Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Fast Track: “ForwardTrack is a new system created by Eyebeam R&D designed to promote on-line activism. The system tracks and maps the diffusion of email forwards, political calls-to-action, and petitions. Our goal is to help people understand decentralized networks and see the power of “6 degrees of separation.” ForwardTrack technology helps prove that one person can make a difference.

Millions of political messages are distributed through email, but it has been a notoriously difficult medium to measure. In 2001, Eyebeam’s R&D Director Jonah Peretti, then a graduate student at MIT, had considerable difficulty tracking the spread of his Nike Sweatshop email forward. It was impossible to determine how many people received the email or exactly how it diffused.”

And it will be made open source.

Drazen Pantic (who knows what he’s talking about): PlaNetwork Journal -> Anybody Can Be TV: How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News

I used the following script to create a mod_rewrite file for my new Wordpress install. After running the script, the redirects look like this:

Redirect Permanent /ease/archives/001694.html http://www.poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2002/11/23/562/i-renamed-xfmlmanager-to-taxomita

Note the /562/ part. That’s different from the usual Wordpress URL’s.

The reason I had to write this script is that the existing scripts assume every item has a title. I have written a lot of my MT entries without title, so I can’t use the http://www.poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2002/11/23/i-renamed-xfmlmanager-to-taxomita style, because it assumes no two entries on the same day have the same title. Empty titles wouldn’t really work. It’s not a huge problem, but I tried to solve it anyway, by setting up a URL structure that incorporates the entry ID: (in the Wordpress admin, go to Options > Permalinks and use the following code)

/archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%post_id%/%postname%

This way every entry has a unique URL, even when it doesn’t have a title.

The script below isn’t particularly well developed, so you’ll need to know PHP to adjust it for your purposes. Enjoy.

View the script at http://www.poorbuthappy.com/ease/files/redirect.txt

There are still a few weeks left for the Boxes and Arrows Redesign Contest. Get your pencils out.

Went to see Maria Full of Grace last Saturday. It’s a good movie, not all doom and nastyness, but just real people doing real things.

As someone who has lived in Colombia (and my gf who is from Colombia agrees), I can say Colombia is exactly as portrayed in the movie. My gf said the moto guy was exactly like the real moto guys she knew in Colombia.

I’ve shot a documentary in Colombia earlier this year, and in the beginning of the movie, I kept thinking “we have that footage!”. All the scenes where shot in places we have shot or at least been to as well (Queens, NYC; the airport; Medellin Colombia, Bogota). Of course, we don’t have that story, nor that acting, nor that moviemaking talent.

I donated US$50 for the Kerry campaign on the street the other day. I can’t vote in the US, but US politics fascinates me more and more. Tactics are scarily refined. In Belgium, we have a multi-party state, every election 2, 3 or 4 parties work together to form the governement. Here in the US, it’s one winner takes all.

SitePoint PHP Blog: “the developers behind TheyWorkForYou have published their source code on Sourceforge.”

After trying (without success) to get my laptop to play nice with my wireless card for about 10 gruelling hours, and hearing I’m getting a nice tax refund, I’ve decided on plan B: using my laptop replacement system.

Every few years, I buy a US$900-ish consumer laptop (using the best deal I can find), and sell it about 2 years later for about US$400. Then I buy a new one. This way, I always have a decent model, while paying very little (about US$300 a year). It’s a much better strategy than buying the latest new fancy model for US$2500 and keeping it 5 years. First of all, you’d be paying more per year. And second, on average, you’ll probably have a less powerfull system during those 5 years, since after 2 years my latest new laptop will be at least equally powerful to your older laptop, and after 4 years I’ll have a laptop that’s much more powerful than your old one.

So that’s been my system, and it has worked pretty well. An additional (and not to be underestimated) benefit is that you get a fresh Windows install every 2 years. One of the biggest factors in slowing down a Windows machine is simply the amount of time you’ve been working on it. And there’s really not much you can do about that, even with obsesive cleaning up of your computer. Installing a fresh Windows copy on a laptop yourself is an experience I can’t recommend.

I don’t spend too much time comparing laptops. I know I need a consumer model, I just look around for good deals (there are always a few good deals with rebates and such floating around) and then compare tech specs to check if there are no snafus. For example, on the laptop I decided on this year, you have to take out existing 128M memory cards (and pretty much throw them away) if you want to add memory. Not nice, but I can live with that.

So this year I’m selling my Compaq Presario 715US and buying a
HP Pavilion ze5730us Notebook. Pretty much the same computer, but more powerful. The harddrive is 40Gig instead of 20Gig, the processor is about twice as fast, I can install more memory (up to 1024 M RAM compared to up to 465 Meg on the Compaq) and it has built-in wireless. And a fresh XP install, of course.

Additionally, I’ll sell the old laptop in Belgium instead of here in the US. Laptops are about 20-30% more expensive in Europe compared to the US.

I’ve spend 10 hours so far trying to get my laptop to work with a linksys wireless card. Their support is good because they have chat (I like chat support, even though it’s often slow, at least you can ask questions), but we haven’t been able to fix it. I’m sure someone who knows their stuff and with access to the computer could fix it in 15 minutes.

Working for yourself is great, but where do you get tech support when you need it? I’d happily pay someone to fix this, just don’t know where to go. If you work for yourself, how do you deal with this? Any pointers?

I’m at the point where I’m considering buying another laptop, or re-installing XP from scratch, both way too painful for something stupid like this. Am I going to just have to deal with it and spend 10% of my time wasted trying to fix things like this?

And another videoblogger is born.

Now that I’m working on my own online service, I am the programmer, the marketing department, the usability person, the designer, the business person. I do it all. What is surprising me is how easy switching between the roles is.

I’ll be programming something, then run into a problem that requires a business answer. So I go sit somewhere else, and do the business thinking. Then I sit somewhere else and do the usability sketches, and back to programming.

I didn’t think it would work like this, I had kinda planned to write specs the way I usually do, then implement them. But I’m writing few specs (I am writing documentation). Bad practice? Maybe not for a team of one?

NewsForge | Open source usability is a technical problem we can solve on our own: “The reason why there is no usability data pool is that there is no data to be had. Useablilty is simply a matter of taste and choice, that’s why when you ask a quesiton about useablilty all you get is opinions. Useablilty labs are like marketing labs; they are there to gather opinions from focus groups on useablility.
[...]
Asking developers to increase usability is roughly equivalent to asking them to dumb the interface down. That’s a big hurdle, but one that’s important to broach.
[...]
It’s difficult to understand what users say, just like whales.
[...]
We need guys that do beautiful things… guys like Everaldo, though he’s a designer, not a GUI expert…
[...]
There is an immediate tradeoff between useability and features.
[...]
Just how seriously should people who’s basic goal in life seems to sit around whining about something rather than actually getting off their fat lazy asses and actually doing something to improve the world. I hate to break this to you so-called “Usability Experts”, but Open Source wasn’t created for you losers to build your so-called careers on.”

And so on.

Wired News: Online Games a Massive Pain: “Electronic Arts joins a growing list of companies — Cyan Worlds, Games Workshop, There Inc. — that invested millions of dollars in online games, only to see disappointing sales or unfinished projects.”

Google, for the first time ever, has an ad on its homepage: “Have a digital camera? Try Google’s Picasa software. Free Download.” I know the company is theirs, but it’s still an ad.

EmptyBottle.org: Am I Angry? Do I Hate? Can I Kill?: “But butt-fucking kids while their mothers look on? While videotaping it? I’m not sure that’s really in line with the ‘rape, loot and pillage’ modus operandi so loved and respected throughout human history. Pushing the envelope a little, that. It may not be specifically forbidden by the letter of Geneva Convention, for example, but I’m pretty sure it goes against the spirit of it.”

Nokia - Nokia Lifeblog: “Nokia Lifeblog Beta 0.95 is here! Download and install Lifeblog Beta on your desktop PC and phone and start building your multimedia diary today!”

New Scientist: “After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape.”

So I played around with Python for a few hours, found out you can do really nice Windows client side GUIs with it (Mac as well?) fairly easily, and that you can easily convert python scripts into standalone windows programs. Like it a lot so far.

I know PHP, and I’m learning Python. After 5 minutes:

- it’s pretty much the same as PHP, except that you don’t put ; characters at the end of a command.
- and except that Python comes with a tool that lets you run programs without having to upload to a server.
- and variables don’t use the $ sign in front of them.
- don’t use curly brackets, instead just indent stuff
- and more little differences like that: elseif() in PHP is elif in Python. function becomes def. Variables within functions are local, not global, just like PHP.
- you have to define variables before using them. This annoys me much. And it complains when you mix different types of variables. This annoys me mucher. I don’t see why this is necessary, except for making my life harder.

Going well so far - I got Hello World running in minutes.

Yesterday I spent all day writing the registration pages and error checking code (including defending against those snarkyt sql injection attacks) for my upcoming service, making it as user friendly as possible (which is much more than most registrations). I decided to use the “almost there” pattern, where, when an input error happens, the user is sent to an intermediate “almost there” page instead of being sent to the same registration page with errors highlighted, which most registration systems seem to use. I like the “almost there” approach better: the user doesn’t have to actively ignore a lot of stuff they’ve looked at before. It goes against accepted wisdom that all input should be checked clientside before submission.

So today I’m taking a day off from this project and I’ll learn Python. Python’s desktop capabilities seem to make it a good fit for some of my future projects, so I’m going to spend some time getting familiar with it.

I love having my own business and deciding for myself what I’m doing with my day. I was originally going to work more on the registration script, but I didn’t feel like it so I’ll do one of the more fun things on my long to-do list.

A question: how easy is learning Python (with wxPython) compared to learning Visual Basic? I want to learn some programming language that lets me do desktop applications that are heavily internet connected (xml-rcp, ftp, …). Which language should I spend my time learning?

braintag: Notes for Eyebeam Video Blogging Workshop 7.14.2004

I’ve been trying to include text in a SMIL movie that I save as a .mov and play in Quicktime. Including a .txt file works, but I couldn’t markup (bold, italics, …) the file. Finally I figured it out. QuickTime Text Descriptors like {plain} can be used to markup text (fonts, bold, how long to show pieces of text, …) you want to include in a SMIL presentation for Quicktime (Quicktime doesn’t do HTML markup).

SMIL driven karaoke system

Mica’s latest video is a great lesson in communication technology. Check it out!

I met up in downtown Manhattan (Soho) with Jay and Drazen Pantic, a serb who helped create B-92, the radio station that was in sarejavo during the war and was the only independent voice out there, and former Yugoslavia’s first internet provider.

In the video (inside) he’s explaining how they had to log in remotely in their internet service and erase all user data to protect people. We talked about videoblogging and his new project dv.open4all.info which is like a bittorrent host where people can upload video (torrent files). Share the media - be the media.

One of his quotes I really liked: “Politics happens on the couch.”. Which is why we need Freevo - so people can watch real-people TV from the internet on the couch, not huddled behind a monitor. He also told me about FFMPEG, an open source product that can be used to optimize video serverside.

The video is inside.
(more…)

Tornadowatch! Movie inside.
(more…)

Mica is videoblogging *every* day!

ųmund Garfors is working on server side video optimizing.

Eric Rice is doing some interesting things with videoblogging.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Islamophone: “When it comes to information technology, the United States is something of an outlier. For a variety of reasons, Americans are far more likely than residents of much of the rest of the world to rely on computers as their primary information devices. In most other places, the mobile phone is the main platform for info services. While this has both advantages (mobility) and disadvantages (editing documents), the ubiquity of the mobile telephone as information appliance has led to some novel regional variants.”

Google Acquires Picasa and Yahoo acquired Oddpost recently. The next wave is starting: advanced browser-based functionality in various apps with feelers into the desktop space.

PHP 5 is finally out. I am starting a new service these days, and I’m still using PHP 4. I’ll probably switch to PHP5 in 2005, once some of the classes & libraries I like to use have been updated. (The services I start only need to run on my machines so I can control the environment.)

Ever wondered how to set up username.domain.com when a lot of users are signing up for your service? Apache module mod_vhost_alias is the answer.

In httpd.conf in the virtual host container, add “UseCanonicalName Off”. And instead of “DocumentRoot” you write “VirtualDocumentRoot”. The following code: “/dev/account_htdocs/%1.1/%1″, given “http://peter.domain.com”, resolves to “/dev/account_htdocs/p/peter”.

%0 means give me the whole name: peter.domain.com
%1 means give me the first part of the name: peter
%3 means give me the third part: com
%1.1 means give me the first letter of the first part: p

Using the /p/ subdirectory helps when I get 1000s of users because most Oss get slow when a directory has 1000s of subdirectories. This approach spreads it out a bit.

Discreet cleaner XL - what is cleaner XL: video optimizing software (like Sorenson) with nice automation features. Cheaper than Sorenson as well. Win or Mac.

Today was the first day of “work” since I quit my job and decided to start working for myself.

I spend the morning evaluating PHP classes for use in a project I’m starting up - no point in re-inventing the wheel. I found a user authentication class I like (although it lacks a “remember me” feature - I’ll just program that in myself) and I may have decided on a simple templating class I want to use (Smarty’s not good for this site). In the afternoon I did some design work in Dreamweaver for the admin section of this project (it’s a web-based service).

Working for myself is a LOT of fun. I think it’ll last. I can decide what I feel like working on (I have a long to-do list). And I feel I actually made some progress today.

countless stories: “Countless Stories is a dynamic documentary that combines RTSP video streaming with database technologies to create stories that assemble themselves based on input from the audience.”

Interesting project: Interactive Tele-Journalism

Cafe usability testing: go to a bar/coffee shop, set up your computer and a sign for free beer/coffee, and test with users. I will definitely try this out. Sounds like the cheapest way to get participants to usability test.

Using the XML HTTP Request object: “Internet Explorer on Windows, Safari on Mac OS-X and Mozilla on all platforms provide a method for client side javascript to make HTTP requests. This allows you to make HEAD requests to see when a resource was last modified, or to see if it even exists. It makes your scripting options more flexible allowing for POST requests without having the page change, and opens up the possibility of using PUT, DELETE etc.”