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.
Burao flower
I’m off to Pentecost Island for 5 days or more. It’s a remote area with no intertubes, so I’ll be incommunicado til I get back.
Pentecost is known as the original home of bungee jumping but around here people mostly talk about the beautiful baskets woven by the Pentecost women.
I’ll be back next week, with photos.
This is a short video I made in Vanuatu, with the kids who live next door to Dan’s place:
Here’s a transcription of most of what they’re saying; they’re speaking Bislama. Translation is left as an exercise for the reader.
Ameline: Halo! [???]
Angeline: Halo, nem blong mi Angeline.
Rayline: Halo, nem blong me Rayline. Mi gat wan famili long Ambae. Mi gat tri sista, mo mi gat tu picanini, Ameline dem Smith.
Rosine: Nem blong me Rosine, [???].
With the help of some friends, I’ve put together a little tour of a household in Freswota (pron, “Fresh water”), a neighbourhood of Port Vila which my host Dan describes as “solidly middle class” by Vanuatu standards. This household is about 200m from here as the crow flies, and houses an extended family the extent of which is unclear to me. I think around 30 people. The main guy I know there is called Jacob; he and his wife Georgeline are basically Dan’s adopted family here.
This is what you see as you come in off the road. That’s Dan in the middle of the photo. Note the electricity meter on the pole there.
If you stand about where Dan was in the previous photo, you see this: the main living space. The green hose snaked all over the place is the water supply. Water here is good and clean, and I for one will quite happily drink it without boiling or the like.
Here’s the main under-cover living space. As you can see, most of this place is built of miscellaneous lumber and corrugated iron.
(Since people have asked what the residents thought of me coming through with a camera, I should probably note that I took these photos with the permission and active encouragement of the residents. Jacob is totally onboard with the idea of showing people in the developed world how things really are here in Vanuatu.)
Up behind the open living space is a sort of terrace and a row of sleeping spaces. I haven’t been inside, but you can see here the entrances covered with cloth. I think each space is probably about 6′ square.
Another living space down here, I think, with laundry hanging to dry under the eaves. It was a drizzly, wet day the day I visited, with a cold low pressure system moving through. Also in this photo, note the power line strung across to the roof. I’m not sure what electrical stuff they run here, but I think probably just a few lightbulbs.
This is the kitchen. It all runs on wood fires. Most food is boiled in pots. Rice is a staple food, along with yam, manioc, and taro. There are various green leafy type vegetables, and chicken and beef and pork and fish, though on the whole the diet is heavy in starch and light in protein.
There are more photos over on Flickr, where I’ve put together a set of photos of Vanuatu home life.
By this stage, if you’re a privileged person from a developed country, you’re probably a little stunned by this. Well, I have to tell you a few more things.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a middle class family. The adults have jobs, the kids are in school, and they’re well placed in the community. They regularly hang out with white collar professionals, and yesterday Jacob and I went down to the local Internet cafe and spent a bit of time dinking around on Google Maps looking at stuff; he’s not very comfortable with computers, but he has had plenty of exposure to them. And he and Georgeline have mobile phones.
Although they’re not the actual people who will probably end up with the technical books we’re sending to Vanuatu, they’re the same sort of people. I could imagine, for instance, the older kids from a family like this one deciding to take a computer course and ending up working in the field.
So, this is where your books will be going. And I hope it will also serve, in part, as an answer to the frequently asked question, “Why can’t they use e-books?” The reason is that there is poor power and no landline telephone to most people’s homes, so there are no computers in the home. OLPC may change that, of course, but for now, as Jacob described to me, “Olsemia nao i gud from man i save karem buk igo long haos mo lukluk long aftanun.” (Someone would take a book home to read in the evening, then put what he’d learnt to use the next day.)
Vanuatu’s a bloody long way from anywhere.
It’s hard to realise how far until you come to visit, and people start asking you to bring things. “Can you buy me a pair of Tevas?” asked Dan. One of his friends who’s installing a security system asked me to pick up some connectors because it’s easier to get a tourist to carry them over than to order them to be shipped. And every spare corner of my backpack was crammed with books (“Anything readable!”) which the local residents will read, re-read, swap, and read again.
I haven’t seen a bookshop anywhere in town here. I’m not sure there is one. And if there were, I’m certain they wouldn’t have a copy of the Javascript reference I really needed the other day.
Half of Andy Lester‘s technical bookshelf ca. 2003, used with permission.
I’ve mentioned before the prohibitive cost of technical books in Australia. In Vanuatu, they’re even more expensive, especially relative to the local economy, plus if you try to ship them here they might end up sitting on a dock in Brisbane for an unspecified length of time. The effect of this is that, essentially, nobody here has technical books.
For that reason, I’ve offered to get together a parcel of technical books for Vanuatu’s small community of computer users. The plan is to acquire a box or two of high-quality technical books and bring them back with me from the US after I visit there at the end of the month.
The books will be donated to the local IT users group, VITUS, who will loan them out to members, students, community computer centres, and so on.
## What you can do
If you’re in the US, or willing to ship books to the US on short notice, you can help out.
Go through your bookshelves and look for gently pre-loved technical books that you no longer use. The most desired topics are:
- Linux
- system administration
- networking, web technologies
- programming languages
This wiki page lays out exactly what’s wanted and provides a signup sheet for donations.
Send the books to the San Francisco, CA address provided on that page, to arrive no later than Tuesday, October 30th. (Yes, that’s only 12 days away.) I’ll be in SF from Oct 27th to Nov 1st and will be parcelling the books up to bring them back to Vanuatu with me.
If you’d like to spread the word about this project, I’d be delighted, but please note that the local community may not be able to deal with an enormous glut of books. If you suspect that reposting this to another forum might result in dozens of book donations, please check with me first.
ETA: Take a look at this guided tour of an ordinary Vanuatu family home to understand the living conditions in Vanuatu and see why books are so needed.
This morning I woke early — around 5:30 with the chickens and the next door neighbours’ kids — and dressed before my host, Dan, had emerged. Since I’d gotten a little sunburnt yesterday, today I chose to wear a real button-down shirt with a collar instead of the singlet that’s been my usual attire for the last few days. I’ve got a couple of proper shirts here, and this morning I was tossing up between the black and the white one. I went for white, since even though it’s a cool day here — 27C and cloudy — that’s still warm enough to prefer light colours.
Turns out I should’ve worn the black one. The women of Vanuatu request people to wear black each Thursday as a token of recognition of violence against women.
Like many places in the developing (and not so developing) world, violence against women, particularly domestic violence, is commonplace here in Vanuatu. Women are regularly beaten and occasionally killed by male members of their families.
A few months ago, Port Vila broke out in inter-island violence in the wake of the killing of a woman by her husband. Houses were burned, men were killed, and my friend Dan feared for the welfare of his adopted family. He posted about it here: Inter-islandism, and his followup status update.
Wan Smolbag Theatre is a community theatre company operating on the outskirts of town. Last night I attended a production, “Las Kad” (Last Card), presented in Bislama. “Las Kad” is a fictionalised account of a situation very much like that which occurred here back in March. Madeleine is a young woman unhappy in her marriage to Gordon, and leaves him. Her parents and their chief try to effect a reconciliation, and encourage her to go back. Unfortunately, Gordon is jealous of her relationship with another man, Robin, and kills her. Madeleine’s family ask the local magic man to determine who killed her. For reasons of his own, the magic man points the finger at Robin. Madeleine’s extended family all set out to kill Robin, and enormous trouble ensues.
It was a powerful and extremely professional performance by any standards; even with my tiny smattering of Bislama I followed most of the story and found it fascinating and horrifying by turns. Almost as interesting was watching the audience; most of them were ni-Vanuatu, and the women in particular laughed nervously and hid their faces behind their hands at some of the most difficult points in the story.
I didn’t follow the language well enough to understand what moral, if any, was drawn at the end of the story. I’m just left wishing that I’d known to wear my black shirt today.
