Nokia's N800 internet tablet is an intriguing device. When I originally got one a few months back I tried to treat it purely as a consumer object, just using the installed apps and things available through the obvious point-and-click channels.As a consequence it served mainly as a portable (and expensive) internet radio, streaming me the cricket commentary from the BBC. And when I upgraded my wireless network I somehow managed to make it WPA2 only, knocking the N800 offline. An offline N800 is an almost thoroughly useless device, so it went into the drawer and I forgot about it.Ultimately you can't leave something that expensive unused, so I dragged it out again, fiddled the wi-fi router into compliance, and decided not to deny my hacker nature this time. The N800 is Linux underneath, so who could resist?
The result is two-edged, really: I'm a lot happier with the device, but on the other hand must conclude that the N800 is still a bit far from being consumer-ready.Must-have softwareSo, what things did I install this time around that made the device happier?Claws Mail is a nice email client that works well with my IMAP accounts, which all use SSL and TLS, have lots of messages and a deep folder hierarchy. I don't really want to write much mail on the N800, but an easy reading interface is a bonus.The FM radio is something I can't believe I missed before. I had no idea this was in there, but plug some headphones into the N800 and they act as the antenna for an FM receiver. Desperately cute and old-world, a bit like when laptops still used to have parallel printer ports.I had previously ignored Maemo Mapper, thinking it was useless without a GPS, but it turns out to work very nicely as a dedicated client for Google Maps, as well as several other mapping sources. Must-do geeky bitsTry as I might to like the touch screen, the first thing I had to do with the device was find a way of not using the stylus to do sysadmin type tasks on it.So, first stop is to get a terminal up, figure out how to use the root account, install a SSH client and server, and get my pubkey onto the N800. Now I could shell into it and use a decent keyboard.On my local network I hate maintaining DNS if I don't have to, so the next thing I wanted was Zeroconf support in the shape of avahi. One of the quickest ways to get this going is to install the Canola media application, which uses Zeroconf to find shared music.With these basics in place, the N800 supports APT package repositories familiar to Debian and Ubuntu users, so the device becomes a lot less weird and much more manageable. I felt the same pleasant familiarity as I did with the NSLU2. Things to look forward toThe N800's video camera is neat, but nobody I know uses Google Talk for conferencing. Fortunately it seems that Skype for the N800 is just around the corner. Initially, video support is unlikely, but I imagine that if Skype on the N800 proves popular, it won't be far off.The N800 is something I don't mind having kicking around the kitchen or nursery, so staying in touch with my family while I'm travelling will become a lot more fun.
Also, I'd like to get NFS running on the N800, but that requires the installation of a new kernel, which I've not quite yet had the time to do. Once that's done, all my media, photos and storage will be handily available. 

Long fun weekend here. Last Thursday, Maj's brother Brian appeared on our doorstep unexpectedly. He'd been driving across the country from Santa Barbara for a few weeks, stopping to see friends and go camping and rock climbing along the way. Every few days he'd call our home number to tell us when he'd be coming in... but our home phone has had mixed-up wiring since our move on June 1. So his arrival was a really pleasant surprise. That night we went out to dinner at Ouzeri, the upscale Greek restaurant around the corner. We had been trying to connect with Matt Biddulph and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, who are visiting Montreal for a month. Matt and I were introduced at South by Southwest by connector Ben Cerveny, and Maj and Alex met separately and serendipitously at Montreal Pecha Kucha. So we did a big dinner at Ouzeri to talk and have fun. Boris Anthony came along, which made for a really great time. We had a lot of good wines at Ouzeri -- they have the best-known Greek wine cellar in town. We started off with an Ayiotiriki white (in a cool bottle), then a Naoussa, then a Rapsani. All very tasty. Dinner was a mix of appetizers, moussaka, and a big grilled shrimp platter. Boris got a nice-looking slice of lamb, too. Oh, and we got Ouzeri's trademark saganaki: a big raw cheese, doused with ouzo and cooked flamb at the table. Amita June doesn't like sitting at the table too much, so we took a walk outside so she could burn off some energy. A little bored, I twittered about where we were. Within 20 minutes, both Hugh and Niko cruised in to join us. Power of the Internet, dot dot dot. We finished dinner and decided to take the talk on the road. Everyone came over to our house at 4690 rue Pontiac and we... uh... opened another bottle of wine and hung out and talked for a couple of hours. By the time the bars were open and active on Mont-Royal, everyone streamed out and Maj and I put Amita to sleep. Good time! tags: montreal ouzeri mattbiddulph alexandredeschampssonsino borisanthony bencerveny greekwine hughmcguire niko

Tonight, instead of minding my dinner, which did burn, I was drawn into and extended a pretty fiery IRC conversation on debian-devel on a topic that does not like to die: the merits and demerits of Wikipedia. It is not worth summarizing the conversation here for it followed a pretty predictable arc. There were those who thought Wikipedia was novel and valuable, others who saw it as a pit of bad facts, and inaccuracies and a few others who saw it in ways negative and positive. I found the conversation somewhat ironic, because I usually find myself defending free software to outsiders much in the same way I was defending Wikipedia to free software developers. I tend to be in the camp of admirers, and for many reasons, although, of course, I also was arguing that it is too early to judge the value of Wikipedia as it is in its infancy. Like Debian, since Wikipedia is an institution that has changed *a lot* in its short history, it is hard to make any hard and fast conclusions about its worth, impact, etc, although more modest and qualified claims are certainly in order. The only reason I feel like I can argue anything about Wikipedia is because I am currently reading a dissertation on Wikipedia by Joseph Reagle. He not only has really insightful things to say about the collaborative culture driving the online encyclopedia, but also about the prolific commentary that has closely followed the heels of Wikipedia in the last few years. Just today, he wrote a blog entry entitled, Punditry and The Web 2.0 debate, which so hit the nail on the head on the problems–not with Wikipedia–but with the peanut gallery (commentary) on Wikipedia. As he notes, the problem is often not with the so called correct or incorrect judgments on Wikipedia (or other Web 2.0 phenomenon) but with the very debates themselves, because many of them are built on a shaky foundation of sand, but this punditry, as Joe rightly calls it, is nonetheless worthy of critical examination:

.. while I follow the discussion with interest, I actually don’t find it substantively engaging. Many of the arguments, particularly Gorman’s, tend to be characterized by unsubstantiated claims and the purposeful construal of nuanced issues as extremes — propping up strawmen for subsequent potshots. As I’ve already indicated, while it might bring pundits a sense of righteousness and attention, in the end “Time, not arguments, will utlimately tell.” (And, for this reason I appreciate Larry Sanger’s continuing efforts to implement his vision.)Why, then, do I find this discussion of interest? Punditry, communicative disorders, and history. First, I’m trying to come to an understanding of “punditry,” and I think Gorman’s recent bloggings is an exemplar. My sense is that sometimes people argue for arguments’ sake. That is, even if they genuinely believe the thing they are arguing for, attention, not persuasion, is the goal. (In a sense, perhaps it is a high-brow, and perhaps more genuinely held, form of trolling — another interesting phenomenon.)

While punditry has always existed, there is no doubt that the Internet has accentuated and facilitated this form of (often male) communication and it is great to see someone tackle this topic. Because let’s face it, there is a lot more “garbage” spewing from Web 2.0 or Wikipedia commentary compared to than the actual Wikipedia articles themselves.

This FUD is not spreadable, but it does make… , and was previously noted in Mexico last year.

One thing I'm really missing is Montr al in the summer time. Particularly the Fantasia Festival, where I would usually take in twenty-odd movies over a couple of weeks and I've been going for years. It was great. New York doesn't seem to have anything that compares, except maybe The New York Asian Film Festival. But that seems quite a bit smaller and more focused. I'll still check out it out though.

It's been nearly 7 months since I've moved here and time has really flown. Work has consumed most of my life and it's been amazing, but I'm starting to feel like it's lacking in certain areas. I've barely seen most of Manhattan and it's really not that big. I need to make sure I get the balance right.

DebConf 7 was fantastic, doubly so since I got to share it. My BoF was not that popular (which is what I expected) but people were interested and audience participation was high, so I was pleased. I sort of divided my time between the conference and being a tourist, so I hope no one felt like I was ignoring them. Edinburgh was an amazing city, really very beautiful. It felt good to be connected with this place (my mother was born in Perth, not too far away). Simon, Martin and Kai, you guys rock!

Speaking of DebConf, I should have cornered Keith for some troubleshooting. I bought a spiffy new desktop recently with a 965G chipset and plugged in an SDVO card and tried to get dual monitor set up going. After much Googling I found that Xrandr is apparently the new cool way to configure this, but information is pretty scarce. I can't seem to get them to both work at the same time. There could be problems because they have different resolutions (one is a 22" wide screen and one is a regular 19"). The lack of information about this is slightly frustrating and tells me either no one is trying this or no one else is having problems. Neither is good :)

We've started using Review Board for code reviews at work. It's pretty nice: setting it up is trivial (it's built on top of Django), it's fast enough (using mod_python), email notifications Just Work, and the user interface is sexy, even if it has a few quirks. It even does syntax highlighting in diffs, which is convenient. The only nit is that our workflow sometimes requires reviews of code that has already been committed in the repository, so having a revision browser in the request form would be a plus. But in any case, it's much more convenient than using email for review!

Update: fixed link.

Last-minute note to Montreal BarCampers, hackers, entrepreneurs, designers, coworkingers, designers and other troublemakers: Tara Hunt is coming into town and I invited her to have lunch with local folks in the scene. We'll meet at 1PM, at La ka, since half of us will be there anyways. I've reserved space for twelve, but that can expand pretty easily. For those who don't spend 60% of their time there, La ka is at 4040 blvd St. Laurent near the corner of Duluth. URL: http://www.laikamontreal.com/ Please feel free to come and to invite others you think would like to meet Tara and vice versa. And feel free to Contact me if you've got questions or comments. I'd especially like to hear if a lot of people are coming, since I might need to expand the reservation. tags: montreal barcamp tarahunt horsepigcow coworking lunch laika

GPLv3 iPhone So, I'm as excited as everyone else to hear that the new Apple iPhone will be available today with a new GPLv3 Free Software license. A bold partnership between Apple and the FSF! tags: troll iphone gplv3 apple fsf

New Oceans OK, so, that's a big lie. But wouldn't it be cool if it were the truth, and you could get a cool and good-looking Open Source phone? That way, you wouldn't only get Web 2.0 applications, without an API for the local machine. You could write local apps for the phone itself, and you could even re-write the phone OS if you want. Looks like pretty soon we'll have these Open phones. According to the http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/announce/2007-June/000013.html announcement on the openmoko-announce list, FIC will start taking orders on the first generation Neo 1973 on July 9. So, given that we've got an Open Source alternative to the iPhone coming down the pike in just a week or so, why is anyone working on iPhoneDevCamp? tags: openmoko neo1973 newoceans openphone

July 5^th, 2007 will be the 10^th anniversary of the Debian Social Contract. Also, on July 5^th, 2007, I will be flying to Dublin to start a new job at Google Ireland the following Monday. Today (well, technically yesterday now) was my last day at Allenta. It’s been several good years, with nice and funny coworkers (and friends), learning and doing lots of very varied stuff. However, after several years I felt a need to do something a bit different. It appears that working at Google is all the rage now, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon ;) Oh, yeah, I’m excited about living in Dublin, and about working at Google. I already have so many plans, I’ll be happy if I manage to undertake ¹/₁₀ of them ;-) If you live in or near Dublin and want to meet, feel free to call or email me. My Spanish phone number is in the Debian developer database or in all of my domains’ WHOIS records. My email addresses are all easy to find. As I don’t know what kind of Internet access I’ll have outside of work (assuming I will not be out exploring the city when not working), it’ll probably be a bit hard for me to keep up with mail and with the Galician debconf template translation stuff. Today I’m in the 12^th position in the ranking, with only 12 strings left to catch the Brazilian Portuguese team. I know that the Catalan team wants revenge from when I overtook them. It’s your opportunity, nois! :-)

I am finally catching up with the remarkably thick goulash of email and blogs entries that comes from traveling for well over a month and today I read one in particular When is Open Source not Open Source? that captivated my interest for it compellingly addresses the dangers that follow from diluting, or one might say hijacking, the term open source. When people learn that I study “free software” one of the most common questions I get asked is: why did I chose free software over open source? The answer is quite simple: given that the bread and butter of my research covers ethics, freedom, and liberalism, free software is the obvious path to follow, yet I also feel like a lot of my work is still relevant to the open source camp because of the affinities between the two. I have long maintained that the ideological gulf between open source and free software is not so great nor impassable, but more modest. As most know, both share a certain strong commitment to access and in a strict technical sense they refer to the same set of licenses. Philosophically there is agreement that openness and, especially, non-discrimination are essential for the quality of software and often by close extension, the vibrancy of community responsible for the software. Of course, when pontificating the ramifications and implications of openness, they do part company and enter into different territories. Free software tends to flag rights and freedoms, while open source meanders into a discussion of markets, business, and competition and in this regard they do craft different visions of the social world and human behavior, etc. But the case that Karl Fogel writes about, where OSI is strongly opposing the use of the term open source for licenses that don’t adhere to the definition demonstrates where the two positions join. As Michael Tiemann from the OSI succinctly put it:

The FSF may have got the orthodoxy wrong, and the OSI may have got the interpretation wrong, but we both agree that prohibition of commercial use without special permission is antithetical to both positions.

There is a unmistakable kernel of agreement and it is great to see the OSI taking such a strong stance in this regard. Now, David Richard’s response, who seeks, I think, to essentially dilute the term open source, is as (or perhaps even more) fascinating for in a nut shell, and using a lot of florid religious imagery, it accuses the OSI of being too rigid! In his own words:

I believe the OSI has a wonderful opportunity to continue being relevant and helping to lead the movement forward. If, however, y’all choose to define your denomination of this religion in a way that we don’t fit in, that’s fine. No hard feelings. It’s your choice. You’ll ultimately be excluding a large congregation and we for one will continue trying to build a church made up of others like ourselves.

In response, I would say that the goal of F/OSS is not to be inclusive of anyone who wants to release bits of source code, but to create the conditions under which software, as it has been defined by the community, can be created. Join the church if you would like to make free/open source software as defined and you can go elsewhere (i.e., create a different term) if you are creating something different, even if it is only slightly different. Integrity matters. And again inclusiveness, if it comes at the expense of the main goal, is not a boon but a danger to F/OSS. The OSI will remain relevant by halting the dilution of the term OSI, not by expanding the definition so that it is left with no substance. And in contradistinction to what David Richard maintains, however, there is a great degree of flexibility within this domain but it does not lie in the strict definition of F/OSS but in the realm of interpretation. You are also free, as Mako and I have argued elsewhere to interpret the significance of F/OSS in multiple ways. And I think this is where the political strength of free software lies. There is interplay between a well-defined goal (in this case for creating free software) and a more flexible realm of interpreting the significance of these technical practice. And we wold lose and I might add, a lot if we became flexible about the strict definition of F/OSS and inflexible about its political significance. I get irked with folks like David Richards who would like to bend open source rules to meet their (often commercial) interests and I find it pretty na ve when folks say the political significance of F/OSS is just x (or worse should be x) for in reality its political significance lies in the fact that it has spawned multiple types of political and economic projects. And there is something almost playfully ironic, (or at least it makes me smile) in this fact. Though there is strict definition contained withing F/OSS, this strictness has, at least to some extent, encouraged by an extreme and very healthy form of political proliferation and promiscuity. More than anyone else I know, Mako has most passionately and thoughtfully argued for the importance of what I would call political clarity and integrity. That is, the importance of having a well articulated definition for social movements, for they act, as he says a rallying point to realize a social movement. Urging the Creative Commons to learn from F/OSS and dare to simultaneously narrow and more clearly define their goals, he states it quite nicely in the following terms:

Free software advocates have been able to use the free software definition as the rallying point for a powerful social movement. Free software, like the concept of freedom in any freedom movement, is something that one can demand, something that one can protest for, and something that one can work toward. Working toward these goals, free and open source software movements have created the GNU/Linux operating system and billions of lines of freely available computer code.

In essence, a definition that people can abide by, respect, and perhaps eventually cherish is the condition of possibility to make working political code. And given how hard it is to make social change happen (at least in comparison to build computer code), we should learn from what F/OSS has to offer. And at the same time there is another lesson embedded in F/OSS. The Free Software Definition is well defined; but it must be emphasized, narrowly so. It does not try to do everything and have everyone pledge allegiance to an inordinately complex set of commitments. Clarity, narrowness, and well-defined goals –> these three attributes have powered it far and wide and I hope it remains so. Now, since the term open source is not trademarked, we are left with the problem of how to challenge the current hijacking of the term. For the solution, I will leave you with Karl Fogel, who I think proposes a good solution:

Note that the OSI s objection is not to the Zimbra license per se. The objection is just to Zimbra s calling that license open source . They can use any license they want, but they shouldn t call it open source unless it actually is. Freedom is freedom, and no amount of spin will change that. So what should we do about this? The term open source isn t trademarked. Years ago, the OSI tried to register it, but it was apparently too generic. …But there is public opinion. What Danese and Michael are proposing doing is organizing a lot of open source developers (and I mean open source according to the traditional definition, the one the OSI and I and most other open source developers I know adhere to) to stand up and, basically, say All of us agree on what the definition of open source is, and we reject as non-open source any license that does not comply with the letter and spirit of the Open Source Definition.

Alex Hudson commented:

"Similar comments about another W3C WG: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1181118077&order=-1&count=1 W3C should be about authoring material for the web. It seems at the moment, they're more concerned with the stuff that happens after authoring - e.g., how stuff relates in "the semantic web". IMHO we still don't have any powerful tools for authoring either, so the idea that authoring tools will automate many of the "bolt on accessibility" tasks is pretty naive."

After implementing pingback, I have some respect for hixie. It's disappointing but not surprising to read those comments. Not sure what is meant by powerful authoring tools there. My tools are powerful, but I know they're not easy for new users. As I'm getting old and cynical, I'm not sure whether power tools can ever be correct and truly easy - just look at the pigswill spewing out of some Web 2.0 sites. niq sent me a link to the WCAG Samurai Errata and commented:

"The problem with WCAG 2, as with WCAG 1, is precisely that it's a Work of Committee, and seeks to represent too many irreconcilable viewpoints and egos. In some cases, even the ideas behind it are inconsistent. Many (myself included) regard accessibility as being about ensuring a reader with a physical disability can make use of a site (think Steven Hawking). That's also what HTML is designed to support. Others are concerned with the mentally impaired, also a worthy cause, but one that becomes counterproductive when its advocates fail to distinguish between a site that's inherently inaccessible because it presents a complex and challenging subject, and one that's unnecessarily difficult due to poor presentation. Add the two together, blend in some stupidity, and you get "accessible" sites full of classic "friendly" little illustrations like a "helpful" government booklet, and a horribly intrusive "alt" to explain each pointless "ethnic mummy and child" picture."

I think a Work of Committee could be useful, as long as you have the right committee. Thinking about that, I found the group membership list and I'm not sure that's the right committee. For example, I think the ex-Adobe Google-worker must surely have an irreconcilable conflict of interest (inappropriate use of Adobe's Flash and PDF formats and Google's Web Apps have done more than many to harm accessibility in the past IMO), yet is a leading light of WCAG 2.0 - maybe that's why it's gone so dark? Update: Thijs Kinkhorst comments:

"As I read in the draft, suggestions are still possible until the 29th, not the 27th of June."

I'm sure that's different to the email which started me writing this, but please go comment and see if we can make WCAG-2.0 useful.

If you’ve received email from an attorney in the last five years, you’ve probably seen some version of a boilerplate warning/disclaimer in the message footer, indicating that the message may be privileged (or in some cases, asserting that the message is privileged!) and telling the receiver to destroy and/or return all copies if they are not the proper recipient. In the last couple of years, almost everyone has also added a statement to the effect that this email does not contain illegal tax advice (or if it does contain such advice, you shouldn’t use it!) Cumulatively, I’m sure we’ve used gigabytes if not terabytes of bandwidth attaching this text to every email sent. My question to the world: is anyone aware of such an email disclaimer ever being enforced or held enforceable?

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It's like this. I've got this very fine computer, only it's about four years old. Contrary to popular belief, that doesn't mean it's too slow for today's computing, so I don't feel any particular need to change it or upgrade it (I've been known to use an 8-year-old computer as my main server up till recently). The problem is that its main processor is an Athlon XP 2200+, and that's not the "mobile" version. So there's no frequency scaling, no power-saving CPU states, and so on. And since I moved from a hot place (the French Riviera) to an even hotter place (near Montpellier), summer is likely going to cause frequent crashes as temperature rises. Oh, and my office/computer room is now right under the roof, so it does get hot rather fast. So, something has to be done. First solution (rather blunt): open up the computer case and point a large fan at it. It worked last summer, but it's hardly elegant, and it's noisy. Second solution: try to emulate the CPU frequency utilities with what's available. In this case, the CPU throttling feature accessible through /proc/acpi/processor/CPU1/throttling. I had a look around, but the usual suspects (cpufrequtils, powernowd and so on) didn't seem to be able to help. Hence the following script:

#! /bin/sh
high=55
low=50
minload=1
delay=60
sensorbus=w83697hf-isa-0290
sensor=temp2
maxlevel=15
while sleep $delay ; do
    temp=$(sensors $sensorbus \
          awk "/^$sensor:/  print \$2 " \
          sed s/^\+// \
          sed s/\\..*// )
    cur=$(cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU1/throttling \
          awk '/^active state:/  print $3 ' \
          sed s/T// )
    load=$(awk ' print $2 ' /proc/loadavg   sed s/\\..*//)
    if [ $temp -ge $high ] && [ $cur -lt $maxlevel ] ; then
        next=$(( $cur + 1 ))
        logger "Temp $temp, load $load, throttling down from $cur to $next"
        echo $next > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU1/throttling
    elif [ $temp -le $low ] && [ $load -ge $minload ]  && [ $cur -gt 0 ] ; then
        next=$(( $cur - 1 ))
        logger "Temp $temp, load $load, throttling up from $cur to $next"
        echo $next > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU1/throttling
    fi
done

You'll notice that it unconditionnally throttles the CPU if the temperature is too high, and releases some of the power if the temperature is acceptably low and the system load seems to demand more power (no need to have the box running at full speed if it's idle). Feel free to re-use, comment, tweak, and so on.

I am back home watching footage from this years debconf, which of course is already working to feed the nostalgia. I have more to say about the conference but just wanted to thank everyone for a great debconf and here are some of my photos.

I received some time ago (don’t remember exactly when, I’ve since deleted that mail) a mail from Tux Games informing me that a mail that I (supposedly) had sent them is being held pending my confirmation that the message is not spam. Now, I have never ever before heard of Tux Games, so it seems likely that the message being held indeed is spam – and was not, in fact, sent by me. Email source forgery is trivial if you know how the system works, and spammers routinely forge email sender information. Tux Games is itself engaging in spamming by sending unsolicited confirmation mails to people. I replied to the mail saying so, and asking them to stop doing this. The message bounced. Today, I received another message from Tux Games. The original message is still in the queue, and has not been read by a human. I am asked to confirm it is not spam. It is tempting to do so.

We had a great weekend this last weekend here in Montreal. Yesterday, June 24, was Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day here in Quebec -- the national holiday of this cool and fun nation. St. Jean Baptiste is important to me in a lot of ways. Of course, it's cool that it's the national holiday of our adopted new home. But John the Baptist, the patron saint of Quebec, is also our family's name saint. ''Prodromos'' means "forerunner" in Greek, and it's one of the titles of St. John. Most of all, it's the day that Maj and I moved to Montreal. We came in on St. Jean Baptiste Day, 2003, and we've been here ever since. We drove my beautiful 1972 Citro n DS from San Francisco, where my niece Elena had just been born, all the way out here. We arrives on June 24th and wandered around the McGill Ghetto looking for our sight-unseen sublet. It's hard to believe it's only been 4 years -- it seems like so much longer. We had a good day yesterday. The three of us went to Piknic in the afternoon and hung out with our friends Jeremy and Lina and their two great kids Clea and Sylvie. We had a lot of hummus and pasta salad and bread and cheese and generally had a great time. Meg and Catherine came and hung out for a while, and also our friend Kristen, who's 7 months pregnant and has a 10-month-old. Good luck on that one. Most of all a pretty day enjoying the outdoors in our new home town, as well as fun dancing to house under a big Calder statue. How great is that? tags: montreal quebec stjeanbaptiste prodromou piknic jeremy lina

72 hours from Flickr I forgot to mention that we had a really nice time on Friday evening going to the 24 Hours of Flickr party at the SAT. Heather Champ, community leader at Flickr and welcomer to partiers, put it well: "We have three requirements for Flickr parties: the food must be good, the drinks must be copious, and the schwag must be ample." And that's exactly what happened. All the usual Montreal suspects were out in force: YULblog types, Web entrepreneurs, Web pranksters. It was great seeing m-c and c-c, who wore their awesome Flickr Socks -- although they each had a matching pair. I also talked to Allen Morris, which was really fun. He's a developer living now in Saranac Lake, one of the towns in the Adirondacks I find strangely compelling. We exchanged GPG key signatures and talked a lot about the Bay Area (California), where we both once lived. Probably my best talk was with Heather Champ and Derek Powazek. We talked about their joys of creation of JPG Magazine, the despair of leaving it, and looking forward to the future. We also chatted a lot about print on demand technologies, which we're evaluating for Wikitravel. Heather took the photo of my friend Ben Cerveny at Burning Man that's become his avatar icon on about every social software platform I know of. It must be good to capture someone in the way they want to think of themselves. I took my own self-concept picture by putting the camera on the dashboard of my Citroen. Heh. All in all a good party. One thing I was interested to find out was that there's a Yahoo! Quebec, which launched last month and I guess just slipped by me. Sadly, if you click on the "English" button, it takes you to... Yahoo! Canada. Hey, Yahoo! There are actually a lot of anglophones here! Just in case you were wondering. tags: yahooquebec 24heuresflickrmontreal 24hoursflickrmontreal flickr montreal party

Montreal Web Development Book Club Montreal Web scene stalwart Heri Rakotomalala -- the man with the magic name, originally from Madagascar, along with Montevideo and Marfa, one of the M-places on my travel wishlist -- recently started a Montreal Web Development Book Club. It's a meeting for people interested in the practical side of the Web to talk about the books they read and let that drift into talk about the work we do and ideas we have. I think the book club is an awesome idea. Book clubs are a great grass-roots intellectual meetup that we don't often celebrate in the post-flash mob BarCamp-ized world. The great thing about a book club, for Web people, is that it filters out the bullshitters and dilettantes. If you're going to a book club, you're going to have to know what you're talking about, and you're going to have to care about the subject. The book gives focus that keeps the conversation from drifting to tangential topics. Flakes and hangers-on just don't have the stamina for it. Also, we met at La ka, so it was nice to have some beers in a good place on a hot night. Why not? We managed to talk about a lot of good books, too. Jean-Fran ois <something> (I didn't get his last name) talked about In Search of Stupidity, a look at the last 25 years of marketing and business blunders in the high-tech realm. Our industry is subject to a lot of decisions that seem absolutely self-defeating in hindsight, and the book goes in-depth on 15 case studies -- like Wordstar, Ashton-Tate and Borland. It sounds like a great cautionary tale for Web 2.0 startup mavens. Heri talked about the book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web -- the infamous "Polar Bear Book". It sounds like a really good book for doing initial planning for a Web site, but I'm really interested in tools for profiling an IA effort. We get about 2 million unique visitors a month at Wikitravel, for example, which is a huge amount of usability data I could be mining. But I don't really have the tools for it, so I don't do it much. I'd love to know, for example, about people who land on a Wikitravel page from a search engine and then leave. What were they looking for? Why couldn't they find it? Also, users who browse through our pages clicking on links, then resort to a full-text search. What did they think they were clicking on, and what were they looking for instead? Did they find it? How can we put that in front of them in the first place? Most of all, I want to know how and why people start editing Wikitravel pages, and why they stop. Of people who click the "edit" button, only 1 in 17 click "save". (That is one bit of clickpath analysis I've done.) Why? I've often been tempted to put a survey up when someone navigates away from our edit page. "Why didn't you save? Tell us so we can fix it for other people." I talked about the book I just finished reading a few weeks ago, Everything is Miscellaneous. It's the latest book by Dave Weinberger about how we impose order on information to make it easy to understand and retrieve. It's an awesome book -- really fun -- especially for someone married to a knowledge management expert. I don't think I gave a good enough description of the book to ignite the club's interest, but I hope they check it out, because it's really readable and good. At the end of the meeting Heri took a poll and decided that we'll continue doing the book club on the last Monday of the month. I've already picked out my book for next month: RESTful Web Services. I've heard good things about this book (admittedly mostly from the co-author Leonard Richardson) and I want to give it a look-see. So book-club fodder it is. ''Update: Heri has his own book club report here.'' tags: bookclub montreal heri webdev montrealwebdevbookclub

A few months ago, the Washington Post featured an article about Joshua Bell playing his violin (which happens to be a Stradivarius) in a Washington metro station. Contrary to their expectations, nobody stopped by to listen. The article tries to find reasons for why this happened, digging into theories by a number of famous philosophers. While those are undoubtedly not far from the truth, let me dig up another theory: Joshua Bell may be one of the best musicians in the world; that doesn't mean he's one of the best street musicians in the world. You see, if you play your Stradivarius in a concert hall, you don't have to do much to get people's attention. If your name is Joshua Bell and you play in the New York Opera House, people pay good money to get a seat months in advance, they circle the date on their calendar, and they look forward to it for weeks. When the big day arrives, they dress up, they drive up to the opera house, they queue for the privilege of being allowed to show their tickets and being allowed in, they take their seats, and they wait in excitement and anticipation until the big moment arrives. If your name is Joshua Bell and you play your Stradivarius in a concert hall, people will clap their hands you before you've even started. You'd better make it be good, or they'll demand their money back. If, however, you play on the street, then that's a completely different matter. You don't get to have people circle the date of your street concert months in advance. You have exactly one second to let them know you're playing. You don't get to have an audience that will clap their hands the very moment they see you turn the corner; instead, you'll see an audience that would rather you did not stand in the middle of the way like that, so that they would not have to look out for you. In short, you don't get their attention on a silver platter; instead, you have to earn it. As someone who's done street music in the past, I can tell you that earning someone's attention isn't something you will do by playing the most difficult music that can be found. You should remember that you've got just a few seconds to catch someone's attention; from the moment they vaguely hear someone's playing, until that time when they're getting annoyed at the volume your, no doubt wonderful, instrument is making. If you want people to stop and listen, you need to do it in that very short timeframe. A wild and fast virtuoso piece, while sure to get you a great reaction by an audience in an opera house, is only a very noisy thing if you just get a few seconds of it—even if those few seconds are by the best violin player alive. The best way to get someone's attention is to give them something they recognize. The article notes the reactions from a few passers-by. It did not surprise me that of the three or four people who actually stopped and listened, one recognized the violinist as Joshua Bell, and the other had been a violinist himself in a previous life. Both had something they recognized, which made both stop for a few moments to check what they were seeing. That's what gave them more time to appreciate how truly beatifull this music was, and that's why they waited. The real way to get people to stop, to get a crowd around you, and to have them to listen to you, is not to play what gets you the best results in an Opera House or other concert hall. Instead, you should play something that will catch people's attention. A brilliant piece that is unknown will not do that. A funny variation on "Oh When The Saints" will, because people recognize the music. That's not to say that street musicians should only play stuff like "Oh When The Saints". Getting money from playing on the street has more to it than just the music you're playing; just as important is the place where you're playing, and the time when you're doing it:

• If you're playing in a busy hallway, then people will just hurry along. Stopping gets them angry other people walking in their back, so that doesn't happen. If, on the other hand, you play on a large market square or some such, then people are much more likely to stand and listen—people walk in all directions there at the same time, so you have to look out anyway.
• If you're playing in a closed metro station, you'd better not use an instrument that's too loud. If you do, that will make people move away from you, rather than towards you, because they'll notice they can not talk on their cell phones or some such. If they have to pass by where you're playing to get to where they're going, they'll increase their speed so that they're faster past you. Both options give you less time to catch their attention.
• If you're playing on a monday morning during rush hour, you're not going to be getting a load of success. Everyone is going to work, and you're just something in the background, not much more interesting than the guy who's changing the billboard. If, OTOH, you're playing in a busy shopping mall on a sunny saturday afternoon, you'll get a large crowd anyhow.

A good street musician knows these things, and applies them even without knowing. He'll instinctively know whether it's a good day to do street music, and he'll rather go to a bar and have a hot drink if it's not. So why didn't Joshua Bell get a crowd around him? Easy: he isn't a very good street musician.

This has been delayed for a few days, for reasons I explain in another post, so my remaining debconf posts will be published quite quickly, every few hours. Monday started with me nearly asleep in the back of the Debian-Med session. Interesting stuff and I'm starting to get involved in supplying web apps to the health sector, but I must watch the session back. Then bureado's excellent debian in venezuela talk and a big shock for me when I got called out. The afternoon and evening were mentioned in the last post. Tuesday opened with me confused in the Xen session and then I went to a good-looking session on combining the debian-installer, ubuntu OEM bits, backuppc and openvpn but lkcl didn't show. (His diary suggests he was around. Wonder what happened.) I kicked the session along a bit and learned stuff from others about preseeding, FAI, backuppc, bacula, amanda and so on, but it didn't seem like anyone had plugged these together in quite the same way. At the end of the session, I bumped into Eddie Bleasdale who it seems is working with Phil Hands and lkcl on a very interesting project. He spoke more about it in a meeting the afternoon, hoping that Phil would arrive to handle the technical side. Phil timed his entry to perfection, about 30 minutes after the end of the talk. In between the hijacked talks, I went for a walk up to the top of Arthur's Seat and back with jumpula and someone else whose name I've forgotten - sorry! Oh, and what is it with all the loldebian posts this week?

I’m still figuring out whether Twitter is more than a distraction. It occurs to me that it has perhaps the three most important design elements for a successful new web-based (and particularly social-networking) technology:

1. Twitter works as a simple general-purpose tool with very little structure determining how, exactly, people are supposed to use it. Compare, for example, with the many social networking sites (Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe.net, etc.), each of which have a fairly specific idea about how people should use it (dating, professonal networking, and, um, whatever they do on Tribe, respectively). The only limitations on how Twitter can be used are a few aspects that are defined by the medium — basically, messages short enough to fit into an unextended cell phone text message.
2. Twitter doesn’t duplicate any existing system or medium for communication. Compare, again, the social networking sites, each of which has some version of “email” that is internal to the site. Would I ever want to “send someone a message through LinkedIn” if I actually had their email address? Twitter, on the other hand, doesn’t have an exact one-to-one correspondence with any existing email, text messaging, or instant messaging systems. It’s a sui generis form of communication.
3. Twitter doesn’t require everyone to sign up to participate. Anyone can follow my Twitter feed without actually having their own Twitter account. This is essential to solving the “critical mass” problem. Of course there are benefits to establishing an account, but as far as I can tell, the only features that you don’t get without an account are those which necessarily would require an account. (Compare, again, most of the networking services mentioned above, where you need an account to view people’s profiles.)

(Add to this, of course, the now standard requirement that Twitter is free, at least as in beer.) Now, I’m still not exactly sure how best to use Twitter, but there are some interesting commercial and non-commercial applications featured on the Twitter blog, e.g, this promotion from Dell, and this guy “Twittering My Diabetes.”

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Enrique Dans writes about the "The Coming Battle: Apple's iPhone vs. Corporate IT Departments". He makes an interesting point on how this new gadget can be a point of friction between managers of IT departments and their employees using this kind of gadgets, usually corporate executives. Syncing the database with RIM devices, or redirecting email accounts (iPhone is not capable of using corporate Blackberry or MS Exchange servers), can be a problem in corporate world. If you read those articles, they blame iPhone for not supporting all these enterprise-class software. Basically, IT departments are blaming iPhone for not supporting their competition systems, and they are not requiring all them (and themselves) to be using standards, which were just designed to avoid this kind of problems. They are afraid. No more comments.