A few times on the Growstuff mailing list or IRC channel, someone’s excitedly suggested that we should import data from another CC-licensed data set. Each time, I say, “Trust me, that’s pretty complicated,” but I’ve never actually sat down and explained the full gory details of why. The following is something I wrote up for our wiki so that I could point people at it next time the subject comes up. I thought it might be interesting to a wider audience, too, so that’s why Continue reading → Technically, for most the last year or so since leaving Google, I’ve been unemployed. I didn’t receive unemployment benefits, though, because I didn’t really need it and because the paperwork overhead seemed higher than I was prepared to deal with. (Plus of course the periods when I was studying or overseas.) But now I’m working on Growstuff and I’d like to get onto the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme, which offers small business training and mentoring and some small amount of funding for a year while Continue reading → You think those Google recruiters would know not to contact me, but the other day I got another perky “Opportunities at Google” email from one of them, telling me that they’d found my “online profile” and that based on my experience they think I “could be a great addition to our team!” Riiiiight. Since I just deleted my LinkedIn profile, I emailed them asking where they’d found this “online profile”, since it was obviously outdated. Oddly enough, it seems they’d found a page about me Continue reading → It’s almost a month to the day since I posted my last travel update. Since then I’ve been to Paris, then to Calais and across the channel to Dover, along the south coast to Brighton and Portsmouth, up to London, stayed a week and a half, then north to York, brief visits to Durham and Newcastle, a few days in Edinburgh, then over to Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, and five days in Cornwall. Tonight I was meant to have taken the ferry from Plymouth to Roscoff Continue reading → The other week I posted from GUADEC, saying I’d been inspired to start an open source project to build a gardening website. If I posted, “I planted tomatoes in my garden in Melbourne on the 1st of November” and everyone else did likewise, we’d wind up with an extensive database of food plants, including things like heirloom varieties and where to source them from. We could also build a histogram of the distributions of planting times for every location. Eventually, we could build in tools Continue reading → I gave my keynote at GUADEC today, on the subject of “From Open Source to Open Everything”, loosely based on this blog post from last year. I think it went pretty well, except that I ran badly overtime into the lunch break, for which I can only apologise and blame myself for hitting the wrong option on my laptop and not getting a timer on-screen, realising too late, then thinking I could muddle through without it rather than stop to fiddle with my laptop once Continue reading →