South France holiday

Posted on by Harry Wood

Aigues Mortes rampartsI said I would blog about my nice holiday in the South of France (catching up on a blogging today)

We were staying with a bunch of friends in a villa somewhere between Nimes and Montpellier (map). September was pleasantly hot but never too hot, and pleasantly un-crowded with tourists in the various places we visited: Montpellier, Nimes, Pont do Gard, Carnon Plage, Petite Rhone, and Aigue Mortes. I was surprised by the number of things to see in these places. Even the local un-touristy towns like St Christol and Somieres, were fun to look around, with charming historical steets, and a mediterranean sun-baked atmosphere.

It was great to catch up with Nick again, and Latham’s antics with Beany’s pink poker set were highly entertaining. On this holiday I learned to play poker properly for the first time, having tried and failed to understand anything on many previous occasions. I think I’m missing the part of the brain which is good at remembering card game rules.

So I should present you with all my gloriously sunny holiday snaps now… but I can’t. I carefully separated out my photos so that all the boring photo mapping pictures of street signs were seperate from my proper holiday snaps. I then left my holiday snaps on a laptop locked in a cupboard in the other office. I’ll stick ’em on facebook eventually.

Among the mapping pics I did find this nice picture of the medieval walls of Aigues-Mortes. This was a highlight of the holiday actually. Running around the castle walls like a medieval knight carrying a message for the king… with only 20 minutes to go until our parking ticket ran out! In fact I’ve created the wikitravel.org article for Aigues-Mortes

Wiki Wednesdays – 1st October

Posted on by Harry Wood

Last night’s London Wiki Wednesday was held at the BCS offices, and a load of BCS folk came along. They’re a funny old bunch, and judging by their comments, they found the wiki wednesday people rather odd too.

I explained one detail of using wikipedia to somebody who had been experimenting with editing there. Basically I had to show him the finer points of picking through a wiki history display to figure out what had happened to his contribution. I guess this isn’t the easiest thing for a newbie to grasp. Interesting to follow through useability problems from a newbie’s point of view. I wonder if there’s scope for interface innovation to make that easier.

Someone had reverted his contribution, and explained why in their editing comment. Perhaps the thing which really went wrong here, was that the explanation was very brief and therefore unclear (the newbie didn’t even register that this was the explanation) Wikipedia these days is full of people who will revert edits in a somewhat cavalier manner, and this is surely putting off a lot of potential new contributors. On the flip-side though, wikipedia articles need to withstand a bombardment of sub-standard edits somehow. I guess “defenders” of wikipedia need to try hard to engage people with useful explanations about how to improve their contributions. Basically we should always assume good faith, but when faced with people pushing biased viewpoints or promotional links, engaging in conversation can be the last thing you want. Not an easy balance to strike, but I do think a lot of wikipedians are too harsh and disdainful with their reverting these days.

But wikis are not just about wikipedia! Wiki Wednesday discussion came around to MediaWiki several times (a pleasant change from the usual “enterprise” slant) This was despite starting out with a discussion on the evils of Microsoft Sharepoint, which I don’t really have much experience of (thankfully!)

It was good to meet Dario Taraborelli. If I was doing a PHD, I’d want it to be on topic like his. Interesting stuff! He showed us some of his work on wikitracer and analysis based on spidering to gather wiki metrics across many different wiki websites.

Dario Taraborelli

This is something I’ve experimented with myself. More than two years ago now, I was practising my skills with ‘TIBCO BusinessWorks’, and created a web-scraping bot to generate a list of wikis by response time to help with early building of the database at wikiindex.org. Bots are fun! That reminds me. I need to fire up my more recent java creation again some time. The “most active london wikipedians” bot.

Postholiday

Posted on by Harry Wood

I am back from a week’s holiday in the South of France. Immediately I’ve dropped into a firestorm* of emails to respond to, things to to prepare for, and political fires to extinguish.

So I will blog about beautiful French vineyards and other such relaxing things ….later.   Right now I’m too busy and more importantly I’m just not in the mood.

* “whirlwind”, “quagmire”, “steaming heap of poo”.  What’s the right word here?

Windows CleanUp

Posted on by Harry Wood

I ran low on disk space.

In the past I’ve found treesize utility quite handy for figuring out where space is being used up. Windows should have something like this built-in surely? Anyway I set that scanning my whole disk (takes several hours) But no real disk space revelations this time actually. I just seem to be using up a lot space with photos and mp3s, but not really wanting to delete them.

Then there’s the wonderful windows “Disk Cleanup” tool. This is some kind of usability masterstroke. With the introduction of XP/2000, at about the same time they figured out that yes you do want to be able to press ctrl+F to find things in notepad, and to be able to open JPEGs in paint. Yes, around about then, some genius also figured out that you might actually want to be able to easily flush away all the temporary crap from your hard disk. It even prompts you to run it, if you get really low on space. So somebody’s really thought about the problem. Well done microsoft. Except….

It doesn’t work! I ran it a couple of weeks ago, without much luck, and soldiered on with only a few hundred megabytes free.

Today I’ve just discovered 2.6 gigs of wasted space mysteriously held hostage by windows.

No. The way to truly cleanup unneeded temporary files, is to download and run a little utility written by ….some random bloke. CleanUp!

CleanUp! Screenshot

Do ‘Options’ and untick everything, except ‘Fully Erase Files (wipe clean)’ which should be ticked. It runs very slowly for some reason, but it has spent the past 6 hours deleting ‘c:\Recycler’ directory files which looks like a copy of my complete photo collection twice over, or something ridiculous.

I can only imagine that it’s something to do with recycle bin space for other user profiles, but I thought I’d been logging on as the same user the whole time, so why Microsoft’s built-in “Disk Cleanup” tool doesn’t free up this space is mystery to me.

Swirly Sweden

Posted on by Harry Wood

I was sent to Sweden last week to give a training course in GH Tester . This was very stressful for various reasons, and hard work. I spent the whole three days in a hotel/conference centre just outside Arlanda airport near Stockholm, which seems like a terrible wasted opportunity to go see Stockholm or do something more interesting, but in between working and stressing there was no time.

I think the training course went well though, which is quite satisfying to look back on. Other good things about the trip…

There was a funny guy from Finland on the course. We got chatting about how he goes on big moose hunting expeditions. Apparently as a young Finnish hunter he partook of the tradition to drink a cup of blood from the first beast he killed. Warm and quite salty he told us.  He also talked a lot about saunas. Apparently in Finland there is ludicrous ratio of saunas to people. One for every family. And when farmers settled into a new area of the wilderness, they would build a sauna first, and then the farmhouse.

I got to fly BA from the new Heathrow terminal 5. I didn’t approve of Heathrow expansion, but they’ve done it now, so might as well enjoying being in a nice modern airport. I also enjoyed BA’s headrests on the way out, but not on the way back (Headrest designers please design them so that you can rest your head to sleep. It’s not rocket science)

And this view over Sweden on the way home was nice.

View over Sweden’s swirly lakes

I was looking at the swirly arrangement of these lakes on the Stockholm map So here’s a challenge for you: See if you can work out exactly which lakes on the map we can see in this photo. I couldn’t.

UPDATE: There’s quite distinctive little island in view in the photo, which wasn’t rendering properly before on the map. Having fixed this, it’s clear that the view is looking North Northwest with plane being about here.

Wiki Wednesdays – Back in 2008

Posted on by Harry Wood

Last week the London Wiki Wednesdays thing kicked off again, which I’m pleased about. I enjoyed this regular meet-up of wiki and web 2.0 enthusiasts. It was happening monthly for a while, but this is the first time we’ve managed to get together in 2008. Apparently David Terrar has been struggling to find people to host it, so if anyone knows anyone who has a big (~40 capacity) room with a projector, we’d love to use it (in exchange for appreciative blog links). Big thanks to David Terrar for managing to bring it together again, and special thanks this time since he paid for the food & drinks himself! I showed my appreciation by drinking all the booze and rambling to him on the tube on the way home! And thanks to Alek for hosting us again.

OmCollab logoAndreas Rindler’s OmCollab looked interesting. It’s a blending of MediaWiki with WordPress and bookmarking tools. Some nice customisations, obviously including skinning, but also dropping in various extensions for added toolbar buttons, category tag clouds, easy attachments etc.

Andy Roberts pointed out that wordpress is adding a ‘revisions’ feature, which is rather wiki-like. This kicked off a discussion about using wordpress as a wiki , whether it can be regarded as a wiki, and whether you want to use it that way. Without actually playing with it, it’s not clear whether it would support open editing, how it would relate with the “publish” button, or what would appear in RSS feeds. Personally I don’t expect wordpress to become a wiki. It is fundamentally a blogging tool, and this little revision feature does not represent a dramatic departure from that. But it is nod towards the wiki way of thinking, and this is exciting because wordpress is so extremely widespread, with a colossal installed-based. That’s a lot of users who may start to feel more comfortable when they see a history page in a wiki interface.

People pointed out that this wordpress-wiki wouldn’t support wiki style links, that is, links which are (perhaps) created via some [[square brackets]] or CamelCAse, to create a new page by the same title, or to point to a potential new page. In my opinion this a defining feature of the wiki concept. It is the linking approach which allows wikis to function as a gloriously simple but powerful knowledge management tool, and can also lead to a characteristic wiki sprawling mess in the absence of careful wiki-gardening. Conventional HTML linking features won’t cut it, in my opinion. On the face of it, the only thing which matters about a wiki, is that you can edit a page really easily. But for me the wiki linking aspect cannot be dismissed.

London Bloggers Meet-up

Posted on by Harry Wood

I suppose I really have to blog about going along to the London Bloggers Meet-up last night. It would be rude not to.

It was held at the Dogetts Coat & Badge, which is a favourite of mine actually (We’ve taken my girlfriend’s Brazilian visitors to this pub for traditional english grub, and views over the Thames) . Last night the beer in the upstairs function room was flowing free (thanks stella) .

I think there’s quite a few competing meet-up events for “bloggers” in London. This is the first time I’ve been to one, partly because I wasn’t sure if I could really call myself a blogger. I’ve been properly blogging on harrywood.co.uk for eight months now though, so yes, I suppose I am now officially a blogger.  ….but still more of a “wikier” perhaps. 

So who are these London bloggers? This is something I had been wondering. Obviously anyone and everyone can be a blogger. It’s easy, and very mainstream these days. People from all walks of life. Female and male. Old and young. There was some evidence of this in the room, but of course there was still a heavy bias towards the usual IT demographic. 25-35 year old males. I’m sure blogging itself still has this bias, despite being increasingly mainstream. But also this was a meet-up of those bloggers who are keen enough about blogging itself (rather than just being keen on non-tech topics they blog about) to come along to a blogging meet-up, which I guess makes it more of a tech meet-up. Even so, it wasn’t a purely geeky gathering, which is good.

At the other extreme perhaps,  are the people who actually do jobs relating to blogging. Social media agencies, Web2.0 consultants, whatever you want to label them. Some people talked about PR type roles. I was surprised by the number of these people there seemed to be. Of course it isn’t surprising that such people would choose to come along to a London bloggers event, but I guess it’s surprising to come face-to-face with a fledgling industry which is emerging out of something as fun and chaotic as blogs

Anyway…. enough of this blogging about blogging

Future of the internet and how to stop it

Posted on by Harry Wood

Future of the Internet book coverI finished reading The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it a couple of days ago, but previously (having read most of it) I went along to the Innovation Reading Circle where seven or eight people sat around discussing the book.

Cyber law expert, Jonathan Zittrain, argues in this book, that that the internet’s future could be bleak, as we see it become more locked-down, less free and open and less inviting of innovation. He uses the term “generativity” to describe technologies which provide open platforms for tinkering and unexpected invention. The internet itself is generative at various layers, and our “end-point” PCs are also built to be generative, but new devices are less so. Tethered to their supplier and restricted in their programmability, these otherwise highly capable web-enabled devices represent a shift towards an undesirable future for the internet. Problems like spam and viruses, the downside of open generativity, may drive change through market forces, or ill-conceived legal interventions which fail to take account of the value of generativity.

The book’s title is obviously deliberately provocative, and in our discussions we were largely trying to decide whether he was overstating the doom and gloom. On the whole I felt that he constructed a detailed end-to-end argument and unlike the title, he didn’t really push an overly alarmist message that disaster is inevitable. Nonetheless I did find myself convinced that there is a problem with the way the internet is going, and whilst we can surely rely on market forces to keep us from some kind of total internet lock-down, the pendulum could still swing quite heavily in that direction if the consuming public and the law-makers do not grasp the issues.

And perhaps the most disturbing thing about the book, was that it did need a whole book (or at least the first two thirds of the book) to explain the issues from top-to-bottom. The merits and abuses of generativity ripple up and down the full technology stack, presenting recurring legal and technical cat and mouse games at every level. Take a narrow viewpoint, and the solutions seem simple.

Stag, Conferences and other chaos

Posted on by Harry Wood

There’s been lots of things keeping me busy these past few weeks.

I just got back from a stag weekend in Edinburgh at which I discovered that I am surprisingly good at clay pigeon shooting, but losing my touch when it comes to taking alcohol ….or leading the way with the excessive stag party boozing, depending on how you look at it. Today was baking hot weather. Yes! in Scotland! I was surprised. I should’ve known that would happen though. I was hungover, and hadn’t packed my sunglasses.

Stag Party Author’s Seat
UPDATE: My photos on Flickr, Fudo’s photos on Flickr

On the train I finished reading The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it. Very interesting book. I’ll have to dedicate a full blog post to it.

The openstreetmap conference was great. It was good to talk face-to-face with people behind the some of names I’ve been interacting with online. Lots of presentations and conversations which were thought provoking and educational. I also learned that if you drink too much guiness your poo goes very dark. Since the conference I’ve been meaning to get around to following up on various ideas I’d discussed with people. I don’t seem to be very good at finding the time for sitting down and coding, but…

I have found the time to be out and about doing more mapping, including bagging the Emirates Stadium. It’s always quite satisfying when you find a pocket of unmapped stuff, and you feel like you’re bringing the area up to a good level completion, but finding a missing sixty-thousand seater stadium was a bit of surprise! It’s because it is quite new, so people hadn’t spotted on Yahoo aerial imagery (because it isn’t on there)

What else? At work I’ve had a couple stressful days. I had to give a demonstration of new portal changes to some council big-wigs, and then at the end of last week I was deploying these changes on the live server. This didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. I had to stay late fixing things.

My little sister’s just been moving her stuff out, and my Belle moved out already. Soon the redecorating chaos will commence.

Going to the OpenStreetMap conference

Posted on by Harry Wood

State Of The Map 2008 PosterToday I’m flying to Ireland to go to The State of the Map, a conference all about OpenStreetMap. I’ll be spending this weekend meeting other OSM people and seeing a whole variety of talks on different aspects/ideas around project. I’m excited. Does this represent a disturbing escalation in my irrational obsession with this thing? …Let me explain.

I find the project compelling in many different ways. Like wikipedia, we’re building something great and free for the benefit of everyone. Unlike wikipedia, it’s only the beginning. The fun stage. We’re still very much building the map to achieve basic coverage. It’s exciting to be involved at this early stage. We are pioneers. It hasn’t (yet) reached that turning point where the whole exercise becomes anal and pedantic (as wikipedia feels sometimes). Even the mapping software is still under development. Maybe it always will be, because there’s limitless potential for new gorgeously visual graphical map editors and renderers.

And what’s so great about maps? Maps are fascinating to look at, but they’re also deeply anchored to the real world. They represent the world I travel to work in, and the world I go on holiday to. But the thing about OpenStreetMap which is simultaneously frustrating, bizarre, and amazingly fun: map copyrights, when you follow through the reasoning, will point to one ridiculous/marvellous conclusion: We have to go out and explore! Now I’m in a world where every street is waiting to become a tagged data element. Every journey is a mapping opportunity.

….Nope. I’m still coming across as disturbingly irrationally obsessed aren’t I?

The bad thing is, I’m taking Francine along with me to the conference. She wanted to come along for a fun weekend of flights and hotels and visiting Ireland. I’m a bit worried she might be bored senseless.