Even thought I was told many times during the evening that I was described as being involved in organising a "rival" (I assume, jokingly), I have to say that the 27dinner held in Cape Town yesterday was great.

Perhaps the largest difference between the February 27dinner and this one was the amount of networking that seemed to be going on.  I think this was a function of many things.

The venue (the hotel training school near the Waterfront) was more intimate and dedicated to the event, and had smaller and better positioned tables.  This meant that you had a potential audience of ten people, instead of the six or so from the previous venue (Relish), and that nobody was in "the back row" behind everyone else and away from the speakers and everyone else.

The speakers were kept pretty short, and more time was thus available to networking.  It also meant that people remained pretty upbeat and willing to chat to people.

I sat with Jaco and Joe, and the others at our table were the MyVideo.co.za people, and later Uno.  Dave also sat with us (and, well, everyone else) between MC'ing (which went down very well).  The other denizens of the geekdom were spread amongst other tables in small patches, alone against the dark side...

Of the talks, Ian's talk on technology and morality (in combination, and somewhat in separation) was probably the most profound, and Mike Scott's introduction to the backstory of Bru and Boegie and the creative process was the most interesting.

As I said, a lot more networking went on - I chatted briefly with Mike (checking to see if he knew Jeremy's brother from his time at Rhodes), chatted with Dave about Barcamp Cape Town (you'll hear more about this after the weekend), also with the Myvideo and Zoopy guys about getting enclosures into their RSS (please!), introduced myself to Victoire (who it seems also works with a friend from Rhodes - hi Zweli), said hello to Henk (who raised over R2k for iCommons), dissed PHP and MySQL at Jacques, and so forth.

Altogether, a great evening, and I think it really shows how wrong the people who made silly comments about how Capetonians are just too cliquey are.

In my previous aggregator post, I set up Feed and Post models to capture the core information about these items.  We can now store the information from the aggregation process in a persistent location, and this can be used by some external program to view the aggregation of content.  Now we just need to get the information from somewhere...

The core aggregation logic is quite simple:

1. We'll fetch the feed.
2. We'll parse it.
3. We'll save various bits of feed information to the database.
4. For each entry in the feed, either create or update the information in the database.

There are a few optimisations we can do there for various levels of winnage.  For example, a pretty big win is that there's no point parsing the feed if we can be sure the feed hasn't changed.  An even bigger win given the rate of change of individual feeds on the Internet, is that there's no point fetching the full feed if it hasn't changed - use of eTag and If-Modified-Since can save us from not only unnecessary work, but unnecessary traffic (important in South Africa) and just being a good Internet citizen.  A small win is that we don't need to update the database if the entry in the feed hasn't changed.

Over on Eric Edelstein's, on talk of building another blog aggregator (to compete with Afrigator and Amatomu - listed in alphabetical order so as not to denote preference), I boasted at how easy it is to build the aggregator portion of it.  (Well, I'm fairly certain I did.  It seems the comments have all disappeared.  I'm not the only one pretty sure there were comments there...)

I did it quite significantly differently before, but I'm now building another version of the aggregator, hopefully in a way that gets rid of most of the tedium of aggregation, but allowing the results to be stored in whatever way the developer-user wants, and to allow capturing more about the feeds and posts than a generic aggregator will.

While I wanted to abstract away the particular model, I started with models for Feed and Post as a beginning, using Elixir, drawing inspiration on fields and definitions from the FeedJack aggregator for Django.

I've moved TGOpenIDLogin onto Google Code so that the source code repository is accessible and other people can work on it.  I've also created a TGOpenIDLogin discussion group, in case someone actually ends up using it and wants to know some things about it.

(TGOpenIDLogin is a TurboGears module that you can use to add OpenID logins to your TurboGears application without too much fuss.  A previous post has information on how to use it.)

After a somewhat depressing Digital Freedom Expo, it was great to see the energy that Heather Ford and her colleagues (Hi Kerryn! Daniella!) at iCommons had and evoked at the Bring 'n Braai.

One of the greatest thing about the event is that I had multiple distinct groups of friends attending.  I was not just my "open source conference attendees anonymous" friends, or just my "CLUG" friends, but also the friends interested in technology that just don't normally do events, and even more impressively, friends that aren't even particularly interested in the technology itself, but were attracted by the implications of Creative Commons as a movement and on their own lives.  (Oh, and there were those blogging geeks who'll attend anything to get a few hits by writing a reportback.  Weirdos.)

If I've become very disillusioned about the attitudes of those involved in Free and Open Source Software in South Africa, Creative Commons seems to offer something that has applicability and value to a broad part of the population, and the key message of Read Write culture is one that differs from the continuing focus by many stakeholders in Free and Open Source Software in South Africa on the use of such software, and no provision or support or education or recognition for the creation of such software locally.

So, thanks Heather and Kerryn and Daniella and everyone else from iCommons, and also to Dave for MCing, for relief from the apathy I've been feeling for the past six months, and I hope that this event leads to more creators and creation of content, and thus to more reason to come together to savour the output of our creators and their belief in sharing, re-using, and remixing.

Tomorrow night in the usual 18:30 to 20:00 slot, Jeremy Thurgood is giving a talk on Erlang at the (Western) Cape Linux Users Group meeting at the Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre at UCT.  Erlang is a concurrent and functional programming language featuring strong but dynamic typing and also run-time code hot-swapping.  And, well, Jeremy will tell us more...

After much poking, cajoling, and downright finger pointing and laughing by Bryn and a bunch of other "friends", I now have Gibe, the little project saving my sanity from the tedium of burn-out and under-stimulation, in a publically accessible place for more people to do more finger pointing and laughing.

Gibe is just your standard web log software - people can log in and add posts, other people can read the posts and make comments on them, and there's anti-spam (using akismet) and there's also a bit of a beginnings of a plugin architecture there for people who want to expand it beyond what it does now.

Unlike the previous sociable week, this week is somewhat less about meeting other technical geeks and more for empowering the masses through teaching about open source and open content.  Well, it's all really just an excuse to meet people, so I'll be tagging along.

The Digital Freedom Expo (I've mentioned it before) is being held at the University of Western Cape on Thursday and Friday, and features international speakers like Lawrence Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Brian Behlendorf, and Philip Greenspun.  Local speakers include Heather Ford (representing iCommons), A.J. Venter (former OpenLab lead developer), and Bob Jolliffe (talking about Freedom to Innovate).

On Friday night, there's the iCommons Bring 'n Braai, where Lessig and Wales will talk more about open content to a wider selection of society - and where local creators of content will learn about and show off their open content.  It's at the Independent Armchair Theatre from 8pm.

On Saturday, the Ubuntu-ZA community will be having a meet-up that happens also to have become the Cape Town Feisty Release Party. Come have a drink and chat with fellow Ubuntu users at San Marcos at the Cape Town Waterfront from 2pm.

(And if you're microformats-enabled, you can just pick all the event details up automatically from the post page.  More on that later...) 

Oh dear, I'm "blogging about blogging" again.  I apologise in advance.  And although I know it's silly to talk about "true blogs", I'm going to do it anyway.  More apologies. 

The "technology" section of Amatomu (maybe I should suggest mod_rewrite to them for prettier URLs...) is starting to get a bit crowded.  If it isn't gadgets, it's games.  Both of which I think should be considered "lifestyle" more than "technology".  Sure, there's the occasional useful bit of technical information about the gadgets or games (or their platforms), but the primary point of interest on those sites is the gadget or game, which while made from technology, is mostly about the experience of owning it or playing it.

Our so-far-only Google Summer of Code-r Charl van Niekerk noticed The WebAfrica API, which also has an official announcement on their web site, which starts:

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of our newest offering: The Web Africa API. This affords developers and advanced users the ability to directly, safely and quickly automate access to the various services and facilities we provide.