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.

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).

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.

I recently ran across the web based Mindmeister while reading about the proceedings of a recent NZKM conference on the blog of the prolific Michael Sampson. The map seen there that inspired me was drawn by my old friend Julian Carver who I really must get back in touch with. It’s very cool, and it imports Freemind files, which is the free app I used for the map I did for my 2.0 talk. I feel much better having the map in a web-friendly format :-)

It’s pretty impressive how you can drag the nodes around and actually do one or two things you can’t do with Freemind, but there are definitely a few kinks to be worked out, eg I had problems when one node was on top of another, and kept selecting the one underneath. Printing also wasn’t too flash.

It’s way too big to use as an embed really, but I can’t resist playing around, so here it is. You can zoom from the bottom left and click through to the larger version from the bottom right.

[update: removed it - slowing down the page a bit much, I should probably get in touch with them with performance tips for embedded javascript widgets… Here’s a link to it tho - and if you haven’t seen Mindmeister in action, seriously check it out. Most impressive Ajax I’ve seen in ages]

Actually I’ve thought of another thing I could say when people ask what Web 3.0 means….Wittgenstein says “Meaning is Use” (roughly speaking) and therefore Web 3.0’s meaning is bound to whatever use people put that phrase to. In general, I think they use it to mean “Some funky web stuff that supposedly wasn’t part of Web 2.0″

Unfortunately the meaning of Web 2.0 is vastly more complicated, because people use the phrase for all sorts of purposes.

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.)

Ben, a very smart fellow Cantabrian who’s blogging up a storm about SaaS lately suggests my prediction of 5-10 years of useful life left in the standard email platform might be a little er, optimistic. Perhaps. But we live not just in interesting times, but accelerating times. Things change faster than they once did. I’ll stick by my aggressive prediction because I know I’ve been vague enough about what I’m really predicting to get away with it. ;-)

There are essentially two reasons I suggested that email as we know it, ie as based on SMTP/POP3/IMAP, will be gradually replaced with something better and browser/HTTP based. The first reason is that email is a significant source of pain for users and even worse for systems administrators. The second reason is that the existing plethora of clients, servers and gateway applications that deal with email means that it’s more or less impossible to make any significant upgrades across the ecosystem.

Ok, just looking at the pains for users, here are some things that are wrong with email at the moment. The list of pains for the poor benighted sysadmins is just as long, but I just don’t have time right now (and may not have time for weeks, already wasted too much time on this really, Interclue really needs 150% of my attention at the moment)

Security - it’s too much hassle, and most people just can’t be bothered. Microsoft, for some unknown reason, doesn’t want Outlook to have PGP, most PGP/GPG solutions for Windows are either flaky or a pain to set up, and they’re not all compatible with eachother. Alternative mail security solutions exist but aren’t as common and are probably just as hard to set up.

File Attachments - The brokeness of email attachments has led to about a bazillion online services that try to make this bit easier.

Confirmations - you can ask for a confirmation that someone’s read a bit of mail, but they don’t have to send it. Frankly I’d just like a confirmation that they *got* the mail and it didn’t end up in a spam/virus filter somewhere.

Lock-ins - using your ISP’s provided email address locks you into that ISP, because they don’t want to risk losing emails from long lost friends. ISPs love this. Ditto hotmail/gmail/etc. Switching mail clients can be just as much of a pain due to the problems of getting all your mail archives in one place so you can search them.

Mobile email - a pain, and remarkably inconsistent. Email from a friend of mine in the UK will usually end up in my spam filter because it has some unusual stuff in the headers or whatever.

“Rich” email - if you use HTML in mail it can trigger spam filters, and you are less able to rely on it getting to the other end. To make matters worse (well, actually there are pros and cons) Outlook 2007 changed the layout engine it uses for rendering HTML mail, to something more secure but it increases the difficulty of getting something in the right format.

Viruses - Existing email protocols make it to easy for them to spread - for instance by allowing them to fake the sender header so that you have no idea who sent you the virus.

Spam - The problems regarding spam, well, you could write a book on them. Sure, if you want people to be able to contact people who aren’t already on their list of contacts, or you want the ability to contact people anonymously, then there will always be spam, but existing email protocols and practices just make it way too easy.

Antispam - Almost as irritating as spam is all the problems that can result from the security measures taken by various users and systems to stop spam from getting in, which often get in the way of legitimate email as well.

Depending on the situation you’re in, you might also have trouble with Search, Archiving, Backups, Filtering, File corruption, Software Updates, Virus Checkers…there are a lot of things that can go wrong or were designed wrong with desktop email clients. Some webmail clients are just as bad. I’ll save them for another post.

I have a pile of MoCo bloggers in my feed reader, and I’ve noticed that most of the chatter around the call to action that inspired my post seems to be about what they’re going to do with Thunderbird and why. Only Myk appears to have picked up the thread of building “something better”. But I suspect the seed has been planted and we shall see more of this particular meme.

I think this might herald the beginning of the end. The CEO of Mozilla corporation declared that it was time for Thunderbird, their free desktop mail client, and one of the best out there, to find its own way, so that Mozilla could increase its focus on Firefox and “the open web”.

The venerable communications tool known as “e-mail”, the Internet’s original “Killer App”, is broken, and probably needs to die. At the very least, it needs to evolve, and it might be *too hard* to evolve it, we might be better off coming up with a replacement and a migration strategy. Actually, I think I might even have the beginnings of such in my head from a brainstorm the other night, but it’s competing with a few other things to get out of there right now. Oh and by “evolve” I certainly do not mean this.

Hence, a prediction: Within 5-10 years what you and I know today as “e-mail” will be where usenet is today - a communications platform still loved by a few aficionados, still distributed by many ISPs, but mostly supplanted by web based systems with richer interactive possibilities and fewer opportunities for spammers to gum up the works.

I met a few Mozilla Folk while at Kiwi Foo camp. It struck me that they were all very much Alphageeks, wicked smart, and on top of their game. The Kiwis were Roc, giving talks on the future of the Firefox layout manager and reinventing the debugger as a side project, and Ben, who has mostly moved onto new projects with his new employer, and I particularly liked Asa, who thinks and talks about Mozilla and the Open Web at a meta-level far above the average technical evangelist.

On the other hand, I might just be flattering myself by saying that the MozCorp people are brilliant, because they usually seem to think the same way I do about stuff, most notably about the increasing importance of the web as a platform and the role of Firefox in evolving that ecosystem and keeping it open.

More thoughts on this later…but here are a few links:

From Web Worker daily, who disagrees with me.

From a Seamonkey developer, pondering that this is the second time Mozilla Corporation has attempted to reduce the importance of email.

And thoughts from one of the two key developers of Thunderbird.

And finally a quote from Tim O’Rielly: “Are we moving into a world where Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are just device drivers for Firefox?”