My name in lights (minus the name): Boo! After hours of hard work, I managed to get an AWN helper (nerdspeak for “a thing that shows stuff on my computer’s status bar”) for Workrave included in the official distribution (nerdspeak for “now everyone can use it”). I pinged OMG Ubuntu to say “hey! you like docks, and I wrote this thing! you should mention it,” and they did. They just left my name off the attribution.
All that hard work and no cred to go along with it. (0)
Portable scraping with ScraperWiki: A couple of years back I floated the idea of portable website scrapers that would be able to programmatically pull information off of websites regardless of language and platform. The folks at ScraperWiki have gone so far as to actually do it. Their version scrapes publicly available information (meaning that my use case of scraping my bank statements is out of scope) and stores the result in a publicly accessible manner. Props! (0)
In my mind, Mr. B is a genius. His graffiti is intelligent, thought provoking, funny, and accessible. I would love to live in a city that filled with that kind of art. If Robin Gunningham is Banksy, I hope that the media attention doesn’t slow him down. If not, I hope that Mr. Gunningham gets something out of his 15 minutes of fame.
Make sure your batteries are fully (and freshly) charged before heading out to an event. I was using batteries that were at 50% (according to my camera) and dicked around trying to replace them just before the stands went boom. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
For fast events that are happening at a known location, use a tripod. If I’d been six inches lower that branch obstructing the top of the stands wouldn’t have been in the way. I knew that when I was setting up, but I was too rushed (due to battery idiocy) to scootch. A tripod would have ensured that my photographs were set up properly. Hell, even a monopod would have done the trick.
Blogs are pretty neat. They allow a user to produce a stream of time-specific posts, that automatically appear in subscribers’ RSS readers. But every post on a blog looks the same.
That doesn’t make sense. Let’s say that I write movie reviews on my blog – I want every review to include the movie poster, a link to the movie’s website, and a star rating. With WordPress, I’d have to hand craft every post to contain that information. Hand crafting is easy to screw up, boring to do, and hard to change in future.
What if we give each post a skin? When the user is writing the post, they can say “this is a movie review”, and WordPress is smart enough to ask for the website link, star rating, and link to the movie poster. When WordPress serves that post up, it’s wrapped in a special blob of HTML that renders the links and stars properly.
You’ve noticed that I’m talking movie reviews. Does that ring a bell? Perhaps about microformats? If we’re careful when we sculpt the skin for our review, it can include a hReview, meaning that a web crawler can detect a review and index it appropriately.
chameleon is a first cut at skinning. It’s missing a little javascript goop (to show movie posters and hide some stuff on the post editing page), but it’s functional, supporting hReview and hCalendar by default.
Here’s one to file under the odd links category: The Canadian Gazette publishes a list of unclaimed bank balances. One wonders how to go about claiming a balance, and if there are regulations as to who can make the claim.
OpenMoko should be releasing its fully open source cellphone any day now (q4 2007, March, no April, no May). We’re now told it’ll be available on July 4. I have a sneaking suspicion that Android will be out before the OpenMoko FreeRunner is available/usable for consumers.
Folks wandering around Centretown in the past few weeks may have noticed signs like these. Apparently there’s a pilot episode of a sci-fi TV series being filmed by some folks at Carleton U and Algonquin (methinks it’s a class project, but that’s by the by).
It looks like we working stiffs aren’t eligible however. Filming is one day a week from mid July to September. For more info, take a look at http://www.factorymonkey.com.
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So Banksy’s identity may have been discovered. For those who don’t know, Banksy is a “street artist” (read graffiti artist) who specializes in is own brand of agitprop. Along with producing fantastic graffiti, he’s broken into galleries to hang up his own work and improved famous London statues1.
And for the folks who call graffiti a blight on the urban landscape, it’s worth noting that Banksy’s graffiti is receiving protection from property owners. At least one town council is ensuring that one of his paintings is protected, and another has been protected by a sheet of plastic. If a similar talent started working in Ottawa, would we recognize it?
