Monthly Archives: April 2008

Stand-up Comedy for Carbon Taxes!

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My dear friend Yoram Bauman, aka the world’s only stand-up economist, is doing two special shows here in Seattle in a couple of weeks (May 11 & 12) to benefit our downstairs neighbors at Sightline Institute. You can buy tickets here.

Yoram writes:

Your headliner for these shows is Robert Dubac, an LA-based performer who is brilliant and thoughtful and everything one could ask for in a (non-economist) comedian. He’s volunteered to headline these shows on his way to Bellingham for shows May 13-18 at the Mount Baker Theatre of his one-man show The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron? I will have just returned from my Supply Side World Tour (including a performance at Oxford!) and on the 11th I’ll do a 45-minute “stand-up economist” routine as an opening act, and if there’s demand for it I’ll do it on the 12th as well. So if you want to see what’s funny about economics, this is your chance—I may not be everything one could ask for in an economist comedian, but I’m all there is! The shows are benefits for Sightline Institute, a non-profit I’ve been affiliated with since 1997, when I started an internship there to help research a book on environmental taxes. Even better news is that the money we raise will go towards some carbon tax troublemaking that I’m working on with Sightline and a bunch of other groups and individuals. (Send me an email if you want more info.) Any additional donations you can make on those nights will be matched by yours truly, up to a total of $5000.

I’ll be out of town, but I heartily encourage you to go buy a ticket or two.

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Making Plone Easier to Theme

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My amazing colleague Veda Williams has been leading a team of Plone community members on an ongoing “sprint” to create more and better canned visual themes for Plone.

Along the way, they’ve generated a lot of ideas about best practices for themeing Plone, and some ideas to make the process even easier and more automated by our supporting toolchain.

Veda’s written up a great initial set of ideas for improving the themeing experience.  Highly recommended.

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Easy CAPTCHAs in Plone Forms

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Thanks to PFGCaptchaField by 4Teamwork, it’s now easy to stick basic CAPTCHAs into Plone forms that you’re creating with PloneFormGen.  It’s a nice bit of work that takes advantge of Jarn’s underlying collective.captcha product.  What I especially like about it is that it makes it possible for non-technical end-users to quickly build forms that can’t be easily abused.

As my colleague David Glick, Alex Limi and I have recently PLIPed, I think it’s time for the Plone core to CAPTCHA-protect its key anonymously-accessible forms, such as the join_form and the contact form.  If we get consensus on collective.captcha as the way to go, and Martijn Peters from Jarn is willing to continue to caretake collective.captcha, we’re willing to do the work to integrate it.

Ahhh…

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It’s nice to be back online from our new house, even if it is with borrowed wifi until Qwest gets our DSL hooked up.

Crumbly Manor

Needs a little TLC (and a massive kitchen remodel), but that’s why we’re here.  Plenty of room for guests, though.  Photos of the view will have to wait for a sunny day, which it appears may never arrive.

Call For Presentations: New Orleans Plone Symposium

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Alan Runyan, Toby Roberts and the rest of the crew at Enfold are putting on what promises to be another fantastic Plone Sympoisum in New Orleans.  They’ve just issued the call for presentations:

We are now ready for presentation submissions for the Plone Symposium.

The Plone Symposium is heavily focused on technical useful tidbits and best practices of Python/Zope/Plone development. The goal for the Symposium is for to cover relevant topics for consultants, systems administrators, and developers. It is the perfect venue for prospects to engage the Plone community because of its intimate setting and core developer to attendee ratio.

Some suggestions for talks for the Symposium:

  • zope.interface / Adapters
  • Eggs / VirtualEnv
  • Buildout
  • Lowering the bar for entry
  • Integrating 3rd party applications
  • Indexing / Events
  • Content mirroring / Entransit
  • RDBMS integration
  • ZODB / RelStorage / zeoraid
  • Consulting projects with Plone
  • R&D and Consulting
  • Plone in the Windows environment
  • Making dynamic scalable sites with Plone

Each presentation should be 30-45 minutes. Speaker should be intimately familar with subject matter. We recommend 5-10 minutes of Q&A section of presentation so audience members are allowed to ask questions.

Speakers will have conference fees waived and will get a t-shirt.

Please send title, abstract of presentation to alan@enfoldsystems.com.

If you’re more interested in attending than speaking, then you can register now.  Early bird pricing ends May 7th.