Sethop’s Interesting Times

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

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.

Fortunately more organized minds than mine are pushing things forwards on BarCampChristchurch after I kicked the ball into motion.

Ben Kepes has signed up as co-planner, so I’m only half as stressed about it now :-)

The chaps from OnlineGroups.net set us up a free discussion group using their wizzo ad-free groupmail system. They’re making the same offer to anyone running a barcamp anywhere in the world, very much fitting in with the “gift economy” that Barcamp encourages. The discussion there is taking over from the TVIC mailing list, which you should also be on if you’re in Christchurch. There will be a BarCampChristchurch2 at some point, so you might as well join the list even if you’re not sure if you’re coming to the first one!

Lots of people have added their names to the wiki. Despite the fact that it seems to barf every time you try to edit it (just hit refresh…)

I’m particularly looking forward to Joel talking about the Singularity (trivia: I met Joel after looking for something to link from the word “Singularity” on my Technoprogress page), Ben talking about SaaS, and Marek on OpenID. I’m sure there will be many more topics of interest, so anyone who can make it, should do so!

Anyone is also welcome to come to a meeting at CII, 200 Armagh St, 11am Friday 31st where we’ll confirm as many details as we can, then go have lunch somewhere.

If you’re thinking you’ll be coming, make sure you add yourself as a participant on the Wikipage! It seems to me that every time I try to edit the page it throws a 500 error and I have to hit reload, but it works on the reload. Weird…I will have to ping Chris about that…[update: I found the issue thread about this on the PBWiki Bugs forum and posted there]

Along with Carl from e2-media I gave a talk on Web 2.0 tonight, to 20 or so folks from the Canterbury Software Cluster. Just 20 minutes each, and it was frightening how fast those minutes wizzed by.

I was particularly pleased that a few folks there told me that they’d been been using Interclue and enjoying it. Thanks very much to Dave Tinkler of Holliday Corporation for inviting me to speak and helping to steer me in the right direction as I began to run out of time!

It was good to have an excuse to talk about the 2.0 Big Picture for once. Normally I lose people in the first few sentences…for a more gentle introduction, I’ve got some great videos on my 2.0 page linked in my menu above.

Of course lots of folks wanted to know what I thought Web 2.0 really is, and I put forward my opinion that “Web 2.0 is what Tim O’Reilly says it is“. I’m at least half serious about that. Tim and his company have been the thought leaders of this revolution, almost as much as they’ve just been “Watching the alphageeks” as Tim calls it. Of course they wanted specifics, so I gave them Tim’s compact definition, which is:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

If I’d tried to give them the long version I would have been there all night…

Of course, I live in a slightly different universe to most folks, so I was somewhat thrown by the followup question “So, who is Tim O’Reilly anyway?”. This is why I love the web. We can explain these things with hyperlinks, and not slow down the information flow for the people who already know. Interclue makes it even better because you can view the main body content at the end of the hyperlinks in the context of the current page, without all the cruft around the outside of the page that could distract you off into the distance.

I wasn’t quite sure which bits of 2.0 the audience was going to be interested in, but I had faith in my ability to wing it, so I prepared a little mindmap of the various things 2.0ish that have caught my attention over the past couple of years (distracting me and slowing down the progress of Interclue quite considerably as a result). Unfortunately it’s a bit large. Click the image for a version large enough to actually read!

Also please note that this certainly isn’t a map of all things 2.0 - just the people, projects, platforms and protocols that I think I know a little bit about. And it’s not a complete map of those either.

I wish I’d had time to highlight the bits I find particularly interesting/important, hyperlink relevant articles, and add some more detail, but I’ll regard this as a starting point and post an update later. If anyone sees something they want to have a chat about, feel free to get in touch, or just leave a comment about something they’d like me to blog about in the future.

Last weekend they held what might have been the world’s largest unconference - BarCampBlock, which essentially took up a whole block of Palo Alto. From the look of the photos, and the bloggance around it, everyone had a great time.

I think it’s about time we bought the Barcamp meme to Christchurch, and the people on the TVIC mailing list, and others I’ve talked to, all seem pretty keen on the concept. You can read (and add to) the plan on the BarCampChristchurch wikipage here, or just put yourself down as an attendee.

Unconferences are a neat idea. To some extent they’re an “agile” methodology - but for conferences, not software. They don’t require a lot of upfront planning, and they can work around hiccups quite well.

The Barcamp model of unconference is based on the Foo Camp model, like the one I went to earlier this year, the main differences being that Barcamps not invite-only, anyone is welcome to turn up, if they feel they can add to the occasion. As with the SCA, and Burning Man, there are no spectators, only participants.

Everyone turns up at the beginning, registers, and introduces themselves - using 3 words only. At Kiwi Foo I chose “Attention Deficit Infojunkie.” while Rod Drury picked “Stock Options, Hiring.” - while most other people had at least one programming language of choice in their 3 words!

Then everyone writes down on a big sheet of paper what they’re going to talk about and when. So the agenda is set on the day, but you can announce what you think you’re going to be talking about on the wiki beforehand, and you can also make suggestions of what you’d like to see talked about. I’ve made several over on the wiki, and wll be contacting those people in turn. A few of them have already indicated interest.

But the organisation is very much a shared effort. Anyone who thinks they can contribute is very welcome to do so. Something that would be great to get early on is a logo :-)

Barcamp is a worldwide phenomena, and there are more and more of them being run all over the place, but somehow New Zealand seems to have missed out so far. There’s one coming up in Wellington, but I was thinking we might pip them at the post and host the first one here in Christchurch. I’ve talked to several people about it and there’s a lot of interest.

Everyone who attends should do a presentation, even if it’s a short one. I think we should make the default time 30min, but some people may want to go 15min instead, or 45min, or an hour. You don’t have to do a demo or bring slides, and you can leave as much time as you want for chat. Depending on how many people we get, we’ll do up to three streams.
Some sessions could be in panel format, if people want to run them that way.

You do not have to be as interesting as a TED speaker.

You certainly don’t have to do as much prep as Steve Jobs does.

But if you want to get a standing ovation, I recommend reading this article by Guy Kawasaki.

I’ll post some more links to articles about giving presentations once I dig them out of my notes collection.

From The rules of BarCamp

• 1st Rule: You do talk about Bar Camp.
• 2nd Rule: You do blog about Bar Camp.
• 3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
• 4th Rule: Only three word intros.
• 5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
• 6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists.
• 7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
• 8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)

Ok, so I started this post 3 weeks ago, and have only just got around to finishing it. Bad Seth, slap hand. But there’s been so much going on, and I’d sorta been waiting until Interclue was definitely nearing launch before poking my head up in the blogosphere again.

A month ago was what we in NZ call “Waitangi Weekend” or roughly “the weekend closest to Waitangi Day”. For the last decade or so I’ve celebrated this particular weekend by going back into the past, doing Medieval re-enactment with my friends in the SCA.

This year I instead paid a trip to the future, having scored a late invite to Kiwi Foo Camp (aka “Baa Camp” (an in joke too long to explain), organised by Russell Brown and Nat Torkington, who are both awesome overachievers in their own different ways.

In fact, most of the people I talked to during the weekend were awesome in some fashion. As an invite only event, with the karma of O’Reilly and the two organisers behind it, sponsored by Google and Rod Drury’s Xero, they really were able to pick and choose, and although there were plenty of people they realised ought have been invited, the ones they did choose were pretty damned interesting. I think I may have been one of the last ones to sneak onto the invite list, apparently later on it was more a matter of “Ok, if it’s Jesus Christ come to announce the second coming, then *maybe* we’ll let him in…

So Jayne and Glynn, thanks for prodding me to ping Nat about it when you did! Was good travelling with you (and Damien and Phil).

The event started with everyone introducing themselves with 3 relevant words (eg I was “attention deficit infojunkie”, and Rod Drury was “Stock Options. Hiring”), and filling out forms with among other things, the top 3 things they would bring back from the future if they had the chance (I chose Immortality Pills, a Pocket Quantum Computer, and an iCar, but later I decided I should have gone with a USB2 compatible storage device containing a copy of the future’s version of Wikipedia - or, if their drive was big enough, a copy of the future’s Internet Archive Project…now that would be a big drive.)

Then everyone wrote down on big sheets of paper what they were going to talk about. Goodness, but there were a lot of interesting sessions. The problem was that there were 5 different sessions per slot, and I usually wanted to see at least two of them! Later on I discovered it was even worse, because there was usually someone hanging around the common area who I really wanted to talk to *as well*. So I usually wanted to be in 3 places at once.

Highlights

Our Minister for Communications was great value. I think everyone was impressed by the depth of his understanding of the issues surrounding telco reform. He also was able to get a sense of the consensus in the room regarding the need for peering policy, which is something that has driven everyone a bit batty since the major Telco’s stopped doing it - for a while now traffic that used to travel from one box to another inside the WIX or AIX has had to go via Australia, because our local BigCos are hoping the SmallCo’s will pay them interconnect fees. Judith Tizard was also there, and definitely seemed to be enjoying herself.

A fantastic performance from the Vospertron guys. Conversation overheard in the carpark afterwards was along the lines of: “so, what microprocessor do you use in these light suits?” - “Uh, it’s a PICAXE…” - “Wow, AWESOME, I market those. I’ve got something to write about on our site tonight!”. The other cameraphone in this video belongs to Russell Brown, who I introduced myself to afterwards. He’s a really down to earth and severely clueful media guy, who’s right across technology and politics in this country. I like him.

Showing Interclue to a bunch of people, who were actually pretty impressed on the whole. My actual presentation wasn’t as good as I wanted, I wish I’d spent more time preparing for it, but the week before was just madness. Got some useful feedback on things people wanted to see, none of which we’ve actually managed to implement yet, but it’s all on the drawing board.

Rod Drury’s demonstration of Xero - wow, now that was what I call a presentation. You’d almost think he’d done this sort of thing before…

The Firefox 3 show and tell - some great things coming up there.

Talking with Asa Dotzler, who is a very clever man. In fact, all the Mozilla guys there were wicked smart. But Asa was speaking my language - the big picture stuff, why Google needs Mozilla, how Firefox is assuring the future of the web as a platform, etc. Asa is the head of QA - essentially nothing gets into the final release of Firefox without him signing off on it! He also started the Spread Firefox website, and is a key evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation. [1]

Chatting with Mike from Pitch Black, his friends in the entertainment space, and seeing their awesome multimedia mashup demos. I first saw Pitch Black perform at Roots Festival in Kaikoura - they had the last set of the night and by the end of it I remember thinking “Pitch Blue”. Awesome electronica and great visuals. Kudos to Nat and Russell for inviting some people from the more entertaining side of the geekosphere.

Chatting with Peter Guttman, Stephen Viles, Andy Linton, Charles Coxhead, Colin Jackson, Rob McKinnon and any number of other terribly interesting folk.

Playing Werewolf for the first time. I didn’t last long. I was a werewolf. I picked the two smartest fast-talking villagers I knew, killed the first one in the first round, but failed to convince the other two werewolves to nab the second one, who fingered me in the next round. Doh! Unfortunately that particular game ended at 4am, I was somewhat drunk, and I forgot to set my alarm. So much for sunday morning :(

Top 3 things I really regret missing out on:

Quinn Norton’s session on Bodyhacking (apparently she was appearing with the aid of Provigil, which is marketed under the brandname “Modavigil” in this country, you can get it for “Shift Worker Sleep Disorder”, and yeah, it’s useful, but it’s not a magic bullet.)

The session from the Public Address bloggers, who are great value.

Chris di Bono’s session on the OLPC project, a project I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, as it is one of the definitive Philanthrogeek projects of our time…but I was having a good conversation with Asa Dotzler at the time, so I missed it. Bugger.

There are a lot of people I want to get back in touch with and continue conversations started at Kiwifoo, but every time I started an email I got to a certain point and remembered that I didn’t actually have time to talk, and that anyway I should at least get the new website up, which we still haven’t finished. I’ll go back through my drafts soon and ping them.

After it all, I came back, caught up on sleep, progressed an important deal for the company, and then headed out for the final night/day of Canterbury Faire. I was probably the freshest person on the site, apparently everyone had been having a fabulous time, and I’m so sorry I missed all the action, but well, Kiwi Foo was a bit of unique event (well, hopefully not unique, and hopefully not on Waitangi weekend next time). I did make the Steward pretty happy when I fetched cold caffeine for him and his crew during the hot and dusty packdown.

[1] I’m pretty Bullish on Google and Mozilla at the moment, but Microsoft have finally shipped Vista and Office, which means that they have a bundle of manpower that’s suddenly not completely overoccupied, they’ve been hiring some very smart people like Jon Udell, and Google has decided that they want to start charging for their online office apps, so it’s seriously game on at this point. We (Interclue) are intending to stay more or less neutral, and support both IE and Firefox (and Safari, and Opera, and others) as best we can with the resources we have. We wanted to launch with both Firefox and IE supported, but IE just proved to be a bit more difficult to work with than we hoped - we are almost there, but I decided to give priority to giving the best possible UX for one rather than an average UX for both at the beginning. Hopefully I made the right call on that.

Every now and then various people in New Zealand complain about our health system and say that we would be better off if we privatised it. I think they’re wrong. I think they’re practicing reflex libertarianism, or free-market fanaticism, without looking at the actual facts of the matter.

Frankly, I’ll take our somewhat inefficient public healthcare system over the mindnumbingly expensive US private healthcare system any day of the week, or year, or millenium for that matter. Apparently, as a percentage of total GDP, the Americans pay more to handle the admin costs for their health system than we do to handle the entire thing. I think it’s all to do with the fact that private health insurance companies and providers naturally gravitate towards the formation of a system that maximises the public’s spending on health, and then they use the massive profits derived from that spending to pay lobbyists to ensure that the system stays bloated, inefficient and profit maximising.

Inefficient? Bloated? Surely an inefficient provider would be destroyed by leaner competition? It just doesn’t seem to work out that way. Perhaps it would work out if the health providers were competing with each-other, but in practice they’re mainly competing with all the other things the government and the public might want to spend their money on, and the people who pay the lobbyists in Washington are smart enough to realise that. ¹

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