastically when I tried to savour my lunch between phone calls, and suddenly I knocked off a glass of Pepsi Max to my dear MacBook Air. It was a small wine glass, half full, so not that much of liquid — but it managed to splash shock middle my keyboard.

I instantly turned the laptop over and dried it with a bunch of paper. It seemed to be intact, so I continued working and went to a couple of meetings to a customer. While there, the keyboard started to send extra keypresses, from the QWERTYUIOP row. A dash of letters appeared three times during the afternoon.

When I got home, I plugged in my Time Machine hard disk to backup the system. I also opened Aquamacs to grab the keyboard input. When the backup was over, there were more than three thousand letters in the Aquamacs window. All from the same row.

Other rows had stopped working, too. I tried rebooting, but no avail. External keyboard worked, so I could log in and make another copy of my working files.

The rest of the evening was spent with friends, so I couldn’t worry too much of the computer. Thursday saw me copying files from Air to my old G4 12″. The old laptop wouldn’t recognise the backup disk at all, so I ended up copying 1.2GB of stuff with SCP.

While copying, I also upated Office, Thunderbird, Camino and Adium to newer versions — time seems to take its toll on software pretty fast.

Finally, the copy was ready and I walked to Humac, an Apple reseller and service center a couple of kilometers from the office. I (or Exove in fact) paid extra 75€ to get the system inspected and fixed right away.

They called me later on Thursday, informing that only the keyboard had got wet and changing it would cost 400€. What else can you do but just accept the price?

I gave the permission and they called me on late Friday afternoon. The laptop was fixed and available for picking up. I dashed to the store, got Air back with a shiny new top cover including the keyboard and trackpad.

Maybe I should invest to some kiddy mug or similar that can’t be spilled over…

I just received my first Finnish language spams ever. And when it rains, it pours. I got the same message several times (no wonder), and then also some different messages. Someone has inserted Finnish language files to some bots.

The first mail batch was peculiar. Nothing to do with the normal spam stuff, but it was about a nuclear reactor meltdown in Mikkeli. Rather odd message to be sent as spam, but probably tries to lure people to click on the link at the end to get them infected with spyware or something. Don’t know, didn’t try.

The message would have been more effective, if a) the sender would have had a Finnish name and b) there would be a nuclear power plant in Mikkeli. At least spammers got the name of the town right.

Jokes aside, I think that this development is alarming. There are a lot of people, especially older ones, that do not speak English or any other foreign language in Finland. They have been protected from spam threats by natural means, but now that protection is going to wear off.

I do hope that my parents are not fooled to click on the links, or I end up running anti-spyware tools all the time for them. Better call them tonight.