What we mail back consists of the anonymous ballot, a secrecy envelope, and an outer envelope. The outer envelope has a bar code which identifies who is voting and it also requires a signature on the outside of the envelope. Once the fact the person has voted is counted (note: not what they voted) the outer envelope is discarded and anonymity takes over.

I’ve never liked having to sign the outside of the envelope. It’s always seemed like one more way someone could rip off a signature relatively easily.

Is it that big of a deal though? We sign all kinds of stuff and my general attitude has been that no one really looks at signatures these days anyway. Mix that idea with other people coming to the same conclusion, add my general laziness and I guess I let my signature slop around on my ballot envelope. Also, apparently they actually look at those. I got a letter in the mail today that said:

We were able to match your signature and your ballot was counted from this election, however it appears that your signature has changed since you last registered to vote.

They include another registration card for me to update my signature. I’m curious how they matched my signature despite it changing and, since they could match my signature, why am I being asked to sign another card? My guess is it failed a computerized test and had to be reviewed in person. That just raises the question, why can’t they scan the new signature and add it to the list of matches in the computer?

Anyway, it’s the first time my signature has mattered in a long time and seems to bring relevance to my original concern – putting it on the outside of an envelope makes it that much easier to copy.

Overall it was a pretty fun night. The presentations were fantastic and, in true open source spirit, videos of them all will be hitting youtube shortly. Hopefully they’ll find a bigger venue next time because I’ve got a feeling attendance is just going to go up. I’m sure more details will be hitting the web shortly – search for “igniteportland” on your favorite site that uses tags to get the content.

Some of the events we are considering (subject to change due to group consensus)…

• I remember when, the BS game (any story of geekery, starting with “I remember when” or “I was there when” allowed, and then you call BS or not.
• Name That Language. Snippets from obscure and entertaining languages posted. Can you recognize an algorithm in whitespace if it’s surrounded by poetry?
• 5 Minute Code Sprints: 5 minutes to solve a problem. Prove your language best, or shortest, or most obscure. Whatever you like.
• “I can name that programming language in 3 lines of code”: Name that language Duels. Challenge your opponent that you can name a Programing language by seeing less lines of code than them.
• Best WTF snippet: Do your worst and be the best

Oh, and going to the Slashdot 10-year anniversary party isn’t an excuse to miss this. You can come to PDXPHP, talk about L10n, fill up on pizza, and still show up fashionably late to the Slashdot party.

If you followed the saga when we were trying to launch, you know we ran into some headaches with scaling the code to the amount of traffic that goes to the site. I’ve already written about building a localizable site with CakePHP (and then wrote some more, and a little more), but I don’t think we’ll have time to get into the details like that. I expect this will probably be a higher level discussion, more about concepts and what we tried that didn’t work.

You can read the full description if you’re interested, although I don’t think we’re going to be able to cover all that in the 45 minutes. If you have anything you want me to cover for sure, let me know; and if you’re going to be at OSCON, feel free to drop by.

This was my first time attending one of their meetings, but I think the turn out was impressive for such an informal get-together (I’m guessing around thirty people showed up). There were several newcomers to Drupal that were just wondering what the buzz was about and how it could make their lives easier. After some introductions, the talk flowed mainly around nodes vs. pages, views and CCK. I think a lot of people got their questions answered and got a jump start on their projects.

On the multilingual side of things, I was not so fortunate. By the end of the night, I didn’t find anyone who was already using Drupal in more than one language. A couple people mentioned waiting for Drupal 6 with it’s pile of i18n additions, but that’s not really an option at this point since I need to get something up and working. So, my plan is still to stride boldly forward, armed with a list of modules people mentioned (I’ll post more on that once I have a chance to use them), and my newfound friend.

After the meeting was over, I lost track of time while meeting people and sharing ideas. Eventually our conversations migrated into the parking lot, and we decided we should all go home and sleep before the sun started rising again.

Overall it was definitely worth going – I didn’t learn what I went for, but I got some good ideas (not just about Drupal!) and met a bunch of new people. If you’re in the area and have an interest in Drupal, it’s a great place to meet others and see what kinds of things they’re doing with it in the real world. Thanks to Sam Keen for organizing and the bus project for providing the meeting space.