The tags on this blog have been broken for a really long time. I’ve just fixed them. Thanks and sorry to all those people who told me about it.
Well, I’m here in San Francisco and starting to settle in nicely. Lots of social stuff going on, fun work that doesn’t feel like work, and I found a place to live really quickly and easily.
This photo’s by the lovely yarnivore who took it last weekend at a Rock Band extravaganza where we (I say “we”, though I didn’t do much of it) played right through the full 58-song set list. It took about eight hours.
But the real reason I’m posting today is to assist anyone stalking me. I assume you’re already following my photos on Flickr but you might also like to check out my work blog where I’m, well, posting about work things: Freebase, open data, mashups, that sort of stuff. And if you’re going to be around these parts on Feb 6th, be sure to swing by the Freebase user group meeting for pizza, beer, and of course lots of technical presentations.
Labor Senator Stephen Conroy’s new Internet censorship policy:
Federal Labor will improve existing government programs in this area by:
Providing a mandatory ‘clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children, so that ISPs will filter out content identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The ACMA ‘blacklist’ will also be made more comprehensive to ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material.
(emphasis mine)
The difference between this load of steaming horse shit and the rather similar load that got dumped on us in 1999 is that this time the mainstream media actually know what’s going on:
When a Queensland newspaper’s headline reads “Nanny Rudd censors the internet”, you know the times are a-changin’. So, I have some hope that this idiotic proposal will either get ditched entirely, watered down to pointlessness (as 1999’s was), or worked around to a significant degree. I won’t be here for it, but good luck with that.
Ravelry is a new social networking site for knitters, currently in beta. Most of my readers are probably going “huh?” at this point, and the rest, I hope, are going “ooh!” See, up front it sounds like a kind of dumb idea to have a squillion social networks for all your different interests, and why wouldn’t you just (for instance) join a knitting group on Facebook or Livejournal? Well, here’s why:
Ravelry lets you:
* list your projects, both in progress and completed
* integrate with Flickr to show pictures of your work
* record patterns and yarns used
* search other people’s projects
* plus, of course, the (by now) expected groups, forums, geographical user search, and so forth
What does this get you? Well, it means you can say “Hey, I have this pile of 12 ply alpaca in my stash, wonder what I can do with it?” and see suggestions for projects, read people’s tips for working with that yarn, or offer to swap it for some lace-weight silk/bamboo if you decide you really don’t want to use the alpaca after all.
Here’s a screenshot from the “Patterns” page. Click the thumbnail to enlarge. The pic above is one of the ones I uploaded to Flickr to illustrate my own projects.
Ravelry is slick as all get-out, with fantastic UI, cross-site integration (including the afore-mentioned Flickr), and a pretty solid userbase at this early stage. I’m deeply impressed and will look forward to using it plenty in future.
In short: knitters, sign up for a beta account; non-knitters, take note, because this is how it should be done.
I’m at OSDC in Brisbane this week. Yesterday I presented my half-day tutorial on Test Driven Development, and promised I would put the slides online. Here they are.
I’ve also uploaded my slides from Packaging Perl Modules: From CPAN to Your Project. If anyone else has slides from OSDC, I highly recommend slideshare.net for making the available. Tag them with “osdc2007″ and they’ll be easily findable by other attendees (and those who just wish they were here).
Meet Hervé Soksok, Vanuatu’s first GPS-toting, creative-commons-licensing community cartographer.
I ran into Hervé at Wan Smolbag’s computer centre a few weeks ago and we swapped email addresses. He’s been attending daily computer classes there, where he spends an hour each day learning basic computer skills and — I suspect — finds the time for a bit of self-directed study. He’s a smart guy, with excellent English, but he can’t afford the commercial computer training available in town, nor the courses at the university, and he’s otherwise unemployed.
Meanwhile, Vanuatu has no street maps. Sure, there’s a dinky little thing in the tourist guide, but it shows little of use to locals. Google Maps and Yahoo Maps have nothing beyond the shapes of the islands.
When Kurt at Metaweb heard me talking about trying to find a handheld GPS to map Port Vila, he said he’d ask round his gadget-toting friends. In the end, he donated his own handset, a Garmin eTrex. Now Hervé’s going to be using this to walk the streets of Vila, noting important places (schools, churches, nakamals) and uploading the results to OpenStreetmap.
OpenStreetmap is the wiki version of Google Maps. It accepts GPS tracks recorded anywhere in the world, and provides an online editing system to tweak and annotate them. With luck, in a little while, you’ll be able to see Vila’s streets there.
A giant thank you to all the geeks who donated books to Vanuatu. Here’s a photo of the results:
I carried these back to Vanuatu in my checked luggage: one box (ex copying paper) taped to within an inch of its life and holding 20kg, and another 5kg or so in my backpack. The Perl Foundation kindly wrote a letter that helped me get the lot through .vu customs without having to pay any duty.
VITUS are now figuring out exactly how to manage the technical library. It looks like they’ll be handed over to the Port Vila public library, who already have a borrowing system set up, and they’re talking about having a special shelf for them to give them a bit of prominence.
Oddly, one of the problems here is that libraries have too many books… but the wrong kind. I was at the new Agricultural College in Santo last week, and saw boxes and boxes of donated books, mostly old hardcover historical romances discarded by libraries in other countries. Now anyone that knows me knows that I like a good historical romance, but really, they’re not what you want for an agricultural college. So I’d like to thank everyone for making such an effort to find appropriate books for the technical library. If yours isn’t in the picture above, it’s most likely due to baggage weight limits or because I had to choose between multiple books on the one subject.
One thing I’m learning about life in Vanuatu is that everything moves slowly. Especially bits, up and down to the satellite that provides net access here. My connectivity is graciously provided by CNS, where I have a patch of desk in a corner, and I come in for a few hours each day to work, but I get surprisingly little done.
Well, I’ve just declared it quits on the Perl Survey and published the results as they stand. Which is not to say that they’re incomplete, but just that I’d hoped to have an HTML formatted version to put up alongside the PDF report. Regardless, you can now download:
- Perl Survey 2007 Results, A4 PDF
- Perl Survey 2007 Results, US Letter PDF
(And as an aside, would the US please get their act together and go metric already? If the true beauty of ISO 216 won’t convince them, what will?)
Alongside the official report on the Perl Survey report, there are also a number of third-party analyses, done by people who’ve downloaded the data set and poked at the data already. Both the data set and links to these analyses are available on the results page.
One of my favourite analyses is this one of Portuguese-speaking Perl people. There’s even a great little tool to generate your own reports.
Chris Lansdown’s heat map plots using gnuplot are also really cool:
Please grab the data and do stuff with it. I’ve got a few plans myself, but we’ll have to see how my time’s looking in a couple of weeks, when (hopefully) I’ll have net access at OSDC.
