Puzzlepieces – tag ‘me’

Yet another in millions of articles over the years about supposed schemes to reduce global poverty and otherwise deal with the problems of developing nations. The problem with all of this of course, is that world leaders always go for big, top-down plans that end up costing huge amounts and accomplishing nothing. The World Bank, for instance, runs massive projects that burn through money, and often end up leaving countries worse off than they began.

The only thing that has ever really worked anywhere, is local, small-scale, bottom-up ideas. Microcredit comes to mind as an example, now served by companies such as , as pioneered by Kiva and MicroPlace. It also makes me think of Wangari Maathai’s work.

Gas purchases plummet | | TerraPass: Fight global warming, promote alternative energy - sometimes I forget that people can change

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody - couple of things here I agree with, couple that I disagree with.

To start with, I thought “journalists” calling non-fad web things fads was going to die years ago. The internet is not a fad. Blogging is not a fad. Sharing stuff on the web, clearly not a fad. Lolcats are a fad. Sharing pictures of your cat is not a fad. This is hardly an opinion. Were people still calling radio a fad when it had as much penetration as blogs do today?

Once upon a time in the ancient 1940s, people wondered what humans would do with all the free time afforded by machines doing most of their work, like cleaning, cooking, etc. Try to find someone today who says they have enough free time.

So what happened? Why didn’t we get our free time? Well we did. But the available options with which to occupy our time has increased much faster than our free time has. People no longer need to invent things to do with their free time, they have to spend extra time deciding which things to try to do in their free time, as they can only do a small subset of what they want to do. The difficulty today is to look at the millions of options out there, and eliminate virtually all of them from your life. Realizing that removing things from your life will make it more full; that is tricky.

Saying that you do not have time for something is always a lie. You have time for whatever it is you decide to have time for.

Oh, and to tie that back in, it is nice that an increasing amout of what people are spending their time on is contributing to the public good, such as Wikipedia, as discussed in the article.

I started writing this post a few weeks ago and have mostly forgotten what I was going to write about. whups…

Headway Wiki is a great wiki for public transit data, which accompanies the Headway blog. I added some links for Waterloo, Toronto, and Seattle.

It is great seeing that some cities are opening up their data in a somewhat standard format, although I wish everyone would. Governments trying to keep their data private is almost universally pointless and counter-productive. Google Transit seems to be the best generalized transit trip planner (on the other hand, there seem to be several new ones I haven’t explored), although sites targeted to specific cities often offer a lot more.

Unfortunately I missed out on the first Metronauts unconference, Metronauts being an expansion of TorontoTransitCamp. The wiki is sorta all over the place, but I guess moving from unconferences to major projects takes time.

random rant. biofuel is a bad idea, almost always, if not always. this has been clear since the ideas were first proposed, and confirmed with more and more studies. why does so much of the world not get this? to be fair, I realize that part of the reason is the US corn surplus, thanks to the insanity of the US farm bill

Right to Quiet Society - Home Page - listening to Sounds Like Canada this morning and they were talking about sound pollution, something that bugs me infinitely. The link goes to a website they mentioned, for what may be the most prominent organization advocating for non-insanity on the matter. Non-insanity, of course, being defined as agreeing with me.

There are a huge number of noise problems, so I will mention some that are bugging me at the moment.

Problem unawareness - the fact that many don’t even realize that this is a problem is a problem in itself. People tend to think of tangible pollutants, and discount sound and others. Reminds me of the song Garbage.

Public music obligatoriness - restaurants, malls, stores, elevators, gyms, etc. all feel the need to be playing music 100% of the time. I suspect people buy more than they otherwise would, what with being unable to actually think things through on account of the noise. I would say that it is okay for some of these places to play music sometimes, but none of them should be playing music all the time.

The number of places where one can not have to listen to music is quite sad. I managed to forget my goggles when swimming on Saturday, meaning I kept my head above water for most of the hour-long swim. It wasn’t until then that I realized how insanely they blast music in there. A pool is a noisy place already, what with the echoing. Even good music sounds terrible at the volume they have to keep it at to hear it.

I really do not understand the concept of a restaurant or other venue in which one cannot actually hear anyone. Do people not go out to, you know, talk to each other?

Excessive volume - almost all the movies I have been to in theatres lately have been deafening. Literally painful to the ears to start with. I suppose we are on a very bad cycle these days: people listen to music/tv/etc. so loudly that they ruin their hearing, and thus much listen to things even louder, thus worsening the hearing of those and those around them, thus necessitating louder volumes…

On the subway, I can’t listen to my mp3 player, as I am not willing to turn it as loud as need to be heard over the subway itself, which is very loud. And yet I can still hear the music from the headphones of people sitting across from me. I have the maximum volume on my iPod set to a mere third of its potental maximum volume. It is hard to believe that these people will not need hearing aids quite early in life. To be fair, I do have an American iPod; it is different elsewhere thanks to the less-unenlighted France having maximum volume laws.

Noise from unnecessary tools - another thing mentioned on the radio show was leaf blowers. To me this fits into the category of tools that have no advantage over manual means (ever see anyone spend five minutes trying to move a single leaf with a leafblower?), yet produce a ton of noise.

Jarring sounds - if there has to be noise, it should stop, start, and change gradually. Abrupt changes in sound are just a bad idea, screwing up your scenses, just like lots of sharp scene changes in video.

I will have to check out quite.org now.

dougmccune.com » Blog Archive » Not Your Mamma’s Maps - a very slick app for browsing geospatial data. Their screencast shows input through a geoRSS feed, but I am guessing that will not be freely available. Via Mikel.

Long Bet Winner: Weblogs vs. The New York Times | Workbench - this is rather amusing. I remember back in 2002 when Dave Winer made this bet for 2007, a date which seemed impossibly far away. Of course, nowadays the “we” in weblogs is almost always dropped.

The conclusion is that technically blogs beat the New York Times, but at any rate Wikipedia beat both.

Via Sam.

so I think I have semi-solved my question of where to post things. now everything I tag with “forfb” on this blog will also show up as a note on Facebook. That way I can post things on one, the other, or both, without having to write them twice. Of course, there will still be comment splitting…

Just writing this post tells me that I’m getting way too old…

Anyhow, I graduate from the University of Waterloo around April/May, and had a vague idea that I should probably get a job sometime after that. Although I do rather like doing the internship thing, starting with a predefined end date, however I think that six months would be more useful than the four-month ones that my school uses.

“Unfortunately” I’ll be getting a really good job offer soon with much less time to accept or reject it than I would like. Which means that I may have to decide on all this quite soon, and thus I need to be looking at other options right now as well. Overall I would prefer to work in Toronto or Kitchener-Waterloo, but if anyone has any job opportunities or ideas they think I should consider (at any location), then please let me know by email. I’m interested in hearing all sorts of different ideas (from full-time to part-time, volunteer, etc.), and even if I don’t take you up on them, we can have a good chat

Right to Dry - looks like someone in (sorta) my area has taken up the cause

Thanks to PowerPoint: sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying I found out about Don McMillan. The first two clips on there are absolutely fantastic. That lead me to his site, where part of his demo video had me laughing for longer than I’d like to admit, and it was actually his non-technical jokes.

Greening businesses, one step at a time - somehow I got dragged into writing an article for my campus paper this week about an event (Environment and Business conference) I was attending.

Anyhow, writing for a newspaper just felt really wierd, almost like going back in time . I’m much more accustomed to my blogging style (obviously). The article was supposed to be a fixed length, of course, which just feels funny. Writing from a semi-neutral tone was the hardest part, I’m so used to using “I”… it just seems so drab otherwise.

Then I submit the article to the editor. “So, I guess you edit it and send it back to me?” I asked naïvely. Of course not, they just make their changes, then publish it, with my name on it of course. Naturally I’m not hugely in favour of the changes, as what person likes their writing modified? My biggest complaint? They took away one of my exclaimation marks.

Oh, one last point… I wasn’t responsible for the headline, subheading, photograph, or photo caption.

London Free Press - Local News - Ban on clotheslines put through wringer - so for a couple of weeks I’ve been pondering putting together a one-page poster infosheet to convince people to hang-dry their clothes rather than use appliances. (Also need to work towards accomplishing this myself).

Today on CBC Radio I hear that some cities are banning clotheslines? I’ve never heard anything so isane (well, okay, anything from the Bush administration, but still).

They’re more environmentally friendly, cheaper, make clothes last longer, etc. The supposed “problem” is that people don’t like seeing each others’ clothes. That’s just ridiculous and is yet another symptom of the North American attitude of everybody being afraid of each other. So much for community.

warning: long personal story

When I was in grade four, we started learning about verbs and how to conjugate them in French class. I immedately found them very easy to learn; a nice logical system. By grade eight, we’d obviously learned much more about verb conjugation, and yet many of my classmates were struggling to understand even the basics that we had learned four years prior. Those years included many instances of me trying to explain them to others, but this can hardly be done in a few seconds or minutes.

So I gave in and decided to write it all down. I believe it took me about two weeks to finish my first version of the guide, simply entitled “French Verbs” (with my copyright, of course), and was something along the lines of eleven (8.5x11) pages. Oh, the days of writing in WordPerfect (can’t quite recall the version). The need was obviously there, because when I showed it to my French teacher (who actually cried, but that’s a longer story), and she asked if anyone wanted copies, something around 100% of the class asked for one.

I think it was extremely well done, and I continued making corrections and additions to it (okay, I went a little crazy including the many-page verb dictionary and then starting an excersize book and solutions manual…). In grade nine, my last year of taking French, I started but never completed a second edition to incorporate what we learned that year.

I didn’t totally abandon French verbs, as in my grade ten computer class (when I learned to program, and in Turing) my final project was a French verb conjugater. And a pretty good one, if you ask me

It occurred to me today that it is still probably a useful resource (admittedly I haven’t seen what else is out there on the web today) and that it would be really neat to bring it back and publish it on the web.

So the question is, do I simply upload the original files (I have some of them at least) or do I convert it to HTML? I really should do the latter, but what then… should I try to reproduce the original formatting with CSS, or do I make it look good as I would design it today. And if I find my incomplete second edition, should I complete it (this would require me relearning a bunch), or leave it as is?

Fortunately, it’s not as if I have several thousand other unfinished projects to occupy my time with..

These Come From Trees Blog - what a great idea. Via Seth Godin.

Pictures of Numbers: False Advertising - for those who seem to wonder why I care so much about my information graphics - this is what happens when you don’t care.

argh. I noticed today that my blog appeared to be completely down, in the sense that all the pages were blank.. hmn… the Wordpress admin interface still worked…

Took me about a half our to track down the problem, which was solved by disabling a plugin that I don’t use anyway. I have no idea why, but can hardly be bothered to figure that out now.

Tories and Liberals trade barbs over environment - it’s funny how things change. When I was in grade 4 (’93-’94), we had some group work on determining political party issues and campaign platforms, or something like that. I vaguely recall that I didn’t really know what issues were big, but I figured stuff like the environment, maybe education. Then I found that it was actually things like healthcare, which I would have never guessed.

Fast forward to 2006, and the Conservative government reduces environmental spending, and pretends that global change doesn’t exist. Now it’s 2007, and all the major parties are trying to out-green each other, or at least pretend that they are. While I’d rather have a non-Conservative party handling things, this will (and is) certainly improve matters.

Doing some blog maintenance..

I’ve fixed some .htaccess problems affecting my old (old) blog. I got rid of my outdated and static blogroll, replacing it with one that pulls from Bloglines.

I’m also finally trying out MyBlogLog, so we’ll see how that goes. It seems to be slowing down page loads, but this may only be on the first load? Let me know if you notice slowness of the sidebar. I was prompted to finally do this by hearing more and more about MyBlogLog in the last two months or so, and after registering but not using it yet, noticing my face on a blog I was reading. How cool is that? … so now I’ve put it in. The company (now part of Yahoo!) happens to be headed by Scott Rafer, who I worked with back in ye old 2005 at Feedster.

Once upon a time (okay, 1995), Ward Cunningham invented WikiWikiWebs. They spread all over, even slowly creeping into the commercial world. In 2001 it was thought that using one would help speed up article-writing for Nupedia. Today they are known as wikis, and that particular one has grown so popular that it is not only known by virtually every internet user, its popularity relative to other specific wikis is so much greater that to almost everyone, Wikipedia = Wiki = Wikipedia.

Wikis are a very useful type of website for many applications. Not all, of course, but many. When thinking up a name for a website using a wiki, a convenient name is “Wiki”+”topic”, e.g. Wikitravel. Of course, doing so presumably makes your website the definitive wiki for that topic, despite the reality of others e.g. World66. [hmn, upon writing this I find that these two examples have now decided to work together… cool]. You can see their relative popularity on Alexa; how much of the greater popularity of Wikitravel do you think can be attributed to its name online?

The strategy these days seems to be (1) pick a topic, make a wiki for it and (2) call it Wiki[topic]. The difference, I think, is that now the naming is very deliberate, rather than convenient. I think it is working very well, too.

Open[Topic] is the other name I wanted to mention. While there are many open sourceish projects around, it seems that people are getting better at marketing and are calling just about everything Open Something. I’m personally a strong advocate of OpenSearch, and I do think that some of its success can be attributed to the name.

Identity systems have been proposed and built for years. Marc Canter will tell you how great things would be today if we’d been supporting the Sxip technology years ago. Today it seems like the momentum behind OpenID is really going forward, and that it may indeed be poised to succeed more than any previous system of its kind. How much of its success do you think can be attributed to the name?

This post was provoked by the mention of Wikileaks as I listen to the radio.

Puzzlepieces - so I think I’ve successfully moved this blog over to it’s new home… everything should look the same. I believe the post IDs have not changed, which is what should happen… except that it’s not because I’ve done it on purpose, it’s because for some reason I seem to have previously hardcoded them, before I learned the best way to make unique IDs for items in Atom feeds. ah well

So for all of you (~2 people) who complained that Puzzlepieces was dead, I’m happy to say it is back and doing well.

During this between-semesters holiday I’ve finally gotten myself a new host, and have (almost) successfully moved all of my websites over. My University of Waterloo search engine (UWhub) doesn’t work, but that will be fixed once I change all my file request function calls to use CURL instead. There is also a minor problem with Fagan Finder’s older .shtml pages, but I’ll worry about that later.

So, congratulations to me. Also, I’ve finally gotten myself a website, faganm.com, and so I intend to move this blog over to somewhere there instead of hijacking my old website’s domain.

‘Farm market’ opening this week

Student enthusiasts have teamed up with Food Services to create the UW Farm Market, which will open for the first time this Wednesday, selling local produce as well as other products from the area, brought in mainly from the Elmira Produce Auction Cooperative.

excellent

work seems to be keeping me rather busy

Yesterday I got around to fixing a several-month-old bug with my University of Waterloo search engine. Turns out the problem was Yahoo having changed their query parser. The query I was sending used to be

search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com)

however example.com wasn’t showing up on the results… the fix was adding a space before the ending parentheses.

search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com )

I wish Yahoo would publicly document all of their advanced search syntax, including the maximum query length.

I’ve been meaning to do another OpenSearch Update post. I’ve recently started adding some of these to del.icio.us. Noticing lots of non-English blog posts on OpenSearch lately, which is very cool. Today someone asked about including thumbnails. I’ve replied suggesting Media RSS but asking for consensus (although my email still needs to be moderated).

Lots of neat stuff in the mapping space lately. Thanks to Mikel Maron, Virtual Earth now has georss feeds.

So for years I’ve been largely ignoring the social networking websites. Or to be more accurate, reading up on them a lot, but not actually using them. Among other things, I don’t want to waste my time, nor provide a lot of my personal data to some walled garden. Regarding the latter, PeopleAggregator has been out for a while, and I hadn’t gotten around to congradulating Marc and Phillip. Anyhow, Facebook came to my school (this year I believe) and I’ve found that I’m actually using it. Not much, but more than I’ve ever used another similar site. Unlike the first generation of these websites, it actually has a point to it. I’m still resisting uploading photos to it (if I annotate those photos, am I ever going to be able to export that? highly unlikely) and I don’t like using it for messaging, because it won’t be searchable and integrated with my email or instant messaging services. Amusingly enough, I do think Facebook will actually succeed in making money. Hmn.. I guess I don’t have any major point to make here..