DrumGit, Curtis Cunningham’s blog.

Traveled with Dr. Mike to this weekend’s BarCamp meet in San Deigo, at the Microsoft campus in La Jolla, Southern California.

Check twitter updates from a bunch of attendees here.

Wiki with attendees and details of talks here.

My photos of the event available here.

I’ve other notes on people I spoke to and talks attended, to add to this post when I pretty them up properly.

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Ok, gathering my rough notes into something a little less rough for this post. Lesson learned is don’t wait long between the event and the write up, as you start to forget the details/context of some of your notes! I ramble a bit, am missing a few names to credit, but you’ll get the idea

…

I got speak to someone who was very enthusiastic about WiMax, and it’s something I know nothing about, so must look into.

I got speaking to Charles Wible, who was very interested and active in the open source community regarding the Microsoft Excel file format, and producing an Exchange replacement.

Attended one talk on “Hacking eBay” I think from a person from DealLocker. He advocated using tools like TypoBuddy to locate incorrectly categorized/spelled items available on eBay and Craigslist. A quick google turned up more on that at LifeHacker, and Reuters. Seems other related sites are fatfingers.com, gumshoo.com, mistypedauctions.com, etc.

I attended a talk by the creator of MachDB, a very cool looking open source DB type of thing for gathering data about your computer systems. He was there to share his work and illicit constructive criticism, feature suggestions, etc.

The always enthusiastic Dr. Mike (twitter @chiropractic) gave a talk on ideas for increasing traffic to your site. A great example was if you find an article you like on another website, cite the author, link to the author, and the original article, twitter search for the the author, tell them you cited their great article, etc.

I got reminded to look beyond Google Adsense, and investigate other affiliate opportunities with companies like Amazon.com, Apple.com, etc.

Someone gave a talk titled along the lines of Mind Hacks, advocate of the work Jose Silva, more here. Can’t say I was into this much though.. didn’t seem to be much substance to it.

@dantecl gave a talk on hacking WEP. He cracked WEP 64 bit in seconds, and said the 128 bit version would only take a few minutes. It’s recommended to change from WEP to WPA2. As a side note, learned of a cool wifi product, a super strong USB wireless card called something like Alfa Awus 36h.

I learned of free Photoshop lessons! All available here online at the San Diego community college here.

There was a talk about web standards, and ways to improve your web coding. Lots of great tips! There’s a meet of sdwebstandards.org, first tuesday of each month. Here’s a summary of my notes..

Basic Stuff
- use tables for tabular data, not for presentation layout!
- add correct doc type to all pages
- add alt text to all images
- add meaningful page titles
- valid code
- semantically correct code
- replacing inline font tags/color with css
- accessible forms, data tables, and skip menus

Advanced Stuff
- basic positioning with CSS (padding, margins, etc.)
- full positioning with CSS - no tables for layout
- practice CSS layouts
- read CSS tutorials and books
- set aside time to learn CSS positioning
- practice, again!

Debugging
- IE6 is not your friend
- top 3 IE6 bugs: incorrect box model implementation; double margin float bug (fix is display inline); 3 pixel text jog (fix with height of 1%)
- as a debug aid, outline:1px solid red; background:pink;

There was a great talk by @jbruin on the Twitter phenomenon. Took a while to get going, there were comparisons of Twitter to Google. Another cool site mentioned, facereviews.com. Ultimately it appears that Twitter requires more creativity from the user to come up with a purpose for using it, as Twitter seems to focus on providing the pipes/technology, with the user left to motivate themselves to use it.

There was a really interesting talk on linguistics given by @lisinsd. Good explanations of how different sounds are made and realize which languages/cultures use these sounds.

All this talk of Twitter got me thinking of ways to query/process Twitter using the APIs, based on things like, location, keyword trends, attempts at categorization, etc.

There was also a talk about how some users become power users of a community. A link to a video lecture I got on that here.

And I was turned on to technarium.com and the context completely escapes me, but documenting that here too