Planet Wolves

Aq: Not blocking the UI in tight JavaScript loops

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:55:54 +0000

Everyone’s written a JavaScript loop that just loops over all the {LIs, links, divs} on a page*, and it’s pretty standard. Something like

var lis = document.getElementsByTagName("li");
for (var i=0; i<lis.length; i++) { // yes this could be more efficient, don't care
  // do something here to lis[i]
};

or, if you’re using jQuery:

$("li").each(function() {
  // do something here to this
});

This is problematic if there are, say, 2000 LI elements on the page, and what you’re doing in the loop is semi-intensive (imagine you’re creating a couple of extra elements to append to each of those LIs, or something like that). The reason this is a problem is that JavaScript is single-threaded. A tight loop like this hangs the browser until it’s finished, you get the “this script has been running for a long time” dialog, and the user interface doesn’t update while you’re in this kind of loop. You might think: aha, this will take a long time, so I’ll have some sort of a progress monitor thing:

var lis = document.getElementsByTagName("li");
for (var i=0; i<lis.length; i++) { // yes this could be more efficient, don't care
  // do something here to lis[i]
  progressMonitor.innerHTML = "processing list item " + i; // fail
};

but that doesn’t work. What happens is that the browser freezes until the loop finishes. Annoying, but there it is.

One approach to getting around this is with timeouts rather than a for loop.

var lis = document.getElementsByTagName("li");
var counter = 0;
function doWork() {
  // do something here to lis[i]
  counter += 1;
  progressMonitor.innerHTML = "processing list item " + counter;
  if (counter < lis.length) {
    setTimeout(doWork, 1);
  }
};
setTimeout(doWork, 1);

so you move the bit of work you need to do into a function, and that function re-schedules itself repeatedly, using setTimeout. This time, your user interface will indeed update, and your progress monitor will show where you’re up to. There are a couple of caveats with this: it’ll take a bit longer, and you’re no longer guaranteed to have things processed in the order you expect, but they’re minor issues.

For doing this in jQuery, a tiny plugin:

jQuery.eachCallback = function(arr, process, callback) {
    var cnt = 0;
    function work() {
        var item = arr[cnt];
        process.apply(item);
        callback.apply(item, [cnt]);
        cnt += 1;
        if (cnt < arr.length) {
            setTimeout(work, 1);
        }
    }
    setTimeout(work, 1);
};
jQuery.fn.eachCallback = function(process, callback) {
    var cnt = 0;
    var jq = this;
    function work() {
        var item = jq.get(cnt);
        process.apply(item);
        callback.apply(item, [cnt]);
        cnt += 1;
        if (cnt < jq.length) {
            setTimeout(work, 1);
        }
    }
    setTimeout(work, 1);
};

and now you can do

$.eachCallback(someArray, function() {
  // "this" is the array item, just like $.each
}, function(loopcount) {
  // here you get to do some UI updating
  // loopcount is how far into the loop you are
});

$("li").eachCallback(function() {
  // do something to this
}, function(loopcount) {
  // update the UI
});

Not always a useful technique, but when you need it, you need it.

David Goodwin: Timberhonger 10k Race - June 2009

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:38:44 +0000

I came 29th - with a time of 42 minutes 50 seconds - it was pretty hot, and I was therefore quite pleased with my time - which was better than last year.

thanks to the organisers; more info here

Peter Cannon: Sunday Update

joomla-admin@cannon-linux.co.uk (Peter Cannon) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 09:56:08 +0000

Its been a while since I posted anything here, to be honest I've been really busy what with LugRadio Live stuff my other blog on http://www.archlinux.me/dick_turpin Micro Blogging not to mention IRC.

Now I'm working on yet another project which is going to be awesome and is to do with AcrhLinux. I cant say too much yet but most of the stuff is in place its just a case of putting all together.

Jono Bacon: Tracking Ubuntu Community Issues

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:57:06 +0000

Recently Melissa wrote a post about how we track problems with community, and how she feels that blogging about community problems is a reasonable approach. As part of her post she says:

Blogging about problems we see in our community should be seen as a good thing, not a bad thing. Why? Because this blogging is action. The alternative is no action, and that is much worse.

Firstly, I entirely agree with Melissa that we need a better way to track issues with community, which I will get to a little later in this post. While blogging has become a tremendous tool in online communities and enabled community members to have a platform in which to share their opinions, ideas, perspectives and achievements, I don’t feel blogging is the most suitable means of tracking community issues, improvements and regressions.

Blog entries are single shot capsules of feedback, wisdom and opinion ejected onto the Internet and often aggregated in places such as Planet Ubuntu. They are typically highly personalized, lurking in personally-driven locations (such as a homepage or personal blog), have no facilities for applying status, assignment, milestones or priority, provide little or no means to subscribe to specific problems, and lack facilities for communicating when a problem has been solved: if the issue is resolved the blog is sometimes updated and sometimes not.

While a blog entry can express a concern about something, they are not really useful for finding solutions to the problem. Notification of a problem is one tiny element in the issue-tracking process and although blogs can indeed be used for this, it is equivalent to asking your neighbour to move his car by opening your window and yelling out through a loudspeaker. Aside from more elegant and better directed methods of communicating that a problem exists, we ideally want to attach problem-solving capabilities to the reporting of an issue: I care only a small amount about hearing the problem, what I am really interested in is collaborating with that person and others in trying to find a solution. Blog entries are not really cut out for that kind of collaboration.

Bugs are though.

Bug reporting systems were designed to allow people to collaborate around defects in software and include facilities to identify, track, prioritize, milestone, subscribe and share information. Although everyone complains about bug reporting systems, they are generally productive in finding problems, developing solutions and having visibility over the lifespan of a problem.

I think it could be useful for us to use Launchpad for filing bugs for community, process and governance issues. To this end I have registered the Ubuntu Community project in Launchpad which we can use for tracking these kinds of bugs. There are some benefits to this:

Visibility - this is going to help everyone keep visible on community issues. On a slightly selfish note, this will also help me keep visibility over issues for me and my team at Canonical. This should mean more bang for your buck with your friendly horsemen.
Tracking / Triage - this will make tracking, prioritization, feedback and potential milestoning much easier.
Assignment - this improved visibility will help us assign bugs better to the right people.
Familiar - many of us live and breath bug reports: the interface is part of the furniture. No new systems to learn, no random blog entries to keep an eye on.

Before I wrap up, there is one simple caveat here. I have literally just set up the project this afternoon and we will need some documentation, guidance and best practise written and shared around these bugs, and this will take a little while to be developed. As such, you may have some questions which we will need to document the answers to over the coming weeks. In the meantime we can work with existing bugs and file new bugs there. Feedback on this is of course welcome!

Aq: Why not to use domain sockets for a desktop CouchDB

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 09:47:28 +0000

The obvious idea that pops into everyone’s head, including mine, when talking about having a running CouchDB that’s specific to me is: why use TCP for it? Why not just use a unix domain socket? Then you don’t have to worry about other people on the same machine trying to access it. Everyone thinks this, and on balance it’s not the way to go. This is why.

You can’t browse to a unix domain socket in your web browser. This, by itself, is enough to kill the idea for me. I genuinely love the idea that applications store their data and then I can see that data in my browser using Futon, the CouchDB web UI. I can edit that data. That’s fantastic. Using unix sockets would break that.
One other nice thing about CouchDB is that you can do replication between two different databases; I like this because I can have the same data on my laptop and my netbook if I want. That doesn’t work if you use domain sockets, because the two CouchDBs can’t see one another.
As far as I can tell, Mochiweb, the underlying Erlang HTTP library that Couch uses, doesn’t do domain sockets anyway. (Obviously fixing this is only a Small Matter Of Programming.)

This has been a public service broadcast on behalf of the Write These Reasons Down So I Have Them To Hand Next Time Someone Suggests Unix Domain Sockets party.

Jono Bacon: VMWare: Rock and Roll

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:34:09 +0000

In a world where most companies would give their hind teeth to get your email address into their marketing database, it was refreshing to see this from VMWare:

Thank you for your past interest in VMware. As part of our routine scheduled maintenance, we will be removing email addresses and associated subscription information from our marketing database for contacts who have not updated their profile and/or subscription preferences within the last 6 months.

If you would like to remain on our mailing list and wish to receive updates on news, specific solutions, offers and much more, then please update your current profile.

This is great: it clearly states that if you are not engaging with VMWare, they won’t spam you. Good work. Let’s see more of this from other companies.

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase Deadline Draws Near

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:03:09 +0000

Just a quick note to you lovely folks that the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase, a competition to have your audio, video or imagery included on millions of Ubuntu systems, has it’s deadline drawing near on 16th July 2009. If you know some creative types who you think would love the opportunity to have their art on all those delicious Ubuntu systems, point their beady eyes in the direction of this page and tell them to get cracking.

Also, thanks to our friends at the Creative Commons for blogging the competition.

Jono Bacon: Learn How To Run a Jam

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:58:06 +0000

Recently we announced to epic Ubuntu Global Jam that is set to go down from 2nd - 4th Oct 2009. In this event hundreds of Ubuntu fans and contributors get together in their local area to work on Ubuntu, get to know each other and just have a big ‘ol barrel of fun. With the scheme recently announced we are still building up the list of events and are looking for you wonderful people to start organizing events. Sound interesting but don’t know how?

Well, I have good news.

We have organized a number of tuition sessions and events that will help you get started organizing a rocking Ubuntu Global Jam event. Here’ the skinny:

Live Video Tutorial - Mon 29th June @ 6pm UTC - I will be hosting a live video tutorial with a live Q+A. You can watch it here.
IRC Tuition - Jorge Castro will be running some IRC tuition sessions on these dates:
- June 27 - 1500UTC - #ubuntu-classroom
- Sept 4 - 2100UTC - #ubuntu-classroom
- Sept 18 - 1500UTC - #ubuntu-classroom

So there you have it, a good solid toolkit for how to get started. Go learn, organize and have a great time. If you need further help, be sure to ask the rather nice folks in #ubuntu-locoteams on Freenode.

UPDATE: I have needed to re-schedule the video tutorial until Monday 29th June 2009 at the same time (6pm UTC).

David Goodwin: Go away spammers

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:05:40 +0000

Since I've been messing around with this drupal site, and upgrading/downgrading etc, I seem to have lost my spam protection/armour. Since Saturday, the approval queue today (48 hours later) contained 1500+ comment spam things.

Like FFS... I know you're not reading this M[rs]{1} Spammer, but really - just don't bother trying. I won't let you get through.

I've now installed some ASCII art anti-spam stuff, hopefully this will work better than whatever chocolate teapot there was before.

DELETE FROM comments WHERE status = 1

David Goodwin: iphone hippy geek freak

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:56:15 +0000

On Friday, I bought an iphone 3gs, it comes with a 24 month sentance to pay o2 a load of money.

On the positive side of things ....

It's easy to use and has an excellent UI
Great for passing the time
Using Trails I can log where I run/walk etc, so perhaps I'll finally be of some use to OpenStreetMap (e.g. I logged Sunday's run which gave me times/speeds/elevations etc)
Means I'm no longer ever away from work (is this good?)
It's dead easy to take and upload pictures to the internet (flickr, facebook, email etc etc)
It can also take and upload videos (youtube) in one simple motion
It's very easy to install additional stuff (e.g. Twitterific, Bejewlled 2, Fring, Simcity, SpaceX, BBC Iplayer, Skype, Remote, Sudoku, Traffic Info and other crap).
It supports even my mail server configuration with no issue

Bad points :

Cost
Apple Monopoly++
Can't run stuff in the background (e.g. I can't keep an instant messenger running while browsing the web)
Battery life - it will last a day... but if you plan to watch video on it for more than a few hours, or spend sometime browing the web - you'll probably need a charger)

Not sure about :

Voice commands - it started dialling a taxi company when I asked it to phone Kat....

Aq: Using CouchDB to store contacts

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:51:20 +0000

One of the things I’m looking at is using CouchDB to store data for applications on your desktop as part of the desktop data/settings idea that Rodrigo’s already written about. Obviously one of the great things here is that applications can collaborate on data stored in there; obviously one of the pre-requisites for collaboration is that everyone’s speaking the same language! So various people working on a number of different mail clients for the Linux desktop and so on are working out what the schema for contact records in CouchDB should look like.

Being able to browse around your database with a web browser is dead handy for writing this sort of thing, I have to say :-)

At the moment, this is the sort of direction we’re heading in. A CouchDB document is JSON, and an example contact looks like this:

{
   "_id": "362cbeae5f408d6863bb70892d5ba345",
   "_rev": "1-182987891",

   "record_type": "http://example.com/contact-record",
   "record_type_version": "1.0",

   "first_name": "Joshua",
   "last_name": "Molby",
   "birth_date": "1945-07-04",

   "addresses": {
       "85cf156f-fcf6-4901-9201-82ee90859213": {
           "city": "Bedford",
           "state": "",
           "description": "home",
           "country": "Scotland",
           "postalcode": "cw12 3hi",
           "address1": "Nicol Street",
           "address2": "",
           "pobox": ""
       },
       "d20f7364-e80b-47a2-a7e7-0677cb293745": {
           "city": "Bedford",
           "state": "",
           "description": "work",
           "country": "England",
           "postalcode": "dk12 3av",
           "address1": "Rush Street",
           "address2": "",
           "pobox": ""
       }
   },
   "phone_numbers": {
       "f0bac2a0-83a3-46f9-b079-d41533b87391": {
           "priority": 0,
           "number": "+84 63 6220 9178",
           "description": "work"
       },
       "cf01fc9c-703b-4ae4-b303-fcc6f8ce5a53": {
           "priority": 0,
           "number": "+91 99 6920 2837",
           "description": "home"
       },
       "f0c05bf4-de4a-48f2-bbaf-f9698e52d491": {
           "priority": 0,
           "number": "+97 52 9211 6455",
           "description": "other"
       }
   },
   "email_addresses": {
       "6e3178d8-fee6-45b1-b95a-2c76be090e2b": {
           "description": "home",
           "address": "Joshua1.Molby@uck.com"
       },
       "adb1fc2a-0468-4deb-bb6c-974db23ef7fd": {
           "description": "work",
           "address": "Joshua1.Molby@vkc.com"
       }
   },
   "application_annotations": {
       "Funambol": {
             "jobTitle": "Director",
             "company": "ACME Ltd"
       }
   }
}

Fields in this are as follows:

CouchDB fields

_id: Unique document ID, provided by CouchDB (or you can choose it explicitly if you want)
_rev: revision number for this document. Managed by CouchDB.

Contact schema fields

The contact schema is the list of fields that are stored for a contact. Since this is a shared schema, everyone can rely on it. Fields that aren’t in this list can be stored by applications in application_annotations, if an application cares about extra stuff.

first_name (string)
last_name (string)
birth_date (string, “YYYY-MM-DD”)
addresses (MergeableSet of “address” dictionaries)
- city (string)
- address1 (string)
- address2 (string)
- pobox (string)
- state (string)
- country (string)
- postalcode (string)
- description (string, e.g., “Home”)
email_addresses (MergeableSet of “emailaddress” dictionaries)
- address (string),
- description (string)
phone_numbers (MergeableSet of “phone number” dictionaries)
- number (string)
- description (string)

Basic “record schema” fields

The record schema is the basic format we’re talking about for storing any data in CouchDB; it’s a couple of fields that are in every record that everyone can rely on.

record_type: A URL which is a unique identifier for this type of record. It would be good if that URL had a page at it describing the record schema, but (importantly) this is not a reference to some sort of JSON DTD or anything
record_type_version: Version of this record type schema (so you can make updated versions if you want to make changes to field names, etc)
application_annotations: The application_annotations section of the document is where apps put their own data that isn’t part of the schema. For example, Funambol knows about “company” for a contact, but the contact schema doesn’t directly include that field. So Funambol stores it on the contact record in a Funambol-specific section, so it can happily get it back later. If it turns out that everyone’s storing their own version of the same field, then that field is probably a good candidate for being in the schema (making this sort of change is what the record_type_version field is for :))

Quick script to drop contacts in this schema into a CouchDB database: createCouchContacts.py. Requires python-couchdb (and Couch, obviously).

Rob Annable: Links for 2009-06-18 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Pulse Laser: Maps as service design: The Incidental
'...One thing that’s very interesting to us that is using this rapidly-produced thing then becomes a ’social object’: creating conversations, collecting scribbles, instigating adventures – which then get collected and redistributed...'

David Goodwin: Marin Rough Ride 2009 - Kington Mountain Biking

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:51:52 +0000

Sunday saw me cycling 75km across random moorland and hills around Kington on the Rough Ride. I found it slow going, a little too hot - but fun (looking back at least, during the event I was happily cursing to myself and listening to Groove Electric). For the first time ever I nearly passed out from pushing myself too hard near the finish (I did the last 5k as fast as I could, overtook lots of people - but was nearly thwarted by a short uphill to get to the finish, which nearly finished me off!). Annoyingly I wasn't wearing my heart monitor so I don't have any interesting numbers to look at.

Kat & Rowan had been waiting at the finish line for me - but they'd given up by the time I got back (it took me about 7 and a half hours :-( , I'd guessed before hand that it would take somewhere between 4 and 6).

Thankfully the rehydration salts I had seemed to work really well, and although I had a slight headache most of the time, it was no where near as bad as previous years.

I took some random photos on the way around- not many feature other riders, but they might give some idea as to the scenery and terrain. I didn't take any pictures in the last 10k as I was too busy trying to go quicker....

Anyway, as a summary, it was an well organised event (as always) and the route had changed sufficiently from the last time I did it to stop me knowing what was around the next corner. Perhaps obviously, there was bugger all phone signal on 99% of the course, so the various rude text messages I sent probably never got through the "Hill/Sheep firewall".

Afterwards, we went to the Harp at Old Radnor, where we had a really nice meal (even Rowan liked it) (thanks for paying Caroline!)

David Goodwin: fscking drupal

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:41:58 +0000

Well, I thought this site had upgraded fine without problem to Drupal 6. Wasn't I wrong.

The taxonomy was totally lost, and I wasn't able to make new posts (stupid failure to write code that works on a database other than MySQL)... *grr*

So I've now rolled back to Drupal 5. If I could I'd move to wordpress, but I think that would be too difficult as I'm using PostgreSQL.

Now, perhaps - finally - I can make my blog post about the Marin Rough Ride 2009...

Jono Bacon: The Ubuntu Global Jam

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:25:44 +0000

In the last few cycles we have organized and run an event called the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam. The idea was simple: encourage our awesome global Ubuntu community to get together in the same room to find, triage and fix bugs. And they did, all over the world, as can be seen here.

Well, at the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit we were having a good ‘ol chinwag about the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam and we came to an important and sage conclusion:

Why limit the event to just bugs?

As such, I am proud to announce Ubuntu Global Jam - more jam but with the same great taste!.

Based upon all the feedback from the UDS session we have scheduled the Ubuntu Global Jam from the 2nd - 4th October 2009. To make the event as simple and accessible as possible, we have picked four topic areas and we are encouraging you lovely people to organize an event with one or more of them:

Bugs - finding, triaging and fixing bugs.
Testing - testing the new release and reporting your feedback.
Documentation - writing documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community.
Translations - translating Ubuntu and helping to make it available in everyone’s local language.

With four primary methods of getting involved, there is something for everyone in this rocking global event.

One thing that I am keen that everyone remembers: you don’t have to be an official developer, packager or programmer to take part in the Ubuntu Global Jam. Also, lets not forget that Ubuntu Global Bug Jam events are a fantastic place to learn and improve your skills: you can sit next to someone who can show you how to do something or explain something in more detail.

To get this campaign off on the right foot, we have organized an IRC meeting to discuss the event and how can get as many people involved as possible. Here’s the skinny:

WHEN - Third Thursday of every month (next meeting is Thurs 18th June 2009) at 6pm UTC.
WHERE - #ubuntu-meeting on Freenode.

If this is all sounding right up your street and you fancy organizing an event, go and read this page and then add your event to this page.

Rock and roll: let’s make this one to remember. Start your engines, folks…

Jono Bacon: Art Of Community Reviews

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:59:26 +0000

Recently I have been sending the completed Art Of Community manuscript out to a number of people who are well respected in various communities to get there feedback on the completed book. Some of these quotes are here. Wow.

Rob Annable: Links for 2009-06-14 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Sensory Threads demonstration - Proboscis
'...demo at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre on June 23rd 2009 as part of the Surface Tension event. We will be demonstrating the prototype Wearable Sensors and the Rumbler and inviting participants to test out the system during the day...'

Adam Sweet: Dark Days, Baby

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:57:06 +0000

It's been a difficult time recently, a lot has happened and you'll have noticed my tail off in blogging. In the last few months I got a cat, bought a house, broke up with my girlfriend, made my first Ebay sale, thought I was cracking up, didn't crack up, thought ...

Adam Sweet: New Hardware

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 23:57:12 +0000

I was bored this evening and I started playing around with some stuff I had lying around, like the USB Missile Launcher I bought in 2007, known as a Dream Cheeky Missle Launcher, for which I never found a GUI control tool under Linux. I never got that guy's code ...

Jono Bacon: Community Leadership Summit Update

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:09:14 +0000

A while back I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 in San Jose on the 18th and 19th July 2009. Well, I think it is time for lil’ update on what is shaping up to be a rocking event.

The aim of the summit is get community managers, leaders and organizers together to discuss, debate and share ideas on building great community in a vendor-neutral environment. The event is entirely free (although I ask everyone to go and register and it takes place the weekend immediately before OSCON, in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Details of how to get there are here.

Since I announced the event, the response has been stunning and over 150 people have registered with a fantastic and diverse range of contributors signed up to attend. You can see this awesome list of attendees here.

The the aim and purpose of the event to provide an open, transparent and vendor-neutral environment for discussion, and I have been really keen to make sure this is an unconference (an event in which an empty schedule is available at the start of the event, and attendees can go and add topics). The reason for this is to ensure the sessions are as diverse as possible and not merely what I think we should discuss. The openness of the scheduling means that anyone can add a session that they think would be of interest to the other attendees.

If you are coming along and interested in running a session, feel free to discuss it on this wiki page with the other attendees: you may find some other people who would like to help with the session. Speaking of the wiki, we also have rideshare, roomshare and other pages springing up to make attending the event as easy and enjoyable as possible.

I have another update on the event half-penned, but I will send that over in the coming week. Stay tuned, and go and register! I hope to see you there!

Jono Bacon: The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase Kicks Off

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:01:35 +0000

Folks, we are back with another Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to bring the best of two great worlds together by showing off high quality Free Culture content in Ubuntu. At the heart of Ubuntu’s ethos is a belief in showcasing Free Software and Free Culture, and with each development cycle we present the opportunity for any Free Culture artist to put their work in front of millions of Ubuntu users around the world. Although the space restrictions are tight, and we are limited to how much content we can include, the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an excellent opportunity for artists everywhere. I am always hugely inspired by the wonderful entries that we recieve in each competition and I am excited about the opportunities we have to ship awesome Free Culture content with Karmic!

The winning submissions will be made available on the shipped CDs and download images of the Ubuntu 9.04 release. Every user will be able to find the content in the Examples/ folder in a home directory.

With this competition we are accepting submissions for audio, video, and graphic/photo submissions. We have a winner to find for each category, and the competition closes on 16th July 2009. The time is short on this competition, so you better get cracking on some stunning entries!

Entering the showcase is simple:

Your submission must be one of the following:
- Audio Entries - no larger than 1MB in size - made available in Ogg Vorbis format.
- Video Entries - no larger than 2.5MB in size - made available in Ogg Theora format.
- Photo/Graphic Entries - no larger than 0.5MB in size - made available in PNG or JPG formats.
All entries must be licensed and distributable under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike or Creative Commons Attribution license.
Upload your submission somewhere online (there are lots of free hosting solutions available such as archive.org). Do not email any of the organisers or judges with your submissions.
Add your entry to one of the submission tables at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.
When the deadline for submissions closes, our panel of judges will pick a shortlist, and the Community Council will then pick the final winners from the shortlist.

The deadline is 16th July 2009 and you can read more about it at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.

Aq: Filmage

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:11:05 +0000

So, me & Bill are making a film. It’s going to be along the same sort of lines as http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/. The plan at the moment is to document how we came to be interested in all things Internet and computers in general, and then move on to document our momentous trip to http://www.har2009.nl.

I’m under strict instructions that I’m not allowed to help with the soundtrack because my music tastes suck. The experience of thinking about a script gives you a new appreciation for the work that scriptwriters do, though. Just thinking of how it all fits together is hard. Me, personally, I’d like it to feel like a Top Gear film (it won’t look like it, since they have the best camera work in the industry, but it might have the same sort of atmosphere, if we’re really really good).

Didn’t I see something about a script-writing program for Linux somewhere? At the moment we’re using a Google document…

Richard Smedley: links for 2009-06-10

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:30:30 +0000

Why I’m not voting Green : Dan Wilson : eBay expert, social networking, online community, ecommerce, stuff Amazingly wlllful misreading of Green policy from labour activist which seems based on some of the best bits of the Green's policies! (tags: green politics science badscience distortion misrepresentation bigotry anti-green)

Aq: Working with CouchDB

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:14:33 +0000

I’ve been working with CouchDB as a database in which applications can store their data; there’s an increasing trend recently for applications to start using databases to store their data rather than flat files, and I personally think it’s a jolly good trend. There’s been rumours for years about the idea of a database-backed filesystem, where instead of pathnames you use queries and so on; that’s never happened (and I’m not convinced it will ever happen), but individual apps can get most of the benefits of that by using a database to store their data. I like CouchDB for this because it has a number of advantages over simple databases like SQLite; for example, CouchDB does replication, meaning that I can get all my data on all my machines. This is a genuinely lovely property. It’s been really interesting talking to the Tomboy team about how this sort of procedure ties in with what they’re doing; we’ve been working on their Snowy server and talking about its API and how it should work, too. Cool times ahead for this stuff. I’m really excited!

Jono Bacon: Live Burnout Videocast

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:10:03 +0000

Recently I have been pointing my beady eye at the topic of burnout. My interest was originally sparked while researching content for The Art of Community, but I have also had something of a personal interest in it as I myself burned out a few years back. It sucked, and I felt compelled to confront the topic in the book as it is a very real issue in every community, particularly technical ones.

While reading up on the subject I was looking for some concrete methods of identifying the symptoms of burnout and found a fascinating piece of research called The Burnout Cycle with it’s twelve stages. Not only did I feature this in the book, but I also prepared a presentation for Allhands and the Ubuntu Developer Summit. The presentation really resonated with folks and I heard countless stories of how people had burned out in different ways.

Well, recently I have been doing a live videocast called At Home With Jono Bacon on ustream.tv and I thought it could be useful to repeat the presentation, which would then obviously be recorded.

So, tomorrow (Wed 10th June) at 6pm UTC / 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern I will be doing the presentation and also have a Q+A. You can watch it live here. I really hope it helps.

Jono Bacon: Well, Hello

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:58:50 +0000

Oi oi folks. Well, hasn’t it been a while? It seems I have been on a little blogging hiatus recently, and I think the simple reason is that I have been writing a lot more than usual recently so my blogging tendencies have suffered from all the writing. Well, as I will share in a few paragraphs, I am largely done with the writing, so the blogging is coming back.

So, before we get back into the normal blogging flow…a quick update with what has been keeping me busy recently.

Ubuntu

It has been a busy time in Ubuntu-land recently. A few weeks back we had our Ubuntu Developer Summit in Spain and the week before that we had our Canonical Allhands conference. The time building up to UDS is hugely intense: weeks of planning the venue, schedule (which had doubled in size to over 450 sessions), merch, social events, plenaries, presentations and more. Thankfully, it was an awesome event and the response was really positive. Many people who had been to UDS before felt it was one of the most productive events we have run. Thanks to Jorge, Claire, James, Maria and the other organizers and thanks to my fellow track-leads for a sterling job!

David Planella also joined my team recently and he is doing a rocking job. David is focused on growing our translations community and I have been learning more about translations by joining the Ubuntu UK Translations Team. At the heart of the Ubuntu ethos is a belief that everyone should have access to high quality software in their local language. While we have an incredible existing community, we have many challenges ahead to refine and smooth our translations workflow and how we can unite our community betwee. We have some exciting plans around translations so stay tuned, and keep an eye on David’s blog.

In the interests of being concise (and not having much time to blog), I won’t go into all the details about what I have been focused on recently but it includes the LoCo directory, initiatives for this cycle (Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu Developer Week, Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase, LoCo Docs Days, UDS Planning) as well as some key projects for the cycle such as ArchiveReorg, Ayatana, Upstream Relations, Bug Triage best practise, Design community workflow and structuring the LoCo project. I am also really keen to get back on the ground more in this cycle: the last cycle had me busy with some of the growth inside Canonical, and I am keen to reseat the balance with our wider community. Exciting times!

The Art of Community

As some of you will know, I have been writing a book called The Art of Community to be published by O’Reilly in mid-August. Well, the book is written and has been through the primary edit phase, the review edit phase and is now in copy-editing. As such, the content is complete but we are checking in for little types and grammar issues before it goes off to be typeset. I am really excited about the content: it feels good and I am really hoping the content will be useful for many different types of community. There has also been a fantastic amount of buzz around the book: thanks to everyone for supporting the project!

Last week I also confirmed that Leo Laporte is writing the foreword for the book. I emailed Leo about it a few weeks back and he confirmed live on air shortly before we recorded FLOSSWeekly.

The book will be available under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial ShareAlike license and available to buy in print in all good bookstores. The book is also available to pre-order on Amazon: you can find out more here. If you pre-order it, do stick a button on your website.

Community Leadership Summit

A little while back I announced an annual summit that I have put together for community leaders, managers and organizers called the Community Leadership Summit. The 2009 event takes place the weekend before OSCON in San Jose on the 18th and 19th July 2009. The take-up and pre-registration for the event has been fantastic, and I will be updating the website with all the new attendees soon. It is shaping up to be a hugely exciting event with a massively diverse range of participants.

With the UDS, book and other things keeping me busy I have not updated the website for a few weeks but expect to hear more over the coming week. Stay tuned, folks!

FLOSSWeekly / At Home With Jono Bacon

Recently I have become a semi-regular co-presenter with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz on FLOSSWeekly. I have been having a blast doing it, and I am looking forward to doing more shows with the guys. I will be there on the show on Wednesday to interview Tim O’Reilly.

I have also been experimenting with live videocasts and have a show called At Home With Jono Bacon on ustream.tv. On the show on Wed 10th at 6pm UTC I will be talking through the 12 stages of burnout; a presentation I did recently at UDS. Stay tuned!

OK, nuff said. More blogging soon. Also, stay tuned with my microblogging madness on my Twitter and my identi.ca feeds.

Dave Morley: UDS Wow

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Morley) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 22:01:00 +0000

It's late I know but I was on holiday straight after.

Firstly, my wife and I would like to thank everybody that took time out to talk to her (Sue the woman knitting in the atrium).

Secondly, Wow uds was mad. The talks were great and full of information and laughs. But more important were the general sessions.

I mostly followed the QA track, and I was impressed to see how much thought has gone into the whole process. In general it was based on the process of automated testing and automated bug reporting using checkbox and apport. These are 2 awesome tools that are in their infancy still. By all accounts the if the features get added they will instantly mature the apps into a far more robust tools, hopefully with checkbox/apport integration for auto bugrepporting on automatic testing which will be really cool.

Peter Cannon: LugRadio Live Countdown

joomla-admin@cannon-linux.co.uk (Peter Cannon) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:29:52 +0000

LugRadio Live Countdown for you're site help us promote this event by displaying it.

Get the code for this countdown Or here

Peter Cannon: Information Overload

joomla-admin@cannon-linux.co.uk (Peter Cannon) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:21:33 +0000

I really need some clever clogs to write a piece of software with a dashboard that has all of my information in a single location.

Because I'm not a programmer I did this Mock-up to try and explain what I was after, basically I want just a notification area probably via RSS or something. It would tell me how many emails are sitting unread in various accounts I have, any new podcasts that are available, any Micro Blogs such as twitter and the RSS feeds I'm subscribed to.

I did include a 'Submit' element for possibly WordPress and ping.fm but the main idea would be if say I wanted to see what the 5 Emails was about I'd click on the link and Thunderbird would open to view the mails. The same could be said for any RSS stuff.

If it was a Micro Blog then Gwibber would open and for Podcasts Gpodder would open. I mentioned this on IRC but apparently iGoogle can do pretty much most of it apart from opening the various applications, I tried explaining that I wanted 'Your Dashboard' to be a desktop application as opposed to a web based one but it would seem this is yet another idea that I think is pretty cool but others think is pants.

Talk about piddle on a man's parade

Richard Smedley: links for 2009-05-27

Thu, 28 May 2009 01:45:09 +0000

Wild Apricot Blog : Social Media for Non-Profits: 26 Great Slideshare Presentations You Can Use (tags: socialmedia slideshare presentation 3rdsector vcs howto resources) The Management Myth - The Atlantic (June 2006) (tags: management philosophy mba ethics capital balderdash)

Dave Morley: Day 1 and 2 in the Big Brother House UDS

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Morley) — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:32:00 +0000

Dear diary,

Today I have been mostly in the QA Track. ~~Hopefully throwing a spanner in the works where possible~~ Helping out ;) Although some of the talks have been slightly more technical for me to get on with on the whole it's been great.

The venue is good apart from room 14 avoid it like the plague (It's like a walk in freezer). The staff and developers are great. I've meet up with some old friends and met new ones too.

It looks like there is going to be a lot of work going on to improve the automated testing suites we currently have and a lot more work going on to import these into checkbox. There should hopefully be some work to get all that info into a database that people can then use in multiple different ways. That's only from the first 2 days, tomorrow is going to be a day I can really get on with as most of the discussions in the qa track apply to me.

Dave Morley: First ever flight, UDS and Barcelona

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Morley) — Sun, 24 May 2009 20:41:00 +0000

So my first ever flight was today to get to Barcelona for UDS which starts tomorrow.

Barcelona is an intriging City a nice mix of old and new for a city of it's size.

Just can't wait for tomorrow now :)

Richard Smedley: #SmallSteps @ the[FACT]blog

Wed, 20 May 2009 22:59:26 +0000

During the final weeks of FACT’s Climate for Change exhibition, our Small Steps to Sustainability workshops have moved from Gallery 1 (as an after-hours social café “combining beer, conversation, and the jagged interface between technology, networks, and ’saving the world’”), to the[FACT]blog (no beer there, I’m afraid). This means that I’ll be posting there with the [...]

David Goodwin: Upgrading a server from Etch Xen 3.0 to Lenny Xen 3.2

Wed, 20 May 2009 20:06:24 +0000

Right - first off, thanks to the Debian developers - this morning I finally finished off upgrading the server this site resides on to be a full Lenny install with the underlying server running Xen 3.2. It was (from my point of view) a hassle free experience (aside from dealing with the config file changes I've made which caused conflicts, but these were easy to resolve).

Thankfully I didn't encounter any issues - it was pretty much a case of apt-get dist-upgrade and then sit back and wait. Xen 3.0 remains installed incase something does go pear shaped, so it should be easy to roll back.

While rebooting and faffing around, I decided to add more disk space to this virtual machine - which is why the downtime lasted about 2 hours - rather than 5 minutes - this morning (wanting to be on the safe side, I took a copy of the disk image, ran fsck a few times and so forth - this took far longer than I'd planned, but the 1% chance of everything going pear shaped would have taken far, far longer to fix!)

Anyhow, onwards and up. And in a semi-relevant twist, I listened to FLOSS weekly's Xen podcast today too - which was interesting (although for new servers, I think I'll drift towards KVM.

Minor issues(?) encountered :

Xen appeared to break my Bytemark support shell thingy - this was easily fixed by editing the grub config file at boot time.
On upgrading to Etch, udev was introduced - I had to edit one of the files in /etc/udev to make eth0 remain eth0 (this is a well known issue; grep will identify the file you're after anyway).
I edited the xen config files, and added
extra = "console=hvc0 xencons=tty"
to each. I've no idea what this does (yet) but it didn't break anything, and other sites on the web seemed to think it was a good idea. (Just like putting your hand in the fire because your best friend does...)
Edited /etc/xen/scripts/network-route - as per bugs.debian.org - again, I didn't try booting without this... but I had no problems with it.

Dave Morley: So off to UDS...

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Morley) — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:53:00 +0000

So I'm getting too excited now.....

First UDS and I can't wait.

I'm coming over with my better half, if anyone is taking theirs would it possible to meet up and let the better halves go shopping, site seeing together? If this is you feel free to drop me a mail at davmor2@davmor2.co.uk

Richard Smedley: links for 2009-05-18

Tue, 19 May 2009 01:08:37 +0000

How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street — New York Magazine "I wrote the software that turned mortgages into bonds." (tags: economics crash recession depression wallstreet banking banks finance economy programming subprime mortgage crisis history) Frankenstory. The writing game where two heads are better than one. Frankenstory is super simple to play! You [...]

Rob Annable: data landscape

rob@annable.co.uk (Rob Annable) — Mon, 18 May 2009 08:18:02 +0000

Question answered:

cityofsound says:

It was a conversation between Matt Jones and I, wherein he sketched out his idea (using your notebook it would seem) about a kind of perspectival layered data landscape, building up from Dopplr and related web services – in the manner of the classic New Yorker cover on ‘the x view of the world’ …

I think.

Richard Smedley: Accessible websites

Sun, 17 May 2009 09:03:58 +0000

Why am I planning to run low-cost courses on website & social media strategy? Because there is a need: not just a need for good websites, and communication strategies for social media, but just getting across the basics of awareness of accessibility. Local groups Yesterday I toddled around a hall in the next village, looking at the [...]

Ron Wellsted: Vote for my suggestion to improve Ubuntu

Fri, 15 May 2009 11:45:06 +0000

If you use webapps on an Ubuntu server, take a look at

and vote for it if you feel it is a good idea.

Dave Morley: Ubuntu One (Am I Missing Something)

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Morley) — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:01:00 +0000

This is my own personal view only. You can tak a fence but a gate is more useful

Ubuntu is a trademark that belongs to Canonical...
That means it can be applied to any SERVICE they choose.

RMS when he first laid out the lay of the land said "And companies can make money from the services they provide".

This is Canonicals first atempt at user level services. I for one think they are doing the correct thing by linking this service to Ubuntu as that is the intended market. New users may know the Ubuntu Name but not that Canonical are their sponsor.

On a final note Why whine? If your not happy with it don't use it, vote with your feet! The fact of the matter is there are propriatary drives in Ubuntu and you choose whether to use them or not, why should this service be any different? To be honest I think that it will still be around it's too useful not to be.

Congratulations Canonical I hope things go well for your infant service and I can't wait to see what other features you'll add.

Richard Smedley: Aide Memoire

Wed, 13 May 2009 13:42:52 +0000

Most days I’m either sat at the keyboard, or I’m out and about and meet a handful of people. Few enough that I can usually remember who they are, as I file away business cards & write short follow-up e-mails the next day. Some days are different. At networking events (OpenCoffee, Social Enterprise events,Unconferences, etc.) you [...]

David Goodwin: Twitter + Identi.ca + irssi

Wed, 13 May 2009 10:14:59 +0000

I tried, and failed, to get the pidgin-twitter plugin to work (installed fine, but what do I click on to use the fricking thing?)

So, Peter suggested I try twirssi - a script for irssi which adds Twitter capabilities. All very well. The website even seems to imply it supports identi.ca, but conviently seems to omit how one does this.

Here's how -

/twitter_login thegingerdog twitterpassword
/twitter_login gingerdog@identica identicapassword

You can then prefix things with @identica or @twitter elsewhere should you so wish.

See also the changeset that added this functionality.

Aq: Ubuntu One beta

Tue, 12 May 2009 23:49:07 +0000

Cool, the first bit of Ubuntu One is released, which is the project I’ve been working on since I started at Canonical. We’re currently in a beta test for the file sharing part of U1; I haven’t been working on that much, but the team who have are some cool guys. You can sign up for an invite at ubuntuone.com.

I’m looking forward to more stuff happening. I was interviewed along with Matt Griffin by the Ubuntu UK podcast guys last night about the project and what we’ve done so far (and they’ve got invites to give away, too). I’m also speaking about Ubuntu One at OSCON, and the abstract for my talk seems to be being passed around as information about what might be coming up in the future :-) Cool times ahead, especially since today I came a step closer to achieving enlightenment with lazr.restful, one of the libraries I’m using.

Rob Annable: Links for 2009-05-11 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 12 May 2009 07:00:00 +0000

DIY Streets Pocket Guide
'...written for people who would like to do something to improve the safety, condition and general feel of their street...'
BiCi_N Urban CT-SCAN
'...Our proposal is to equip numerous bicycles in Barcelona's new public transportation system Bicing with A/V (Audio/Video) and GPS (Global Positioning System) devices in order to collect the everyday qualitative and quantitative aspects of the city via the routine of its inhabitants...'

Ron Wellsted: Lugradio Live 2009

Mon, 11 May 2009 13:30:35 +0000

The leading Linux Community Event in the UK

On Saturday 24th October 2009, several hundred Linux users from all over the world will be descending on The Newhampton Arts Centre, Wolverhampton, for LugRadio Live 2009.

Dave Morley: LRL09....

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Morley) — Mon, 11 May 2009 11:10:00 +0000

So hopefully you will of heard that LRL09 is back again.....

It's happening on the 24th of October at the City Of Dreams (A.K.A. Wolverhampton)

Get there if you can as fun is had by all :) Honest!

Peter Cannon: Lugradio Live 2009

joomla-admin@cannon-linux.co.uk (Peter Cannon) — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:55:14 +0000

24th October 2009

Newhampton Arts Centre

Wolverhampton

United Kingdom

Aq: Absolute beginners guide to Google Maps JavaScript

Sun, 10 May 2009 20:47:39 +0000

A mate of mine has been building a relatively complex website for Potton, the town he lives in. In six months he’s gone from knowing nothing about Django or JavaScript to building something pretty cool with lots of Google maps and so on, and he’s started a series writing up what he’s learned for other people in the same position. First essay, an Absolute beginners guide to Google Maps JavaScript.

Aq: Games in pure SVG

Fri, 08 May 2009 23:33:47 +0000

In the “stupid experiments” category…

If you’ve got nothing better to do for three hours in an evening, why not experiment a bit with SVG? That’s what I thought, earlier on this evening.

So: cave.svg, a game for people with no graphics criticism ability and only one finger. One single SVG file, with all the controlling JavaScript therein. Inspired by SFCave, a game I played a million jillion years ago on a Palm IIIx and which I was astounded to discover has a website and a Java version and everything.

I have discovered the following things about SVG this evening.

It is dog slow. I mean, slo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ow. You’ve-finished-the-exam-and-there’s-still-an-hour-to-go slow. Sitting in a traffic jam for three hours and the kids keep asking for an ice cream slow.
It works in Firefox and Opera. I’ve tested in Midori, which is a WebKit browser, and it seems to work there too except that the fonts display as black-on-black, which means that either (a) Midori misimplents the spec (10% chance) or (b) I’m doing something wrong (90% chance). It’s probably broken the same way in Safari too, but the game seems to work.
You have to care about XML at inopportune moments. I spent twenty minutes trying to work out why createElement didn’t work before sighing and using createElementNS.
You can specify all the sizes in percentages! So it works at any size at all and the browser handles it all for you! Resize the game while you’re playing and it all still carries on working and scales for you! Do that with canvas!
The previous point appears to be the only thing where SVG scores over canvas. For everything else using SVG on the web seems rather like having your scrotum gently resting between a pit bull’s teeth. It makes everything slightly more awkward than it ought to be… and any moment now you know the pain is coming.
Did I mention slow? Can somebody please tell me what kind of a world we live in where my dual-core 2×2GHz PC can’t render a screen made out of rectangles at more than 10fps without dropping keypress events? I mean, come on.
It’s not very optimised code (but it shouldn’t need to be). It would probably be a lot faster if I actually did things an SVGish way, by which I mean use the transform attribute and so on, but there are so many things I’d rather do than matrix arithmetic that it’s not even funny. Up to and including eating a pound of fish fingers with broken glass in.

In my head for a while has been a slight disappointment that everyone writing games or graphics things using JavaScript has gone for canvas (which is one step away from being a plugin — it gives you a white box and you draw in it) rather than the more web-ish SVG (which works like HTML and can be intermixed and everything). I am no longer disappointed. People don’t avoid dynamic SVG on the web because they’re wrong. People avoid dynamic SVG on the web because it’s quite shit.

Jono Bacon: Art Of Community Update and Pre-Order Available

Fri, 08 May 2009 20:34:22 +0000

As some of you will know, I have been writing a book in recent months called The Art Of Community to be published by O’Reilly. The book covers a wide range of topics around building communities including the social science behind community, planning your community growth, communicating clearly, building effective processes, setting up infrastructure, governance, conflict resolution, organising events, how to hire a community manager and more.

Well, its been a while since I provided an update on the project, so here are some nuggets of goodness you.

I started writing the book back in November and I am now nearly complete. Right now I am knee deep in edits and I have merged in all the changes from my editors Andy Oram and Simon St. Laurent. We are also currently in the reviewers phase where The Art Of Community is gently slid under the noses of a diverse set of readers where they can offer comments on grammatical issues, typos, which content works well and not-so-well and other feedback. This merry band of heroes includes Amber Graner, Stephen Walli and Stuart Langridge. Their comments and attention to detail has been superb, and I want to say a huge thankyou for their efforts. I am looking forward to wrapping these final changes before I head off to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona soon.

I am also pleased to announce that the book is now available for pre-order. Before we finalised the book specs to go out to the retailers, O’Reilly and I had a conversation about the pricing. Originally the book was going to be priced at $39.99 but I felt the price could make the book less accessible to communities with limited funds available who wanted a printed copy. O’Reilly agreed and I am pleased that the book is now available for the more affordable recommended retail price of $29.99. Also, don’t forget that the book will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike Non-Commercial license too. This means that anyone download and read it, but the print edition complete with the expected O’Reilly quality in materials, print and binding will be affordable too. O’Reilly have been stunning over the coarse of these discussions; thanks folks!

So, where can you pre-order it from? Ultimately most good book shops will carry the book but I know that each of the Amazon sites now provides the ablity to pre-order. So, head over to one of the following sites, lay down some wonga and pre-order a solid chunk of community building expertise distilled into an eye-ball friendly fun-fest:

Canada - CDN$ 37.99
France - EUR 22,70
Germany - EUR 24,99
Japan - YEN 3,574
United States - $29.99
United Kingdom - £22.99

Buying a copy of the book will show your support for the project and send a great message to O’Reilly about (a) publishing books about community and (b) publishing books under a CC license. It will also provide you with chunk of text that requires no batteries, no Kindle, and can be scribbled on with a pencil for easy note-taking! Sounds like a good deal to me.

In addition to this, if you do pre-order it do show off your support for the Art Of Community project and put the following button on your website/blog:

Available in these sizes:

So, there we go. But before I wrap up, I am also looking for some feedback regarding the www.artofcommunityonline.org website and how I can continue to build out its facilities for the needs of readers and those enthuses at building community. Do come along and join in the discussion!

Aq: LugRadio Live 2009

Fri, 08 May 2009 15:22:38 +0000

http://www.lugradio.org/live/2009/

Rob Annable: Links for 2009-05-07 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 08 May 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Sutton Grapevine
'...A community storytelling and sharing project collecting and recording the stories of the people who live, work and play in Sutton and the surrounding area...' - more fantastic work by Proboscis

Rob Annable: Links for 2009-05-06 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 07 May 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Archival Sound Recordings
'...Explore 21,000 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments...'
Birmingham Social Media Surgery No: 6 - May 13th 2009 | Podnosh Blog
Our local web2 enthusiasts scene goes from strength to strength. A recap by Nick Booth and news of the next event.
Neighbourhoods: 'Local paper makes headlines'
'...Local nets will give you all this and better, more efficiently, less expensively, with genuine options for user-involvement and interaction - and by extension in my view, conversational democracy...' - Kevin Harris on the value of the local paper billboard
New Statesman - Yesterday's tomorrow
'...As a commentator on architecture, however, Hatherley is in a school of one...' - Owen's new book fully endorsed by Jonathan Meades. Can't think of a better accolade.
thecontainerproject
'...The Container Project is a community media lab in a 40 foot shipping container in rural Jamaica...' - via twitter.com/gileslane

Rob Annable: There & Here

rob@annable.co.uk (Rob Annable) — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:11:05 +0000

I’ve been itching to tell you about this for months, ever since Matt last put me up for the night at Hotel Webb and gave me a sneak preview. The other half of the ever-inspirational Schulze & Webb has published the results of his Bendy Maps research and the finished product is even more beautiful and game-changing than I ever imagined.

“Imagine a person standing at a street corner. The projection begins with a three-dimensional representation of the immediate environment. Close buildings are represented normally, and the viewer himself is shown in the third person, exactly where she stands.

As the model bends from sideways to top-down in a smooth join, more distant parts of the city are revealed in plan view. The projection connects the viewer’s local environment to remote destinations normally out of sight.”

A map projection that simultaneously places you in your current location and future destination, it offers all the potency of well understood mental wayfinding devices and imagery in one single drawing. The potential, as both a drawing technique for urban design proposals as well as real-time guide for travellers, is huge.

Those well understood devices of course include references to ancient, seminal texts such as Lynchian ideas of nodes, boundaries and paths etc., but in the title of the project itself – ‘Here & There’ – lies another connection to the world of mid-20th century urban design theory explored here in past entries: Gordon Cullen’s Townscape.

From our previous entry:

“Place…is concerned with our reactions to the position of our body in the environment. This is as simple as it appears to be. It means, for instance, that when you go into a room you utter to yourself the unspoken words ‘I am outside IT, I am entering IT, I am in the middle of IT’. At this level of conciousness we are dealing with a range of experience stemming from the major impacts of exposure and enclosure.

…

Arising out of this sense of identity or sympathy with the environment … we discover that no sooner do we postulate a HERE than automatically we must create a THERE, for you cannot have one without the other. Some of the greatest townscape effects are created by a skillful relationship between the two…”

Which you may remember was followed by a some other examples supported by the imagery in Chuck Jones’ Pepe Le Pew cartoons.

You can read more about bendy maps on the S&W blog and order your own copy on the official project page or read more about it in this month’s Wired UK. I’ll certainly be ordering a copy for my wall, but as beautiful as it is I still can’t help dreaming about a version rendered like a letratone covered Cullen sketch or Chuck Jones animation cell.

Rob Annable: Links for 2009-05-05 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 06 May 2009 07:00:00 +0000

learning architecture
'...academic blog of James Benedict Brown, a doctoral student in architectural pedagogy at the School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering at Queen's University Belfast...' (via thingsmagazine)

Richard Smedley: links for 2009-05-05

Wed, 06 May 2009 01:11:46 +0000

VA£U€$ – The Blog » Obama’s Philanthrocapitalism (tags: philanthropy socialbusiness politics obama) How-To: Search the Social Web - Ultimate Toolkit Monitor the conversation about your charity or social enterprise (tags: socialmedia monitoring searchengine analytics media howto twitter facebook buzz metrics blog) Flawed Altruism: Empower Africa to solve the malaria problem on it’s own. | Project Diaspora (tags: aid africa malaria selfreliance) 30+ Places To [...]

David Goodwin: Howies Dyfi Enduro 2009

Tue, 05 May 2009 05:50:41 +0000

Short summary - once again I suffered some form of dehydration and had a stinking headache around at least the last third of the course; I'm pretty sure I hit the 'wall' - as I kept thinking "I'll never do this again" and "If I see a shortcut, I'm taking it". But then, at about 5km from the finish my mental attitude perked up and I was somewhat happier. The course itself was excellent - although I took the easy way out and pushed my bike downhill in a few places (considering I passed one poor guy on a stretcher and earlier an ambulance had zoomed past with it's lights on, I'm happy with my approach!).
.....

The weather was lovely, but perhaps too warm for me. It had rained fairly well the night before so there was plenty of mud and water on the course. As normal, everyone was very friendly - marshals and riders included.

Of course, just after the end, I had a puncture - which was annoying, but at least it wasn't during the event!

I thought I finished at around 15:00 (I had no watch), but I didn't arrive back in Machynlleth until 17:00, so I've no real idea of how long it took; hopefully the results will be up soon! I was a bit annoyed with myself for not taking my heart monitor - but no doubt I'll perhaps remember next year.

As per two years ago, we camped on a farm next to the Centre for alternative technology, "the women" went to Corris Craft Centre on Sunday, and on Saturday we went on the Corris steam train.

On Sunday, after I washed all the mud off, we went to Tafarn Dwynant - a lovely pub in Ceinws (near our campsite). Were we ended up seeing Fermit again (this time a pint of beer replaced the steam train) and of course Johanna.

Richard Smedley: links for 2009-05-03

Mon, 04 May 2009 01:07:48 +0000

stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site (tags: stockphotos pictures stock photography free webdesign resources)

Ron Wellsted: A Jaunty week

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 10:25:47 +0000

Just over a week ago I upgraded my laptop (a Fujitsu Amilo Li1718) to Ubuntu 9.04, using the release candidate. I found it to be very impressive. Previously I had had to jump through various hoops to get everything working. Now (hopefully) those days are gone.

Richard Smedley: links for 2009-04-29

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:11:13 +0000

50 Tricks to Get Things Done Faster, Better, and More Easily - Stepcase Lifehack (tags: lifehacks GTD effectiveness productivity timemanagement tips efficiency) How I set up a community journalism blog for where I live by edwalker.net (tags: local blog preston lancs northwest community twitter journalism)