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Like Some Kind of Geographic Secret Handshake

Remember when I said I don't watch TV? Come on, you remember. Well, that's over now: BitTorrent and DVD rentals are my new TV. Here's what I'm watching (contains spoilers if you haven't yet seen them).

Prison Break: I initially downloaded episodes to catch up with the first season, but now I do it because they show it on Mondays at 8 o'clock, which is about the time my girlfriend and I are on the phone. (Aww.) The show is utterly preposterous: in one recent episode we see escaped convicts Michael Scofield and Fernando Sucré falling into a river only to see them in the next scene high and dry, the former wearing different clothes giving the latter a note from his pocket. That's on top of all everything else in the second season: now that they've escaped from prison, the FBI and "The Company" and the prisoners' former guards are on their tail, each prisoner with their own story line, involving revenge, marriage, clearing their name, and so on. At least they killed off the annoying characters (Veronica Donnavan, "Tweener") but shit's ridiculous. And yet I watch.

Battlestar Galactica: I finally watched the miniseries on DVD as well as a few episodes I had already seen and can see what people like about it. Almost everything about it—the story and the morals in the story, acting, soundtrack, the effects—are great. Almost? It tends to gloss over a few things, like how Boomer landed her ship after leaving Caprica. But something tells me they explain that later on.

The Wire: Jason Kottke wouldn't shut up about it, so I watched the entire first season over a span of a couple weeks. Set in Baltimore, the first season takes us inside the low-rises of the projects, with the police trying to break down a drug operation. The second season takes us to the docks and inside the dock workers' union. (The title refers to wiretaps placed on pay-phones and pagers in the drug dealer network.) Unlike Prison Break, The Wire seems intent on killing off the most interesting characters, like Wallace in the first season (unfairly, he just wanted out of the game) and almost Kima, the black lesbian. In season two, they kill of D'Angelo and make it look like a suicide, also for wanting out of the game (but also because they were afraid he'd snitch or already had). The series introduces me to slang like "mope", "the bug", and "suction". Also interesting is how they namedrop neighbourhoods, like some kind of geographic secret handshake. (I wonder if that's how Vancouverites felt about Da Vinci's Inquest.) Other things I learned about Baltimorians: they swear every third word and are all alcoholics, especially Baltimore cops. Oh, and don't fuck with Omar.

What If You Created A Community Site and Nobody Came?

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:

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.

They Didn’t Know How to Use Them

Pointing to an article about roundabouts in the UK, Stephen Rees writes: “I expect that this idea will be highly controversial here - and will induce the usual 'not invented here' syndrome. After all, even though Canada has English trained traffic engineers - and cities like Edmonton had roundabouts which worked well, they started getting ripped out when people started complaining that they didn’t know how to use them.”

My neighbourhood recently introduced a roundabout, replacing a 4-way stop. The street is jammed during rush hour in the afternoon, since it's parallel to a major artery. Few people came to a complete stop at the stop signs anyway, so the roundabout might be an acknowledgment of that fact.

I didn't get a notice in the mail about it, so if there was consultation, I didn't hear about it (the city installed the roundabout while I was on vacation). Also, there is no obvious place to cross the street for pedestrians: the crosswalks at the intersection were wiped out in favor of painted white squares. As in Stephen Rees' neighbourhood, the signs informing cars of the new traffic pattern are obscured by blowing tree branches, so while there haven't been any mishaps so far, a particularly windy day might confuse a driver new to the neighbourhood.

WorldChanging Vancouver Book Launch Links

Following up on last night's Worldchanging book launch in Vancouver:

That's just from a quick search on Flickr and Technorati, so feel free to add in the comments links to your blog post or photos of Worldchanging's Vancouver book launch, and I'll add them here.

WorldChanging Vancouver Book Launch

slip cover for Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century

This evening I went to Workspace in Gastown, a historic neighbourhood in Vancouver, to see Alex Steffen give a brief talk and signing for the book he edited, Worldchanging: A User's Guide For the 21st Century. Containing contributions from several dozen writers and photographers, the book, beautifully designed by Sagmeister Inc. (the book's cover advertises both this and that former Vice President Al Gore wrote a forward), outlines the problems this planet faces in the next decade or so and innovative solutions to those problems.

The book wears its ideology on its sleeve, or rather its slip cover, featuring not just a photo of a bird standing on a branch, but die cut holes so that, as Steffen pointed out, will make its mark on the book itself. The book, in other words, will evolve (change!) into something as the reader takes it out and puts it back. The photo above, by Kit Seeborg, shows the inside of the cover, while another view shows the outside. I asked Steffen if the book was intended to be a reference book or a coffee table book, and he answered that it wasn't intended to be read cover to cover, but looked at from time to time for ideas on how to change the world and holistically address the world's problems.

I have a set of photos from the event on Flickr. Nothing special, just photos of Steffen holding the book and of stacks for sale. I will have to reserve some thoughts about the book until I've given it more attention and consideration.

[Cross-posted to Urban Vancouver.]

Like A Separate Weblog About the Book

Back in August I mentioned that I had started reading Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy by Rudy Rucker and have, since then, been quietly posting chapter notes from the book. A little more dense than I expected, which should become clear when reading my notes, but enjoyable still.

This is not the first time I posted chapter notes of a book while still reading it: back in 2004, for Urban Vancouver, I posted chapter notes of The Corporation by Joel Bakan. In this case, keeping with the permanently experimental nature of Just a Gwai Lo, thanks to a newer version of Drupal combined with the Views module, my chapter notes almost looks like a separate weblog about the book. Though conceivably I could have done it with a tag (like 'lifebox') an outline with a view made a little more sense, since I can use the tag for links to external articles about the book or photos of the book. Someone already has, in fact: at this writing, the only two photos tagged with 'lifebox' at Flickr are photos using the book to display bookmarking technique: 1, 2.

The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul by Rudy Rucker: Chapter 3: Life's Lovely Gnarl

Rudy Rucker's third chapter of The Lifebox, The Seashell, And the Soul tackles evolution as computation and the possibility or artificial life (which he shortens to a-life). Of the three so far, this is the most accessible, talking about activators and inhibitors (relating them to ideas and their spread), and later in the chapter, cellular automata algorithms used to produce what look like trees. Most compelling, however, was his discussion on search method algorithms, though as a computer geek, I had to remind myself that he did not limit himself to search engines as we know them on the Internet but the ways and the feasibility of the ways we as humans and potential artificial life system would search for the solution to a problem. He distinguished between best solutions and acceptably good solutions, because it's far more efficient, not to say worthwhile, to find the acceptably good solutions over best solutions, because the later most often means you have to search through all possible solutions:

The fact is, given a large enough search problem, none of our various search methods is likely to find the absolute best solution with a feasible amount of time. But so what? After all, absolute optimality isn't really so critical. In any realistic situation we're quite happy to find a solution that works reasonably well. Nature is filled with things that work in clever ways, but it's a delusion to imagine that every aspect of the biome is absolutely optimal. Surely we humans don't have the absolute best bodies imaginable, but—hey—our flesh and bone holds up well enough for eighty or so years. We do better than our rival apes and our predators, and that's enough.

Nearer to the end he quotes at length from his novel The Hacker and the Ants, about a scenario in which software developers create virtual worlds in which their simulated robots compete amongst themselves in virtual environments. I imagined several homes in The Sims, with robots instead of humans, evolving in houses each slightly different but covering all the possibilities of combinations within those homes, the robots having descended into complete anarchy. I haven't read any of Rucker's novels but they can be found at the local used bookstore, so it's about time I got my hands on a few, since if he uses scenes from them to prove a point, he must think that they have stood the test of time reasonably well.

Assignment

After taking a few hundred photos in Iceland with my new camera, the Canon Digital Rebel XTI, it's time to invest some time in to really figuring out how to take decent photos with it. Because vacation really is a bad time to learn to use a new piece of documenting equipment, I mostly just took the same photo with different settings and uploaded the best one. Not a secret or anything, as I know that even great photographers hedge their bets sometimes, but I'd like to be able to know, if not instinctively then at least through practice which settings are appropriate for the situations I'll find myself taking my camera to. Looking at the camera settings for photos people take, by clicking the "More properties" link in Flickr (for example, the cool long exposures taken from Vancouver's SkyTrain: 1, 2, 3, 4) and attempting to duplicate the shot should help me learn too. These include planespotting at Vancouver International Airport, SkyTrain (photo)walks, and live events such as concerts and parades. Can you think of anything else? Maybe I should get more active on Now Public—so that people can assign me to cover something—and Urban Vancouver and give citizen journalism some serious effort.

(I'm thinking that if I bring a big enough lens, parade organizers will think I'm media and won't ask me to stop walking in the middle of the parade route. Concerts I'm not so sure about: do I need to ask the venue for permission? Or can I just walk in without fear of camera forfeiture?)

On another note, I find it difficult to take photos of strangers because I need to get over the idea, especially in a public setting, that I'm taking photos without someone's permission. The photographers I watch in Flickr have the ability to not care what people think, or at least understand that the other person knows that the photographer takes the photo because the photographer makes no attempt to hide it.

Middle Finger, Olympics!

Kris Krug just posted a photo of a poster seen in Gastown, and surely elsewhere, of a stylized middle finger made out of the Olympic rings. If it had the Olympic colours, it probably would have been less subtle, but let's be honest, I don't think a lot of people, myself included, initially saw an obscene gesture made with one's hands, but a body part that people are more discreet about. I wonder if the people who were behind the 2010 Riot stencils are behind this poster as well.

I walked right by it not thinking to take a photo of it. Not only do I work in the same office as a company with a citizen journalism site, but I work with citizen journalists. If you see them any of the posters elsewhere in Vancouver and use Flickr, be sure to tag them with 'vancouver' and 'olympics' so that they show up in the search for both tags.

[Cross-posted to Daily Vancouver and Urban Vancouver.]

A Few Minutes

Darren links to news about Google showing full NHL games on their video service. I'm not sure how I feel about full video of old available on demand. The only game interesting to me, the 1992 regional final of the NCAA basketball tournament between Kentucky and Duke, the one with Christian Laettner's final shot, would bring back the memories of my 14 year-old Duke fan self running around upstairs screaming, getting my dad to come downstairs and watch the replays. Instead, I'd love to see what the CBC does after its doubleheaders on Hockey Night in Canada: show extended replays, multiple stretches lasting a minutes, of the important plays during a game. This way we see how they led up to a goal, huge save, or fight, instead of having to watch the pauses between faceoffs, plays that don't lead to anything, and so on. I've heard of a service that Major League Baseball offers that shows the last pitch over every batter, so that we skip through everything that leads up to a strike-out, home-run, ground out. There would be stuff that happens before the last pitch, such as a stolen base or a balk or a manager arguing with the ump that I think should get included.

In other words, I'll watch the full game when it's live, but after the game happens, I'm a busy man, so I just want the gist of it.

(If you're watching the video of Game 7 of the 1994 Stanley Cup playoffs between the New York Rangers and Vancouver Canucks that Darren points to, be sure to watch the video of the aftermath in the city of the losing team afterwards.)

National Blog Posting Month Starts Today

National Blog Posting Month!

Writing in June, Eric Kintz argued that posting frequency doesn't matter, and he's right. Strike when the iron's hot, the cliché goes. Write when you have something to write about. Write about which you are passionate. Or, just write.

That said, today I start my participation in National Blog Posting Month, where I post to Just a Gwai Lo once a day for all of November 2006. Some goals for this month, all of which should come as the result of increased frequency of writing:

  • increase traffic. I look at hits and visit counts multiple times during a typical day, so they impact me psychologically. Of the things I should let go of about my weblog (see below), my stats aren't one of them.
  • increase "loyalty", which means subscriptions to my weblog's main feed. I can't measure that easily without using an external tool to provide the feed, and might contradict with the above goal, since visitors to the website will stop once they add this site to their aggregator. That said, insert something insightful about the network effect here.
  • increase inbound links, easily measurable using Technorati. See above about stats, and below about the conversation.
  • more difficult to measure, but I'd like to participate in the conversation better. I've complained to people close to me that I felt left out, but I only have myself to blame.
  • increase quality of writing. Eric Kintz argues, in his frequency piece linked above, that quality decreases due to increased quantity. I'd like to prove him wrong, or at least prove that I'm far away from the point at which quantity negatively affects quality.

Karen and I sat down last week at her apartment and, while she cooked, we wrote down some ideas for what we want to talk about this month. I love the idea of weblog as publication, as a type of online magazine, something both written and edited by an individual, with a great deal of room for spontaneity. I actually had the idea of hiring an editor type person for my weblog, someone who would assign me topics to talk about or at least a beat to cover. Karen and I came up with enough topics to fill more than a month, not including topics that deserve multi-part articles. This doesn't include my "Respond To?" section of my bookmarks, so I have lots of material to work with.

Today also marks the start of letting go. I need to be more comfortable using the words "blog" and "blogosphere". The former doesn't have in it the "web", blogging's medium. I never had a problem with the words "blogging" and "blogger", so it's time to give up rejecting its root word. The metonymy "blogosphere" made me cringe as being neither an identifiable place (physical or virtual) nor having a unified voice. It is one thing to say that "White House announced ...", but to say the phrase "in the blogosphere" was another. So I'm dropping the scare quotes. Blogosphere. There. Also starting today, the URLs of all individual posts come without a section. All posts beginning with today start with the year, month, day, and end with a slug. I plan to do this for old posts too, redirecting the old URLs to the new.

TextMate Hallowe'en Easter Egg

Scary TextMate Dock Icon

After saying yes to the TextMate update dialog box, the icon changed into a scary jack-o-lantern (seen left) and a window with a spider web. I don't use text editors that much (most of my scripting and text editing happens in a console window), but for notes and modifying existing plain text, it was worth the purchase price. I also love the screencasts, which clue me into some features that make repetitive tasks easier, the most useful so far being the screencast introducing how to use TextMate in conjuction with HTML tags. A day early, at least here in the Pacific time zone, for the easter egg, but still fun.

(Not technically an easter egg, since you usually have to do something for them to happen. But it's the best approximation of what this is.)

And yes, even though I don't really celebrate it—too loud and scary—I still spell the cultural holiday celebrating death with an apostrophe.

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

My worries about Eric Shepherd's presentation being too focused 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.

Notes on "Documentation: A Key to Openness" at the Free and Open Source Symposium

At the Free and Open Source Software Symposium at Seneca College at York University (not the Markham campus, to my embarrasment), I came in late to the documentation and openness presentation and took some brief notes. Presenter Chris Tyler recommended breaking documentation tasks into beats, which I interpreted to mean have leaders/managers/editors assign documentation tasks, push them just hard enough to write quality and up-to-date documentation, and not assume that "the community" will automatically contribute. (Near the end of the presentation he wondered why many open source projects have, as their suggestion for users' first contribution to the project, writing documentation if they are possibly the least familiar with the product. It might be that I misinterpreted this, but there is some value in encouraging those who are—or, even better, were—frustrated with a portion of the software to voice their frustration at the quality of documentation and submit their own so that others might come in and edit and, if necessary, bring the documentation up to the standards of the project.) He had a favourable opinion of projects like MySQL (or, the example I would have used, PHP.net) as documentation websites allowed for comments where people can comment with their alternate solution or a correction that might later be incorporated into the official text. He also liked the idea of people writing HOWTOs on their own weblogs. He complained about the unidirectional nature of links in the current version of the Web (2.0 if you didn't already know), but documentation with comments open would permit dropping a link in the official documentation's page, making it a "manual trackback" of sorts.

In the discussion, someone mentioned that there's a balance between professional quality and community input. As well, someone mentioned the desire for a balance between community involvement and appropriate length of documentation (especially true of wiki pages, but also applies to documentation with comments enabled), as individual pages may become unwieldy over time. Video documentation (the word screencast wasn't mentioned, but many software packages defy easy written description but can be shown in a few minutes or even seconds). The other problem Chris mentioned about documentation —other than asking users to contribute help texts when they may not be familiar with the product, addressed above—was translation of documentation and keeping the translations synced up, especially with documentation in wiki format. A few times the people in the room mentioned the need for new tools but a lot of the problems sound like they can be solved better socially or organizationally.

Naturally metadata made its way into the discussion, and more than 2 people were frustrated with the way the Google search engine is setup for people to find documentation. I don't share their frustration, nor do I share the frustration with the seeming lack of authority of documentation found on sites other than the project's official website, because for the vast majority of problems I needed solved I've found through a basic search engine. Granted that much documentation needs to be 'tagged' for the version that it describes, but the tools for doing that exist: it's a matter of "just" doing it.

Some things not addressed by the presentation, at least not while I was there was documentation hosted services based on open source software? While I'll be the first one to admit that <ahref="http://support.bryght.com/">Bryght's support documentation is not always complete (that's what the support forums are for, so that people can ask questions and then we can update the documentation with our answer) nor is it always up to date (mea culpa), Bryght has a larger degree of control over what version of the software running there than a downloadable product, since Bryght does all the updates for everybody. I'd also be interested in how companies contribute their documentation back to the communities from which they run their hosted services (or even from where they get the software they host a possibly modified version of for download). People are free to use Bryght's documentation for their purposes since it's licensed under the Creative Commons, though there's no automated way other than screen scraping or copy & pasting to migrate documentation from one place (support.bryght.com) to another.

Next up, in a few minutes, is Eric Shepherd's presentation on documentation in the open source world. From the looks of the summary, it looks to be about developer documentation, not end-user documentation, which I think is more interesting if we're to help sell people on open source.

Free and Open Source Documentation at FSOSS: Introduction

Those following my Upcoming.org stream know I'm currently in Toronto (after a vacation in Iceland!). I'm attending Day 2 of the Free and Open Source Symposium, with specific interest in Chris Tyler's presentation on documentation and openness and Eric Shepherd's presentation on documentation in the open source world presentation. Documentation in open source is a bit of a long-standing issue, since many open source tools have the impression that they were built for developers. At Bryght, I've written a lot of the support documentation for the Drupal-powered hosted service, and without formal training in documentation-writing, I'm hoping for some more eye-opening on the subject. I don't have any Bryght swag to give out other than my business card, but you can meet two of the Bryght guys (James Walker is also there, presenting on the violently awesome Drupal).

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