Entries Tagged 'Goals and Projects' ↓

On Saturday CII played host to the 2nd Christchurch Barcamp, only 2.5 years after the first one. As with the first one, we probably didn’t publicize it as well as we should have, but it turned into a great event nonetheless.

There were many excellent talks of both a technical and general nature – leaning heavily towards the technical, but that more or less suited the participants (I won’t say ‘audience’ because at an unconference there is no real seperation between organizers, presenters and audience!)

At some point we all gathered ourselves together to show solidarity with the 120 people in Wellington hashing out the PublicACTA declaration that day, via twitter. It was unfortunate that we’d already announced the date for the barcamp by the time PublicACTA was announced, as there were certainly several people who would have liked to have gone to both events (including moi!).

#bcchch showing their support for #PublicACTA

As one of the nominal unorganizers of this particular unconference, I’d particularly like to thank CII for hosting the event, my co-unorganizer Pete for doing much of the publicity, getting the ball rolling, and buying the beer, Stephen for organizing the Pizza and doing much of the MC work once things got going, and everyone who showed up, got into the spirit of things, and shared a great day of talks with us, despite it being nice and sunny outside!

A few highlights of the barcamp for me included:

Rus Werner from CrowdFusion gave us a quick demo of how to put together a website using the CrowdFusion framework, which looks to be a highly advanced content management system targeted at large group blogs, but capable of supporting all sorts of content management scenarios. Rus is the only NZ based developer, the rest of the team were in LA that day to put their latest client live – TMZ – which is one heck of a big site.

We were very pleased to have CJ down from Wellington and she joined her fellow Hitlab member Rob Ramsay to talk about a really fascinating idea they’ve had for combining augmented reality and the DigitalNZ APIs into a new kind of mobile-web game. Actually it appears to have got a long way past just being an ‘idea’ and we’re eagerly looking forward to seeing this come to life later this year.

Later on in the day Pete wowed us with his demonstration of what’s possible with HTML5 and Webkit, culminating with a live demo of the Quake engine running at 30fps *in the browser* – I had already heard about this awesome demo (done by some Google guys to show off what’s possible with HTML5 these days), but it’s another thing to actually see it running.

It was great to hear that we have a Camino developer in Christchurch, and Chris gave us an update on the Camino project, entitled ‘Not dead yet!’ or something along those lines. I asked about what it might take to get extensions into Camino, and he seemed open to the concept. My feeling is that it will be best be done using the new Mozilla Jetpack framework, as that does not use any XUL, which Camino avoids in favour of native Mac ‘Cocoa‘ componentry.

My old friend Neil from Screaming Duck software talked about his new lightweight browser plugin (plugin as in something like Flash, rather than an extension like Interclue) ‘thefbi‘ that allows for a subset of native x86 code to run inside a sandbox in the browser. I think there may well be a niche there despite the fact that HTML5 may make most plugins irrelevant in the long run (and many of us would be very happy about that).

Andrew from Morningstar Security gave an overview of the huge scan of NZ based ‘websites’ he originally presented at the last Kiwicon. Apparently lots of really crazy stuff has public facing content on Port 80 these days – Printers, Voip-phones, drilling equipment, you name it. Much of this stuff should only be available behind a firewall or at least a login, but as you would expect, this is not always the case.

Personally I did a presentation about “Personal Idea Management” and although it was ok, I put it together in a bit of a rush and didn’t really get in all the “ideas about ideas” that I wanted to. I got some good feedback afterwards and I look forward to reworking the presentation and giving it another go sometime in the future. Maybe as a Pecha Kucha talk, or at another unconference. At the very least I’ll make a blog post on the subject at some stage! For this talk I was mainly talking about the special class of ideas that could form the core of new tech projects (or even new startups), which is a type I am particularly prone to. This is a pretty tiny subset of the general field of “ideas”, and although in an ideal world one might have software custom designed to help out with it, it’s probably going to be handled mainly within the standard note-taking / brainstorming apps such as Mindmappers, Hierarchical Outliners, and Personal Wikis. I have tried a bunch of these and have never quite settled on one I’m totally happy with, or a system that was in any way ideal, but working on this presentation and the feedback I got afterwards has definitely given me some ideas and I look forward to trying them out. Since the presentation I’ve had two new ideas for iPad apps, and they will join the backlog of 50+ things we could be building if we had any spare capacity right now. Certainly I look forward to the day when some of that backlog hits the front burner!

Many of the folks at the barcamp said we should have another one soon – which hopefully means “within the next year”! I may or may not still be living in Christchurch at the time, but I will try to be there regardless! Remember there’s nothing stopping anyone from getting another barcamp ball rolling at any time, anywhere. Come up with the nugget of a plan, make a post to barcamp.org about it, tell your friends, and you’re on your way! I may make another “lessons learned” post with a few hints about what went right for us and what went wrong this time around, but really all the info you need is at barcamp.org, and if I do make that post I’ll try to find a place for those thoughts there as well.

Anyone who missed Barcamp but would like to present a tech talk in an informal setting, I encourage you to come along to a Spacecraft gathering, and let people know in advance what you’ll be talking about. There are also the monthly TVIC tech dinners – the last one was very good with possibly as many as 20 geeks in attendance.

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!

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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]