Pat Allan pat

Hullo Berlin friends,

I'm passing through town for a few days - arriving on the 3rd of November, departing early on the 7th. I'd love to catch up with as many of you as possible, though I know that's not a small ask. I'm currently planning to drop by the Ruby meet on the 3rd, and will be hanging out at TravisCI earlier that day to say hi to all the wonderful Travis humans, but beyond that I'm pretty flexible. Maybe a group dinner on another evening? Or I can catch up for a beverage or two during the day as well :)

So: if you've got some spare time and you'd like to say hi, let me know! Suggestions on dinner spots that cater for groups and a variety of diets are very much welcome as well :)

If you're too busy, or happen to be elsewhere at the moment, no worries - I shall catch you next time!

Oh, and if we're friends and I've forgotten to send this to you but you've spotted it anyway via Twitter or the like, do get in touch! Knowing many wonderful Berliners means I usually end up forgetting at least one per

Some rake tasks to help migrate Radiant (v1.1.4) sites to Refinery (v3.0.4).

Put these Ruby files in place in the respective Radiant and (new) Refinery apps
You'll need to manually bring your layouts across and adapt accordingly, as well as images, javascripts and stylesheets.
Run rake export:json in your Radiant app
Copy the resulting dump.json file into the Refinery app (or put it online somewhere - perhaps a private gist - if you're going to need to import in the production environment)
Add the salt column to your Refinery app's user model: rails g migration add_salt_to_refinery_authentication_devise_users salt:string
Run rake db:migrate in your Refinery app.
Run rake import:pages import:assets import:users in your Refinery app.
In a Rails console in your Refinery app, change your home page to have the root path. If it's the first page in the app (likely), this will do the trick: Refinery::Page.first.update_attributes :link_url => '/'

UPDATE: There's an event on at Dolores, so it's likely to be extra busy. Thus I'll be heading to Alamo Square Park instead (I know, not quite as convenient, but hopefully not too far out of the way for most of you!)

Hullo wonderful friends in San Francisco :)

I'm going to be in town for a few days - arriving late afternoon on the 24th, then departing on the 28th. I would love to catch up at some point, but given there are just too many of you to catch up with separately, I've a group gathering suggestion instead: I'm planning to hang out at Alamo Square Park on Saturday 25th from 3pm (this coming Saturday!) with a blanket or two and some snacks. Does that fit your schedule? If so, do rock up and bring any food or drink you'd like as well, and we can hang out :)

If not, no worries! Perhaps there's a chance for a coffee or meal before I leave, but otherwise, we'll just have to catch up at some other point! Hope life is treating you well and you're having fun :)

So, I'm in NYC for a little while (departing the morning of the 16th), and it's clear that there are too many excellent people I'd love to see, and not enough time. Thus, I'm thinking of hanging out somewhere on Sunday afternoon - at a cafe or a park, likely in Brooklyn - and if you don't have existing plans, it'd be lovely if you could swing by for a chat.

Current suggestions for a location include Prospect Park, or cafes Pudge Knuckle and Sweatshop in Williamsburg. If you have strong opinions one way or the other, do tell. Mostly, just let me know (on Twitter is best) if you can likely drop by, because it'd be lovely to see you :)

Pat's Twitter account and website
Midnight Oil's Power and the Passion
opensource.org
Nadia Eghbal on the definition of open source, the importance of free open source infrastructure, and many other related posts.
Avdi Grimm on the problem with mixing passion and work.
Jeff Lindsay on open source and Jacob Thornton's puppy analogy - which is also referred to by Nadia Eghbal.
Ruby Together
[Sidekiq

SDRuby and their mailing list
RailsConf
RubyConf
Keep Ruby Weird
RubyNation
Ruby for Good
Rails Camps
Rails Camp USA West and East
Reviews of the past two Rails Camps in the USA by Shana Moore, who is on her own journey of becoming a professional developer: West and then East
Code Retreats: an event that gives you the opportunity to pair and practice the Right Way to write code (this is the event I couldn't remember the name of).

At some point, I received a spam email that came with the From address of my own email account. I marked it as spam. However, Mailgun, which I use for email forwarding, then decided my email address was a spam account, and stopped forwarding emails to me. Any legitimate emails sent to me did not receive failure notifications, they just disappeared. Thankfully, I was able to get this issue resolved, but it took about 28 hours for this to be the case.

So: if you sent an email to me (pat at freelancing-gods dot com) between 3:30pm Sunday 15th May AEST and 6:00pm Monday 16th May AEST, it never arrived. If you think it is important, please do send it through again!

This evening I attended the Melbourne Conversations event Re-creating Communities, which was run in conjunction with the Smart Cities Summit happening in Melbourne this week.

There was certainly some interesting things discussed by the panelists, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting. I was hoping for a discussion on how to increase interactions between people within their communities, but instead it was more about how use technology to serve communities. The latter is not a bad thing - and indeed, the panelists spoke earnestly about putting people first - but the routes to all solutions seemed to be driven by technology, startups, and innovation-as-a-buzzword.

I probably got more value from reading the #melbconvo tweetstream and the thoughts it provoked.

Parts of town to stay in:

Melbourne’s CBD (Central Business District) (ie: Melbourne proper, a rough equivalent of a US ‘downtown’, kinda like a smaller Mitte for Berlin-familiar folk) is the centre of everything, and it’s easy to get almost everywhere. It’s where I live, and I love it. Plenty of food and drink options here, and especially in the east half, not too crazy at night (King St, on the west side, is home to stripper joints and the like, not my sort of thing, hence I mostly stick to east of Elizabeth St).
Fitzroy, Carlton, Collingwood are the trendy/hipster suburbs, with plenty of restaurants, bars, cafes. Perhaps something along the lines of Chicago's Wicker Park / SF's Mission / Berlin's Kreuzberg (though less gritty). Fitzroy in particular is pretty easy to walk around, and is worth checking out even if you’re staying elsewhere.
St Kilda: very trendy these days, and right by the beach - albeit on Port Phillip Bay, so don’t expect much in the way of waves. If you want a proper Australi

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