Today I spent a productive and thoroughly enjoyable day at Oxford Geek Jam.

This was a techy event organised by @mattythorne and @loleg at the Jam Factory in Oxford bringing together hackers, ideas people and general interested populous to bash out some ideas and start hacking on some projects.

The group split into two main camps based around a couple of ideas; Oleg wanted to hack on a visual wiki representation, and my off the cuff idea which I’ve been playing on for a little while – the Stalk-O-Matic.

Stalk-O-Matic is a little data mining toy I have had in skunk for a while which uses the Google Social Graph api to aggregate much of the public information available on the internet about you into an easily explorable form. This is done for the purposes of education and illustrates just how public private information is – something that I might talk about at Barcamp Transparency.

Off the back of the Geek Jam I have open sourced the code and have started a Google Code project which I’d be interested in seeing people get involved in – usual “It was a private hack made public so is a total mess” disclaimer applies!

Anyway, I found today both enjoyable and thoroughly useful. I hope that there will be many more events like this in Oxford!

Barcamp Transparency is gaining momentum fast. Our sponsorship list is growing and we already have already confirmed a number of high profile people who are going to attend!

I therefore urge you to keep the 26th of July free in your calendar! Tell your friends!

On a somewhat related note, I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, because they are doing some very important work regarding freedom of speech and the fight against censorship – and without those you can’t have transparency or democracy.

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” (http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/) campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

This is just a short post to say that Barcamp Transparency is now on Digg.

Please take a moment to digg this up!

Those eagle-eyed developers who have been tracking the Elgg core SVN may have noticed that I have recently committed a bunch of captcha related changes, including a simple captcha module.

I just thought I’d write a quick post about it as this module makes use of a bit of Elgg functionality which has been around for a while, but that I know a number of plugin developers have missed.

Namely, the ability to extend actions.

When the Elgg framework calls an action the Action handler triggers a plugin hook called “action” before executing the action itself. This hook looks like this:

$event_result = true;
$event_result = trigger_plugin_hook('action', $action, null, $event_result);

Where $action is the action being called. If the hook returns false then the main action will not be executed.

The captcha module uses this to intercept the register and user/requestnewpassword actions and redirect them to a function which checks the captcha code. This check returns true if valid or false if not (which prevents the associated action from executing).

This is done as follows:

register_plugin_hook("action", "register", "captcha_verify_action_hook");
register_plugin_hook("action", "user/requestnewpassword", "captcha_verify_action_hook");

.
.
.

function captcha_verify_action_hook($hook, $entity_type, $returnvalue, $params)
{
$token = get_input('captcha_token');
$input = get_input('captcha_input');

if (($token) && (captcha_verify_captcha($input, $token)))
return true;

register_error(elgg_echo('captcha:captchafail'));

return false;
}


As you can see, this lets a plugin extend an existing action without the need to replace the action itself. In the case of the captcha plugin it allows the plugin to provide captcha support in a very loosely coupled way.

Happy coding!

I am pleased to announce that the Barcamp Transparency UK sponsorship pack is now available! Many thanks to @sylwiapresley for putting this together!

Please help by spreading the word as much as you can, and if you represent an organisation that is interested in sponsoring us for any amount then don’t hesitate to get in touch!