Proving once again how excellent women are at multi tasking, I am currently:

~ reading the last few days of the Great Sun Debate on debian-legal
~ preparing notes for a breakfast meeting
~ reviewing elgg functionality on elgg.net and being distracted by finding my name all over the place!
~ listening to Bic Runga
~ playing with my cat
~ enjoying my heater
~ drinking a glass of very nice sauvignon blanc
~ providing support on moodle.org about the moodle/elgg integration.

So how much do I kick ass today? Quite a bit.

I have finally put the elgg integration block into moodle contrib & up on the downloads page.

Yesterday I wrote a big HOWTO for getting moodle and elgg to play together nicely. It's pretty easy for the straight SSO setup, transferring files requires setting up ssh keys and a bit of trickiness.

There's a wonderful quote in Peter Pan about tidying up minds:

It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day.

I have a very good friend with whom I have discussed putting things in boxes extensively. Sometimes, things happen that shouldn't happen, or shouldn't happen now, and we have discussed this idea of boxes as a way of dealing with these things. It's sort of a way of accepting things and moving on. This particular thing happened, and ok, it was a bad thing, so lets just accept that it happened, put it in a box, labeled with an appropriate taxonomy system, and put it aside.

I've been thinking about tagging so much lately, because of tagging blog posts here, tagging that I'm thinking about in elgg, and of course consumating, that last night, before I went to sleep as I was going through my nightly Peter Pan-esque mental tidyup, that I found that I was putting things in boxes and my appropriate taxonomy structure was tagging.

If only I could write an interface to my brain to capture this tagging and output it in one of those clever different sized font for frequency of tag thing, a la flickr, or even this website, I think it would be extremely useful.

moodle is about to go into a freeze for 1.6!

We are making progress with elgg! Watch this space.

I am addicted to eclipse mints. I find the 'warning - excessive consumption may cause a laxative effect' to be rather alarming, given my addiction.

I watched Amelie again last night. I had forgotten how incredibly much I love that movie. I am going to cut my hair off again, I think.

I have cleverly convinced a few Debian Developers that it's a good idea to blow up a balloon and write my name on it and carry it around Debconf, since I won't be there. Rather than just having one official Penny balloon, Martin Krafft has put the idea in my head that it is a good idea to have a whole herd of Penny balloons.

In other news, at Friday night drinks at Catalyst everyone was a little bit drunk and we were playing jump through the hoop of flames and now there is a broken collarbone.

returns 1. Who on earth made that decision?

I am now going through elgg looking for sizeof($thing) and testing for is_array first.

It's my own fault for adding a database access library that returns false for no results rather than an empty array which is what the old general db_query function used to return.

:(

I got to work this morning and gmail was down! Life without gmail! I am lost.

I am currently very busy merging our NZVLE elgg with clean elgg and my head is full of merging. Knowing about

echo 'hash_of_patch_to_merge' > .git/merging

Makes life easier. I was whinging about how with arch I could just touch the relevant patch log file and it would know that patch had been merged. I guess this git trick isn't so useful with cherry picking, because it means that everything is merged up to that point, but that's ok, because I am actually merging everything, or deliberately not merging it because it's redundant.

I went to the theatre last night and saw two plays, one absolutely awful, the other pretty good. Fringe is a mixed bag.

This Saturday I am going to Tea, with my mother, which I am looking forward to immensely, and then back to my house for drinks with my wonderful dysfunctional social group. I have been playing a bit with what to call my friends lately, I had a brief love affair with 'posse' but right now I am very happy with 'dysfunctional social group'. It pleases me.

This week has been very productive. I have finally gotten The Blue Room's website done and dusted (insert gratuitous google juice plug here), and had lots of beer and/or coffee with people I like, had a great skype conversation with my Megan in Venice. Hearing someone's voice is so much better than just IM. And I merged a million elgg patches on top of that.

I find people walking to work in dress clothes with fancy stockings and then sneakers so incredibly ridiculous. Sure, I wear high heels, and they hurt, but I walk to work in them, and home again too. I wouldn't feel like I had earned the right to wear them otherwise.

-----
Fall on your face in those bad shoes.

Moodle and elgg are now playing pretty nicely.

Moodle has an 'eportfolio' block that sends a request to elgg asking for an rss feed for the logged in user. Elgg checks to see if that user has an elgg account, and if so, returns an rss feed of their recent activity. If not, it returns a 'no such user' error.

Moodle then either displays the rss feed, or it makes a 'join up to elgg' button, that when submitted, keeps a receipt of the subscription request and then forwards the request to elgg. Elgg then sends a pingback to confirm that the request came from the lms, and then asks the user for a bit more information and creates the account, adds them to the community that matches their institution and logs them on.

All the communication between elgg and moodle is secured by a shared token and a signature that's reverified at every step of the way, and when the communication is just between the two systems (ie, not from the client), ip address validation happens too.

Next: the ability to publish assignments and such from moodle to elgg, both scping files and sending the metadata across with 'intent to send files' and 'finished sending files' pings.

I am having fun.

My hair is gleeful.

Scrubs is making me so happy. Oh my god how I love scrubs. So so so so much. Sometimes, I'm watching it in the house by myself and I crack up laughing and then I feel silly because there's nobody around but I can't help it because I have some serious scrubs love. Chocolate bear. Oh my!

And having moodle display activity from elgg in a block with magical secret squirrel token authentication makes me happy.

And catharsis is pretty damn good as well.

My plans for my next tattoo were almost foiled by the shell man from Te Papa telling me my murex was not a native, which would ruin everything, but I realised that somehow my mother and I had swapped our murexes and I had the tropical one. Which means that she has now found my poirieria zelandica and I can fetch it this weekend and tattoo glee can go ahead as planned sometime in the near future.

I am utterly gutted that I am not at linuxconfau, since I was supposed to be, but one has to make these sacrifices for the sake of one's own sanity.

And Jo is here, which helps make everything better because there is much Jo love and snuggles and squishing and all things Jo-like and good. Like, chow. Chow has become Jo-like, and chow is damn good.

And I love the Minnie Cooper bag. And I get my hair done tomorrow. And I have three more books sitting waiting for me to read them.

Which reminds me, I read Other People by Martin Amis which was thought provoking and I found it quite fascinating.

I am so happy that I'm reading again. I didn't realise it at the time, but most of the last year I have hardly read anything. Except crappy pulp. I didn't have the energy really, to read anything that would require effort or thought, but already this year I have read quite a few really good interesting books. It's good, and pleases me immensely.

- The kittens are gone. My Borris has a new home already and I miss him so much it hurts. I wanted to put a photo of Borris up this morning but my script that generates thumbnails seems to be suddenly (and silently!) broken. I suspect a php change, as ImagePNG to file has stopped working, but isn't complaining.
- It's 10am and people at work are drinking already. The plan is to let them have a few beers and then challenge them to fooz.
- Last night I went out for a few drinks with a few crazy kids from Auckland. I was wearing a jacket I made and somebody asked me if I got it from Ricochet. That's pretty fancy.
- mysql is retarded. Ok, that's not news. Having to support 3.23 is the bane of my existance. Seriously. Why don't I get join_condition on table1 JOIN table2? Grrr.
- Yesterday I started playing with elgg. So far I have bought in adodb, for my next trick I am bringing in datalib from moodle which is chock full of useful database stuff.
- I just got a text message from the Interislander about my ferry on Sunday. That's kinda neat. How bout that, I got an email as well. I guess they're covering all bases.
- I have finished christmas shopping! Now I just have to wrap it all up.
- M & I will be sleeping in a tent on the night of December 25. This is good, because my father wakes up at 4:30 and starts whistling. His nickname is 'The Whistling Professor'. He's pretty shrill, yeah, it's not much fun at 4:30am.
- Sara tonight! Yay!
- This list started off as an asterisk list, but serendipity converted them to bold tags.

Time to start taking over the world!

I can see that I'm going to become completely obsessed with it. Damn that Ben Brown.

It's made me think about tags though. I wonder if I can convince s9y to do tagging. Maybe in 0.9. I should merge it in anyway and the other day I found a bug that I can probably fix. I quite like the tagging thing, especially when you get a sidebar with words and some of them are in bigger fonts, presumably due to the number of recent entries with that tag. See elgg: Fresh on our minds for an example.

I guess I could just write one.

My eyes hurt today. The proportion of brokenness/normality is not in my favour.