My old pal Carl de Visser, who has probably introduced me to more cool things in my life than any other person, recently had his boardgame Endeavor, co-designed with Jarrat Gray, published by Z-man games in the USA, quickly followed by 4 other gaming companies in different languages in different parts of the world. After a few short months it is now ranked #40 at Boardgamegeek, where over 50,000 games vie for the attention of the world’s Boardgame Geeks. Given that no other Kiwi designed game is ranked higher than #600 on that list, this is a monumental achievement.
I’m actually quite proud to be mentioned in the credits for Endeavor as one of the playtesters. Also mentioned (at the top, in fact) is Emma Hart, life partner of Karl, the lead developer here at Interclue. Emma proofread the Endeavor rulebook, but is more well known for her column at Public Address, and just recently she had her first book “Not safe for work” published – awesome!
Another friend full of awesome is Grant Ryan, who I mainly know from the turn-of-the-century Christchurch entrepreneurial “Tech-BBQ” days. His company of the time, GlobalBrain, was one of the big success stories out of NZ during the dot-com Boom (and a few of my friends were briefly paper-millionaires as a result). After that he went on to co-found Realcontacts and Eurekster. In what will hopefully be his most significant project yet, Grant has recently released his latest invention on the world – the Yike BikeMini-Farthing. Helping him out is Realcontacts/Eurekster co-founder Gary Franklin, who is on the nascent Interclue advisory board, and is yet another friend full of awesome.
Another friend from the same era, Mark Rocket, is behind the company that recently launched NZ back into the Space Age, with the Atea-1 sub-orbital rocket. Awesome!
Meanwhile, my friend Ana Rakonjac, who is currently living in Dunedin, has posted photos of the Magneto-Optical-Trap (MOT) based experiment that she’s been building for her PhD. She (and another PhD student) are working on creating Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC), which is probably the coolest (in both senses of the word) state of matter in the entire universe. Ana recently got her taekwondo blackbelt, so she kicks ass in more ways than one. In fact, like Brooke Magnanti, you could say she’s a character straight out of XKCD.
And although Dunedin gets pretty chilly, it’s not the coolest work location on the planet – that has to be where my buddy Ethan Dicks has spent the better part of the last decade – The A.M.A.N.D.A / IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. Ethan hasn’t been in XKCD but he was in a User Friendly plotline back in 2004.
Oh and I shouldn’t forget my mate Daniel Webster who’s new band Permanence has been rocking the local venues lately with the best Joy Division sets, since, well, Joy Division. Nor my friend Tria Manley, who has joined the potential XKCD pinup brigade by mixing telco knowledge base management by day with burlesque dancing by night.
Nor, for that matter, Joel Pitt, who’s the only guy I know with a half decent shot at accidentally destroying the human race, should one of his experiments (in open source artificial intelligence) go horribly wrong. I’m actually hoping to grab him for Interclue if his crazy friends in Silicon Valley don’t start paying him to bring us closer to the Singularity again.
I have many other friends who are full of awesome, particularly those I met at Kiwi Foocamp – where being at least somewhat awesome is more or less the price of admission – but it’s good to have older and closer friends doing just as well in their own fields of endeavour. I’ve mostly kept this list to the people I know who’ve done something awesome *recently* – if I was to keep listing all my awesome friends I’d be here forever. ;-)
Many of these people deserve their own complete blog post and I hope to get around to it, but given I have a heap of other stuff to write about and my posting rate has not been great of late, it may take me a while – by which time they will have increased in awesomeness so it’s all good.
A year ago, when Google asked for “Big Ideas” to improve the lives of as many people as possible, so they could spend 10 million dollars on good works to celebrate their 10th Birthday, I was seriously impressed. This was one serious philanthrohack! Competitions like this almost always create more value than just spending money on stuff, and now Google has shown that over 150,000 people will compete just to win some kudos, help a lot of people, and see their idea brought to life – without even a promise of cash or contracts to the people with the winning ideas.
I had a couple ideas of my own that I thought might fit the bill, and I managed to get one of them out of my head in sufficient detail to submit*. Amazingly, my idea seems to have ended up in the 16 Idea Themes that over 3000 Googlers distilled from over 150,000 submissions!
My submission was one of the two bundled into this theme (other themes had as many as 6 relevant submissions)
As you might imagine, I’m pretty stoked. Of course, “Enable people to submit bug reports about problems in the real world” is just the first line of a longer submission – not too long – Google wisely required everyone to refine their submission to answering 6 short questions and supplying an optional short video. Good thing, given they got 150,000+ ideas to read through!
Following up on my previous post about the Christchurch Digital NZ hackfest, I did find the bug in my search plugin script, it was just one of those minor typos that takes ages to find because the error message you got when you tried to use it was completely uninformative. Sigh. However, since I spent most of my time on this during “Mozilla Service Week” I chalked up a few hours there to add to their total. Kudos to Mozilla for organising that and I’ll be sure to take part in a more serious way should they do it again.
Digital NZ has created a Custom Search Builder, and it seems to me that they could add Search Plugin generation to this reasonably easily. All they need to do is take a copy of my sample and use it to create a template the swaps out the content of the ShortName and Description tag, and also the template attribute in the <url> tag – everything else can stay the same. Then they need to add a javascript install link to the search result pages similar to the one here.
Heres what my sample search plugin file looks like (NB: First bit of code I can recall posting in this blog. I promise not to make it a habit.)
It’s also relatively trivial to add something to the headers of a webpage to enable autodiscovery of one or more search plugins. I’ve done that on my example page. Once you’ve done so it’ll appear in the search plugin manager for the browser, like this:
For more details, and how to do other cool things like enabling search completion, see:
Fellow Kiwifoo camper Jo Eaton was in town on the weekend, spreading the good word about their mission to index all New Zealand’s digital content, and make the data available via their new developer API’s, with a travelling “Hackfest”. Fortunately It wasn’t too far for me to walk to take part – it was upstairs at CII, where Interclue is located.
Among the various hacks there was an iPhone app and a Drupal module, and I got most of the way through building a Search Plugin for Firefox and IE, which is a relatively trivial hack in theory but I’d never built one before so it was a useful learning experience.
Unlike fully blown browser extensions such as Interclue or Lazarus, search plugins are just an xml file that when loaded using a special javascript method (only available in certain browsers, such as Firefox 2+ and IE7+) will cause your browser to create another search provider for the search box, which by default in Firefox only has a few general purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo available, and a few site specific ones such as Wikipedia. But anyone can create a new search plugin for the search on their website, and getting users to install it can mean that they come back to your website more often.
I found a few little niggles, such as that the xml file had to be served up with the right MIME type by the webserver, and that the best way to provide the icon was using a “Data URI” – essentially a way of encoding an image using text. Fortunately Hixie has a kitchen for that.
My attempt is here, and in theory it should install fine in IE7+ and Firefox2+ by clicking the link on this page, but so far, it doesn’t, and I’m not quite sure why. I’ll update this post once I’ve fixed it! [update: fixed]
DigitalNZ has a “roll your own search engine” system set up for their growing collection of Digital Kiwiana, and it should be simple enough to extend that system to build a search plugin for each derived engine, since they will share the same pattern apart from the target URLs. There are also standards for search completion (guessing what you want to search for) and autodiscovery. I’ll make another post in a couple of days once I’ve had a chance to figure it out properly.
[updated because I forgot their mission was only to index the metadata, the digitizing and putting online bit is up to the contributors and partner organizations]
As I mentioned, Lazarus is now a Mozilla recommended add-on. That seemed to be good for about 3,000 downloads a day last month. But on Sunday night I glanced at our stats and noticed we’d had 10,000 downloads. Gosh.
Provisionally, I am inclined to blame this tweet, which eventuated shortly after this post. Cheers Fred. :-)
I expected the download rate to tail off after that. However, it’s actually steadily increasing, thanks to a spate of retweets and blog posts from people like Rick Broida, who is syndicated allovertheplace. We might clock over 100,000 installs for the week at this rate. That would put Lazarus in the the top 20 Firefox addons, maybe even top 10. Unfortunately I can’t tell right now because the AMO stats are broken – the last 5 days of traffic haven’t been processed for some reason. So everyone’s weekly numbers are currently way off. That may be fixed by the time you read this post, of course.
A few weeks ago I was talking to my advisors about whether we should be focused on Lazarus or Interclue. I argued that Interclue had better long term monetization prospects, and showed them my marvelous J-curves. Nat pointed out that Lazarus had the more obvious value proposition and some incredible user feedback. I threw a few ideas into the ring on how we could extend and monetize Lazarus, and it was mooted that it would be best to get at least one of those ideas into action before we started to actively promote it. However, it appears that active promotion wasn’t exactly required in this case. We appear to have entered a cycle where every time someone complains in a tweet, on a forum, or in their blog that they just lost a pile of text they typed in, someone else chimes in and says “Got Firefox? Get Lazarus.” or words to that effect. Hence we have some pretty impressive word of mouse going on right now.
[UPDATE: It appears there was a bit of a stats glitch! We were never getting more than ~5k installs / day for Lazarus. However, ~5k/day is still very impressive and a considerable boost over what we were getting before that]
