Ranting and Roaring

My condolences to Joey and his family.

We won the gold in curling. And by “we”, I mean some other guys that I don’t know also from Newfoundland, but I did just invest 2h30 of my life in watching it.

(Kudos to CBC for getting the headline right seconds after the game ended).

On the second day of Mashup Camp [tags, photos], anyone who wanted to had the opportunity to show off their mashups. The format for the demos was “speed hacking”, where every demoer was given a table and everyone circulated from table to table in semi-strict five minute segments.

Of special note to me were:

• Chicago Crime, by Adrian Holovaty
• Podbop, by Taylor McKnight and Daniel Westermann-Clark.
• TrainCheck, by Frank Harris and Bart Solowiej

Chicago Crime came second place but was in some deep meaningful sense was probably the best demo there, if you believe there’s going to be or should be an “infosphere”. Although the application is kind of limited in scope, the idea that just about everything is a URI for querying the underlying database is very very powerful and this shows it off very well. Adrian‘s the big brains behind “Django”: and I look forward to meeting him again in the future, perhaps at Chicago Django Camp (hint hint). Also worth mentioning is that CC is probably the first Google Maps mashup ever created.

Podbop came in a well deserved first place, netting the winners a Mac and a fat-ass Sun T2000 server. What developers should take away from Podbop is that (1) applications should so something useful and (2) the simplest interfaces are often the best. Two thoughts: Eventful should host the best Eventful applications themselves and Popbop should make their artist DB available as an API.

TrainCheck is an interesting and simple concept: you need to no the time for the next train (or hopefully, bus)? Just text message on your mobile and the next three departure times are texted back to you. If organizations like the TTC adopted a microformat for transit schedules, rolling this app (and many others) out to many cities would be a breeze. A brief digression: the TTC won’t do it, because they’ll either give a contract to some big org like Google (they’re talking about this) or they’ll build some closed unuseful application themselves. Blech. Power to the people, baby.

Two other companies I wanted to mention. Eventful, an online repository of places and events, powers half the Popbop application. They had a really cool mashup of Eventful straight into Google Maps, where you could fly around the Earth and see what was happening where popup in real time. I also want to mention Ning, because in terms of you being able to create a mashup or social application, well, they’re probably the first place you should visit.

Mathew Ingram, Mark Evans, Michael McDerment and Robert Hyndman are organizing a “Web 2.0” conference for Toronto sometimes in May. It looks like they’re going to go for a ununconference which makes me a little sad because Mashup Camp [tags] worked and scaled. However, that conference was pretty narrowly focused and I think these guys are trying to do something more general.

Here’s a blurb:

We’re hoping to capture the same kind of enthusiasm, spirit and interactivity as other conferences and local events such as BarCamp and TorCamp. To make sure the conference flows with conversation and ideas, it would be great if the community can help us with suggestions about ideas/topics they would like to see on the schedule, tips on what worked well at other events, and some of the pitfalls we need to avoid.

My only early suggestion is to come up with a name ASAP so people can tag it!

One of the first things I saw at Mashup Camp [tags, photos] was this poster:

At first, I was a little confused about what taxonomy to place this under. Is it Totally Gay or New Hippy Fascist? As it turns out, it probably should be filed under Kinda Useful. What they’re really saying is that at an unconference, people shouldn’t feel socially bad about walking out of sessions if they’re getting nothing from it and session chairs shouldn’t take it personally if people get up and walk out.

Here’s a few photos of me at Mashup Camp [tags, photos]. These were taken at Mary Hodder’s ”video mashup” session:

The funny thing (in retrospect) is that Mary didn’t care for Flash Video very much as a format (for very good reasons I’ll admit) but I’m looking more closely at that product now because it may indeed actually be an application enabler for the types of things we were talking about—the ability to tag interior portions of a video. I was talking later on that evening to Sara Spalding of Adobe Labs and she’s promised to hook me up with some Flash Video people so I may have something more intelligent to say about this later.

I’m back from California and Mashup Camp [tags, photos]. I just want to bitch about a few things:

• noise abatement laws make it very incovenient to fly from SFO to Toronto. You cannot leave SFO between (basically) 4 in the afternoon and 10 PM at night because you would land in Toronto between 12 and 6 AM. For the business traveller, this means you’re pretty well stuck on the red eye. Blech.
• Henry’s High Life doesn’t make a great rib anymore. The love just isn’t there.
• Californians have no idea how to drive.
• The Palo Alto Sheraton is too expensive for the quality of the room they’re giving you (I may just stay at the airport Westin next time).
• You’d think for all the money Google has, they’d do something innovative with their buildings. I did a brief tour and I’m sorry: it looks like a modern geek-factory distopia to me. Wow, you didn’t put in ceiling tiles! How clever. (On the other hand, two big monitors per-developer rocks).
• Oh sure, have Demo Camp on the same day.

That’s all the negatives. All the positives may take a couple of hours to type in: Mashup Camp was the best conference I ever attended.

I’m off to Palo Alto Mountain View this afternoon to attend Mashup Camp, have a few meetings, shake some hands, etc.. I’ll be back Wednesday morning.

Let’s say someone gave someone special, say their wife, some really delicious licorice candies for Valentine’s Day. And let’s say, hypothetically speaking, while the wife was at work, the first someone ate some of those candies. And instead of saying “some” how if we said “most”? Would this be wrong?

Just asking…

From Ian Kershaw’s ”Hilter 1936–1945 Nemesis” (page 123):

But when that next crisis came, [Hitler] was even more confident that he knew his adversaries. ‘Our enemies are small worms,’ he would tell his generals in August 1939. ‘I saw them in Munich’.

Just in case you’re wondering the respect appeasement and submission will get you.

Via Danny Ayers, we learn of something called ”triple tags”:

Users are great and smart and do cool stuff, you can’t stop them. Therefore it’s no surprise to see them constantly pushing things to the limit, and this is why we’re seeing the start of curious tagging methods.

Let’s look at the obvious one that I deal with…

 geotagged geo:lat=53.1234 geo:long=-2.5678 

The second two tags have three parts; its namespace ‘geo’ and a key/value pair ‘lat=53.1234’. Because most tagging systems don’t allow us to search with wildcards, you can’t find all items tagged with ‘geo:lat=*’ for example, we also use a declarative tag ‘geotagged’ which can be used for searching.

Anyone can follow this [namespace]:[key]=[value] convention. If I wanted to sell my bike, I may add a photo of it to Flickr and add the tags:

 selltagged sell:price=79.99 sell:currency=dollar 

There’s the declarative tag and two TripleTags. If it gained traction and enough people did it, then it’s easy enough to build a website or services that handle the searching and tagging of photos of items people want to sell. Once they’ve be sold the tags are automatically removed.

Combine these with geotags and you can find items near you that are for sale.

This is actually a problem I’ve been working on for the last four months (and thinking about for about nine) at BlogMatrix: namespaces with tags and how do you associate key=value data with URIs (tags are basically an association of key=True with a URI, or maybe assertions?). Here’s where my thinking is:

• instead of added a tag ‘geotagged’, why not automatically add a tag recognizing namespaces—‘has:namespace’. For example, if a post is tagged ‘sell:price=79.99 geo:lat=53.1234 geo:long=-2.5678’, automatically add the tags ‘has:sell’ and ‘has:geo’. It’s very neat, flexible and doesn’t require much (any?) effort on the user.
• I’m pretty uncomfortable with tags like ‘geo:lat=53.1234’. I mean, they’re not really tags, are they, because we’re not really looking for an exact match for the string ‘geo:lat=53.1234’ and one could see the tag namespace filling up with a lot of semi-equivalent giberish. Why not explicitly recognize this as a key/value pair? Of course, the problem is that del.ico.us, etc., don’t have this metadata concept.
• There’s synergy here with the xFolk microformat.
• slightly off topic, BlogMatrix reserves all tags beginning with the ’:’ for internal use—i.e. the empty namespace. This lets us do all sorts of internal tagging tricks without letting the user accidently (or deliberately) upsetting the model

Tagged: xFolk, triple tags, Blogmatrix.

CBC reports:

City workers in the Montreal borough of Ville Marie are facing disciplinary action after an investigation showed it took 90 staff hours to fill nine potholes.

[...] The investigation found one team spent six minutes of a nine-hour overnight shift fixing potholes. The team spent another 2.5 hours doing odd jobs and then filled the remainder of the shift at restaurants or at their home base.

[...] Borough Mayor Benoît Labonté ordered the investigation after receiving what he says were hundreds of complaints from citizens about work not being done.

[...] “If there is a small bunch of activists who don’t want to work, or let [others] work. These are the ones I will target,” said Labonté.

Bureaucracy blamed for death of mother and son

Rescuers tried in vain to save a mother and son trapped in a vehicle that plunged to the bottom of the Holland Marsh drainage canal in an accident Bradford’s mayor says could have been prevented.

On Canal Road, just east of Highway 400 between Newmarket and Bradford, Cassandra Read, 32, lost control of her vehicle on the snow covered road at approximately 7 p.m. Saturday.

Read and her 4-year-old son Taylor Grasby were returning home from a trip to St. Jacobs, near Kitchener.

Traveling east Read’s SUV skidded out of control on the icy road. It tumbled down a small embankment and into the canal’s frigid waters.

The Toronto Sun

After a day-long outing with her son to the St. Jacob’s flea market in Waterloo, Cassandra was headed to Pittman’s home to drop off Taylor for babysitting, so she could enjoy a night out. Cassandra had just turned off the slippery Hwy. 400 and was talking to Pittman about where to pick up coffee when tragedy struck.

I don’t want to sound too much like a curmudgeon here, but can you all please stop yammering away on the cell phone talking about nothing when in situations where you should be concentrating on driving.

CBC reports:

Violent protests over the publication of editorial cartoons showing the Prophet Muhammad are gaining momentum, with activists threatening to launch “a day of anger” across Europe and the Muslim world.

I love the way media value neutrality has turned the meaning of “activist” into “unhinged violent nutbar”.

Fred Wilson writes:

If you don’t get this, do yourself a favor and go do a search on SNL on google video, youtube, myspace video, or anywhere else that video content is aggregated on the web. You’ll find a bunch of Saturday Night Live skits that have been uploaded by internet users who wanted to share them with their friends. I did the same with the Steve Jobs SNL skit on this blog last year.

NBC needs to make SNL available on the web wherever people want to get it. And they need to microchunk the shows down to the skit level. And monetize it with ads or subscriptions or both. Because if they don’t others will and are already doing it.

This one’s especially for the ladies, though I suspect there’s a few guys out there with the same misassumption. There is no temperature acceleration. If you want the house to be 72° setting the temperature to 74° will not get it there any faster. The furnace doesn’t go “oh gee, I guess she really means it”. It just, eventually, after passing through 72°, gets too hot.

That is all.

Rick writes:

Ottawa Senators goalie Ray Emery has been in the news around here simply because of his mask. Emery seems enamoured of boxer Mike Tyson and has two images of him painted on his goalie mast. People here have freaked over it. Emery explained to the press that he greatly admires Tyson for his skill as a boxer and sees no reason for a fuss. One reporter shouted from the back, “It’s because he’s a convicted rapist.” Emery repeated that he likes Tyson for his boxing skill. What he should’ve said to the reporter was, “Yes, and he went to jail and served his time,” and then continued about Tyson’s boxing skills.

What the reporter should have asked whether it’s appropriate for the player that is least likely on the team to get in a fight, that will be protected by the other players as if he was a little girl if he does get in a fight, and is padded with tens of pounds of body armor — to wear the image a boxer.

Of course, that reporter should know Tae Kwon Do or something if he’s going to ask that question