Entries Tagged 'New Zealand' ↓

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 Bike Mini-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.

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.)


<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Digital NZ</ShortName>
<Description>Digital NZ Archive Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">data:image/x-icon;base64,[data string goes here]</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://search.digitalnz.org/en/search">
<Param name="search_text" value="{searchTerms}"/>
</Url>
</OpenSearchDescription>


The Webserver has to serve up that XML file with a MIME type of application/opensearchdescription+xml

eg using apache, in a directory where .xml isn’t reserved for anything else, one could put this in a .htaccess file:

AddType application/opensearchdescription+xml .xml

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:

OpenSearch Specification
Mozilla article on creating OpenSearch Plugins for Firefox

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]

Last night I had the pleasure of presenting at the 5th Christchurch “Pecha Kucha” evening, where I was invited to present 20 slides for 20 seconds each on my subject of choice. I chose “Pimping your Firefox”, and although it was a bit of a last minute effort to pull it all together, I managed a fairly good 6 minutes 40 seconds judging by audience reaction. Pretty sure I made a few Firefox converts as well, as my first 8 slides were mostly dedicated to explaining why you should be using Firefox if you’re not using it already.

The 3 big reasons I gave were (1) It’s way faster than IE (with IE8 that depends on how you measure it – but Firefox is certainly much faster for highly dynamic sites) (2) It’s the safest browser available, and (3) there are over 5000 free addons available to help you “pimp it” to the max. I also talked about Firefox being an open project and the fact that you could, in theory, fix any bugs you find yourself (I could have spent another 6:40 explaining why this almost never happens in practice, starting with the fact that unless you’re an expert, you’ll never be able to tell what is a bug in the browser vs a bug in the page markup, webserver, or network services).

My next 11 slides were mostly dedicated to the various types of Firefox add-on that are out there, and on the last one I promised to post links to all the examples I used, so here they are:

Foxtab: See all your open tabs in a coverflow like visualization.
Personas: Radically pimp the look of your browser without even needing a restart.
Foxclocks: A world-time clock in your status bar.
ReminderFox: Tasklist with alarms etc.
Trashmail: An addon that lets you use a different (disposable) email address for every website you visit (we recently redeveloped this for Ferraro Ltd in Germany)
Flagfox: Information about the web server for this webpage, starting with a country flag icon in your status bar.
Interclue: Our flagship; tells you everything you want to know about a link before you click (ok, maybe not everything, but we’re working on that).
Lazarus: Our first major side project; securely & privately auto-saves content as you type, so you’ll never lose anything you enter into a webform again.
SimSidekick: Fun animated Sim-companions for your surfing, who do whacky things when you visit various “cool” sites on the net. We redeveloped the addon version of this for Freestyle Interactive, who built the no-addon-required version for their client EA, as part of what (I suspect) is the largest game marketing campaign of all time (for the Sims 3, of course).
Firebug, every web-developer’s must-have addon.
Zotero, the academic’s add-on of choice
Adblock Plus, the addon installed by over 50 million Firefox users, strips the ads from your webpages before they even get a chance to load.

My thanks to Vanessa Coxhead from Pecha Kucha Christchurch for the invitation to present, and for helping me sort out my slides at the last minute. If you’re in Christchurch and have something you want to talk about with 20 slides for 20 seconds each, I’m sure she’d love to hear from you. If you’re somewhere else, just google “pecha kucha YourCityName” and there might be one closer to home!

The ‘08 US election has re-drawn the American Political Map, put tears in the eyes of many (myself included), and surely changed the world. My father was pretty sure it couldn’t happen, and I think most Americans his age would probably have agreed, right up until the first results started coming in. Dissatisfaction with American politics was the major reason my parents ended up here in the early 70s, a year or so before I was born. History was made on the 4th of November, there’s no doubt about it. But enough has been written about Obama’s victory to stretch from hear to Mars if you printed it in 8 point Helvetica, so I’ll refrain from going on about that in this post.

In contrast, New Zealand goes to the polls tomorrow in what has to be described as a bit of an anti-climatic mood. Few seem to see a lot of difference between our two major parties – largely because John Key decided to adopt most of Labour’s policies, on the grounds that (a) they seem to be working and (b) the public seems to like them. The NZ public appear to have simply gotten bored of Labour, and frankly, I think they’re a bit daft because “boring and predictable” is about a thousand times better than what we saw from all the other NZ governments in my lifetime. But after 9 years everyone has managed to find at least one or two things they don’t like about Labour people or policies (Recent copyright legislation is a biggie for me and anyone else who cares about freedom and the internet), and since minor quibbles become more important when the other side isn’t promising to do anything much different, well, I can see how Labour is unlikely to get through this time. I’ll still vote for them, because they earned it, and I think, as Russel says, in years to come we’ll probably look back at the 4th Labour Government as one of the best we ever had.

However, one other notable point of difference lacking between our two possibilities for Prime Minister is their religion – or rather, their lack of one. In the last leader debate “Both said they did not believe in God or in an afterlife” – I quote from a report of the debate I read, because I missed the debate myself. Recently I’ve been regretting the lack of a TV at the office! So perhaps what they actually said was a bit more nuanced.

But if not, my assertion that this too is an historic election. I haven’t had time to research it, but it seems to me that Helen Clark vs Jenny Shipley was probably the first time two woman had fought for leadership of a western democracy, and this might be the first time that the fight is between a pair of atheists.

The reason this is possible is that the role of religion in NZ culture has been depleted to the point where no one really seems to have thought about the significance of such an election. Our separation between church and state is very much a “done deal”, and any talk of bringing the two back together is electoral poison. The fact that the last leader of a significant Christian party in this country is currently doing time for sexual abuse of multiple girls under the age of 12 probably may have something to do with that.

In America, on the other hand, it is almost impossible to win office, even at the state or local level, where they elect almost everyone from the local judge to the local tax collector, if you openly declare that you do not believe in God. It is a tragic, broken state of affairs and explains much of the pain that the country has gone through in the last few decades – through deliberate manipulation of their “flock” and of their favored politicians, the leaders of the religious right have prevented anyone from getting into power who was (a) smart enough to have decided there probably isn’t a God, and (b) honest enough not to have hidden their decision. And when you can’t elect a huge number of smart, honest people into even lowly positions of power, and it’s impossible for them to get into those particular positions of power through merit alone, well, what would you expect to happen?