It's been a topsy-turvy week, but I'm finally getting my head above water again here at our new home. A lot has happened, which I'll try to capture here, but I'm not sure I can get it all. On Tuesday, Maj, Amita June and I spent the morning in Central Park in New York City. It was a beautiful day -- the rains had cleared overnight, and it was warm and crisp everywhere. We went to the big playground near Columbus Circle, which had about 1000 kids from 2 to 14 running in every direction, and a huge water spray fountain which meant that most of those kids were soaking wet. We went and grabbed lunch at the Whole Foods Market on the circle itself, and ate it out on the grass. AJ and Maj went back to the hotel for a nap, and I got a haircut for the awards ceremony that night. Then I had coffee with Tim Wu, creator of the concept of net neutrality and a writer for Slate. We had a great talk about net neutrality, the future of Wikitravel (Tim wrote a critical piece in Slate in April), and new projects we're both working on. It was really pretty fun. Unfortunately, I took too long talking to Tim, and not enough time buying myself a pair of pants for the awards ceremony. So by the time we were done, I was in a huge hurry. I ran down to the Old Navy on W 34th, picked a pair of black khakis off the shelf, and jammed in a cab to get back to our hotel room in time. Maj was done up to the nines, so I jumped in the shower, shaved, threw on my sport jacket and slacks, cut off all the tags with nail clippers, and ran out the door. The event itself was pretty incredible, and I don't want to flood this blog post with all of my comments and recollections. So I'll add a more detailed report later today. tags: newyorkcity maj amitajune travel wikitravel timwu wholefoods webbyawards webbies

Drive time Suffice it to say that we were out really, really late. We got up at 6AM the next morning to make our 8AM train back to Montreal, and it was clear to everyone (even Amita June) that if we tried to make this train it would be one of the worst days of our life. But there's only one train from NYC to Montreal per day, so we'd have to stay in town another night, and then have the same problem the next morning. So Maj canceled our Amtrak train tickets -- which were 100% refundable, even a couple of hours before the train leaves. Bravo, Amtrak! Then I got to work trying to rent us a car to drive home. It turns out that it's hard to get a rental car for a one-way trip from New York to Montreal. I tried Budget and Avis and National, and none of them would let me rent one-way into Canada. Annoyingly, none of their Web sites gave straight error messages on the subject -- I got "no cars available" or "unable to find your destination" (!) -- and I had to call the 1-800 numbers for each one in turn. I finally got a car from Hertz, on-line, and there was even a little note in my confirmation email to the effect of "ONE WAY TRAVEL CONFIRMED". I guess there's a reason that some companies get to be number one -- the more flexible you are, the more grateful your customers are going to be. I, for one, am planning to use Hertz in the future. I picked up the car at the W 55th Hertz office, and it took me 45 minutes to get back to our hotel at 7th and W 47th. The garage at Hertz goes onto W 54th, which is a "Thru Street" -- no turns allowed until you're halfway across town. And, it was bumper-to-bumper, of course. I finally gave up and made an illegal turn, and was promptly pulled over by a motorcycle cop. D'oh! Luckily, he let me off with a warning. Our trip out of New York was uneventful, but pleasant. It was a beautiful day, and the Catskills and Hudson Valley are a beautiful place to drive in the early summer. Deep, cool woods and bright green fields -- they're lush and fertile-looking. We stopped in Lake George for an early-afternoon dinner, and then had a pretty sunset drive through the Adirondacks up to the border. We got in late -- 10:30PM -- but it was overall a pretty good trip. And nice to have left at 2PM rather than 6AM. tags: rentalcar amtrak newyorkcity hertz

MANA Yesterday Mark, Allegra, No ma and Anoushka stopped back through Montreal as they wended their way home to Lausanne?. We had a nice lunch at Zyng and then took a walk down av Mont-Royal, where a pedestrian fair is going on this week. They got off yesterday evening, which makes the last of our RoCoCoCamp visitors to leave. tags: mark allegra no ma anoushka

Pecha Kucha Montreal I'm very interested to hear via Boris and James that we'll be having a Pecha Kucha night here in Montreal. It's going to be on 14 Jun 2007 at 20:20h (8:20PM) at the SAT. Pecha Kucha is an unconference for designers (not necessarily Web designers). I think it sounds like a really interesting event, and I hope to go. tags: pecha kucha unconference montreal

I recall Linux/PPC kernel developer Benjamin Herrenschmidt saying ages ago that it would technically be trivial to write a tool that accesses the Open Firmware device tree to adjust the iMac's built-in monitor's features (brightness, contrast, geometry, etc.). I'm wondering if anybody ever coded such a tool? Otherwise, would anyone be willing to study the Darwin source code and port it to Linux?

While I was away, Jam-Busting June started. It's one of the biggest commuter challenge events in England. I took part in King's Lynn's event last year, but this one has a prize draw too, so go for it if you're in the WsM area. Things are already in good shape here, as you can see from the hotspots in both WsM and Bristol on this Census-based map. The North Somerset Cycling Officer writes:

"There are also the commuter cycle rides into Weston-super-Mare starting tomorrow with the cyclists breakfast organised for Wednesday the 20th - you can arrive at the Victorian Caf by your own route if you prefer. The rides will be:

• Wednesday, June 6 - meet at The Campus - 8am.
• Wednesday, June 13 - meet at Worle Railway Station - 8am.
• Wednesday, June 20 - meet at Ebdon Cemetery - 7.30am (to the seafront for a free breakfast - cyclists can also make their own way to the caf ).
• Wednesday, June 27 - meet at Weston General Hospital - 8am."

Maybe see you there. Their homepage also has a preview of the new Strawberry Line leaflet and the 2007 route map will be up in due course.

Darcs-monitor will send email to a specified recipient about new changes added to a specific darcs repository. It can be run as an apply posthook (resulting in near-instantaneous push emails), or periodically from Cron, or occasionally by hand, whatever seems most convenient. This new release (0.3) contains the following changes:

• there is now support for the %CHANGES% and %SHORTREPO% substitutions in the template
• a default template is now provided
• ' and " entity references in darcs changes –xml is now supported
• patches with just the author email address (no real name) are now handled correctly
• when multiple emails are sent, they are now sent in chronological order
• emails are announced to the user

The minor update 0.3.1 brings the documentation up to date. Benja Fallenstein and Benjamin Franksen provided some of the features and bug fixes in this release. My thanks to them You can get it by darcs at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/darcs/darcs-monitor/ (darcsweb
available), or as a tarball at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/software/dist/. It depends on mtl and
HaXml and is written in Haskell, naturally. It has been tested only with GHC 6.6 so far. For installation and usage instructions, refer to the README at any of the locations above. Please note that this software is very new and thus can be buggy. As with any email-sending software, bugs can result in major annoyance; user caution is warranted.

Via Jamie, this hilarious This American Life parody (direct link to MP3 if the embedding doesn’t work for you). This guy obviously has listened to a lot of episodes of the show. (I expect this parody will be funny only if you have, as well.)

Share This

In the French-dubbed version of Tomorrow Never Dies, the on-board computer in James Bond's BMW speaks with a German accent.

I'm sure that there's some fundamental truth about European politics there, but it escapes me.

When Mika gave me a haircut a couple days ago, I was a little concerned she might give me a bad haircut. I realized I was worried because bad haircuts have become cool and I was afraid of looking hip.

I bought myself a beautiful black fixie today. The ride is nice and smooth! Now if only I could find the usb cable for my camera to post pictures.

Just enjoy: And if you do not already have, I really suggest you to add Jamie Zawinski's RSS feed of "Astronomy Picture Of the Day" to your feed reader (again: (http://www.jwz.org/cheesegrater/RSS/apod.rss).

In the last two weeks, life has been jam packed, full of movement and travel and a bit of sensory overload. I went to San Francisco to visit friends from the past but also took a trip to NYC to help set things up for the future. Logistically, it certainly was not enjoyable to travel from Edmonton to SF to NYC and back to SF before heading back to Edmonton, which was only made worse by the fact that I was sick flying back from NYC to SF. But taken from an aesthetic point of view, there was something that made sense about going back and forth between cities that in reality connect my past with my future. For it was my time in SF when I did my research that more or less made possible my future life in NYC. I had not been back to SF since I had left in the summer of 2003. My mom’s illness kept me away from the west, pulled instead toward the east. In fact, right before I left SF was also the time when my mother’s condition took a turn for the worse and I started to travel only for work or to visit my mom PR (or Debconf, which is, well, somewhere in between work and play). Because of my relatively long absence and the many memories of the area, my return hit vividly. You may leave a place, but when you return you are reminded of how much a place always leaves some imprint in your body and soul, which resurface upon your return. Feelings and memories of the past flickered to consciousness when my eyes first absorbed the stunningly beautiful (but also vulnerable) geography of the Bay Area: the pale blue sky, the colorful bridges and houses, the ridiculously steep hills, the wispy and thick fog. San Francisco is a city, it seems to me, that has made a Faustian pact with nature. Nature and the geography have not been completely conquered. They seep right into the man-made environment, which is why it is so beautiful here. But it comes at a price measured in ways small and large. Daily battle with the hills is a small reminder and the larger reminders come in the form of terrifying earthquakes. It was really great to see many friends, many of whom I have stayed in constant touch with on IRC, but of course, from time to time, a little flesh and blood goes a lot further than the bits and bytes. While SF does not have a high retention rate (apparently 30% of the population changes every 2 years), many of my techie friends have faithfully remained and other techie friends have since made their way to Bay Area. As much as I find this city amazing, I was reminded of how much I find San Francisco’s weather completely objectionable, disliking it even more than the cold Canadian north (really).The damp cold and constant wind are impossible to escape, only made worse by lousy indoor heating like the cozy heater I already blogged about (and apparently, this is how you can fix it). I am staying in the outer Mission district, which is where I lived for a while, and I do love the slightly warmer temperatures, flatness of the streets, and very colorful murals. While Valencia street has moved up a few notches on the gentrification scale, it does not seem out of control. And of course, the city is brimming with a particular mixture of youth and tech. In the many coffee shops, youthful faces are illuminated by Shiny New Laptops and it seems like at least every third person you meet works in the technology industry. I had not planned on heading out to the east coast but since I was given the option of seeing a couple of apartments courtesy of NYU housing, I decided it was well worth my while to make the cross country trip, given that it may be my future home for many years. Spring in NYC is one of its more flattering incarnations for there is a slight touch of nature that drapes the city, a touch that is absent during the height of the summer when the hot concrete jungle overtakes the flowers and trees. Heading to NYC briefly also reminded me that moving to NYC feels like a really BIG move. And not because the distance between Edmonton and NYC is 3900 KM but because of what it represents. It sort of dawned on me recently that becoming an assistant professor is not unlike the grueling period real doctors go through once they graduate medical school: residency. Even though by the time you start your job, you have been bequeathed with the title of a doctor, and are prepared to teach, advise, etc., in reality you are only half-baked and there is more cooking for you to go under. You need to go through a few more years of somewhat intense training to seal the deal and that is what is awaiting me starting this fall.

Tonight I turned 27. By chance, this fell onto a Tuesday, and there is a great dancing party every Monday. This monday, there was also a great band, the Souvenirs. They're pure fun and great for dancing - so I obviously opted to celebrate my birthday there.This probably was the nicest birthday party I've ever had: lots of friends showed up (though mostly girls, but thats fine with me :-)), we danced a lot. And danced. And danced. :-) And I'll probably spend some more hours today dancing later this day.And with dancing I mean: Swing, Lindy Hop, Balboa. I just love this music and these dances. So playful, sometimes cheeky - swinging...

Would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar

Todays music was also great, a nice speed and patterns you could play with... I don't know what it is, adrenaline?, that makes dancing so much fun. And probably the communication. Dancing is all about communication. There was this class titled "Moves that make the follow smile" once... That is the best moment in a dance, when you managed to lead the follow into some slight variations or some fun move matching the music, it worked out great and you see this flash of delight in their face... this "I'm not sure what we just did, but it felt just so right"-smile. The "I didn't know we could do that"-smile. That's what I'm striving for. Sometimes there are some moments in a song where this works out great, and occasionally there is a song where it works out through most of the song. These are the really great moments when dancing.Sorry, no pictures or videos. Just memories.Keep on swingin'!I'm really looking forward to events such as Senigallia (Summer Jamboree) or the Munich Lindy Exchange.And of course our regular events here in Munich, such as our Thursday open air get-together at Hofgarten, sundays in Salon Erna and mondays in Cord.

I appreciate the appropriate, if not entirely intuitive, juxtaposition of items in aisle 7F of my local drug store.

Harvard Free Culture is helping to organize this years' National Free Culture Conference -- the meeting for North American Free Culture student groups. The whole shindig is planned for May 26, 2007 at Harvard University here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The schedule is solidifying and I will presenting and arguing for adoption or support of the Free Cultural Works Definition within the FC student movement and probably also be talking about community building and advocacy in some free software groups I've worked with. Housing is available and the event is open to the public. If you d like to attend, speak, or help out with the conference, please email freeculture@hcs.harvard.edu or check out the Facebook event. If you're on the fence about attending, you can read this glowing endorsement of the conference by high protectionist James DeLong at IP Central.

As I mentioned previously, I was graciously given the opportunity to speak the crowd at the Free Software Foundation's Members Meeting in March about some of my work and activism around Free Culture. In front of what was probably the friendliest audience possible, I compared the free software and free culture movements and explained why I think that free culture movement may be off track -- and, of course, what we as a community might be able to do about it. If you listen to it, please try to forgive my faults as a speaker. The message I tried to convey is what I think is one the most important tactical issues facing free culture. If this talk dwells a little too long on free software and the lessons we might take from that world, please consider my audience. You can listen to the talk here:

• Talk (OGG Vorbis or MP3)
• Q&A (OGG Vorbis or MP3)

When I saw the first mutilated Tickle-Me-Elmo, I thought it was slightly funny and worth a quick picture with the camera -- but I didn't give it much thought. Now that it's becoming a trend, I'm beginning to get a little worried.

Once, I was telling an executive in a large technology company that mostly builds non-free technologies why I did not like most of their products and business decisions and about some of the things that I was doing to help their consumers work around them and avoid paying them in the future. Excited, the manager suggested that I consider a job with them at least in part as an advocate for these ideas within their company. I mentioned that my criticism was primarily principled and fundamental to the way his company did business. He responded, "yes, but if you take a job with us, you get to have your principles and a BMW." I don't think he understood my principles. Perhaps, he didn't understand principles at all.

Very quietly, the Ubuntu community reached a major milestone today when we held a Community Council meeting, like it does fortnightly. The only thing different was that the council included five new members -- Mike Basinger, Corey Burger, Matthew East, Jerome S. Gotangco and Daniel Holbach. These members are, with the exception of Holbach, not employed by Canonical and were each confirmed by a vote of the full Ubuntu membership. Before the recent elections, I was the only member who was not a Canonical employee -- and I used to be one. From a technical perspective, the founding Ubuntu team was able to benefit from everything that Debian had built -- a running start if there ever was one. From a community perspective though, we had to start from scratch and had to deal with the very difficult situation that paid labor and closely entangled corporate interests. Working with the rest of the team, I drafted a set of community norms (the Code of Conduct) and governance structures designed to keep both the community and Canonical under control. They seemed like good ideas but, because we didn't have a community yet, only reflected the sensibilities of Mark Shuttleworth, myself, and the rest of the early Ubuntu team. The highest Ubuntu governance board, the Community Council was initially filled with people that were in the room in Oxford when we came up with the idea: myself, Mark, James Troup, and Colin Watson. We decided that the council members should, and would, be approved by a vote of the membership. With no members though, we faced a bit of a bootstrapping problem. Three years later, Ubuntu has a vibrant community with hundreds of enfranchised members who have an up-or-down say on the members of the council itself. When we looked for new potential council members to propose to the community, we tried to pick the most active, most level-headed, and most representative group we could find. It was pleasing to see that only one member of the new CC board works for Canonical; Canonical employees are now outnumbered. It has been interesting to see announcements by Fedora, FreeSpire, OpenSuSE over the last few years proposing systems of more inclusive community governance structures that, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, look a bit like what Ubuntu has built in its attempts to empower users in that sometimes awkward community/company environment. Whatever the reasons, I think it means there's more pressure on us at Ubuntu to keep raising the bar. I see today as a great example of how we've done just that.

Not to be missed: well-known enfant terrible James Grimmelmann is guest-blogging on PrawfsBlawg. His opening commentary on the relationship between law practice and computer science:

Practicing lawyers, like practicing programmers, are professional pragmatists. Both must make their cases (and case mods) out of the materials they have available; both starve or eat steak depending on whether their creations work. The day-to-day practice of law is unlikely ever to require much high theory. We can mourn that fact because it means that they look at us with suspicion, or celebrate it because it frees us to chase Truth and Beauty and it will remain a fact either way.

Aside from the fact that I don’t eat steak, I think this is correct. Via a commenter on James’ entry, I learned that the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is implementing a wiki (the entry page could surely use some more content). Surprisingly, it was not Posner but Easterbrook who spearheaded the effort. This is a very interesting development, but I expect it will be quite a while before any other circuit takes up the idea. Finally, I have been meaning to write about this New York Times story describing Jonathan Coulton’s success as a musician breaking with the traditional distribution /promotional channels (via 43 folders, a productivity blog that is still on my “probation” list). Unfortunately, slashdot beat me to it. I first re-discovered Jonathan Coulton during his guest episode of the Show with Ze Frank. In any event, the article is well worth reading:

More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as a reasonable middle-class living between $3,000 and $5,000 a month by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140 . In total, 41 percent of Coulton s income is from digital-music sales, three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site. Another 29 percent of his income is from CD sales; 18 percent is from ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11 percent comes from T-shirts, often bought online

Share This

More than a year ago, I published an election methods library called RubyVote. Interest in the library surpassed any of my expectations: I know of at least one startup using the library heavily in their core business and a number of fun sites, like Red Blue Smackdown, that are using it as well. The point of course, was to make complex but superior election methods accessible in all sorts of places where people were making decisions suboptimally. It its own small way, it seems to have succeeded enormously. Over the last year, I've been asked by a variety of people if they could use RubyVote for their own organizational decision making -- tasks like electing leadership of a student group or members of a non-profit board of directors. Since RubyVote was just a library without a UI of its own, I had to tell them "no." I caved in eventually and got to work on a quick and dirty web-based front end to the library. That project grew into Selectricity which is a primarily web-based interface to a variety of different election methods and voting technologies. You can currently try out quickvotes which can be created in half a minute and voted on in a quarter but which bring all of the power of preferential voting technologies to bear on very simple decisions. Prompted by Aaron Swartz, I also built a mobile phone version that's lets you send a short email or SMS to create or vote in a election. For those that follow research in voting technologies, there's not a lot of new stuff here. What's new is that this project, unlike the vast majority of voting technologies, is interested in the state of the art for everyone but governments. Clearly government decisions are important but they're one set of decisions, usually only once a year. Selectricity is voting machinery for everything and everyone else. It was announced in a variety of news outlets today that Selectricity was selected for grant from mtvU and Cisco as part of their Digital Incubator project. As part of that, I'm going to be working with some other voting technology experts to bring tools for auditable elections, cryptographically secured anonymity, and voter verifiability to the platform (I have only rudimentary functionality today). There are a couple people who will be joining me on the project this summer and we will building out what I hope will be an extremely attractive platform for better every-day decision-making. More than the grant though, I'm excited about the visibility that use by MTV will bring to the project. Most of all though, I'm just excited about more free software and more (and more accessible) democratic decision making. My adviser Chris Csikszentmih lyi put it well:

One of the big arguments against preferential voting, or new voting technologies, is the fear that they would disenfranchise the average person who doesn't yet understand how they work. Certainly, making all voting technologies open source is critical, but the issue of familiarity is worth considering. We re hoping that MTV and eventually American Idol will move their voting over to Selectricity, allowing it to work as both a technical tool but also pedagogically, training future voters. Why not integrate democratic processes into all your software and communications tools? Why not use the best democratic processes available, so long as they're available to everyone?