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.

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!

Three things you might be wondering at this point:

Surely this isn’t a new idea?

It’s certainly not a new idea in 2009. There a lot of similar projects underway right now. One of my friends was telling me about his at the Digital NZ hackfest just the other day. A recent silicon valley demo contest even featured a SaaS version of the idea, Citysourced, targeted at American Cities, and it was noted as one of the few potentially world-changing products among the 50 launches. It probably wasn’t a new idea when I submitted it for this 10^100 contest a year ago, although I hadn’t heard of anyone else doing it back then, and I also doubt it was a new idea when I submitted it for an informal blog post based competition 6 months before that (ironically, I was trying to win a ticket to Google I/O, and missed out!). Way back when I first thought of it, circa 2005, it may have been vaguely original, but there was little point in implementing such a project back then because cellphones with GPS didn’t actually exist at that stage, so it ended up on the backburner with the other 5-10 “big ideas” I usually have fighting to get out of my pile-o-notes and into some sort of coherent project plan.

Should I vote for Seth’s idea?

Well, the idea behind the competition is to help as many people as possible. So pick the idea theme you think will do that. However, here’s why it might be worth picking my one: Cellphones with cameras** will likely be more or less ubiquitous in 5-15 years, we all share an environment that has it’s occasional problems, and people who want to know about those problems (and pretty soon, autonomous systems will want to know too), and the usual ways in which information about these problems is transmitted, routed, stored, organised and displayed is really inefficient and fragmented compared to what could be enabled with todays technology, so a good implementation of this idea would eventually help everyone on the planet. So the real question is, could a project sponsored by Google in the next year or so create a significantly better outcome than would be achieved by leaving it to other players in this space***? And how does the importance of getting this done right, sooner rather than later, stack up against the other 15 big ideas? I may post a follow up considering one or both of these questions, but this post is getting long enough already.

Why isn’t Seth’s (or anyone else’s) name mentioned in this list?

I was initially a bit disappointed about that, but I think they quite rightly want people to focus on the ideas rather than the people who submitted them. I was also initially disappointed that they didn’t link the submission titles to copies of the complete submissions, but I guess the point is to get as many people as possible to read all 16 ideas and then vote, and linking to a bunch of extra information would not have helped! On the other hand, after the voting process is over and the “final five” are found, I hope Google will provide more information about the individual submissions and submitters.

In conclusion, go vote!

PS: I made my final submission in a bit of a hurry, typing it direct into Google’s webform, and wouldn’t you know it, when I went to recover the text I’d entered using Lazarus I discovered I didn’t have it installed in the browser I was using! Hopefully Google will send me a copy of my submission even if it doesn’t make it into the final 5 – I’d like to blog it for posterity.

PPS: If you actually managed to read this far, why not sign up for my RSS feed?

* I’m working on a blog post that explains the other idea, which I still think is well worth doing.
** GPS helps, but isn’t essential, phones can do a reasonable job of nailing down location using signal triangulation.
*** Of course, some of them would probably be invited to answer Google’s RFP, and an ideal solution would probably allow for open and distributed interop between both new and existing players in this space.

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

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]

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 all over the place. 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]

She’s everybody’s sister… she’s symbolic of our failure… she’s the one in fifteen million who can help us to be free.

“Watching TV”, from Roger Water’s amazing album “Amused to Death“, contains surely one of the more poignant statements of the value of mass media in evolving peaceful democracy that you’re ever going to hear. Given the events of the day, I suggest giving it a listen. (And if you haven’t already, you might want to buy the album, and listen to it on a good sound system, it really is awesome. )

Roger’s Yellow Rose was a student of philosophy. So was Neda Agha-Soltan. So was I.

And I grieve for my sisters.

Some good news. Lazarus Form Recovery, our little side project, has risen through the ranks and joined Interclue on the AMO “recommended list” – probably the highest accolade available in the world of browser add-ons, apart from perhaps a glowing review in the Mossberg column, as our colleagues at Surf Canyon recently achieved.

The AMO directory (addons.mozilla.org) is linked directly from the Firefox Tools|Add-ons menu, and add-ons from the recommended list are even featured within the browser itself, so the 30-40 add-ons on that list do get a lot of exposure, and having two in there at once really is a great honor, given how many they have to choose from.

I’ve been asked a few times how we managed it. The short version is in both cases I wrote to Mozilla and explained how our addon met their criteria for recommendation, which you can read at the bottom of this page, and not long after that they were recommended. So it’s really about having the right sort of add-on and the right sort of reviews, rather than doing much in the way of lobbying or cajoling.

Most of the credit goes to Karl, who put a lot of effort into making Lazarus almost flawless. My only significant contributions were the original concept, a few innovative implementation ideas (eg asymmetric encryption to get around having to enter a password), and letting him avoid our Interclue todo list for a month or three. It took a while longer to get Lazarus right than we expected, there are a bunch of edge cases where form recovery is hard, but we felt it was worth chasing them all down so we could honestly say “Never lose anything you type into a web form again”.

Part of the Interclue Manifesto says “We will never stop looking for more ways to increase the value of the time people spend online.”, and certainly being able to recover hours of typing that otherwise would have been lost has increased the value of my time online, and from the ecstatic reactions we’ve gotten from Lazarus users, I’d say we haven’t strayed too far from our core mission.

Here are some snippets from Lazarus reviews on AMO:

I guess that means they like it :-)

It’s also gotten good feedback from tech bloggers who picked up on it. Not a lot of mainstream attention so far, probably because I haven’t contacted any of them, but hopefully that will come with time. Hey Walt, about that column of yours….

Personally, I’d rather be waterboarded, despite having also recently read the harrowing tales of Mancow Muller and Christopher Hitchens, two pro-Iraq-war commentators who stepped up to the plate and found out for themselves exactly what Waterboarding is like, afterwards reluctantly declared they were in no doubt that it is torture, and although they certainly didn’t say it, effectively concluded that certain members of the Bush administration are liars and war criminals.

There are unlikely to be any conservative pundits imprisoned for life without the possibility for parole anytime soon, but I’m sure if there were, and they still had the ability to get published, they would be arguing just as vehemently that this much slower form of torture must also be abhorred and abolished by any decent and humane society.

The only good thing about LWPFP, vs actual executions, is that it leaves a small chance that these individuals may eventually be released and rehabilitated by a more enlightened America after a change in the law, which surely seems a little more likely now Obama is the one nominating replacements for the Supreme Court.

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!