Sethop’s Interesting Times

I saw this post on O’Reilly Radar and it inspired me to go looking at the list of available Google APIs. There are a lot of them. Google just totally rocks in this regard. I quickly picked one of the many product ideas I have lying about that I’ll never get around to implementing, and tried to figure out how to implement it using a big pile of Google APIs. It would need mobile, so I started with the Android APIs. While looking at those pages I noticed there was a competition closing in 6 days that had some awesome cash prizes. We’re short on cash at the moment so I thought so I thought “can I come up with something we can build in 5 days that will crack the top 50?”. 10 minutes later I had a decent idea, half an hour later I’d fleshed it out enough to decide it was good enough to tempt some developers if I could find some with free time. Problem is most of the people I know who are good are also busy. I started writing letters to a few of them anyway. But next day, by bizarre co-incidence, a friend who had more or less the perfect combination of skills, interests and free time walked into my office, which I don’t think he’s ever visited before. This was sufficiently serendipitous that I figured it was a sign of something that had to be done.

To cut a long story short, Trond, Paul and I are now 4 days into our Android Hack-a-thon and we’ve made some reasonable progress, Particularly Trond who has been going great guns on the UI side of things. We have about 25hrs to go. Can we complete an app that will crack the top 50? Remains to be seen.

Part of me feels guilty because Interclue requires my full focus at least until we get to break-even on cashflow (which we’re not even close to on donations alone…), but I could see there was an overlap in the technologies we would need for the Android project and those we will be using for the subscriber extensions to Interclue, and although I come up with new product ideas pretty often, this is the first time I’ve allowed myself to get past the “idea” phase on a new one for over two years, and there is a definite cutoff point (30 hours away now) where my attention can switch back to Interclue, which I have been keeping half an eye on in any case. So I decided I could risk it just this once. I promise not to make a habit of it!

BTW there is some particularly awesome news about Interclue that I haven’t formally announced yet. Will do so soon. Let’s just say that it’s going great and I’ve got no intention of sidelining it in favor of a new venture in Android Application Development, but if we do win one of the 50 $25k prizes then I’ll have to at least give this at least enough attention through June 30th to have a crack at the $275k and $100k prizes, and based on the experience gained “Interclue for Android” will be looking good for the next $5m challenge contest happening later in the year!

PS: Rob O’Brien and Marek Kuziel, who were both sadly too overloaded with stuff to give me a hand with this, are organizing a Mobile and Identity Barcamp in Wellington near the end of the month. Go if you can, I’m sure it will be awesome.

Things have been going well, but it’s been extremely hectic. Have just recovered from Kiwi Foo Camp, which was awesome, and am now on the way to catch the end of Canterbury Faire. More details on those and the other things that have been happening after I get back.

So it was another night with the wild and crazy boys [1] of TVIC (The Valley in Christchurch).

TVIC is the second thursday of the month [2], but I’ve only just gotten the video I took off my Treo - I’ve been having problems with my sync softhardware, and with the impending launch of Interclue 1.5 [3], a bit too distracted to figure them out. Sorted at last, though.

For this particular TViC, Phil had inspired Marek to go hunting for dead CD-ROM drives we could take to bits in search of useful components. Unfortunately the call went out about a month after I threw out my own half dozen deaders, but Morris had a stack just as large, so the scene was set.

After dinner we went to the Bohemian, near the Incubator, got pints, and got out the screwdrivers. I’m really not sure what the rest of the clientel made of us, but the staff didn’t seem to mind us using their table as a workbench.

For a while it was “who’s got the 2nd smallest Phillips”, “did anyone bring one of those star-shaped drivers?”, and of course “who’s for another beer?”

The best things inside CD-ROM drives aren’t circuit boards (what sort of “boards” did you think I was talking about in the title?) but rather motors, gears, magnets, sliders, switches and LEDs. We found that the old drives were the best - less custom-designed plastic bits, more off the shelf components and metal bits.

The hardware hack of the night came after Morris used a DC motor wired to a CD-ROM tray slider as a DC generator to power a blinking red LED, when Phil suggested hooking up a green one with the opposite polarity…

Geektacular!

Marek took all the bits home afterwards. I have no idea what he’s going to make with them, but I’ll be standing well back when he demonstrates.

[1] Pssst! TVIC needs more girlgeeks! And well, more people in general actually. If you find this post amusing you’d probably fit in.
[2] Well, for the moment. It’s possible it’ll move back to Tuesday. Also, I think dinner needs to move to somewhere with an on-licence.
[3] It’s not too late to give us feedback on the new beta version

Here’s a screenshot of a link being previewed in the new Interclue 1.5 Beta, which you should install if you haven’t already.

See the hint next to the magnify cursor you get when you mouseover a thumbnail in a the new clueviews? When you mouseover the comics in XKCD you can usually see a little in-joke in the title hint. Sometimes, the titles are pretty long, and Firefox the tooltips don’t wrap. This has been a subject of some complaint, but thankfully, with the landing of the infamous reflow branch (count the dependencies!), this will be resolved in Firefox 3.

Yep, in the 1.5 Clueviews, images of sufficient size are thumbnailed, you can click to see the image full size, and then click again to go back from there. It’s pretty cool, and we think it’s a good compromise to showing no images, or a full size window with all the images, like Cooliris does (frankly, if I wanted to see the whole page, I’d just open a new tab).

I love this cartoon, and I wish he’d put it on a T-shirt, because Turing featured in one of my favorite assignments [1] while I was at UC, where I majored in Philosophy and Computer Science.

I was never a great academic, far too scatterbrained most of the time, and being up till 3am most nights running my BBS, playing Civilization, or online backgammon (FIBS 1700+, back when that was actually pretty good), sure didn’t help, but I do have my name in the credits of one academic paper, “On Alan Turing’s Anticipation of Connectionism”, because our logic lecturer, who later went on to become co-director of the Turing Archive, discovered a mostly ignored paper by Turing from 1948, in which he definitely did anticipate “Neural Nets”, which is pretty amazing given that at the time there was only one non-specialized computing machine on the entire planet, ENIAC. [2]

Unfortunately, Jack couldn’t figure out how to make Turing’s “B Type” networks actually compute something, so in a brilliant combination of laziness, sadism and cunning, he gave his 3rd year students the option of skipping one our 20% take home assignments for the year, and instead figuring out how to make Turing’s type B networks work.

It was fun trying. In the end, I was one of about 3 students who instead succeeded in making a logical proof that these networks couldn’t work, (as specified by Turing, anyway). As I recall, I had to prove it 3 times, the last by structural induction, because Jack couldn’t accept that Turing might have got it wrong. He gave in eventually and I got full marks.

I put this achievement at the top of my list of 10 things I’ve done you probably haven’t, back in Feb 2005. Number 10 on that list was in fact Interclue, which was in the prototype stages even back then. It took a bit longer than expected to actually get it out, to same the least. I blame Hofstadter’s Law. But I’m really happy with the new beta so far, although it’s going to need some testing and tweaking, and we’d love your feedback. So if you’ve got firefox, go for it!

[1] And one of my favourite books, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

[2] Although others were under construction, and Turing had a hand in two of them - see Jack’s “A Brief History of Computing” for details).

I played rugby when I was in primary school. The geek in me won out by age 11, all that running around a sports field in mid-winter just couldn’t compete with curling up at home with my funky new ZX81.

I guess I started watching again in my late 20s, mainly because my Dad is a rugby fan and I like hanging out with my Dad, but also because it’s hard not to become at least a little bit interested in rugby when your local team is the equivalent of Manchester United in the Football world [1]. The Crusaders aren’t playing at the moment, it being the International party of the rugby season, but tonight is Canterbury vs Auckland in the NPC, and the All Blacks vs Romania in France, so a big night and I’m up in Kaikoura with my parents to watch it.

It’s about bloody time we won the World Cup again, given that we supposedly have the best team on the planet, but come Cup time we keep, er, choking[2]. To give you an idea of how important this thing is to our national psyche, and how much kudos will go to the guys who bring it home, the only All Black captain to actually hold it aloft, has now risen up to become CEO of Fairfax NZ, the biggest media conglomerate we have - they own piles of newspapers and magazines, and after their acquisition of Trademe they probably receive about 85% of all pageviews from Kiwi browsers. In this country at least, Murdoch don’t got nothing on David Kirk.

So without further adieu, I give you our new National Anthem: “God Defend the All Blacks”

…because I’d hate to be the last Rugby watching Kiwi Geek on earth to embed it.

Trivia 1: My favorite agile development methodology is Scrum.

Trivia 2: TV3 has the games in a format suitable for importing into various calendar programs.

Trivia 3: Check out the Kiwi Architectural Invasion of Paris. Interclue got reviewed in Le Monde a couple months ago, I hope they don’t figure out we come from the place that inflicted that on them, they might never mention us again. On the other hand apparently the All Blacks are very popular in France right now so maybe it’s ok after all.

Trivia 4: I’m definitely expecting the All Blacks to win it this time, but I’m far from this confident. In fact, if it wouldn’t mean backing the team we all love to hate, I’d go the Aussies instead at the better than 10:1 odds offered on them!

[1] On the other hand, most Kiwi’s like a decent match-up as well as actually winning, so it’s been noted with some dismay that Christchurch fans can’t really be bothered going down to JadeAMI Stadium these days unless it’s, say, vs Auckland or Otago, or a Test match.

[2] And every time they have to deny that they choked, and talk about how it was just bad luck, the ref, or the other team played a blinder, or whatever.

Update: Well, so much for that. Knocked out by the French in the Quarter Finals! Just goes to show nothing is ever a sure thing. I guess the good news is that apart from a few inevitable whingers, the team, coach, and most the country took it on the chin. Sure, the ref had a bad game, but so did the All Blacks, they should have been winning by enough that poor ref calls wouldn’t matter. It helped that the Aussies got knocked out as well. Ah well, like Henry said, that’s sport. At least rugby is no longer distracting me from work! Could barely give a toss who wins it at this stage.

BarCampChristchurch was very cool. Already looking forward to the next one! I’ve had this post under construction for a while now, just been completely flat out for the past couple weeks.

I ended being MC by default, which is a pretty unfamiliar sort of role for me, but Ben was busy liveblogging and Stephen was running the laptop finding interesting content to go along with the talks, so I ended up being the one doing the talking between talks. The job was to watch the clock and figure out when and how to call time on each speaker, and since we had a lot of interesting people there and lots of good questions being asked, it was tricky. Didn’t completely fluff it. Everyone seemed to have a good time anyway.

A few notes on some of the presentations:

Ben didn’t quite manage the Steve Jobs effect since we couldn’t make the air-pointer driver work with Powerpoint 2007, but it was an excellent presentation on SaaS nonetheless, probably the best of the day from my perspective. And he thought he wouldn’t be geeky enough!

The lads from SLI definitely had the best schwag. Actually I think they had the only schwag. They also brought their projector which came in handy. It’s good to know there are some well financed web companies in Christchurch - hopefully Interclue will join them in that regard sometime soon. They’re hiring, by the way.

Marek showed off his new OpenID provider. OpenID was very much on the menu at BarCampWellington as well. There was some good debate about the pros and cons at both. I think it’s definitely an important standard, but it may take a while to catch on with the users. I hear that they have taken it off the menu for Firefox 3 which is a shame.

We chatting about hardware gadgets in an open session, with Phil telling us about Arduino and Eric Woods mentioning his recent investigations into the world of smartphones, and his conclusion that the best value to be had right now was importing a new Treo 650 from the states, for about NZ$300. I have a Treo 650 and I can confidently say it’s excellent value at that price, but the two things that really irritate me are the lack of 3G data - GPRS ping times are awful - and the camera being a poxy 640×480 that doesn’t work well indoors. The photo I’ve used here is an example of that. The sound recording for video is also pretty poor. Also if you want to use it as an alarm clock you’ll need to install an app, and most of the cost money. Google Maps works moderately well on it tho, and doesn’t cost money.

Near the end we remembered we hadn’t done the 3 word intro’s! A week later, the same thing happened at BarCampWellington! You’d think if anyone would have remembered to point it out at the time it would have been me, but my memory is reasonably atrocious at times. At Barcamp Christchurch we mixed 3 word intro’s with short talks by the people not wanting a half hour slot. Eg
Isaac from Wowza gave us a bit of a chat about user-centric data modelling that he expanded on here.

As a Finale, Roger Bays gave us a demonstration of his phenomenal augmented reality artwork, Semaphore. He was able to demonstrate using a monitor rather than using a headset like he did when he one the People’s Choice award at a recent exhibtion featuring 50+ artists (I think). I’m really looking forward to the day when they get this sort of thing working with descrete, affordable, non-bulky, wifi enabled dataglasses.

All in all, although I think in retrospect we should have given ourselves a few more weeks to prepare, and done it over a weekend, it was a really good day for the Chch tech scene and I hope it inspires more gatherings of it’s like as soon as we can organise them. Don’t forget to sign up to the TVIC mailing list to find out more about geek gatherings in Christchurch.

Julian has been LiveMindMapping instead of liveblogging, and he’s doing a pretty good job of it. Here’s a link to the topics he’s encountered so far during the BarCamp.

Marek is talking about OpenID now and whether every Kiwi should have one. He’s been working on his own OpenID Provider recently. Fascinating.

I’m in Wellington for BarCampWellington, focused on Government 2.0 in New Zealand. There have been some really fascinating discussions and presentations, with many different viewpoints being expressed.

Currently sitting in a presentation from Julian Carver, one of the Christchurch based attendees who’s well known in Wellington from his consulting work on Knowledge Management. He’s discussing the imporance of interop between the various agencies charged with protecting and enhancing the environment in New Zealand. This is the sort of thing going on behind the scenes which really makes a difference, but a lot of people will never hear about. Here’s an interesting site he pointed us to where the public can interract with the agencies relevant to this.

The last week was a bit of a whirlwind as I tried to tie together my thoughts about how Web 2.0 could enhance the policy process, on top of getting various things done for Interclue, and wanting to write more about the great time we had at BarCampChristchurch last week. Since getting here I’ve been having some fascinating conversations around this, particularly with Jayne, who has a wealth of experience in the New Zealand policy process from her pre-entreprenurial days. We’re going to be talking about it in a session later on in the day.

Tim offered me use of his flat but I ended up staying with Jayne and Glynn because Marek is staying there as well and we’re all going to Barcamp. They have a really nice place, with excellent connectivity.

I’ll be in Wellington till Tuesday night, if anyone wants to meet up, please get in touch.

About 40 of us have gathered in the CII Building for BarCampChristchurch so far and more are expected later. I was surprised how many folks turned up on time. Steven made the nametags, Nic and Terry set up the Wifi, and it’s all going rather well.

I failed to get my talk on Browser Addons into shape. I brainstormed a hundred things I wanted to talk about and didn’t manage to get it down into a presentable set of slides. I talked more about Web 2.0 again instead.

Everyone else has given a great info packed half hour. Loving it.

We need more beer. Anyone bringing beer would win much kudos.

Marek is Liveblogging. Ben too.

In the universe I co-inhabit “Mashup” means “Create a new user experience by combining 2 or more websites and/or webservices”. But of course, Web 2.0 stole that word from the music world, where “mashup” means “Create a new auditory experience by combining 2 or more songs and/or samples.”

So I thought I’d mention that one of my favorite bands, Salmonella Dub, has a remix contest going to help promote their new album, “Heal Me”. The idea is that you take their samples and recombine them with some of your own to create a new bit of music. This sort of thing is exceptionally common in the age of digital production, and sometimes bands release albums constructed entirely of remixes/mashups of their music made by other people. Eg, the amazing “Outside the Dub Plates” or “Halfway between Ape and Angel” - remixes of iconic albums by Salmonella Dub and Pitch Black.

I first heard Salmonella Dub live at a Kaikoura Roots festival, and frankly, they were incredible. Andrew Pennman then actually moved to Kaikoura and the latest album was mixed there in his new studio. My parents live in Kaikoura and Andrew is now friendly with my Dad, who among other things makes these awesome ceramic art speakers that I’ll blog about again once he finally gets them into regular production.

Kaikoura Roots was also my first live experience of Shapeshifter, and Pitch Black. I saw Pitch Black the other week and they haven’t lost their touch. Shapeshifter are performing in Christchurch this Saturday and Sunday.

Here’s the first single from “Heal Me” which is not the track subject to the competition.

Check out some more Salmonella Dub Videos.

BTW If you haven’t heard any Salmonella Dub before, the album you simply have to buy is Inside the Dub Plates. If you don’t like it you might want to think about getting your hearing checked out.

(will come back to this and add more links…)

• Apr 14 : The Android Distraction
• Feb 5 : Great start to the year…
• Nov 19 : Boys, beers, and ‘boards at the Bohemian.
• Oct 21 : Turing, XKCD, and Interclue 1.5
• Sep 29 : This may be the first and last time I mention sport on this blog….