Cherished

Getting to Maybe: How the World Is Changed by Frances Westley, Brenda Zimmerman, and Michael Quinn Patton

Richard — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:04:39 -0800

When shopping for Christmas gifts at the Laughing Oyster bookstore in Courtenay, I came across a book whose subtitle, or rather, its very long and prominent description, spoke to me. Ever since befriending people who were able to project an attitude that they can change the world—or at least their world—for the better, I've started to believe the same thing. This belief came in direct conflict with my long-held attitude that I was just one person, that I neither had the energy nor the inclination to find the cause that I couldn't not join, the something so undeniably wrong that I couldn't not do something about. Everything seems taken care of. Global warming? Somebody's working on that. Sexism? A whole cadre of activists are on it. Hate, poverty, racism? All issues that I can outsource my conscience to someone else because these were so obviously problems that there were enough people on the job.

Enter Getting To Maybe: How the World Is Changed by Frances Westley, Brenda Zimmerman and Michael Quinn Patton. The "subtitle", in text as big as the title, that grabbed my attention reads: “This book is for those who are not happy with the way things are and would like to make a difference. This book is for ordinary people who want to make connections that will create extraordinary outcomes. This is a book about making the impossible happen.” I showed the book to Karen, my agent of change, who knew my struggle with cynicism and with trying to find my passion. She offered to buy it for me. She thought this might be something to knock me into action, whatever that might be. She was right, but it won't knock me into action soon.

Westley, Zimmerman and Patton describe the people who are the forces behind social change as "social innovators". I see social innovators all around me, but I yet don't have the confidence to describe myself as one. (Yet: one person, who will remain nameless, has pointed out that I'm at the top of a pyramid, and whether or not I agree with the idea that I'm "over" people, I concede that there are people who listen to me and take me seriously during the times I want to be taken seriously, and that my influence with them is nonzero.) The authors challenge the mindset that problems have simple explanations and simple solutions, and argue that embracing complexity and, most difficult for me, ambiguity lead to the change that social innovators seek. They also challenge the notion that the best social innovators are the strong personalities, and argue that they are rather people from all dispositions that felt a calling. They could not not act. Even if the social innovators knew for a fact that they wouldn't solve the problems in their lifetime, or even ever if they lived forever, they could not stand idly by while it was happening. "Not on my watch", Ulysses Seal of the Conservation Breeding Specialist Group said to himself. Write the authors: “that watch will last his lifetime, but by thinking about his mission in this way, he makes it human-scaled—manageable enough to carry without succumbing to despair.”

The authors recommend constant evaluation during implementation and finding moments to sit still, to see where social innovators are and to note changes in the social landscape and adjust. Citing the case of PLAN (Planned Lifetime Advocacy Networks) and their struggle to scale their network out, the authors suggest that not every movement can be replicable, or at least not quickly, despite pressures to do so. Other case studies offer more lessons. The case of Opportunities 2000 in Waterloo, Ontario suggested that even though the implementors believed they had only a small but measurable effect, theirs was the motivating force. Others found success through their failure: Roméo Dallaire, a Canadian hero if there ever was one, could not prevent a genocide in Rwanda, and lost everything after he retired. His current stature amongst Canadians has vindicated him, and he finds success in speaking tours around the country. (His stature amongst Belgians is another story.) MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), Bob Geldof, and other cases illustrate the calling, the struggles, the failures, and the changing landscapes social innovators face when making the change they must make.

The authors tend to repeat their stories for effect, and sometimes showcase overtly political motives (as opponents of the war in Iraq and President Bush), and their approach might be a tough sell in an age of one-liners and easy solutions. Despite that and not being able to identify with many of the cases presented, I found the book inspiring. Karen, unwittingly or not, bought this not for the current me, but rather the future me. The me who lets the ideas and stories in the book rattle around in his brain for a little while and waits for the forces that cause me to find my calling align. Or, as the chapter title has it, for hope and history to rhyme. They haven't yet, and they will. After having read this book, I'm better prepared for when they do.

GPS Logger Tomfoolery: Getting the GlobalSat DG-100 Working On a Mac (Successfully!)

Richard — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 23:18:33 -0800

One of my intentions this year is to track more of my movements and document them in photographic form. One of the downsides of the GlobalSat DG-100 GPS logger is that there is no support, at least not officially, for Mac users to retrieve tracking information, necessitating a trip to Windows and then back to get the photos matched up with the coordinates at which they were taken. Many have tried, and failed, to hack it in, and after spending a couple of hours today, I can now declare myself as part of those who have failed. But I came oh so close.

Spurred by Richard Akerman's writeup and screenshots of HoudahGeo for the Mac, and especially his sidebar comment about support for the GPS logger we both own, mixing metaphors like few have mixed before me, I dove into the swamp of programs and yak shaved until the cows came home. Or, rather, until an error message that I couldn't debug appeared on my Terminal screen. Cough. Here are the steps I took to get where I got to before giving up.

First, I downloaded the GPSBabel command line program and graphical interface, but not before spending a few minutes looking at the gpsbabel.org documentation. It's not clear from their downloads page, but you have to click through another link to get through to the SourceForge project page. SourceForge, despite improvements in their interface, is still not easy enough to use, and not easy enough to get a direct download link for a package (which I often need when at the command line using wget). That's another story. After downloading the Mac OS X package, and hopelessly futzing around with the command line supplied for the DG-100, I searched around a bit and found someone who had also tried GPSBabel with the DG-100 and found out that indeed DG-100 support wasn't built into the 1.3.4 release. They suggested checking out the HEAD version from the SourceForge CVS repository. If none of that previous sentence made any sense to you, consider yourself part of the blissful majority.

That of course meant compiling software. And what do you need when you compile software? A compiler! The compiler I needed was gcc, and seemingly the only way to get gcc is to install it from the DVD that comes with your Mac. People like me lose stuff like that. Not yet, in my case, as my DVDs are in a cabinet at my apartment, but having done most of the work at the office, they needed to be at the office. Good thing I work with Mac users.

After a couple of tries at installing gcc (I needed the SDK for Mac OS 10.4), I was able to compile a developmental version of GPSBabel. Somewhere along the line, it occurred to me that I didn't know how to access the USB port via the command line, that is, which argument to use. The command line suggested at gpsbabel.org recommended /dev/ttyUSB0, but there was no such 'device' on my Mac. I came across a forum post about DG-100 support for the Mac, which tipped me off to an open source driver, which has something to do with a Prolific PL-2303X USB-serial adapter on the DG-100. That got me closer.

(We break into regular programming to note that a "Jaako" posting in the forum was able to get the DG-100 working with his PowerBook, but that all the dates of the readings were from the fist day of 1970. Is that the same Jaako that went driving around Taiwan and reported it on Good Fishies, the blog of his and his incomparable girlfriend Cathy Wang's trip to Japan and China? If so, he got closer than I did. Now back to the thrilling conclusion.)

After installing that, and restarting my MacBook (along with the customary baby feline sacrifice), satisfied that my yak had been sufficiently shaved, I modified the command line slightly to look like the following: gpsbabel -t -i dg-100 -o gpx /dev/cu.PL2303-0000103D outputfile.gpx I get the following response: dg100_recv_byte(): read timeout

And that's where I'm left. Looking at the C code that does the work for the DG-100 with PHP-coder eyes, it's not clear what could be changed to make it work. Searching for the error message or the function name only gets me the C code or forum posts I've already looked at. Any ideas?

Time passes and Jaako reports in the comments on how he got the GlobalSat DG-100 working on a Mac. You'll need gcc to compile the C file, in which I've changed 3B1 to 0000103D. The software is GPL, so I distribute it under the same terms. Thanks Jaako for the pointer, and thanks to Mirko Parthey for the original work.

One Week Documenting My World With a Nokia N95

Richard — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 11:50:25 -0700

Along with Kris, Roland, Dave, and Rebecca, I'm participating in a week-long Simon Fraser University research project centered around social media and the Nokia N95, a feature-rich mobile phone that takes amazing photos, acts as a media (video and audio) player, and tracks my movements. After two days of playing around with it, I've walked around my neighbourhood, taken video of trains, mapped out my morning commute to work and the full length of the 101 bus from 22nd Street Station to Lougheed Station. Bus routes are boring, I know, since they're already well-documented by the people that operate them, but I endeavor to accurately map my bike route using satellite technology, rather than draw it imprecisely by hand based on memory.

Ideally I'd be using some of the location tools built for Drupal to map out my adventures on my site using external services like Google Maps or Google Earth. Using these tools, either Drupal or the external services, would then spit out RSS and other XML-based feeds so that others can take the information and remix it somehow. In fact exactly a year ago today I wrote (Re-)Documenting My World With Drupal and the Nokia N95, which laid out a rough recipe of how that might happen. The development of some of the tools have atrophied (e.g. Aggregator2), but others—especially the Drupal core CMS and map creation services—have matured and people are finally baking location into the web. A week isn't long enough to get these things humming, though.

Impressions of the "phone":

the S60 user interface is still non-obvious and therefore hard to use
beautiful photos from a camera with an autofocus that I can't get the hang of
I can't take photos at all while tracking my movements with Sports Tracker, though that application is cool, giving you graphs of speed and altitude over time, exporting into multiple formats so that you can, for example, display them on Google Earth
everything's faster and better than my regular luxury phone, the Nokia N70
absent a data plan, having wi-fi that works on my phone rocks compared to not being able to get instructions to share an internet connection with an N70 working
vibrating when turning the thing on scares the crap out of me

Rebecca started things off accurately calling the research project a 'taste test', and has been posting photos of her travels around the Vancouver area. If it wasn't for Roland, I'd be using about half of the functionality that I'm currently using. He has his first day Blink! reaction and sober second day thoughts. I'm looking forward to hearing from Kris and Dave, who are most likely to document with video.

29

Richard — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 13:16:24 -0700

Today I enter the final year of my twenties, turning 29 years of age. The last few weeks I've been reflecting on how to get my shit together, and the prospect seems overwhelming. Money currently ain't a thang, but I have no plan for 5, 10, 20 years from now. My hobbies revolve solely around a computer, and the only thing I know how to cook is spaghetti. I lead a disorganized life in a small apartment, something I feel condemned to continue. Other issues nettle, like health (much improved due to floorball and dragon boat) and sleep schedule (closely related to my so-called diet), so over the coming weeks and months I'm doing a complete assessment of my life as I live it presently and coming up with at least the outlines of the next 30 years.

Where do I want to be? What do I want to do? What should I do? Whom do I want to spend my time with? What's that goddamn beeping noise? These questions and more I'll be asking myself. And my friends, annoying them surely. Some of them have it together in my view, so I'm not about to let this social network I've developed over the years go to waste. But first lunch (you guessed it, left-over spaghetti), then off to buy a new notebook to make it seem like I'm starting over. Because that's what it feels like.

iPhone, Co-Housing (With Wife-Swapping Jokes), Next Bus Info on Facebook, and Spying on Your Readers at DemoCamp Vancouver

Richard — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:46:22 -0700

After some initial confusion about the location of tonight's DemoCamp Vancouver, we all made it to the Irish Heather to hear about the iPhone, co-housing, a Facebook application for bus schedules, and tracking the movements of people while they visit a site. And then networking ensued, at least presumably, since I left after the demonstrations.

First a demonstration by a self-described fan-boy of Apple's iPhone, the latest status symbol among geeks and affiliated. I happen to think the iPhone is pretty awesome, so after someone said "it's just a phone!" I yelled towards the presenter, "what else can it do?", knowing full well it's a better looking but smaller (in disk space terms) version of the iPod than the current non-nano non-Shuffle versions. It was cool, and dude answered all the questions reasonably without going into hype overdrive.

Next up was a "presentation" about co-housing, which I think left people wondering why we should care about it. He started off with a joke about how people hear it's about wife-swapping and that yes, it's about wife-swapping. Stupidly thinking that this was a bombed joke that needed resuscitating, I blurted out something like "so tell us about wife-swapping". Yeah, real smooth, seeing as how my girlfriend was sitting across the table from me, among other women in the audience (though they were a distinct minority in the crowd). I know what my girlfriend thinks already, but Megan and Ariane, you were there, what did you think? Was it just an attempt to get a cheap laugh that failed, or is it negatively indicative of the type of events that have the word "Camp" in their title?

The co-housing presentation itself seemed to lead to more questions than answers. Usually, if I don't come out with more questions than answers, I give the presenter a lot of credit for raising them in my brain. In this case, however, I knew there would be a presenter on the subject, and came for that reason, but came away with two questions that a lot of audience members might have also come away with. I for one would have started right away attempting to answer 1) what is an intentional community and what are some examples and 2) how is co-housing really different than a strata, or is it? I came in with those questions, and left without an answer.

I'm no doubt getting the order wrong, but John Boxall presented on MyBus Vancouver, a Facebook application that shows you (and only you) bus schedules on your Facebook profile. I'm more interested in next bus information via SMS, since I'm not bringing my Facebook profile with me to the bus stop, but we were assured that the developers are making progress in re-igniting the service that does that. If TransLink would only open their data to an API...well, that's an argument that deserves its own series of blog posts.

Finally, Andre Charland got up to demonstrate RobotReplay, which tracks the movements of person visiting a website and records them for playback later by the website administrator. The goal is to figure out what people are clicking on and what they are typing in in order to make the experience better for current and future users. Or, it's a tool to spy on your readers, but I don't see how different that is than what Google Analytics or the various statistics packages many people unproblematically (and rightly so) use already. The demonstration itself could have had better examples or people navigating a site for a period longer than 10 seconds, but it's cool, lightweight tech and Andre knew his shit and addressed the concerns people had about privacy and future features.

This was a very well-documented event (with multiple video and still photographers), so I don't regret not bringing my camera.

The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford by John Robert Greene: A Review

Richard — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 19:48:55 -0800

Before the new year, the death of former United States President Gerald Ford took the sails out of former-Senator John Edwards' announcement that the latter would run for the highest office in the land. Press platitudes described Ford—the only in American history to be neither elected as Vice President nor as President—appointed by Nixon after Spiro Agnew resigned, ascending to the Presidency after Nixon resigned—as "decent" and "honorable", an image that despite press clichés, still has resonance. Ford appeared at the end of an episode of The Simpsons, asking Homer if he liked football and nachos, and whether the latter wanted to join him in watching the football game while eating nachos. Homer, the episode makes clear, identified with the former President, because both were a little dim and a little clumsy, but at the core, decent human beings unlike the episode's portrayal of a hateful George H.W. Bush.

John Robert Greene's book, The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford attempts to portray the President as a man leading an administration in search of an agenda, only to have it derailed by both his miscalculations and Congress' increased power after a nation appalled at the executive branch's excess. We are given a tour of Ford's domestic and foreign policies, as well as political intrigue involving Ronald Reagan's challenge to the incumbent's renomination, nominations of a sitting President these days a done deal, as well as former Nixon administration officials who either disliked Ford personally or were bitter about their exit from the halls of power.

The Nixon pardon was—and remains—Ford's most controversial act as President. Anticipating neither the outcry nor its vociferousness, the pardon shattered Ford's image of humble, honest President who appealed for healing after Watergate. Ford was an angry, partisan, political president that sometimes acted on principle (school busing and desegregation) and out of political concerns (New York City's bailout). Greene does not judge Ford as harshly as Christopher Hitchens about the Mayaguez rescue mission, one of the few foreign policy crises Ford faced. Greene recounts the punitive air strikes matter-of-factly, almost as if Ford didn't care that the crew had been released already. (While both discuss the Solzhenitisyn snub, Hitchens covers Ford's turnaround against the Kurds in Iraq, while Greene does not cover it at all.) Greene devotes full chapters to Ronald Reagan's challenge to Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination—Ford ultimately eeked out a victory both in the primaries and at the convention—and another chapter to the presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter, to whom Ford lost.

Greene's book, while short at 193 pages (this excludes the endnotes, bibliographic essay and index), comes very detailed, outlining Ford's rise from Congress to the vice presidency to the presidency. The book also features tidbits on major contemporary political players, like the aforementioned Reagan but also Richard Cheney (currently George W. Bush's Vice President) and Donald Rumsfeld (up until recently Bush's Defense Secretary). Green has written another book about a one-term president, George. H.W. Bush, and that book is next on my reading list about U.S. Presidents. One-termers have necessarily less written about them than two-termers, and while, because of that, they seem a little more mysterious, they still have enough primary resources to draw upon for book-length studies, and the George H.W. Bush book no doubts talks about players in that Presidency that will make up a future Republican presidential administration.

Ford's brief experience offers lessons for future presidents—and decision-makers in general who are thrust to the top of an organization with not a lot of preparation, and that is what makes Greene's study of Gerald Ford so interesting. The writing is accessible, not bogged down in interpretation or policy details, but written as a story about a football-playing midwestern President with a public image of sometimes having a few sandwiches short of a picnic, whom the American people judged still too close to Nixon and the perceived moral failings of the Republican Party in the 1970s. A President, in Greene's mind, who nevertheless set out to heal the nation and succeeded.

Personal and Social

Richard — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 15:09:11 -0800

Jason Kottke links to Nicholas Felton's personal annual report for 2006. Last year, while on the airport express from downtown Toronto to Pearson International Airport, I started making a list in my notebook of terms from business and other fields that sound cool if you put "personal" in front of them. Note that some are real things that people do, and others are not-quite-neologisms (in that the words are all English words, but the mixing of them are new).

personal mission statement
personal tagline
personal data model
personal use case scenario
personal business model
personal valuation
personal value proposition

Note that if you substitute "social" for "personal", you get the same effect. Are there any other terms or phrases that sound more interesting—or make something you think is bad turn into something you think is good (e.g. "social networking")—if you add either "social" or "personal" to them?

What If You Created A Community Site and Nobody Came?

Richard — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 23:42:30 -0800

A few months ago, Jen announces she's one of the new writers at Metroblogging Vancouver, in addition to Jonathon Narvey. Making a note it of it at work, I said in our internal group chat something to the effect of "it's almost as if you have to make something appear like an exclusive club in order to get people to join." I was a little on the grumpy side when writing that, mostly because Urban Vancouver, which has free weblogs, forums and event listings for anybody who signs up, but I actually consider Metroblogging Vancouver to be a successful group weblog: the authors have different perspectives on the same thing, and frequently contribute interesting writing. Same goes for Beyond Robson, of whom I'm envious of their Vancouver's art and music scene coverage.

Among the reasons Urban Vancouver isn't a successful community site:

the design as seen in Internet Explorer is broken.
even with the redesign there's a lot going on on the site: lots of blocks with 'most recent x' and 'popular y' and navigation that can be confusing
I along with Ray are the only regular writers for the site, and I generally just cross-post Vancouver-related material (which I'd love if people like Darren Barefoot did with his great writing about Vancouver). Jonathon Narvey says he'll cross-post, and want to encourage people to do the same on Urban Vancouver.
you have to register to post comments. That a pretty big impediment to participation. It was my decision and I stand by it: spam overwhelmed the site. As soon as we upgrade the software that powers it, that should cease to be a problem and 'anonymous' people—who can leave their contact info, just like on any other weblog—will be able to respond.
the event listings sometimes show the correct time and sometimes don't. I'm hoping that's something related to the need to upgrade as well.
what do you think? What would make Urban Vancouver (or similar community site) more iviting?

(Among the reasons Urban Vancouver is successful:

fairly high traffic, and high ranking in search engines
almost 4500 contributions over 2 plus years
an understanding of how getting included in the aggregator, which I find useful in tracking what Vancouver bloggers talk about, benefits their weblogs even though it's technically republishing their writing. Note that inclusion is both opt-in and opt-out: you can ask to be included and to be removed as well.
an identifiable brand, which gets me and others into some events for free as 'media'.)

We managing editors have other ideas for the site, but it languishes a bit as we work on things that are a little more mission-critical. Something I've been struggling with is, working for a company that provides tools to build community sites, I haven't created a lot of them. Successful ones, that is. PDXphiles, improvident lackwit and even 43 Thongs are good candidates for opening up for user signups. (That last one is the least likely to open up: I meant it to poke a little fun at some guys who were creating services I actually use and like, so I don't ever want to feel like I'm competing with them using their sites' design.) Watching China and Translinked have open signups, but I don't give them enough attention or promotion for people to want to participate.

If you watch my reading about community, you'll see links to some great articles about the subject:

Jakob Nielsen on participation rates, something I've seen with Urban Vancouver
Gillian Carson on turning visitors into users, or, a better word, participants
Matt Haughey's article on building a community, using MetaFilter as his example (for which I don't blame him, he poured a lot of effort into it, and you can see that the first posts for a while were just him, which gives me some hope for Watching China)
John Gladding on how to be a great host, or, or to start and maintain a great forum (aka community site)

What if you created a community site and nobody came? That question rang in my head when reading the above articles and thinking about it consumes a sizable percentage of my day. I continually have to remind myself that using the technology is about 5% of the work you put into building a community site. Public and private promotion (online and offline), maintenance of the site, user and content moderation, facilitation, participant retention, and technical support, not to mention participating yourself by creating the initial writing, video, audio, what have you, and continuing to participate in the community after it takes off constitute 95% of the time you put in. Soft skills, but hard work.

Tranlinked may or may not succeed as a place where people can write about Vancouver transit issues, but maybe I have to think smaller. Starting in April of this year, I created a group for Vancouver transit on Flickr for the sole reason that it didn't exist yet. Watching the 'translink', 'seabus', 'skytrain' tags, I politely ask people if they want to post their photos there (trying not to tell them what to do; that's a personality thing, but personality has a huge impact on the success of a community). I have quietly—via private messages, which felt more personal than leaving a drive-by comment on their photo—been building a small but already-passionate community using someone else's service. By piggy-backing on a photo-sharing community site I could carve out a niche for myself and others who think public transportation is an interesting aspect of their city.

In other words, I don't really have to build a community site or even a community: communities are usually already there. They just need a place to hang out and feel like belong to a community.

Notes on "Documentation in the Open Source World" at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium

Richard — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 15:57:53 -0700

My worries about Eric Shepherd's presentation being too focussed on developer documentation were both correct and unfounded. Correct because he only talked about developer documentation for the Mozilla Corporation. Unfounded because everything he talked about applied directly to end-user documentation writing. Some notes here, then a paraphrase of my comment-slash-question at the end. He broke the talk into sections:

planning and organizing
the five C's of documentation
creating documentation
who decides who writes
gathering information
some do's and don'ts

He showed a continuum of openness, from less to more open: published documentation (without comments), commented documentation, and collaborative. The distribution of documentation also proceeding on a continuum from less to more distributable: printed, downloadable, and browseable. He also talked about the advantages of using wikis—anybody can contribute and correct, they take advantage of everybody's strengths, and even non-technical people can contribute—and their disadvantages (prone to sabotage, clueless-if-well-meaning people, and potential for spaghetti documentation. Mmm, spaghetti documentation.

The five C's of documentation that Eric listed are:

completeness, meaning cover all topics and make the documentation as thorough as possible, but not too thorough.
correctness, with testing of sample code (or, in my case, the instructions I write out for people)
clarity, meaning formatting and writing in easy-to-understand language designed for readability.
convenience, meaning organize the documentation so that the solution is easy to find.
consistency in language, spelling, grammer, colours and formatting

Creating documentation means making tough choices, depending on the time a writer has to write the documentation but also how soon to revisit. He recommended finding ways to remember and remind to revisit documentation as new releases of software come out. As to who writes the documentation, since he discussed developer-focussed documentation, he listed developers, writers, managers and readers. No mention—at least to my recollection—about users, but maybe readers encompasses that groups. He touched on documentation requiring maintenance (everything requires maintenance) by monitoring changes both in the software and the documentation itself and monitor its organization. Also he listed some tools (wiki discussion pages, IRC, email and instant messaging) used to communicate between programmers and documentation writers, and, by extension, users.

An interesting section of the presentation focused on information gathering. He listed reading design notes, discussion archives, source code and asking the programmers themselves, but I wondered about casting the net wider, like asking the community as well as the users. I sometimes come across something that I know—or think—is possible and want to document, and I know if I ask on the support forums I'll get an answer, but as a documentation writer, I'm afraid of looking like it's something I should already know. It's something to get over, since at the end of the presentation he gave some advice to documentation writers which included "check your ego at the door" and "don't be territorial" and "collaborating means admitting that someone knows more than you." That last one is the answer to my worries, and I'm going to make an effort to ask the community if something is possible and how, and if appropriate or necessary, elaborate on the answer in a step-by-step way.

(Re-)Documenting My World With Drupal and the Nokia N95

Richard — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:54:04 -0700

After I tell two people an idea, it probably makes sense to publish it somewhere so that someone can go out and implement it. Here are the ingredients:

a site powered by Drupal 4.7
Location module for Drupal
GeoRSS module for Drupal
Aggregator2 module, though its successors are currently in heavy development
A Nokia N95. Or any mobile device that combines GPRS, GPS, and a camera and a phone. The phone part is completely unnecessary, but that conveniently limits us to the Nokia N95.
(optional) Google Maps and Views modules for Drupal

I say optional for the last one because you would only 'need' it to display a map on your own site. (Which I do: more on that later.) Some assumptions, using Vancouver as my example. Since we all have a natural urge to let complete strangers know not only that there's nobody back at home but also to let those same complete strangers where we are at all times, say I'm walking in Stanley Park and want to make a 'live' document, with a map, of the walk I'm taking. With photos and video, say. Say, also, that I have a reasonably-priced unlimited data plan, the same reasonably-priced unlimited data plan I moan and groan about not having. Here's what would happen:

I would take a photo and automatically upload it to Flickr, the GPS taking care of the co-ordinates and geo-tagging as I walk around.
Flickr then displays it on its map. That's really neat, but not the exciting part. In the RSS feed, Flickr adds the longitude and latitude to each photo's item.
My Drupal-powered site takes in the RSS feed, and thanks to the Aggregator2 module + the Location module + the GeoRSS module, automatically adds the longitude and latitude to the individual item.
I map it on my site using the Google Maps module. That's really neat too, but still not the exciting part.
The GeoRSS module also adds longitude and latitude to my site's RSS feed.

That way someone could come along and use my liberal "Attribution" (no other restrictions) Creative Commons License and do something with it. Add it to a mapping aggregator (like mapufacture that displays crimes committed in Stanley Park, which would be so nuanced as to point out where crimes didn't happen. So hopefully, assuming the current odds of my being involved in a crime at any given moment, it will map out that data point at that particular moment.

We now come ever closer to having all the tools we need to not only document our environment, but to let others re-document it in different, unimagined ways. Right now the process is fairly time-consuming: before even knowing about GeoRSS, through a process involving manually looking at Google Maps of the area, then parsing out the Google Maps URLs for coordinates, I pasted in longitude and latitude for each station so far on my SkyTrain Explorer walks. That gets me a cute map of each walk (clicking on the label goes to the walk's individual page), and thanks to the SkyTrain walk feed (generated with the Views module) that contains geographical data (courtesy the GeoRSS module) you can get the points plotted on an external map. Which also happens to use Google Maps, but the point is that the service, through a standard to output location data in RSS and a few other pieces, someone else can use an external service or pull down my RSS feed and do something with my location data.

By few, of course, I mean "a lot of", since none of it comes out of the box, as you need to glue together a content management system, modules, and a little bit of manual labour. The Nokia N95 takes care of the manual labour part, and the wifi modem makes grumbling about lack of a GPRS plan almost pointless. (Almost.) It also takes out of the hard work of learning mapping, mobile devices, location-aware tools—and increasing my own location-awareness—as I try them out, since they'd all happen at once. And it would be fun!

I'm not worried that some evil-doer has, after reading the above, gained knowledge to hasten our doom. I'm 100% confident they would have figured that out for themselves.

Logitech R-20 Speakers and Subwoofer: A Review

Richard — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:19:21 -0700

After work yesterday, I popped by the local shady computer store to ask about a couple of things, one of them speakers, which I needed for my Powerbook. My laptop's speakers are really not that great, and it's a little mortifying that I relied on them for so long. Connecting the laptop to my stereo isn't really feasible anymore, it being 10 years old, the volume control effectively broken, the CD tray literally broken. So I bought the Logitech R-20. ($30 Canadian, and they were one of few types of speakers there, so I didn't do a lot of comparison shopping either. Or any research for that matter. Also, I distance myself from any accusation of my being an audiophile.) As for placement, I sought Chun-shek's wisdom, and he suggested that the subwoofer can go anywhere since bass doesn't travel in a straight line, but the right and left speakers should be at ear level while sitting down. That might not be possible with my current setup, so I'll have to hope the angle of the two speakers will make up for being below my head while at my desk.

After a few hours of use, which consisted of listening to KEXP streaming over the web and an episode of Open Source about the limits of the wisdom of crowds (while ironing, of course), I'm pretty happy with them, so much so that I'll reproduce Franklin Villalobos's review from Amazon.com since it nicely reflects how I feel.

Pros:

Headphone jack and POWER button in the left speaker

No "wired remote" (which adds more clutter to your desktop)

Nice design for the price

Even cheaper than Creative's SBS 350

Cons:

Small sub-woofer

No "wired remote" which means you have to keep one of the speakers close.

No bass control (which usually means too much bass if your audio source has no equalization control)

The cons aren't really an issue for me: I almost considered not getting a subwoofer at all, don't want another remote, wired or otherwise, and I'm happy with software equalization.

Now to find somewhere, other than leaning against my dresser, at a 45 degrees angle, to put the subwoofer.

Logitech R-20 Speakers and Subwoofer: A Review

Richard — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:19:21 -0700

Pros:

Headphone jack and POWER button in the left speaker

No "wired remote" (which adds more clutter to your desktop)

Nice design for the price

Even cheaper than Creative's SBS 350

Cons:

Small sub-woofer

No "wired remote" which means you have to keep one of the speakers close.

No bass control (which usually means too much bass if your audio source has no equalization control)

The cons aren't really an issue for me: I almost considered not getting a subwoofer at all, don't want another remote, wired or otherwise, and I'm happy with software equalization.

Now to find somewhere, other than leaning against my dresser, at a 45 degrees angle, to put the subwoofer.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow: A Review

Richard — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:33:20 -0700

In Someone Leaves Town, Someone Comes to Town by Cory Doctorow we follow Alan, whose name changes (see below), around the city of Toronto helping his new friend Kurt install wireless Internet access points using equipment found in dumpsters, fall in love with Mimi a young woman with wings, and fight off an evil brother while trying to protect his other siblings. Since having spent some time in Toronto this year, I recognized a lot of the areas Doctorow describes, like Kensington Market, in which I spent a week at a hostel. I started reading the book while spending a week at my girlfriend's apartment downtown, which prompted me to post a long quote from the book about Toronto's smells. I even recognized, if distantly, Kapuskasing, one of my favourite Canadian place names, because my dad once had a conference there.

Of the main characters in the book, only the names of Mimi, Krishna and Kurt—the only three main characters who can be reasonably assumed to be human, Mimi's appendages aside, and there's even reasonable doubt that's her real name to begin with—stay the same. The names of the not-quite-humans (Alan and his five brothers) switch frequently, each character's name's first letter remains the same. While most of the time the protagonist, Alan, remains mostly Alan, he changes from Abel to Arthur to Albert to many others, all starting with A. Mimi's, Krishna's and Kurt's names never change. Kurt and Krishna are the closest to what we would consider human, neither having wings nor lacking navels nor being altogether evil, with Krishna being the only one that displays an ability for figuring out who is not-quite-human (Kurt never really catching on). Why have the not-so-humans' names change while humans' remain the same? Not clear: I've never seen this device used, but it at least forced me to pay attention to the narrative and not skim a paragraph as I sometimes do.

There are two scenes that stick out as memorable, neither having a lot to do with the plot, but which came across to me as refreshing and interesting, at least considering the source is Cory Doctorow, who some might have the impression of someone who automatically resists anything that a large corporation would want to support. This is particularly the case when Kurt and Alan meet executives and techs from Bell, one of Canada's largest telecom companies, which gets this soliloquy from one of the executives:

Think a second about the scale of a telco. Of this telco. The thousands of kilometers of wire in the ground. Switching stations. Skilled linesmen and cable-pullers. Coders. Switches. Backhaul. Peering arrangements. We've got it all. Ever get on a highway and hit a flat patch where you can't see anything to the horizon except the road and the telephone poles and the wires? Those are *our wires*. It's a lot of goodness, especially for a big, evil phone company.

So we've got a lot of smart hackers. A lot of cool toys. A gigantic budget. The biggest network any of us could ever hope to manage -- like a model train set the size of a city.

That said, we're hardly nimble. Moving a Bell is like shifting a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick. It can be done, but you can spend ten years doing it and still not be sure if you've made any progress. From the outside, it's easy to mistake 'slow' for 'evil.' It's easy to make that mistake from the inside, too.

But I don't let it get me down. It's *good* for a Bell to be slow and plodding, most of the time. You don't want to go home and discover that we've dispatched the progress-ninjas to upgrade all your phones with video screens and a hush mode that reads your thoughts. Most of our customers still can't figure out voice mail. Some of them can't figure out touch-tone dialing. So we're slow. Conservative. But we can do lots of killer R&D, we can roll out really hot upgrades on the back end, and we can provide this essential service to the world that underpins its ability to communicate. We're not just cool, we're essential.

So you come in and you show us your really swell and interesting meshing wireless data boxes, and I say, 'That is damned cool.' I think of ways that it could be part of a Bell's business plan in a couple decades' time.

Another memorable scene, near the end, has a reporter from NOW magazing coming over to interview Kurt and Alan about their wireless network, with the young reporter not buying the line that freer access to the Internet will lead to freer expression:

"You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other -- even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of the presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corruption hearings.

"And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there's always some old pecksniff primly telling us that our phones don't give us *real* democracy. It's so much bullshit."

He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt's mouth hung open.

"I'm not old," he said finally.

"You're older than me," the kid said. His tone softened. "Look, I'm not trying to be cruel here, but you're generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it's not the last great thing we'll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You're a PC guy, so you think my phone is a toy. [...] I'm talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for *free*. I can talk to *everyone* with it. I can say *anything* I want. I can use it *anywhere*. Sure, the phone company is a giant conspiracy by The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face that because I can't invent the Web for my phone or make free long distance calls I'm being censored?"

The reporter is later mollified by a more nuanced argument, that it's not an either or proposition.

Aside from the above scenes, and the running theme of producing freely-available wireless Internet access, there does not seem to be any overt social commentary happening in Someone Leaves Home. The best science fiction I've read—not that the novel is heavy by any means on science or even futurism, but rather more so on fantasy elements—has political or social commentary as its basis for existence. This novel clearly aims to entertain, but of his three (I've read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe), this is the least entertaining. That's not to say it isn't entertaining, but that there's no interesting take on scarcity like in Down and Out and no IRC chatlogs for me to identify with like in EST.

The Best SkyTrain Photos on Flickr?

Richard — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 01:57:46 -0700

Last night I spent about an hour going through photos on Flickr tagged with 'skytrain'. (At some point I'll move on to another obsession, but until then... ) Not to be mistaken with photos of the elevated light rail in Bangkok with the similar title "Skytrain" (note the miniscule 't'), only ever having taken the Vancouver system, I had gone through the photos wondering which were the best ones. The ones I liked the most fit into two categories: photos of tracks and photos of blurry trains and/or tracks as the trains were in motion, using long exposures as well as a copule of photos of empty SkyTrain cars. Here are the highlights, with people I know personally disclosed.

Blurry or Long Exposure

SkyTrain streak from hudrednorth
CeeBee's "SkyTrain Vancouver
"skytrain front seat (retreating)"
Bill Stillwell's b&w photo
Eldon Whalen's "G-Force"
Terry Forrest's motion blur series
if SMeaLLuM wins the award for coolest blurry SkyTrain tracks photo, who has a just as cool underground shot and another above ground he also wins the award for most annoying capitalization
Will Pate's "Skytrain Under the City" wins the "Hey I Know That Guy" award (Roland, easily with the most photos tagged with 'skytrain', comes in a close second
PoYang wins best use of stationary object (in this case, a human) of a train whizzing by
Christopher Chen's "Bombardier SkyTrain" makes the train look like a white glob
Eastbound train at an empty-looking Main Street Station, with a westbound train at the same station
also at Main Street-Science World is "Expedited Parallels", with Pacific Central in the background

Tracks/Guideways

"Commercial looking up..."
"Tracking Over" in New Westminster
"SkyTrain Tracks" (taken near where I took the elevated guideways shot)
hundrednorth wins the "Hey I Know That Girl" award with what looks like a tree between the tracks (the photo appears to the right as well)
Roland's in July 2004, one of the earliest posted to Flickr, of tracks near Gilmore Station
a photo that makes the tracks seem higher than they are
Travis Smith's photo of a train over Commercial Drive Station got entered in the "Hey I Know That Guy" category (he didn't win)
Jonathan Schwartz posted multiple photos of tracks as did Stephanie (she wins the award in the "Person Other Than Me Or Roland to Have Photos Tagged With 'skyte'" category)
two photos (1, 2) with sky between the tracks
two more from Zoomlens (see the "Expedited Parallels" photo linked above), both involving a shopping cart: one with it as a central figure, another with it off to the side

Empty

MK I (older SkyTrain)
MK II (newer SkyTrain)

The award for most interesting thing done on SkyTrain (other than kissing, of course) has to be playing board games (from another perspective).

Are there any photos, posted on Flickr, that I might have missed?

Photos I missed, including photos submitted to Flickr after I originally posted this:

after seeing Dave Elton looking at a blurry SkyTrain, I check out his other photos tagged with 'skytrain', which includes a blurry SkyTrain in November 2005 near Stadium Station, and another colourful blurry train. More time passes, and he posts, on May 20th, 2006, a blurry SkyTrain near Quebec St. and another.
Some great photos of SkyTrain arriving at Commercial Station: original and b&w version.
A photo below the tracks, blurry, heading towards Main Street station.
Brassy 1 posts the blurry lights of a passing SkyTrain

Leafs Suck

Richard — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:30:07 -0800

Randy Charles Morin, J.J. Guerrero, Jackson Murphy, and Joe Frazier all summarized the Vancouver Canucks' 4-3 over the Toronto Maple Leafs I was able to attend (thanks Jeffery)! My coupled friends M and S attended, she wearing a Maple Leafs' jersey, he wearing a Canucks jersey, though in seats far away from mine. They weren't the only people who came to the game together but as opposing fans: a guy from Newfoundland cheering for the leafs came with his son, who was cheering for the Canucks.

Some observations and interpretations follow. It looked as if the star players, at least from the Canucks side, were doggin' it. Specifically, Todd Bertuzzi and Marcus Naslund looked as if they were going through the motions, the latter taking a shot on goal from the latter with zero chance of going or even rebounding, but with no apparent decision to consider alternatives, like passing it off. Every time the players (not just the stars) made a change, they coasted to the bench, making me wonder whether the rules for too many men on the ice should be enforced more stingently.

Tom Benjamin compares the speed of the players at the World Junior Championships to NHL players: “We were flipping back and forth to the Canuck game. The difference in the pace was very stark and not flattering to the NHL at all. How could Juniors be so much faster than NHL players?” In the comments, Darren blames the 82-game schedule, but I'm not so sure. Every now and then I would catch a 'classic' NHL game—you know, the ones where there are no logos on the ice surface?—and I think it has more to do with the size of the players with respect to the size of the rink; rule and enforcement differences between leagues; and more controversially perhaps, that the current batch of NHLers are coddled. They have million-dollar contracts, flawless ice surfaces, long "media breaks" during games, access to world-class equipment and coaching/training personnel and maybe even the celebrity status of sports players that require them to not only perform on the ice but also fulfil contracts to their sponsors. Those things might actually work towards the favour of a higher-speed game, but the only people that are really exciting anymore are the rookies and the odd player like Trevor Linden who seemed to give 100% on each shift. A lot of the truly talented players have the ability to get away with not giving it all when they score every night, but if we're paying full price for something, shouldn't we get full effort?

Watching a hockey game live is so much better than watching it on TV. The thrill of cheering a goal with thousands of others alone is usually worth the price of admission, but also booing the ref and chanting "Leafs Suck" in unison when thousands of fans of the opposing team in question are in the audience adds to the effect. I don't care much for the fact that everything has an advertisement on it—including the Zamboni's, which look almost as if they are NASCAR cars. Also the long breaks between play to cut to commercial for radio and TV are too long, but at least watching the kids clear the ice of snow—and the players looking at the girls' asses—eases the boredom. They're almost like the crew during a play that set the props correctly in between scenes. The metaphor breaks down because plays, unless they are improv, have a pre-determined outcome.

It turns out that the Leafs do indeed suck. They would have sucked less with Lindros in the lineup, but so too would the Canucks if they had Jovanovski in the lineup. The part that truly sucks is that the Leafs play in Vancouver the next time won't be for 3 years, or so goes the rumour. Do the geniuses at the NHL know how many Leafs fans there are in every Canadian city? There were, as I mentioned, thousands of Leafs fans at GM Place on January 10th. This is true, I hear, of Calgary and other Canadian cities with an NHL franchise. I know revenues from TV are often more important than what the league gets from fans in the stadium, but all you have to do to guarantee a sold out game in Canada is schedule the Maple Leafs to play. Becuase you'll get a least as many fans of the Leafs to come jeer the home team.