84Fitzroy.org

Here's a graph that shows traffic, over the last day, on our Internet connection here at the office (time runs backwards from the left-hand side of the graph):

See the two "mountains" of traffic, one yesterday afternoon and the other starting at 9:00 a.m. this morning? That's all spam. Loads of it. Floods of it. Enough incoming network traffic that our SMTP server is having trouble keeping up.

In this case it's not the spam itself that's a problem -- most of it is so obviously spam that we can easily throw it into /dev/null -- but rather the impact on our bandwidth, and the server resources needed to identify and throw the spam away.

Looking at our mail server logs, this spam is coming from all over the place -- there's no discernable pattern of IP addresses or domain names that we could simply firewall out. And so I'm sort of as a loss as to how to react, other than to hope that, like the flood yesterday, this too shall pass.

Anyone have any advice to offer?

Directions to a man from Alabama, looking for a mocha latte on lower Queen Street: "See that sign up the street on the other side with the sunshine on it that says Cora's? Don't go there. But walk there, and then go two doors up."

I've been experimenting with the beta of Nokia Chat for the past few days; it's an interesting application, with lots of promise, and is pleasantly open, in that it's built on the XMPP protocol. This is the same protocol used by Jabber and Google Talk, and so Nokia Chat interoperates nicely with those services (you cannot, however, use an existing Jabber or Google Talk account with Nokia Chat -- you're forced to create a new "@ovi.com" account).

The tag-line for Nokia Chat is "more than just messaging" and its ability to share location, using the built-in GPS in modern Nokia devices, is the feature that is used to differentiate it from other instant messaging apps.

How this actually works isn't immediately obvious unless you happen to be using the application to chat to other Nokia Chat users, as the location sharing features aren't even on the menu when you're chatting with users on other networks. Here, for example, is what my Nokia Chat menu looks like when I'm chatting with Mark, who's using Jabber.org:

Compare this to a chat with another Nokia Chat user; there's now a "Send" menu option, with two sub-options, "Voice message" and "My location."

Now in this case the user I'm chatting with is actually a xmpphp script that's signed into another Nokia Chat account. Because of this I was able to watch the actual XML being sent back and forth; what I found was that if this script advertised its presence like this:

then Nokia Chat didn't show the special "Send" menu. However if I modified the script to advertise that I was a client with some additional capabilities:

then Nokia Chat took me to be capable of receiving location (loc-1) and voice message (vim-1) presence updates and acted accordingly, displaying the "Send" menu as above.

So what actually gets sent when I select "Send | My location" to a contact from within Nokia Chat? Simply more XML, it turns out, using the geoloc XMPP extension:

(The message also contains a link to a Mapquest.com URL which I've removed in the XML above for brevity).

On the receiving side, when someone sends you a location in Nokia Chat, the message looks like this:

When you select the "Open" link, the Nokia Maps application starts up and zooms to the given location.

Because this is all done using XML, using published protocols, the door is open to build all sorts of interesting applications that hook into Nokia Chat. Sending location information, for example, to a XMPP-speaking bot, would provide a built-in mechanism for sending location updates to a web application.

Stay tuned for more experimenting.

I got my fresh-off-the-press copy of the new book A Good Summer this afternoon from my friend Ann:

The book features the photographs of Island photographer Anna Karpinski accompanied by text from 16 Island writers. I'm honoured to be one of the 16: I wrote a paragraph about my brother Steve's official reprimand for not attending the Gold Cup and Saucer Parade one summer.

The design of the book, by Mathew MacKay, is wonderful: he's come up with a design that would have worked well in 1966, looked dated in the interim, but suddenly feels exactly right for this moment.

The book is being formally launched on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. in an event -- open to the public, meaning you -- being held at The whY. There will be readings, signings and refreshments.

You can buy the book online from Nimbus or ask your local bookseller to order ISBN 9781894838320.

First, it's cotton boll, not cotton ball. And the boll weevil feeds on same. Also, a weevil is not a rat-sized gopher-like mammal but rather a small beetle.

Second, if you're Cornish you're from Cornwall. I'd never made that connection before.

Oh, and there's a Margate in England too (we have our very own Margate here on PEI). The things you can learn from Relocation, Relocation.

Ask Eygló is a regular column on the Iceland Review site that invites readers to submit questions about Iceland that are "neither rude, thick, nor difficult to answer."

Here's the construction site at the University of PEI for the new Canada Games track and field facility:

Here's the attempt to mitigate the effects of having a giant pile of red dirt flowing into the tiny creek that's right beside the construction site:

Here's how well it worked, taken yesterday morning after a small amount of rain fell on Charlottetown:

A few years ago, basking in the afterglow of the first Zap Your PRAM conference, the lads from upstairs and I were having lunch and pondering what to do for a follow-up act. Someone -- it might have been me, but I can't recall -- suggested that we launch an "Artist in Residence" program here at 84 Fitzroy Street. In the way that pompous ideas are often greeted around our lunch table -- we're not programmers, we're artists! -- this one was warmly received, and we set off in search of our first candidates.

Our first candidates fell through -- the lure of Hollywood -- and the idea sort of collapsed around them.

Until last summer when I suggested to my Swanish friends Olle and Luisa that they be the first candidates. The idea percolated in their heads for a year, and this year they accepted the appointment, and on September 30, 2008 they'll begin their 3-week residency here.

I'll leave it to Olle and Luisa to flesh out their own artistry -- suffice to say they probably won't be painting still life portraits of Beaconsfield. They've just lauched Hello PEI as the blog of their project, and if nothing else this promises to be a goldmine of "seeing the Island through strangers' eyes" flow.

If you'd like to sign on as a co-conspirator or sponsor, or otherwise be involved, please let if be known.

Noting for the record that .mobi, which is in theory the domain for "the mobile web," is not numeric-keypad-typing friendly (the m and the o are both on the 6 key, which means you must pause between keying them in). On a similar note, Nokia's ovi brand name is mobile-friendly -- 666-888-444 will type it for you. Of course "mtg" (key "684") would be even friendlier, but it's not as strong a brand name...

The Dryden Municipal Telephone System is "a full-service public utility telephone company owned by the City of Dryden." It suggests here that they are also poised to become third GSM carrier in Canada, albeit, presumably, for a limited area (Dryden is a "city" of 9,000 people in north-western Ontario).

Fully MWS Compatible PAMP. Neato. Accusations of acronym and initialism overuse are warranted.

Let me briefly sing the praises of the amazing bit open source of code that is Zebra Barcode Reader. Using the zebraimg application that's included with the source code, I can take a JPEG image of a UPC code on the back of a and get the book's ISBN returned to me as text.

I've managed to assemble the pieces of a puzzle that lets me take a photo of a book's UPC code, email it to my server, and receive back, a few seconds later, the best Amazon.com prices for new and used copies of the book. It all seems, well, rather magical when it works. And the barcode decoding part of the process seems to work very, very well -- 100% so far, in fact.

This was all induced by this 43 Folders blog post about iPhone applications that don't exist -- I reasoned that, as the Nokia N95 has an excellent macro mode for taking close-ups with its 5MP camera, it would also be very good at taking barcode photos with enough resolution to easily decode. And it does.

Here's how the process works. First, I take a photo with the N95's camera, using the macro mode and holding the camera about 6 inches above the UPC code:

Next, I email the photo, using the N95's built in mail application and its wifi connection, to a special email address I've set up on my server. There's a script on the server that intercepts the incoming email, pulls the JPEG image's MIME attachment out of the message, runs the image through zebraimg to get the UPC code, and then uses the Amazon.com API ItemLookup operation to find the title, author and prices for the book. These are then simply emailed back to the sending address:

If you have a new Prince Edward Island driver license -- the crazy all-digital ones with the tiny numbers beside each field -- flip it over and you'll see a barcode. Thanks to The SWIPE Toolkit it's easy to find out what information is encoded in that barcode. For me, the "processed" version of the results came out like this:

There's actually more information in there, which you only see if you look at the "raw bytes" tab in the Toolkit application; this Pennsylvania document can be of assistance in understanding what the fields mean. In there I see information like my name and eye colour that the Toolkit doesn't parse.

The PDF417 format for the barcode used in Prince Edward Island is used many other places too, so if you live elsewhere you may be able to do this just as easily. It took me about 5 minutes from scan to decode, and worked on a Mac (it's a Java application). Be sure to save your scanned image as a JPEG (I tried TIFF and it didn't work).

Nokia Map Loader 2.0 came out of beta today. This is a big step, as the old Map Loader never worked for me -- something to do with Parallels and USB and device drivers -- and I was forced to resort to other means to load map data into my Nokia N95.

I'm happy to report that the new version supports "PC Suite" mode for data transfer, routing around my USB issues. And it's a much slicker application too.

I happened upon this page on the PEI Department of Cultural Affairs website this afternoon and was hit with a sudden waft of time travel: the design of that page is one that I put together more than 7 years ago for the Province of PEI -- here's an Internet Archive of the www.gov.pe.ca front page from 2001 that uses the template.

I always loved that design -- it's my favourite of all the interations the site has gone through over the years. All that crazy green and blue and orange, and the jaunty swoosh, borrowed from the wordmark, that just peeks over the edge into the green.

Icelandair cuts winter flights, reports Nova Scotia Business Journal. What was supposed to be year-round flights from Halifax to Keflavik will now be suspended for the winter, with the last flight for this year on October 20, 2008.

This is really too bad: Icelandair is a much better alternative to Air Canada for getting to Europe, if only because Keflavik is so much better a hub than Heathrow or Frankfurt.

Fortunately for any Europeans coming to Zap Your PRAM, the October shutdown date comes the day after Zap closes.

There has never been a Rukavina in the Olympics (pointer from Jason Kottke -- to the site, not the Rukavina absence, that is).

With the redesign that launched yesterday, the City Cinema page in Plazes becomes much more functional.