in gravyland

A bit quiet here…

Oh and if it seems a little quiet here, check out my Presence Labs blog. That is where all the technical stuff is going these days,…

And also the ValuesHacker podcast blog for values/ethics/future stuff.

New Stuff

I’m working on some new AJAX-driven interactive web stuff. AJAX is a hype-driven idea that we can make web pages interactive and asynchronous so visitors don’t have to spend all their time waiting for pages to reload.

It is a cool idea. But there is an “As Usual” here. As Usual, it works great for simple things. To make things fast and snappy and with rounded corners is a lot harder and will involve lots of JavaScript with the usual cross-browser issues.

That said, it is fun and enjoyable to work with. And it is very refreshing to break out of the one-thing-per-page idea.

Want to know more? Start at the Wikipedia entry for Ajax (programming).

For my development, I’m using Python on the server, using the Myghty template framework and the Myghty Ajax Toolkit.

Scary Powerbook upgrade

My poor old (12″ Al) Powerbook was suffering. The hard disk was getting slower and slower, but only showing the occasional disk error. This all started while we were away travelling, so I picked up a pocket-sized firewire drive and got a bit serious about backing things up.

So, I’ve suffered with a slow, occasionally stopping, laptop for a while. I finally bit the bullet last week and ordered a new hard drive. Now, this is not really stuff for the faint-hearted. To change the hard disk in this one, you have to remove about 30 screws from all sides of the laptop and pop keys off the keyboard and disconnect this and that. You want to know what you are doing.

But as usual the internet provides: pbfixit.com has detailed guides to help you through assembly and disassembly of your computer and has things like a screw guide you can print out to carefully place the screws on as you remove them. For the hard disk change I was doing, it was about 11 pages of instructions with pictures.

Everything went smoothly, except for removing one cable connector leading to the power on-off switch. Carefully trying to separate the plug from socket pulled the socket off the motherboard inside the laptop. (Honest, I was being really gentle :-) Gulp. A bit of fine soldering work put the socket back on and the on-off switch still works.

All is back to normal now. I chose a Western Digital WD600VE drive, a 60GByte one. Works nice. Seems quiet and cool. And fast.

[Update 20/12/2005: Oh, dear me. Yesterday saw a few more disk I/O errors show up in the system log, and then ended up with an unbootable system. I ran DiskWarrior and recovered a bunch of binaries from /usr/bin, some config files from /etc, and some startup .plist files from /private/etc/mach_init.d. I put them all back in the right places and could boot again. I ran another backup of my home dir and all has been ok since. Will this problem come back? Time will tell. Gulp.]

My Favourite OS X tools

I’ve been meaning to write down the set of software I use with OS X on a daily basis. It has taken me a couple of years to refine this set. OS X is a great operating system to start with. This is the cream.

Desktop Search/Launcher

The latest and greatest thing to make a big difference is Quicksilver. Hard to describe all it can do. At the basic level, you hit a hotkey, in my case Command-space and then start typing what you want. The name of an application, file, bookmark, contact, … and Quicksilver presents you with a list. You choose. It remembers for next time. I hardly ever use the dock anymore. Quicksilver has a plugin architecture that is constantly being added to, meaning that it can often perform functions inside applications. Like select a playlist from iTunes or something. Simply wonderful.

Writing/Editing

BBEdit is my tool of choice for writing and editing text, html and script languages. It is reliable and solid and works well under OS X. I use it for creative writing, blog posts, todo lists and just about everything else. I will use Microsoft Word for final documents, but I do all the source writing in BBEdit. It doesn’t get in the way. I’ve use both vi and emacs a lot in the past and still do on linux and windows. BBEdit is just better on OS X. Worth the money.

Browser

Two favourites. I use both Safari and Firefox. Safari wins for having that OS X sleek simplicity. Firefox wins for compatibility and extensions, like the Web Developer toolbar which I love. I’m in a Safari mood at the moment. Thankfully it is easy to move bookmarks back and forth between these two. Oh, Safari really benefits form the addition of Saft.

Email

I use and enjoy Mail.app. Again, nice and simple. I like the open storage of Mail. Entourage databases scare me.

Calendar/Todo lists

I use iCal. Works for me. It has got a lot better in the last couple of version. Clean lines and simple. I wish it was better at inviting people via email. That side of things is a bit clumsy.

I use PyGTD and BBEdit to manage my To do lists.

IRC

I use IRC a lot when working. So, I was really pleased when Colloquy came along. Very Tidy.

Instant Messaging

Lots of sucky IM clients for OS X. iChat is ok, but it annoyingly loses the server frequently and has to be logged back in manually. Presence lost. However, the Skype implementation of IM is nice and it always manages to stay automatically connected without creating a fuss. Plus, I love the way it works. Read about the protocol (pdf, 300k). It is all peer to peer!

Java Development

I use Eclipse for Java development. Hard not to love it. Free and fully featured and reliable and heavily extensible.

And the rest…

iPodderX Lite for podcast downloading. NetNewsWire as an RSS reader, most of the iApps for various things. Address Book for contacts. Terminal for just about everything else.

That covers most of it.

go go gadget gra!

My first podcast: I joined Gadget Lounge supremo Richard Giles as a co-host on the latest Gadget Show news podcast.

Thanks Rich. It was great fun. Let’s do it again sometime.

Listen to the show here

Oh, and did I mention that I’m an occasional writer for Gadget Lounge? Emphasis on occasional. Got a couple of notes up there in a month or two. I will do better. I will do better. I will do better …. :-)

Experiments in Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done is the title of a book by David Allen that teaches skills and systems for working through the long lists of things we all have to do in an ever-more chaotic world. In this post I’m going to talk through how the book and the ideas behind it are changing the way am organised, and what tools I am using and trying out.

If you are looking for a gentle introduction to Getting Things Done, have a listen to Richard Giles’ Gadget Show Podcast interview with David Allen.

This book is a good one. I haven’t read it all yet. So far I find it is sensible and practical and an easy read. It deals with people like you and me as real fallible people with scattered minds and gives concrete things to do to create stress-free productivity.

(Note: in Australia, the book is called the slightly different How To Get Things Done.)

Even before my copy arrived I discovered the rather wonderful weblog called 43 Folders. 43 Folders is named for the number of manila folders to make a 12 month tickler file system. It talks about tools and techniques for implementing the Getting Things Done (GTD) systems on a Mac under OS X.

In GTD, it is really important to have a place to record the next actions (ToDo items) that you need to take in a reliable system. You don’t want to be relying on your memory, or on some system that you don’t trust. You want a way to record things that makes it very easy to put things in reliably, and makes it easy to get things out reliably. If you can trust that when you put things in they aren’t lost, and it is easy to put things in, you have the beginnings of a solid ToDo or next actions list.

I’ve adopted a pair of tools to handle this for me. My portable tool of choice is a stack of 3″ by 5″ index cards held together with clip and a pen or pencil. This is known as a hipster PDA. It is a very flexible way of quickly writing down things that are easily lost. Once written down, these can be merged later into the master system, or just thrown away when things are done. It works best if you write one item per card. This is so cheap and easy and flexible beyond belief that it is hard to beat.

So that handles the mobile todo system. On the Powerbook I’m using a slight advance from a plain text file. I’m using Keith Martin’s PyGTD, a python script that works on a set of text project files and combines them into a todo.txt file. It uses dates, importance, and urgency among other things to calculate the order of todo items and allows modifications of the todo.txt file to feed back into the project files. Entry is very quick, being simply adding plain text into a project file. Modifications are the same. Very quick. Fast feedback. No mouse clicks.

To enjoy PyGTD you are going to want to be very comfortable in a text editor. I’m using BBEdit to edit the files and activate the PyGTD script via a single key-press, but BBEdit is expensive overkill for this task. Look for another text editor that can easily run scripts.

So that handles the ToDo list side of things. Once you’ve got a system like this running that you can trust, and you can chuck things in easily, you are halfway there. But, my email was getting out of control, so I’ve simplified that as well by adopting some email productivity tips from 43 Folders. The most important thing here is (I find) to turn off automatic email receiving, and only check your mail when you are prepared to process what is coming in. That stops the email mounting up in a discouraging pile automatically all by itself. I feel back in control of my email now.

I’ll report more on how I go here as I get these systems bedded down. So far it feels really good. Also, I’ll report on my list of favourite OS X productivity tools. There are some real gems out there.

Creative Commons for Australia!

According to the Australian, Creative Commons licenses for Australia were launched this week and will be available later this month from the creative commons website.

This is great news. It is the first good thing to happen to copyrights in Australia for some time. It feels like a little bit of an antidote to the Free Trade Sellout Agreement,

Here’s a first hand report of the launch from David Jacobson. See also his highlights of the Creative Commons and Open Content Licensing conference proceedings. Thanks for putting them up, David. I really wanted to get to the conference and just couldn’t get there.

Blog shy (two week short form blog entry)

Golly, another 2 week gap between entries. It intrigues me why I get stuck sometimes and blog entries don’t come easily.

So, here’s two weeks worth of blogs in one:

New Years happened. Doesn’t that seem like a century ago. A big party, lot of fun, people, lots of talking. From a week or two weeks later it seemed a bit empty somehow. Perhaps I was looking for something a bit more soulful, a bit more of a ritual. I’m glad to be in the new year. 2004 sucked a lot in many ways.

I had a great time down south after new years, catching up with good friends and having a holiday for a couple of days. Everybody was in a holiday mood.

Look, every time I go fishing I catch absolutely nothing. This has been going on for a while. What god have I offended? Or is it really true, as Kimmy claims, that I don’t really want to catch a fish anyway?

Bill Gates said silly things, calling us free culture creative commons folk communists. Now we are creative commies. Thanks for the meme, Bill. I’ve got a T-shirt on order.

I’ve got lots of new innovation going on in my work life. A couple of interesting new highly secret projects that might be really big one day :-) haha. We’ll see.

Apple are beating up on mac websites that publish rumours of upcoming products. The EFF jumps in to help the websites. Silly Apple.

Then Apple releases new products at Macworld. Gizmodo shows off a couple of cool fake Apple ads that are funny. Despite Apple’s litigious behaviour which deep in my creative commie heart I should punish them for, I immediately order an iPod shuffle.

Fortune on Blogs: “Why There’s No Escaping the Blog”

Fortune has an interesting article about blogs from a business perspective as a part of their Top Ten Tech Trends to Watch For. Say that three times fast.

iTunes Music Store coming to Australia, finally?

Engaget reports rumours that we might finally get an iTunes Music Store in Australia.

Gadget Lounge Opens

Perth blog maestro Richard Giles of has started a new gadget blog called Gadget Lounge. Amazingly, this is a gadget blog about gadgets available in Australia, with Australian prices and availability. Fantastic. I enjoy the global Gizmodo, but I get frustrated when all of the devices are available in the US or Japan, and never Australia.

So, well done Rich, and good luck with it.

From the home page:

Gadget Lounge is dedicated to bringing the latest news of gadgets available in Australia. If it’s available in Australia, draining the power grid, filling the wireless airwaves or maintaining the bit state, we’ll report it.

Link

Solve the cube

I never completely solved a Rubik’s cube. I got it to a point, thought with a characteristic smugness “I can do this” and then wandered off to do something else.

But look at this: JP Brown’s Serious LEGO CubeSolver. A beautiful piece of LEGO Mindstorm building plus some software that can solve the cube. Pop in the cube (after some necessary lubrication to make it turn easily) and off it goes.

(thanks Joi)

Petition against FTA Intellectual Property clauses

Some local linux and open source folk have started a petition against the Intellectual Property provision in the proposed Free Trade Agreement. We need to get a lot of signatures on this so we can get the senate to understand the problem.

The IP provisions of the FTA do everything to support the rights of enormous media companies, further extends the lifetime of copyright, and criminalises reverse engineering and circumvention devices. A circumvention device is something like a multi-region DVD player, so this will potentially criminalise watching legal DVDs purchased in Asia.

Please sign here.

People make bad metadata

Cory Doctorow writes about humans and metadata in Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.

((Metadata is one of those slippery things to define. I can say it is data about data but does that help? For example, the metadata for a word processing document includes all the title, summary, category and keyword kind of stuff that you are asked to fill in when you create a document, but almost nobody ever does. Dealing intelligently with metadata helps us link things together and make sense of our data in a bigger way than on an item-by-item basis.))

In torching the seven straw straw men, Cory explains how people tend to be lazy, liars, inconsistent, stupid and unable to categorise things reliably. Plus other big human failings. People will never fill in the metadata reliably. It is better to stick to metadata that can be arrived at automatically.

The O’Reilly Radar

I’m always telling people about Tim O’Reilly’s speech at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference this year. He talked through a lot of particularly interesting stuff that is emerging on the net, and if you are doing anything with the Internet and content, you need to hear what he is saying.

To paraphrase: Where do the big internet successes (Google, eBay, Amazon) get lots of their content from? Leveraged from their community. For free.

Read a Transcript, download MP3s or stream audio from IT Conversations (simple registration required).

SmartGate Misinformation

Roger Clarke writes about Australian Government attempts to make a face-recognition trial look good.

Basically, for a face recognition system to be good and useful, it has to have both a high accuracy in picking out suspects and a low rate of false positives.

It does sound like this system is not there yet, with an 8% failure to detect impersonation. That sounds unusable to me.

thanks Joi.

Quiet Velcro?

Now this might seem like a strange idea, but I want to invent something called Quiet Velcro.

Velcro is great, but it does make a big noise, especially if you have a couple of good large surfaces with the stuff, like the top of my laptop bag.

Loud enough to wake people up.

Trouble is, in a quiet room, this stuff makes a lot of noise. It sounds destructive, A huge noise compared to opening a button or two or a zipper.

So how about something quiet, maybe magnetic, with the same sticking power, but less noise?

Creative Commons 1st birthday flash

Creative Commons have a new flash presentation that talks about the first year of the amazing creative commons license. It is called Reticulum Rex or is that Remix Culture.

Very clever, very inspiring. Doesn’t look like anybody is adapting the licenses for Australian law yet. This is something we should get onto. Know any good Australian Copyright lawyers?

Down in the engine-room

I’ve been working away in the engine room for a few weeks, which goes part of the way to explaining why there have been no postings here for some time.

We were running a nice old server in my Fremantle office, down the end of a 512/128 ADSL line. The uplink speed was getting a bit too slow for the volume of traffic on the 7 domains it was hosting, the server was getting very old and I was a bit afraid of one of the seven domains becoming popular and then having constant bandwidth problems.

As of late last week, we’ve moved to a new managed server at servepath.com, and I’ve been spending the last few weeks configuring, installing and testing it. servepath.com are excellent, amazingly professional and well organised. These guys send you a warning email when there is going to be a twenty or thirty second routing instability as they add more links. They also offered Debian as a operating system, which is what I was looking for.

So, back to normal now, which means I’ll do one blog entry every week, rather than one every two weeks :-)

Oh, and a few statistics about the old and new servers:

Old server:
Pentium 166MHz with MMX Extensions
64 Mbytes RAM
512k/128k ADSL link to the internet

New server:
Pentium Celeron 1.7GHz
640 Mbytes RAM
100Mbit ethernet connection to the internet

ACCC asks SCO to Please Explain

Harking back to my comments on SCO and my call to the ACCC to get them to look into SCO’s outrageous claims, it looks like the ACCC decided to investigate. Slashdot is reporting that the ACCC has asked SCO to explain themselves.

Props to the ACCC for doing something. I’m impressed and gratified. SCO’s response will be interesting.