liz radford commented:

"Thanks for the advice, your comments on the route match those of a couple of others so I think we will go ahead and make those changes but keep the hill of pain! I will ride the revised route this weekend to give it a go."

While you're out there... I heard some comments that Windwhistle Lane on the short route wasn't very easy to follow, but I suspect that's more a problem with the council's (lack of) signs than a bad route. I didn't find the black-and-white bikeathon signs easy to spot on the faster/busier stretches. The pink and the yellow(?) ones were usually easily noticeable. I wonder whether the first black-and-white signs were at Worle Moor Gate - I went so wrong there that I rode up to the marshals at Summer Lane/Diamond Batch from behind!

"On the photo web site, you can get access to a total of about 700 pictures but it's not immediately obvious how. Mind you I can't criticise - the http://www.lrf.org.uk site is even less user friendly. We have photos on it of local people getting out there and doing great things to raise money but you try and find them its like wandering the catacombs. We need our own simple West-country site! Have a look and comment if you want, an experts critic is well overdue."

Well, the LRF site isn't bad - it needs to sort out its colours and contrast, and the text alternatives to images seem to be nonsense like asterisks, but I think I can actually access all of the pages without trouble. If you'd like a westcountry site, contact me at work and I'll offer a deal.

"Anyway back to photos. Get onto the one page of photos it will let you see and then click "refine search." This will take you to the menu as follows... Start Childrens Race Bleadon Hill Finish 1 Finish 2 Finish 3 Finish 4"

I can see more photos that way, but still only the first 8 from each category. Thanks once more for organising a great event Liz! I've noticed that my page is attracting some search results for bikeathon - is anyone else who rode this event reading? Care to comment on it? (If you're reading this at swik.net or a similar irresponsible republisher, click "Read more" to get the real comments form.)

It took a while, but Nokia finally relicensed eds-sync under the GPL. Hooray! eds-sync is one of the many components that you don't see on the Nokia N800, but is essential to the integrated chat/voip interface. It's role is basically to do full two-way synchronisation between any number of remote rosters (generally Jabber/XMPP rosters on the N800) and the Evolution Data Server addressbook. It also downloads avatars, so that they are available on disk for display in applications. NP: Live at the Jazz Café, Fink

My “webloyalty is a scam” blog entry from 2004 continues to get thousands of hits per month, despite the fact that it appears to have dropped off the top Google search results. It should hit 100,000 unique visitors any day now, and 2,000 comments. Every once in a while someone comments to defend the service. E.g., this, today, from “Jim”:

THIS IS THE OFFER WEBLOYALTY GIVES. yOU ARE ALL REALLY STUPID PEOPLE. MOST OF YOU OBVIOUSLY ARE UNEDUCATED BECAUSE YOU CAN’T READ. YOU ARE ALL A BUNCH OF STUPID FUCKIN PEOPLE. I FEEL SORRY FOR ALL OF YOU. YOU MAY ALL BE RETARDED, SORRY FOR THAT. THIS KIND OF THING MAY HAPPEN TO YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIVES BECAUSE YOU DON’T READ WHAT YOU ARE AGREEING TO. HONESTLY WEBLOYALTY IS DOING NOTHING ILLEGAL, AND YOU WILL NEVER PUT THEM OUT OF BUSINESS OR WIN ANY KIND OF JUDGEMENT OR MONEY IN A LAWSUIT. GO BACK TO SCHOOL AND LEARN HOW TO READ,THAT IS MY ADVICE TO ALL OF YOU MORONS.

And then, a few minutes later, from the same IP address, from “Brian P.”:

I actually agree with Jim 2 posts ago. People who say these things really did not read what they were signing up for and that is all of your own faults.

I used to get more of these kinds of comments from people actually posting from their workplace, where their workplace IP address resolved to Webloyalty. Someone must have told Webloyalty employees to stop doing that, as the comments above come from an AOL IP address.

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Crappy OpenOffice.org Impress Styles The "GNOME suite" (mainly AbiWord and Gnumeric) is quite nice and I usually prefer it to the bloated OpenOffice.org counterparts. Unfortunately it is missing a good presenter. Yeah, I know, I should use beamer, and I fact I often do for academic stuff, but for quick and dirty presentations, where you care more than you should about visual aspects and WYSIWYG ... I often resort to ooimpress. It is not that bad, if you can stand its memory consumption and startup time, but for a long time I was convinced that I was wrong about a feature I was not finding in the UI. My reading of the ooimpress manual this morning seems to contradicts this belief. Here is the simple scenario. I do not play with fonts, the default styles inherited by the master page are fine. I just want from time to time to select some text and mark it as "verbatim text":

• monospace font
• remove the bullet/number corresponding to the current outline level

the use cases are those you guessed: markup a shell command, a command output, or a code snippet. Of course I can't stand doing it again and again by hand, having to keep in mind each time the font I chose and its size for ensuring uniformity. I want to use a style. That's it, nothing less, nothing more. Is it asking too much? It seems so. ooimpress supports two kind of styles. One type (sorry, forgot the name) can be applied to built-in content types, e.g.: heading1-9, titles, subtitles, .... Changing such a style will affect all slides. Fair enough, that's good. The other type can be applied only to "graphics" elements, including text boxes. Fair enough as well, this way I can change at once all the text boxes or labels I've used in my document. But wait ... how can I solve my problem now? I see only two awful ways:

1. devote a high heading level (e.g. 9) to my verbatim text
2. use a graphic style

of course, a graphic style can not be applied inside non-floating text boxes and I do not want to use tons of text boxes, especially because they are not anchored to ordinary text Dear lazyweb, please prove me wrong.

Yesterday we had one of our first full-evening rains of this Summer. It started raining around 15:00, and didn't really stop until past 22:00. Most of the time, it was a low intensity rain. Also yesterday, Sergio and I started with the Debian course I recently talked about - Fun!
Now... This course is scheduled at Instituto de Astronom a, which is halfway between my work and my home. 19:00 to 21:00.
I decided to leave early, so we could check some pending details - At 18:00. I biked to Astronom a, about 1.5km. When I arrived, I was as wet as you usually get at a regular rain: I still had some dry spots under my arms and legs. Nothing terrible, although a bit coldish - Anyway, that's a top-down approach for hydrodinamics, the approach most people are used to.
When we finished this session, I had to go out in a rush, as I had a meeting at 20:00 at Balderas (downtown Mexico City, ~25min away by metro). Of course, I was one hour late already, and adding the time it would take me to get home, leave the bike and run to the metro, I could not just sit and wait for the rain to get any easier on me. So I pedalled.
Contrary to what I originally expected, I didn't get soaked wet in the usual pattern. Stronger rain leads to more rain flowing down the road. Yes, almost immediately I felt a cold shudder on my legs and back: The water sprayed from below by my wheels. Of course, the front wheel was even more fun, as it sprayed my face from below - My helmet has a small protuberance at the front to make some shadow, and tilting a bit my head forward prevented the rain from hitting my eyes - but the dirty water, with small bits of wood and whatnot, from the ground found an easy way to my face. My only defense was to close the eyes as much as I could without losing visibility. A strange excercise to do :) Anyway, that's the bottom-up approach for hydrodinamics.
Anyway, by the time I got home, after an extra ~1.5km, my pants were basically a soup. My shirt was not exactly dry, but it still kept me a bit warm. I just ushered inside, grabbed a jacket, and went on for my second meeting.

Christopher Hitchens goes to war against religion–on a recent episode of Radio Open Source: “Religion does not say that there is a mystery. Religion says there is an answer to a mystery.” It’s an interesting observation, but, I think, wrong. For a hyper-rationalist, Hitchens resorts to a lot of irrational attacks. If nothing else, his caustic approach is probably not winning many converts. Although he refuses to admit it, I think his problem is really with fundamentalists, not with religion. By taking such a polemical approach, though, he is probably selling more books. Check out his appearance on the show, as well as the follow-up on a later show (and comments). Radio Open Source is a rare example of a successful melding of old and new media. Often traditional media efforts to create a web-based “community” around an existing show fall flat. Open Source was started as a multimedia show, though, and maybe that’s why it works.

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Eddy has been exposing some of the long standing feature requests for Mozilla. They have a huge record or such requests. My favourites:

• needsterminal flag in /etc/mailcap not supported, 5 years old,
• Support for $http_proxy environment variable, 6 years old,
• -width and -height options ignored, almost 7 years old,
• Reply-to-List feature in mailer, almost 7 years old,
• Support for the <ruby/> xhtml element, 7 years old,
• Inheritance of alignment attributes in table columns, almost 9 years old

And these requests are only a small subset… On the other hand, I’m amazed the 1.8.1 branch (the one for Firefox 2.0) is ABI compatible with 1.8.0 (Firefox 1.5). I’m currently running epiphany with a pre-release of libxul 1.8.1.3 (coming soon in sid), and it works flawlessly (so far), without rebuilding epiphany.
I must say I’m impressed, especially when I look back at how 1.7.x releases were.

I'm rather surprised to find that Liz RADFORD comments:

"As my first year as organiser of this ride, I would like to thank you and everyone who came out for us. It was a great day and looks like we raised over 10,000! As Leukemia is the most common form of cancer in Childen I get a bit over-enthusiastic sometimes when I see so many people joining in doing so much good and prehaps see the event through rose tinted specs. I hope you enjoyed it and the legs are better now, the hill is a real challenge. One question for you. Was it something you enjoyed enough to do again or do you think a flat route along the front Sand Bay and Wick would serve us better at bringing riders back each year? Your comments appreciated. Liz X Also check out www.UKeventphotos.com"

10k. That's a great result! I think I'd do it again and I think the initial hill has its uses - it's a bit of an unusual challenge and strings the field out. I didn't have any congestion problems until the first checkpoint after we merged with the short route. If you're looking for changes, I'd put that Somerset Avenue checkpoint somewhere with more space and reroute a quieter way around Worle, maybe up Walford Avenue with the split to the Ebdon loop at Riverbank. UKeventphotos.com only shows me the first page of the gallery - clicking "Next results" dumps me back at the search front page. I think they need to learn how to make accessible web sites (my work offers advice...). I'm glad I took my own camera and I'm sorry if their bad web site limits the amount LRF gets from photographs.

I’ve been struggling for a tagline for Webconverger. The previous tagline “Webconverger is a free, up-to-date Web browser kiosk live system”, was a bit of a mouth full. Now, I’ve decided that a “Web operating system” best describes Webconverger. Webconverger isn’t just a “kiosk”... The reason why I didn’t call Webconverger a Web operating system initially, was because I didn’t want to confuse anyone. You see I’ve read blogs which talk about Web desktops or rather Web applications that emulate desktops, “operating systems”. I think for such Web applications, I’ll call them Web desktops, to be called an operating system is just abuse. Calling Web desktops “operating systems” tarnishes the good name of operating systems, when silly Web applications emulate broken dead WIMP win32 environments. I can’t be the only one that hates Windows. I’m not talking about Microsoft Windows. I am talking about overlapping Windows windows. :) So I have a little fight on my hands with Wikipedia and the entry on Web operating systems. Hopefully someone agrees with me that Webconverger is a Web OS. Sidenote: I’m in the process of releasing the Debian-live etch based Webconverger 2.15 (download) which features a new textless progress bar and reset feature.

I was reading some of the debate regarding this guy and his business: The man who owns the Internet and got to thinking about the comparison between domain names and real estate. One of the things that irritates me about domain name squatters is that they can essentially sit on a good name forever, at very, very little cost. You can't do that in real estate, because you have to pay property taxes, which acts as an incentive to actually do something productive with the property, rather than simply let it sit there until someone comes and offers to buy it from you for even more than you paid. So you can't let the space go completely to waste - you have a big incentive to at the very least rent it out to someone who can make money with it. You can't really rent out a domain name, though. Since it's an integral part of your brand and identity, it would be insane to borrow one for a few years, whereas with a physical business renting space, people will still be able to find you if you move. Perhaps an annual tax based on the purchase price of domain names would encourage people to either do something valuable with them or pass them on to someone who could? I don't think anyone would be sad to see pure speculators gone, but on the other hand, I have a strong suspicion that all the extra taxes and red tape would make the idea a net negative, and taxes on 'real' domains like google or ebay, would simply be passed on to consumers, and so wouldn't be desireable. In any case, it's something interesting to think about.

I just finished reading Ben Yoskowitz's Top 10 reasons to join a startup, and I feel like I have to say something. As an experienced programmer, I think of a startup as an abusive relationship. Most technology startups I've been in have been run by charismatic sociopaths with no actual management or technology experience. They make wild, ignorant, unfounded promises to employees, investors and potential customers, then get increasingly anxious and unpleasant as their unsupportable predictions of schedule and market share don't come through. Employees end up working 80-hour weeks, typically for low or no pay and worthless stock options that never pay out. Guilty that living the "startup lifestyle" (work from home, come in late, have fun) has caused schedule or feature slips, they push themselves too hard at work, to the detriment of their health and home life. It doesn't help you much get another job later. Most startups don't succeed, which means that you end up with 1, 2 or 3 years of space on your r sum consumed by a made-up company name that no one has ever heard of and whose phone line has been disconnected. If people have heard of the name, they'll associate it with failure ("Oh, yeah, wasn't that the company that spent all that money and went nowhere?"). On top of all that, the tech experience of working in a startup is usually pretty bad. The engineers are typically unexperienced -- just out of school, or close to it -- and they waste a lot of time and effort trying to reinvent the wheel. The idea that you're changing the world encourages this kind of bad engineering. You end up cutting a lot of corners and developing a lot of bad habits that you have to unlearn later on. Schedule pressures make you drop important engineering steps like analysis, design, unit tests, documentation. That is, if you even knew you were supposed to do them in the first place. It takes a lot of experience in this kind of pressure-cooker environment to come out of a startup sane, healthy, and wealthy. The vast majority of people end up with broken relationships, poor mental and physical health, and not much in the way of money to show for their efforts. tags: startup benyoskovitz work

Wikiclock in the news So, Niko, Hugh, Mike and Leoben Richardson all blogged about the Wikiclock. As far as I know, no MSM coverage yet, but it should be coming down the pipe any day. I talked to Niko tonight, and he said that he saw Hugh at La ka, and Hugh was updating the wikiclock. They traded off updating all afternoon. Sigh. It's actually quite addictive. tags: wikiclock niko hughmacguire leonardrichardson mikelinksvayer

Transit strike We've got a transit strike on in Montreal (see the CBC for deetz). It's a pretty heinous problem -- the maintenance workers are asking for X% pay increases over Y years with blah blah blah pension and fie fo fum and... Whatever. The city is refusing to budge, which makes our mayor, G rald Tremblay, officially a hypocritical idiot. Tremblay has been wagging fingers at provincial, federal and international figures for years about sticking to the Kyoto protocol, but when the hard decisions had to be made, he was willing to shut down Montr al's transit system... in summer... after one of the warmest winters in history. You can blame both sides on this issue, but when it comes down to it the union's job is to get the best deal it can for its workers, and Tremblay's job is to keep the Montreal M tro running. Someone's not doing his job. The city spends millions trying to get commuters out of their cars and into the public transit system. And all that work's out the window, now. Despite the public call for more people to rollerblade to work (riiiiiiiight), traffic is way up and auto use is way up. That means air quality is going to go down, and our city can go from being an environmental leader to an environmental mistake. I'm glad to hear that the Quebec government is stepping in to break up the fight, but I hope it doesn't take too long. tags: montreal quebec metro strike

Calling graphic designers: Universal edit button One of the interesting movements to come out of RoCoCoCamp this weekend is the idea of a universal wiki edit button. This would be an icon similar to the RSS radio-wave icon that's become ubiquitous for indicating an RSS feed. The UWEB would symbolize that the current page can be edited. Folks at AboutUs.org have taken the lead on this effort, which could be really interesting. Getting a universally-understood sign for "edit this page" would greatly help with acceptance of the wiki way by the general public. I don't think it'd have to be limited to wikis; any page that could be edited (e.g., on a CMS) could also have the UWEB. I highly encourage skilled graphic designers who want to take a crack at designing the Next Big Icon to look at the UWEB effort and give it a try. tags: graphicdesign universalwikieditbutton wiki rocococamp aboutus.org icon

The first lesson was about wrong assumptions that people do when it comes to i18n. This article is mostly targeted at developers which want to support i18n properly, in particular, plural forms.

This is my second n?getetxt lesson.
This is about making your update-po target to include all the strings you want localized in the pot file.

Probably, at some point you, as a developer have written something like:

print("You won %d point%s", points, points>1?"s":"" ) ;


Well, is nice and dandy that you want to make the proper choice of words when you have more than one point. I appreciate that, but you are doing it wrong. There is a tool for that, as I explained before.

Now, lesson 2.

You have understood what you have to do, but you just hate typing ngettext/gettext all over the place, so you probably defined something like:

#define _(X) gettext(X)
#define _n(sg,pl,n) getext(sg,pl,num)

So now you can write trhis piece of code:

print(_n("You won %d point", "You won %d points", points), points ) ;

The problem: how to convince xgettext to add those strings to the pot file?

Nothing simpler... just add _n as an additional keyword when invoking xgettext... but you have to specify that this is a definition for ngetetxt, so, you will end up having in your update-po target something like this:

xgettext ../src/*.c --keyword=_ --keyword=_n:1,2


TADA!

I spent most of this past weekend (a long weekend in Canada, thanks to our royal heritage) writing documentation for the DebTorrent code. The original BitTornado code was seriously lacking in this area, having only 670 lines of comments out of almost 20,000 total lines of code, which is 3.5% if you're counting. (In fairness, this may be due in part to it being based on the original bittorrent client.) Since Python is supposed to be known for it's well-documented code, I decided to tackle this shortcoming sooner rather than later. It's also a good opportunity for me to become familiar with all of the code. I'm only about halfway there, but the end result of my weekend's worth of work is this diffstat:

DebTorrent/BT1/Choker.py             99 ++++++++
DebTorrent/BT1/Connecter.py         313 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DebTorrent/BT1/Downloader.py        448 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
DebTorrent/BT1/Storage.py           418 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
DebTorrent/BT1/__init__.py            9
DebTorrent/BT1/btformats.py          47 ++++
DebTorrent/BTcrypto.py              147 ++++++++++++
DebTorrent/ConfigDir.py             248 +++++++++++++++++++++
DebTorrent/ConnChoice.py             12 -
DebTorrent/CurrentRateMeasure.py     69 +++++-
DebTorrent/__init__.py               14 +
DebTorrent/bencode.py               193 ++++++++++++++++
DebTorrent/bitfield.py               89 +++++++
DebTorrent/clock.py                  53 ++++
DebTorrent/download_bt1.py          380 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
DebTorrent/inifile.py                70 ++++--
btcompletedir.py                     25 ++
btcopyannounce.py                    20 +
btdownloadheadless.py               111 +++++++++
btlaunchmany.py                      56 ++++
btmakemetafile.py                    19 +
btreannounce.py                       6
btrename.py                          11
btsethttpseeds.py                     6
btshowmetainfo.py                     6
bttrack.py                            6
setup.py                             20 +
27 files changed, 2809 insertions(+), 86 deletions(-)

I've also started using the epydoc program to automatically generate some documentation web pages for easy browsing of the code. So far it's worked out great! So well that I decided to use some of the new features available in a recent beta release that was not yet in the debian archive. The packaging seemed simple enough, so I created my own package containing the new upstream version, which is now available in my repository.

The machine (formerly) hosting this blog was a dedicated server. I’ve got nothing bad to say about the hosting company, but it had the usual pitfalls of dedicated hosting. It was very expensive, which is why I split the service with two friends. We underutilized it. They didn’t provide backup services, so I ran my own using rdiff-backup - I won’t tell you how long I ran it before I bothered to set that up, though. And when something went wrong it could take quite a while to get the machine fixed and running again. Fortunately that only happened twice in all the time we were there. Anyway, our contract with them was up in February, and we decided not to renew. Since all of us were insanely busy at the time we decided to pay the higher monthly rate for three months to give us some time to migrate off. Which of course I left to the last minute. This blog is one of the first services I’ve moved to my new hosting at Slicehost. I don’t have a lot to say about these guys yet, since I haven’t had any trouble. The only downside was catching them at a somewhat turbulent and resource-starved time as they dealt with a wait list for orders, so it took a month for me to get one. They’re working on that problem, though. Towards the end I was checking every two days or so how long it said I’d have to wait. Note to everyone, progress bars that don’t progress are just infuriating. But I happened to check one day during the five minute window between when they sent me confirmation and when my mail client checked for new mail, and poof there it was. This is virtual hosting - Etch on Xen - thus the “slice” naming. They’re a heavy on automation shop, which fits right in with my style. And there is something so viscerally awesome about entering your credit card number, clicking OK, having their software allocate and create a virtualized disk, bootstrapping Etch onto it, and showing you its IP and root password. It doesn’t get much better than that. So far I’m happy. I took the opportunity to move to WordPress, away from my old hacked up Blosxom installation. WordPress imported entries easily, although I had to manually fudge the RSS file to prevent it from inserting a log of bogus <br> tags that I didn’t want in the middle of my paragraphs. I probably could have gotten comments imported too, but I didn’t bother - sorry folks, well, it’s not like there were a whole lot of them. The Debian WordPress packages work fine, although the configuration is a bit messy; my biggest complaints were the centralized upload and themes directories so that I had to mess around with symlinks in /usr to get everything going. Maybe I’ll actually use it more I hacked up the GUIDs a bit by hand, so this shouldn’t flood planet, but here’s hoping. Next step: migrating email service to the new system. Always a joy.

Has anyone seen a recent poll for Galway West? (In the Irish General Election, that is). The last poll was March 26th, which is way out-of-date : long prior to the election being called, before the Cryptosporidium Crisis, etc. The result is, I'm in the unusual position of having to make a decision. Ordinarily I'd vote Number 1 for Niall O'Brolch in (Green) and 2. Micheal D. Higgins (Labour). Ireland uses the unusual Single Transferable Vote system, with multi-member constituencies. Galway West is a 5-seat constituency, and Micheal D. is a long-sitting TD, who most would have expected to be automatically returned. Niall O'Brolch in is fairly new; he's a member of the City Council and current Mayor of Galway (thats a relatively powerless post in the Irish local council scheme of things, though). Unfortunately news from the Labour camp appears that too many people assume he will be automatically returned; the word they are getting on the street is "Yes, you'll be getting my no.2 ". But in the STV system, this could mean he wouldn't be in the running. Those votes for the Greens and others will perhaps stay with the Greens and won't transfer to him. So the choice, Vote 1. Greens, which is my natural preference, or 1. Labour, in the hope of getting both Micheal D. and Niall elected? a poll of the current situation would help. BTW, for voting geeks, following the link and reading about STV is worth it. It makes Irish election counts the most fun election counts in the World. One of the main arguments against electronic voting in Ireland has been that it would take all the fun out of the count, which would be over too soon ... Tags politics, galway

Val ncia clearly leaves no room for mistakes when it comes to bicycles, I just got reminded of this the hard way today. Last night I came out of the institute just 15 minutes before the closing of the supermarket, and I wanted to buy some stuff for dinner. I rushed back home, and decided I had no time to go up to drop my backpack and bicycle before they would close, so I just tied it to a street lamp outside the supermarket door. I ended up buying a few heavy things like milk so when I went out I then realised I wouldn't be able to carry the four bags, plus the backpack, plus the bicycle up, and the easiest would be to drop the stuff at home and then go down again for the bicycle. Great plan, except after placing the food in the cabinets, I totally forgot about the bike and did the usual cooking-laundry-computer-bed ritual. Only when I was ready to go to work today I realised the bike was not up in the flat, and I suddenly realised about my fuckup. A quick glance from the balcony revealed what I suspected: the bike was no longer there. This is quite annoying because there are at least three bikes that sleep outside on the street every single day, although they look old and value-less. Ironically, I value old bikes more than any new mountain-bike like mine, which I got for free from my bank, and was pretty crappy, even if at first glance it appeared to be quite ok Orbea (the gears were crappy Shimano, the back wheel was deformed, and a long etc. of quirks). As I feel quite impaired without a bike, I'll try to get my mother's Orbea Laida, fixed ASAP, something I should have done 7 months ago. For now, I'll just run home/to work; I really need it anyway. People tell me I should just get one from the stolen bicycle market in Val ncia, and I get mad at them. These people are the reason there's such a big offer for stolen bikes, and they get stolen nearly professionally in Val ncia. Sigh.

1 Pack of mixed BBQ meat: 5,90
1 Bottle of 2005 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo: 1,99
1 Throw away grill: 3,50

The fun that is an indoor BBQ party: Priceless! With the weather being so great and everyone having nice barbecues, we wanted to have one too. Unfortunatelly we don't have a balcony or a (nice) garden. (We do have a grassy patch in front of our house but it's not exactly a place you want to sit at and have dinner.) Also do not have a proper barbecue to take somewhere nice and somehow when we travel to friends we always bring bad weather with us. This weekend however, we decided to go for it. We got ourselfs one of those disposable grills, put it on the largest window sill, strategically placed a fan and a bucket of water and declared the indoor barbecue season officially opened.
Our experiences in short Good:

• Comfortable! Toilet, fridge, heating and electric light nearby
• Easy and low cost. You basically just light the only flammable bit on the whole thing, wait until the nasty accelerant is all burned up and the coals glow nicely
• No carrying around of stuff. Fridge, kitchen table etc near by
• That tiny thing really holds a long time. We both were absolutely stuffed, while the grill was still well hot
• BIG FUN!

Bad:

• SMOKE. The fan helps but doesn't solve the problem entirely
• Grill does not get very hot, large stuff takes a while. Bad when you are hungry, good towards the end though
• Throw away grill manual is only in Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Dutch. I wonder what "Grilli saa k ytt ainoastaan ulkona!" means ...
• Worried looks from people walking by the house at the column of smoke rising from a window at the fourth floor. Help to stand in the window and smile in a relaxed way.
• Running down four floors just because your darling dropped the aluminium foil
• SMOKE! (You don't appreciate the full odeur until you come back into the kitchen the next morning.)

PS: How do you extinguish a throw away grill once you're done? PPS: Shower! PPPS: Kids, do not try this at home!

I'm Going to Play Some Number at the Lotto The Lotto Game is a really popular gambling game in Italy, run by the state itself. As in all good gambling game: you, the player, can win a lot of money while who is running the game (the Italian state in our case) will win a lot of money for sure, no matter what. Anyhow, to the facts, it's a well-known folklore that people win playing Lotto FOR SURE by playing numbers told while dreaming by parents, friends, kitties, whatever, ... As a scientist, I've no reason not to trust this folklore, why should I? As a strange coincidence (another fact that strongly hints I HAVE TO PLAY), this night I had a dream (well, it was more this morning while reading the planet, but it doesn't really matter..., folklore is folklore!). There were a lot, really a lot of people whispering this to my ears:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

well, ok, they aren't in decimal notation, and they aren't even comprised between 1 and 90, ... but what would you expect from a bunch of geeks??? They are probably trying to exploit some overflow in the hands of the lotto extractor or something like that... But I won't desist, I'll play those number! Open questions:

• on which wheel(s) should I play the numbers?
• how should I handle overflowed numbers? throw them away? modulo 89 operations + 1?

any proficient Lotto player to answer them around?

I just got back from taking Zach Copley to the airport, and for the first time in a few days I'm sitting in front of my desktop computer again, trying to get back on track. I think it's probably a good idea to get my notes about RoCoCoCamp down on electronic paper while the experience is still fresh in my mind. (I wrote about the first day in Journal/29 Flor al CCXV). Saturday morning I got up considerably later than I had the day before, and I took my time getting to SAT. Which was OK, since things went much smoother in the morning. The only really annoying thing about Saturday was that I had to wash about 50 cups by hand -- we'd run out of clean cups, and I couldn't figure out how to run the dishwasher. It didn't take long, but it meant that I had my head down in the sink as people came in and didn't get to spend as much time talking to them. I was glad to hear that people had a good time going to L'Utopik on Friday night. Apparently a few people who'd flown in late on Friday got a chance to meet up with the experienced crew at L'Utopik, so they were well-prepped for Saturday. Probably the biggest buzz of the pre-sessions was SJ Klein's pair of functional OLPC laptops. They were cute and fun -- I got a few minutes to play with them, and I enjoyed the interface tremendously -- although it took me a few tries to open it. People were fiddling with them throughout the day -- including Amita June, who came late in the afternoon -- and Tristan P loquin even blogged about them. My first session was about wiki and other technologies, which I titled Wiki And.... (I borrowed the name from Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which it seems no-one eats anything but "coffee and".) My main point was that a) wiki people tend to overuse wiki where other software tools may be more appropriate and b) we need to be careful with impedance mismatches when using wiki with technologies with other cultures behind them. Wikis and blogs mismatch; wikis and forums mismatch. You need to work out ways to make them work culturally. As a proof-of-concept that there are ridiculous applications for wiki, I created in about 3 minutes before the session the wikiclock. It's a computer clock that runs on wiki technology: the time is kept up-to-date by human beings editing the page, rather than with software. I was so pleased with myself that I twittered about it, and from there it's taken on a life of its own. The clock is implemented on the amazing minimalist system pageoftext.com. I heard about p.o.t. from Liz Henry's April report from Palo Alto Wiki Wednesday, and I think it's totally great. It's a cross between a pastebin and a wiki -- like an open-edited ImageShack for text. Brilliant. The second session I did was a hyper-focused one on a particular Semantic Web problem. Both Wikitravel and Open Guides have tons of information on "places" in various cities. (That is, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, hotels, museums, parks, etc.). It would be good to export our data on these places to each other, so we could possibly keep them in sync. For example, if a restaurant changes its hours , that info could be updated on The Open Guide to London and automatically synched to the Wikitravel page on London. So we went over some ways to do this kind of interchange; we'd brainstormed before about it on the Open Guides' RDF Workshop, but it was good to sit down with Earle Martin and do some face-to-face hacking on the idea. We don't yet have a vocabulary for it, but we'll get something going on the new wikirdf.org site (which also emerged from this session). I had a great lunch with a lot of people from RoCoCo on the terrace at the Bar St. Sulpice, about 8 blocks away on rue St. Denis. The sun was out, it was cool, and we had a very nice time. It was especially nice to see Marcus Bornfreund and Tina Pipers of Creative Commons Canada, who'd come to talk about the PDwiki, a project to collaboratively document Canadian works in the public domain (see Canadian Public Domain Registry Announced). We talked quite a bit about the social challenges of getting a community excited about such a dry subject, but I think we got some good ideas about it. In the afternoon I led a session on MediaWiki. We were lucky enough to have Tim Starling sit in, and he told everyone about the new developments going on with MW. He's refactoring some very deep parts of the storage and rendering sections of the code, which will result in considerably better reliability, performance, and flexibility. I think it sounds great. I had to work the registration desk for the last session of the day, which was pretty great because I ended up baby-sitting Anoushka Jaroski-Biava for most of the time. But I missed Robin Millette's cool talk about BuzzyBee, which looks to be really fun to play with. We rounded out the evening with music, pizza, and beer at the SAT. tobias.dj played some great dance music, and we had some wiki-collaborative VJ-ing using the SAT's fancy screen systems. All the kids were there -- Mark and Allegra's daughter No ma as well as Amita June. Fun. Sunday morning I didn't have to start coffee until 9AM -- luxury! We had a great Open Space Technology convergence -- a way to turn the discussions of the previous few days into action items for going forward. I did a convergence session on the future of RecentChangesCamp. We had most of the interested parties available (except for the RCC Portland organizers, who had to fly out early that morning). We made some decisions about future RCCs, and we made some plans for next year's RCC -- in the Bay Area (California). Last night we brought back the Keiki gang to our house, since it was great to have them all in Montreal for the event. We did a big brainstorming session on next steps to launching the project, and we also did some graphic design review of potential logos. We have some great designs coming; I'm really happy we got Sarven Capadisli and Bridget to work on the site. I had to crash out at 10:30PM -- Amita and I fell asleep together -- but others were up late talking and thinking. I don't know how they did it -- I was all talked out by the end of RoCoCo. All in all I had a fantastic time -- the event far surpassed my expectations. It was hard -- too hard. I bit off far more than I could chew. But I think we did a good job of establishing Montreal as a technology city -- Wiki City Canada -- in the international mind, and I think we also brought together some really interesting people for some fruitful and productive work. You can see some of the projects that came directly out of RoCoCo on the FutureChanges page -- an ingenious name courtesy of Pm. And there are some indirect ones that we can expect soon. tags: rocococamp recentchangescamp wiki open space montreal barcampmontreal keiki wikiclock pageoftext

Cause and solution So, Technorati has a good listing for rocococamp items, but I especially liked Steve Faguy's post: Wiki: The cause of, and solution to, all of life s problems. Steve was an extremely game participant in the event, which I think was pretty incredible. He wrote a good overview of wikis in the Montreal Gazette this year. A funny thing happened on Friday evening during the daily wrap-up known as "Evening News". We had Open Space's minimalist instructions posted on the walls of the SAT, so people would see and remember them. Steve pointed out that the first of Open Space's "four principles" is grammatically incorrect: Whoever comes is the right people. He said, "In the spirit of wiki, I'm going to correct it right now!" And to applause, he got up with a marker and changed the "is" to "are". This stimulated an interesting discussion. One person noted that the "is" is there because possibly only one person could show up for a session, and that's OK. Finally, Brandon CS Sanders stood up and said, "I like 'is' because when we come together like this, we form a cohesive group, however temporary -- 'a people'. So I'm going to change it back." And he did -- to lots of applause, again. Steve came up to me at the end of the night, laughing. "I got reverted! I should have started an edit war!" It was a hoot; he's got a good sense of humour. tags: stevefaguy rocococamp wiki openspace brandoncssanders