84Fitzroy.org

Consider a science fiction story in which there are two classes of people: those who have arrived, and those who aspire. The Aspirants, as they are called, spend a life damned to aspire to but never achieve a comfortable role in society. In this story I would be an Aspirant and the role to which I'd aspire would be at the heart of the demographic of Mountain Equipment Coop.

I mean, what's not to like: it's a coop, their stores are beautiful and ecologically tilted, and they sell cool, intricate purposes-designed gear.

In my role as a MEC Aspirant I almost always visit a MEC store when I find myself in a city with one, and tonight was no different: driving home from supper with Mike I spotted the new Burlington store on Brant Street and pulled a quick U-turn with the car. Once inside I was left, as usual, to gaze forlornly at the grappling hooks and kayak racks and extra-bright bicycle lights and the trousers with pockets for ice axes, wishing only for one little slice of a hobby that would cause me to need any of these wonders.

Sure, I bought a kids travel backpack there back in March, but a kids travel backpack is surely not at the heart of that to which I aspire. It's no ice axe, no extra-large BPA-free Nalgene water bottle, no bear can.

When they announced that the store was closing for the night in 15 minutes I panicked, knowing that unless something changed I would end up in the parking lot with my Aspirant frown still painted on. I couldn't face the prospect. So I bought myself a spork. A nice titanium spork.

I don't actually need a spork: there is no activity in my life that would be weighed down too much by carring both a spoon and a fork. But I've always wanted a spork. I've gazed at the sporks on every previous visit to Mountain Equipment Coop. And so I'm hoping that by quenching my sporky desires I will somehow, if not give up my role as Aspirant, be at least able to move on.

I took my parents out to see Public Enemies tonight (capsule review: avoid at all costs; a dreadful, unfocused movie the only redeeming feature of which is the typeface used for the credits). Because it was opening night I thought buying tickets online in advance would be a good idea, and as we were going to the SilverCity in Burlington, this led me to the Cineplex website for ordering.

Other than being forced to become a "member" of Cineplex in order just to buy tickets, the purchase process went smoothly. The confirmation screen contained this strong directive:

You might think, from this message, what with all its MUST emphasis, that I needed to print the form out and enter my "booking number" to be able to pick up my tickets. Lacking a printer with which to do this, I ended up creating a PDF of the confirmation, transferring it to my mobile phone, and then ensuring that my mobile phone had enough juice to stay alive until we got to the theater.

When we arrived at the theater I went straight to the ticket pick-up machine, clicked on the "Pick Up Tickets" option, and was presented with the option of simply swiping my credit card to pick up the tickets. I did this, the tickets spit out, and I was on my way in about 8 seconds.

I wish they would align the instructions on their ticket-buying website with the reality of their ticket picking-up system: it would save a lot of needless confirmation form printing and hassle.

I had the pleasure of a brief chat with Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap progenitor, at reboot11 last week. Steve is a kind and voluble man, and I learned a lot about the skills you need to propose a crazy idea ("let's make an open home-brew street map of the world!") and have people follow you.

Now that vast tracts of the world are actually in OpenStreetMap, Steve suggested that the next level of data gathering might be collecting points for street addresses. This isn't exactly at a "we've 100% decided how to do this" state in the OpenStreetMap universe, but there's a generally accepted standard that people are using and the map is rendering, so that's good enough to plunge in. So I did. Here's how.

First, I headed out into the field with my GPS-equipped Nokia N95 mobile phone running the free WhereAmI application that allows GPS waypoints to be annotated (note that, because of nature of the N95, you likely have to sign this application before installing on your mobile).

Once the GPS had found enough satellites to find its location I started walking down the street. With the Annotate tab selected in WhereAmI I pressed the centre button on the N95's joystick when I was walking by the centre-point of each house, and added the house number as the "Name" of the annotation:

One way up the street I did this on foot; the other way I did it on a bicycle (the street's not very busy, so it was easy to amble). When I was finished, the WhereAmI Named tab had annotations for every house number on the street:

When I got back home I selected Options | Named | Save Named To File... in WhereAmI, and this exported all of my annotations as a GPX file to the E: drive of the phone:

Next I started up the built-in File Manager application on the phone, navigated to the E: drive (or "memory card"), found the exported file -- called wami-annotations-03.gpx -- and sent it to my Mac laptop by Bluetooth:

With the annotations file on my laptop, I was now ready to add the addresses to OpenStreetMap. Because of a peculiarity with OpenStreetMap importing -- it won't import a GPX file that consists entirely of waypoint and no tracks -- I first had to use GPSBabel to convert the GPX file into a native OSM-format file. I selected "GPX XML" as the Input File Type and "OpenStreetMap data files" as the output file type:

With the OSM-formatted file now in hand I fired up JOSM, the desktop OpenStreetMap editor, downloaded the existing map data for my neighbourhood, and then loaded (simply with File | Open) the OSM file with my annotations: this loaded my house number points into the map, and I was then able to edit each one, placing it to the right or left of the street and adding metadata to each point, specifically:

• addr:housenumber - for the house number, i.e. 343
• addr:street - for the street name, i.e. Progreston Road
• addr:city - for the city name, i.e. Carlisle
• addr:state - for the state abbreviation, i.e. ON
• addr:country - for the country abbreviation, i.e. CA

More details on the standards to use are on the OpenStreetMap wiki. The result was a map that looked like this:

Finally, I uploaded my changes to OpenStreetMap -- File | Upload to OSM -- and then went to the web-based Potlatch editor where I was able to see the satellite layer under my newly-loaded points and fine-tune the position of each housenumber so that the point fell over the house itself:

The result should is that now, a few hours later now that the map tiles have rendered, you see house numbers on the street my parents live on in Ontario:

It's not hard to imagine a modified OpenStreetMap-house numbering-optimized version of the WhereAmI application that would smooth over some of the steps in this process, but even with the standard setup I used it wasn't all that difficult, and the entire process, including field time, was less than an hour.

I test-drove the Nihola three-wheeled bicycle at the Fridhems Cykel shop in Malmö.

All the Swedes I've talked to refer to the # sign as square. Like "to get your balance you press star 1 2 0 square and then call."

At Folk å Rock in downtown Malmö:

Can you help me identify this music, snapped in a clothing store in downtown Malmö?

A random assortment of experiences at day two of this year’s reboot conference:

• Building spaces with pen, paper and curiosity was a fantastic workshop talk by Ole Qvist-Sørensen from Bigger Picture: participatory and revelatory. If you're looking for a novel take on helping groups work, look here.
• While I was fiddling with pen and paper, Mark Wubben was upstairs talking about ubicomp, and he included a slide about The Talking Bus. And I wasn't there to bask in the glory of the story.
• The Place to Work saw thirty people squeezed into a hallway talking about working in coworking spaces, shared offices and cafés. The most interesting part was the go-around-the-room where everyone said a little about their own working situation. I sat beside Mikkel Hippe Brun, who rolls with his own battery-operated telephone-network connected wireless router.
• David Sjunnesson, from 1scale1, who I've been meeting every morning on the train in from Malmö, was the one to get me over my Arduino inhibitions: I spent 80 minutes cramped into a room with 30 other eager geeks (including Catherine) at the Full Body Arduino workshop. David and his crew were excellent tutors, and when I made my Mac make the Arduino blink its LED (to my surprise) I felt God-like.
• Bruce Sterling, who lost me at the LIFT conference several years ago, pulled me back in with a surgically-crafted poke in the eye with a stick as the closing talk. Throw away your socks with holes, get a new bed. Brilliant observations from a position hovering a mile above our enlightened self-involvement.
• The Baking Bread project never did see us bake bread, but we did make a fetching solar oven that, with some fine-tuning over yesterday, got up to 136 degrees C this afternoon and made Guy Dickinson a mildly-steaming-hot cup of strong tea. Thanks to Peter Madsen-Mygdal for the raw materials, the wrangling and the enthusiasm.
• I met several people who found my reboot by bicycle guide -- prepared a couple of years ago -- useful. That felt good.
• Spent a great dinner over great Thai food talking with Olle and Luisa and Christian Dalager about all sorts of crazy ideas ("social drawing-sharing website," "RSS feed of our bank transactions," "capture the flag with RFID," etc.) Christian's a kindred spirit and our ideas and projects overlap a lot, so I'm certain we'll end up working together.
• Ended the night in the meat-packing district at the after-party. More loungey than Vega (where previous years ended), and a nice feel to it (it was in parking lot, so I spent a good part of the evening leaning on a transport truck's tires). Had a good chat with João Santos, and many laughs and good-byes with many others.
• Finished at the top of the game, as my old basketball coach always advised, and caught the midnight train with the Malmö crew.

It's 2:02 a.m. as I finish this up; should be asleep, but there's a lot to process and this is one way that helps. This was reboot number five for me, and reboot number one for Catherine (more about that when I've talked to her more about it); it's a special place with special people and I'm thankful I somehow found my way here.

Oliver wrote me an email last night from his grandparents. He signed it "love your sun." How right he is. Tears in my eyes.

A random assortment of experiences at day one of this year's reboot conference:

• Through Morgan, met the team from Novalis, that, among other things, make a Rails application that helps measure community happiness. Exchanged business cards with hopes that their work might somehow benefit QoIL.
• Had an good conversation with Luisa and Catherine and Jonas and Yann about community building, neighbourhoods and digital-physical crossovers like this.
• Got together with an interesting group of people to build a prototype of a solar bread oven using cardboard, aluminum foil, plastic and glue. We call it a "prototype" because it never got about 36 degrees C inside. But we're going back at it today.
• Took the Flickr Bike, helpfully lent by Mark, to the shop around the corner to buy an oven thermometer. Of course the bike took pictures of the journey.
• Injured my leg getting on the Flickr Bike: forgot there was a sharp solar panel on the back and put a minor gash into my femur. I will survive.
• Did more session-surfing than session-immersion. Lost heart mid-afternoon -- likely a combination of solar bread oven fatigue and dehydration -- but regained my moxie around supper time.
• Made a tiny contribution to Ton's Open Government Data by talking about the ClosedCorporations.org project.
• Met David Sjunnesson and decided to attend today's Full Body Arduino workshop.
• Sat across from Dave Weinberger at supper, wherein he (very pleasantly, and with much skill) tried to drive a wedge between Catherine on the "net culture vs. wool culture" issue. Followed by an informative conversation about the Google Book Search Settlement.
• Lamented the absence of a vegetarian option at supper: the food was local, well-prepared (over roaring fires outside on the patio), but very sheep-based.
• Put forward the Royalty Oaks Project for the Reboot Prize.
• Left early, by reboot terms, catching the 23h00 train to Malmö with the Malmövians; exhausted and somewhat mind-boggled, but otherwise happy.

Today, day two.

Back in the late 1980s the bee's knees of "you don't have to be a programmer to make awesome stuff" tools was HyperCard for the Mac. It was, in its essence, a visual data juggling tool that let applications get "painted" rather than "programmed."

Making systems that allow complex, powerful and interesting things to be constructed with a simple tool-set with a gentle learning curve is not easy: believe me, it's what I've been asymptotically doing this for years. Simple is never simple.

Yesterday I attended a workshop about Hoist. Going in I had no idea what Hoist was about; Luisa invited me to go along with a group from Signal Digital and I was intrigued by the "something cool in the state of Denmark" prospect to set aside the "oh, and the first hour is in Danish" as something I could press on through and overcome.

Through a combination of good visuals, kind translators, and a hands-on workshop that was quickly hacked into English for my benefit, I emerged with a fairly complete picture of what Hoist is.

Hoist is, in its essence, HyperCard for Drupal.

Drupal is a fabulously capable open source toolkit for making websites. It is part content management system, part programming framework, part pattern language. Like any open source fabulously capable system, Drupal has rough edges and UI bottlenecks; the modern Drupal 6 is light years ahead of the antique Drupal 4 in this regard, but there's still ground to cover before Drupal's ease-of-use catches up with its awesome power, and it's into these crevices that Hoist is shining its light.

If you're Drupal-literate, the technical description of what Hoist does is roughly as follows:

• A web interface for creating new Drupal instances (they call them "Spaces").
• A new UI layer for creating CCK content types (they call them "Apps").
• A set of Views that automatically get attached to new content types.
• A set of canned "Apps" -- content types and related Views -- for common tasks like "Meetings" and "Events" and "Ideas."
• A simple method for creating Blocks (they call them "Widgets").
• A wrapper around all of this that lets them sell it as a web service, charging on a cost-per-user basis.

If you're not Drupal-literate, the simpler explanation of what Hoist does is "makes creating websites that gather and report on different sorts of information easier." So if you need to have your staff of 35 salespeople enter their nightly prospect reports, you can, with relative ease, create a "Nightly Prospect Reports" application in a few minutes of drag-and-drop action:

You end up with a new menu option that gets exposed to all the "members of your Space:"

And they can start entering their Nightly Prospect Reports:

While it might be something of an exaggeration to anoint Hoist with HyperCard ease-of-use, especially in these early days, compared to the regular Drupal "create a new CCK content type, add new views, configure the display of the fields, create Views to all the content type to be reports on" string of actions required to achieve the same thing, Hoist is a considerable leap forward in the HyperCard direction.

While Hoist is still a little rough around the edges, something exaggerated, perhaps, by the abysmal wifi at the workshop, there's clearly considerable talent involved in rounding these off, and kudos must go to the entire Hoist team for being involved in the workshop, and for listening as much as telling. They hold their workshops every week, and at the intermission between the format presentation and the hands-on they serve cake, coffee and fresh fruit; it's hard not to love a company that serves cake.

Today was my day to go exploring outside of the immediate neighbourhood of our apartment here in Malmö and south into so-called "integrated Malmö," which is to say "interesting Malmö," which is to say "the rich and diverse part Malmö that includes people from many cultures."

The dividing line between downtown touristic commercial Malmö and the other Malmö is quite stark: you walk past the Triangeln shopping centre on Södra Förstadsgatan and all of a sudden H&M gives way to Myrorna, and the innumerable Espresso House of downtown disappear, replaced with innumerable places to buy falafel.

Both sides of Malmö have their attractions, but this "other" Malmö certainly pulses with a more dynamic energy.

My immediate destination was Restaurang Nowroz -- and I had a wonderful meal of grilled chicken and rice there -- but I spent an hour or so wandering around the streets and alleys, eventually ending up in front of Carib Kreol, our destination for tonight's pre-reboot supper (as I picked the place, I felt the least I could do was to ensure it was actually there).

On the way back to our neighbourhood I came very close to buying, for 125 SEK, a fetching dark-green waist-length wool jacket at the aforementioned Myrorna used clothing shop; I ultimately decided, despite its wonderfulness, that it was about a size too small for me (or I a size to large for it). If you're more L than XL and are in the market for a nice jacket, it's waiting there for you...

I walked back to our Västergatan apartment in time to meet up with Guy, just arrived from Manchester. On the way I stopped at the Five o'clock tehandel tea shop to pick up a small bag of 2009 first-flush Darjeeling, which sounds more impressive until I tell you I've no idea what that means and even less impressive once I managed to bungle its preparation and produced the evilest, foulest-tasting tea ever prepared. To his credit, Guy grimaced, but finished his cup. Nobody asked for more. Darjeeling needs a gentler touch than I can offer it, I fear.

After some time in our beautiful courtyard knocking around ideas with Guy, we were joined by Olle and headed back into Other Malmö for supper with Luisa, Morgan and, later, M.C. Widerkrantz (who introduced himself by saying "Deb Richardson says to say hello," thus proving the Escher-like nature of the hacker community that we think is vast but that actually only includes 112 people).

After supper (tasty, served with friendliness, but ultimately not life-changing) we stopped for a brief spot of coffee and Setúbal-sourced alcohol and then walked Guy back to retrieve his gear and set him off on the train over to Copenhagen (the other Other Malmö).

Tomorrow morning it's up before the dawn to join Luisa at Signal Digital for the day, where they've kindly offered me a temporary desk to set down and do a day of concerted paying work amidst all this merriment.

Odd and sad coincidence given my post referencing Projects for Change: I just got word that Jim Hamilton, one of the original P4C gang, has died. Jim and I never lived in the same place at the same time, but our lives overlaid in many places and he was always very nice to me. Thoughts to his brother Richard (my old roommate and fellow warrior) and everyone else who knew Jim.

Today we joined a gaggle of Malmöians and drove up to the northern tip of Skåne to visit the occasionally putative independent country of Ladonia. It was a beautiful day: sun shining, temperature around 18 degrees, no bugs, good company.

To get to Ladonia we headed to the Kullaberg Nature Reserve, parked our car in the second of two parking lots, and then followed the unofficial wayfinding -- yellow Ns painted on trees -- through the forest and then down a steep slope to the boulder-strewn shore.

Once there we found the "village" of Nimis:

And, up the shore a little, the "village" of Arx:

Both are the product of the imagination, resolve and hard labour of artist Lars Vilks and are quite a site to behold (see a map of all my photos here).

If you do go yourself beware that it's quite a strenuous hike at times, especially the steep parts as you head down to the shore from the main path. There are rocks and roots to trip over and mud to slip on. You need good shoes and good balance.

A silver lining at the beginning or end of your journey to Ladonia is Himmelstorpsgården, a pleasant little café with outdoor seating that serves coffee, cinnamon rolls, and nice pear-flavoured ice cream treats.

Olle took us to Forskningsavdelningen today -- Research Department in Swedish. It's a hackerspace here in Malmö that he's a member of. To get there meant walking out of the bourgeois heart of the city into its near-industrial fringe and into a collection of low-rise red brick buildings that house, among other things, a Greek school and artists lofts.

Forskningsavdelningen itself is part of a broader "creative and political freehaven" called Utkanten that includes a performance space, workshops and lounge. The aesthetic is spray-paint and concrete slash old couches slash power tools. Emma Goldman meets This Old House means CGBG.

And it did all feel vaguely familiar: back in the mid-1980s I was involved with a group, Projects for Change, that you could call a sort of "analog Forskningsavdelningen."

The tools of our trade were Letraset and Gestetner duplicators the great issues of the day were capital punishment, the war in El Salvador and the arms race. We had a tiny store-front at 139½ Hunter Street that contained some desks, a library, a slide projector, a turntable with a collection of Tom Waits records. And a lot of piss and vinegar. It was a rag-tag group of young and old, with political bents ranging from socialist to anarchist. I made a lot of good friends there, learned a lot about issues I knew nothing of, and developed the shape of my own political philosophy, such as it is.

Forskningsavdelningen is decidedly more digital in nature and is more Mechanics' Institute than political salon. There are computers and telephones and an electric organ, soldering irons and old switchboards and piles of old hard disks. And a few copies of The Whole Earth Catalog.

Utkanten describes itself as a space "free from the capitalistic and static society that has invaded and corrupted our lives and tries to smash all our dreams and hopes that anything ever could be different than the present" and it's interesting, heartening, to see digital work happening in such an environment when so much of the digital landscape is littered with the petty concerns of monetizing friendship, selling the dream of the finally-perfected mobile device and helping cloistered academics navigate their siloed specialties more effectively.

You don't need a freehaven to set your sights on pointing digital work in more interesting, enlightening and valuable directions, but it certainly doesn't hurt: working in an environment that's infused with a spirit of boundarylessness does wonders for removing the walls of the prisons we choose to live inside.

My visit to Forskningsavdelningen has set my mind racing, and has ignited some long-dormant passions. And put me in a good frame of mind to take on reboot's "action" theme with a newly-refreshed set of eyes.

As a longtime admirer and user of Mint, and someone never-quite-satisfied with the state of my RSS toolset, I was excited to find that Mint author Shaun Inman has a new project, a web-based feedreader called Fever.

Fever is an interesting kind of software: it's not a desktop application, and it's not a web-based service. Instead it's a PHP application you install on your own server and thus to use it you need something capable of running PHP and MySQL. And while that "something" can be as simple as your own Mac or PC, and while the installation into that something has been made about as dead simple as such a process can be, it's still not a process for those who find "drag the program's icon into you Applications folder" about all the technical knowledge they want to possess. It was easy for me; I wouldn't necessarily suggest my father take on the task.

Here's the Fever elevator pitch:

That's a pretty good description of where I was at: 128 feeds in NetNewsWire, a mixture of locals and must-reads and generic cruft, and a general lack of enthusiasm for the whole task combined with a vague feeling that if I dropped out of the flow entirely I might miss Something Important.

Fever aims to cure that malaise by sectioning your feed landscape into two big piles: the Kindling, must-read feeds like your son's blog or news from Ward 3, and Sparks, the "inessential" feeds that serve only to pop interesting links into Fever's automated automagical "Hot" list of items in your feed-pool that have received attention from multiple sources.

It took me about 30 minutes to get up and running with Fever: setting up a MySQL database, installing and running a pre-flight check script that makes sure your setup is Fever-capable (a pre-customer-service masterstroke), purchasing a license ($US30), exporting my feeds from NetNewsWire and importing into Fever. I then spent some time paring down my feed list, getting rid of old feeds that never get updated, and feeds that concerns interests I no longer have.

And here is the punchline: Fever actually did for me what it said it was going to. At first I couldn't believe it: this morning there were only 5 unread items in my "Kindling" to read when I would usually be faced with 40 or 50 unread items in NetNewsWire. I thought something was broken, and fired up NetNewsWire to see what Fever was missing. It turns out that it wasn't missing: there really were only 5 must-read items waiting for me to read; everything else was just a lot of "cool iPhone 3GS hacks"-like posts that I was simply in the habit of scanning right over. Now, if enough authors of my "Sparks" feeds think I really oughta know about the cool iPhone 3GS hacks, then that news will show up in "Hot." Otherwise, I never have to be bothered with it.

Suffice to say that, at least so far, I am happy with my new Fever, and it's become my newsreader of choice.