How to prepare pictures for uploading?
Here’s what I do: From the software I use to view the pictures, I export them while scaling them. These days I use 500 × 375 when exporting. I also give them meaningful names, and encode the date in the filename.
Then I remove all metadata from the images. This saves quite a bit of space, since the thumbnail in particular can be quite large.
img-strip *-30.jpg
Where img-strip calls jpegtran as follows:
#! /bin/sh
if [ -z $1 ]; then
echo No images to cleanse.
exit 1;
fi
for f in "$@"; do
echo cleanse $f
n=/tmp/`basename $f`
jpegtran -optimize -trim -copy none -outfile "$n" "$f" && mv "$n" "$f"
done
Then I upload the files to my webspace.
upload *-30.jpg
The upload script calls scp as follows:
#! /bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo No images to upload.
exit 1;
fi
chmod o+r "$@"
scp -p -C "$@" aschroeder@thinkmo.de:/org/org.emacswiki/htdocs/alex/pics/
And finally, I generate the necessary Oddmuse wiki markup to save me some typing:
ls -1t *-30.jpg|sed 's/\(.*\)/[[image external:\1|]]/'
Example output:
[[image external:gletscherschlucht-2006-07-30.jpg|]] [[image external:grindelwald-2006-07-30.jpg|]] [[image external:grosse-scheidegg-2006-07-30.jpg|]] [[image external:oberer-gletscher-2006-07-30.jpg|]] [[image external:reichenbachfall-2006-07-30.jpg|]] [[image external:rosenlaui-2006-07-30.jpg|]] [[image external:schlechtes-wetter-2006-07-30.jpg|]] [[image external:stampede-2006-07-30.jpg|]] [[image external:wellhorn-2006-07-30.jpg|]] [[image external:wetterhorn-2006-07-30.jpg|]]
Tags: Pictures 
Here’s how I backup my current home directory on the Mac Mini onto an external USB harddisk using rsync.
rsync --archive --verbose --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=/Library/Caches --exclude=/.Trash "/Users/alex/" "/Volumes/Media Backup/Alex Pyrobombus"
For my laptop:
rsync --archive --copy-unsafe-links --verbose --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=/Library/Caches --exclude=/apache2 --exclude=/.Trash "/Users/alex/" "/Volumes/Media Backup/Alex Alpinobombus"
I don’t have any music on my laptop…
I’m excluding apache2 because that is a symlink to /usr/local/apache2 and this causes a chgrp error when running rsync. I use --copy-unsafe-links because some of the links in Library/NeoOfficeJ-1.1 point outside of my home directory.
That reminds me, by the way, that I need to buy a second enclosure for the second internal 120G IDE drive I have left-over from my old Confusibombus machine. The old dead and empty hull is all that remains of my self-assembled Pentium 4 SlackWare. BumbleBees don’t last forever…
Update: I bought an “M9-DX Mini Pod” with USB 2.0 1 port upstream (B Type) and 3 ports downstream (A Type), 3 ports Firewire 400, a passive heat sink, and a thermal probe to regulate fan speed.
While backing up, I noticed that my use of the CPAN shell was wrong, and I reran o conf init and used “sudo make“ and “sudo ./Build” instead of the defaults. Now I can run the CPAN shell directly without sudo, and it will sudo when installing. That (hopefully) means that my .cpan/build and .cpan/sources will have the correct ownerships: alex instead of root. 
For Claudia’s account, we also need to backup the DVD stuff. The DVD stuff has no space on the system disk. So we have a disk called “Extern” for DVD stuff.
Here we go:
rsync --archive --copy-unsafe-links --verbose --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=/Library/Caches --exclude=/.Trash "/Users/claudia/" "/Volumes/Claudias Backup/Claudia Pyrobombus"
rsync --archive --copy-unsafe-links --verbose --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=/.Trash "/Volumes/Extern/DVD/" "/Volumes/Claudias Backup/DVD"
CoryDoctorow talks about DRM in the music business, and Apple's iPod in particular.
Via O'Reilly Radar [1]
Comments on 2006-08-03 DRM is bad for business
More evidence from the owners admitting that DRM is not even conducive to their business. They will say less about their “customers” interests, but they’ll admit the rights of customers are being trampled, too.
– AaronHawley 2006-09-25 05:40 UTC
I would like to host my images somewhere else, since I’m paying €20 per month for emacswiki.org bandwidth in Germany. I’ve been using Flickr for the occasional file upload, but I haven’t been using it seriously enough. [1]
I wanted a good integration into a client program: Either an independent uploader (preferably free software, of course), or a plugin into iPhoto, since I’m still using it.
Today I gave both of them a try, and uploaded all the pics I had from my hiking trip on the AlpenPassRoute to a Picasa Web Album and into a a Flickr Photoset.
I’ll have to see how easy reorganizing an existing album is, since the pictures I uploaded are more or less in random order.
Update: It seems I can reorganize my album via the website. The site works fine, however, so no problem as far as I can tell. I wonder how easy it is to get the data back to my local machine, however. Let me check out their RSS feeds…
There’s a pretty good Flickr RSS feed with the last 20 pictures in it. Getting a feed of all of them would be ideal: All the info I care about for now are in there… Or I’ll have to take a look at the Flickr::API Perl library. The Picasa RSS feed, on the other hand, seems to contain all the images I just uploaded, and a bit more meta information including links to thumbnails.
Hm, should I add all 66 pictures to the Switzerland group on Flickr? Something tells me that would be rude, which is why I hit the cancel button after 8 pictures got sent to the group…
Comments on 2006-08-03 Picture Service
I’d recommend flickr. The UI is pretty slick and intuitive. also their API is open, so I think you can write some tool to upload pics…
Does use flash heavily at places, though with good effect. Also storage is somewhat limited.
– AadityaSood 2006-08-03 10:59 UTC
I’m using flickr right now. It has the advantage that you can also upload “private” images. As to upload stuff, they have uploading tools (for OSX as well). There should be some plugins for iphoto to flickr as well. And they have only bandwith limit, but no storing limmit. The website is not always very intuitive on flickr though. And sometimes not that “snappy”. Google seems to be much faster, but they probably have much view users (for now).
– 2ni 2006-08-03 12:30 UTC
Hm, both seem to have upload tools for OSX [1][2]. I’ll upload the same collection of images to my Flickr account and see which one I like better…
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-03 12:52 UTC
It seems that the Flickr Uploadr crashed while uploading. Gah!
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-03 13:08 UTC
Restarted Uploadr, authorized myself, quit, restarted, started upload, and now it seems to work. Weirdo bugs.
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-03 13:12 UTC
In the comment section to an post by AadityaSood [1], in which he links to FromIsraelToLebanon that I also linked to a while ago [2] – triggered by the mail of a mutual friend, I assume
– anyway in the comment section I found two additional interesting visualizations linked to by N:
Comments on 2006-08-03 The Power of Images
Yup. It was me that posted that comment and the visualisations but I think he found the site through other sources. BTW, do you follow democracynow.org? It has lots of good articles that cover the current crisis from an independent standpoint. I especially like the interviews with Robert Fisk.
– NoufalIbrahim 2006-08-03 09:51 UTC
I came across the site before, but it never ended up in my news aggregator. And unless it does that, it’s not going to be read.
InformationOverload, I guess. I liked the Robert Fisk interview he gave on 2006-07-19, which I just read.
I also linked to two Fisk pieces on 2006-03-23 Israel. That’s why his name sounded familiar. 
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-03 11:05 UTC
Well, there are some people who know how to behave. Check this out [1].
– NoufalIbrahim 2006-08-03 12:26 UTC
Yesterday we had our English book club discussion about The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. I had only read ⅔ of the book, and hadn’t liked it. It seemed like a response to Candide by Voltaire. Except that I didn’t get the references. And since I hadn’t liked Candide either, it really made little difference.
Don’t read this book.
Strange. I picked up Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte this morning and on page 37 it mentions Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Is this the same guy?
Tags: Books 
Comments on 2006-08-04 The Baron in the Trees
Yes, it’s the same guy – and Invisible Cities is by far the better book of the two.
– BrianKerr 2006-09-05 18:53 UTC
I’ve read another mystery – Medusa Pool by M. K. Wren. Another book in the metro series by the Unionsverlag. I liked how several interconnected crimes get solved at the same time. I liked how the racism theme is played out. And I liked her style: Short dialogues, short descriptions, dry. It felt weird at first, and I admit that I believed it to be an artefact of the translation to German, but now that I have finished the book, I’ve learnt to appreciate it.
See also: The Mystery Reader Review, and M. K. Wren's Homepage.
Tags: Books
I wonder how useful these online petitions are. Anyway, there’s a Ceasefire Petition to the UN Council out there. It says that your name and message will be publicized in newspapers in the US, UK, and Israel. At least they’re not planning to hand them to public leaders or the UN. I have so totally lost faith in their ability to do the right thing.
Oh, and while we’re at it. How about ending the occupation of the West Bank and stopping the pounding of the Gaza strip? ElectronicIntifada has a piece quoting from a UN report: “The United Nations humanitarian agencies working in the occupied Palestinian territory are deeply alarmed by the impact continuing violence is having on civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza, which has resulted in a sharp decline in the humanitarian situation facing 1.4 million people, more than half of them children.” [1]
Most of these days I just read the emails from GushShalom, with reports from anti-war demonstrations and all that. This is also where UriAvnery writes. On Junkies of War, for example. Here’s a quote both funny and terrifying: “Some comfort themselves with the thought that ‘the Arabs have seen that we are crazy’.” I also laughed when I read this one: “We are conquering South Lebanon as flies conquer fly-paper.”
JanneJalkanen writes about BookMooch, a site where you can trade old books. [1] Via JoiIto. [2]
Sounds interesting. Basically the Amazon Marketplace seems to work well enough for me when I’m trying to buy old books, but I can’t seem to get rid of books I no longer want. At least here in Switzerland the community libraries don’t seem to be interested in them. I asked.
So I’ve signed up, and will add about twenty books. Let’s see if anybody ever wants one of the books. 
BookCrossing sounds so much like dumping the books like trash.
I somehow doubt that in the age of gratis newspapers and tons of paper trash, books will actually be picked up in trains.
I guess my problem is that bookcrossing requires you to read and release good books only. But I only want to give away bad books. 
Comments on 2006-08-07 Giving Away Old Books
I’m a member of Bookcrossing and I meet up with other bookcrossers in my city. Some of us are purists who insist on reading books before releasing them. Others buy bulk lots of books in used-book stores and release them without reading – I think they’re more interested in tracking where the books travel.
I think most regular bookcrossers find that only a small number of books that they release are eventually found and recorded in the system, so these “catches” feel special.
– ClaudineChionh 2006-08-14 08:54 UTC
Hm. What do you is happening to the unregistered books. Are they just lost junk? Here in Switzerland, I suspect people would just dump them. Trash. Recycled paper. I don’t think I can bear the thought. 
One promising development is the appearance of a bookcrossing shelf in a coffeehouse we like to go to [1]. I’d feel ok dropping good books there.
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-14 18:48 UTC
Oh, got my first book request via BookMooch! Somebody wants the Shockwave Rider by John Brunner…
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-16 10:29 UTC
I got an email from the site today starting off with “BookMooch has been live for 9 days now and it’s been a wild week!” – I didn’t know that it was such a new thing. Guess I’m hipper than I though, haha.
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-16 22:38 UTC
Hm. I sent off the Shockwave book. Cost me CHF 10 (USD 8.16) postage + CHF 1.20 for the envelope. And that’s non-express post. That’s pretty expensive… 
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-17 08:23 UTC
Hah, I added 52 books to my inventory @ BookMooch.
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-18 00:31 UTC
Some books reappear on the website after being “missing” for months or years; and some do end up in the bin.
Regular bookcrossers are always discussing their favourite release techniques.
– ClaudineChionh 2006-08-19 11:10 UTC
When an idiot comes along and spams twenty pages on my site, I can easily roll it back. But all changes are recorded for posterity in the log files, and therefore they appear on RecentChanges and thus also in the RSS feed. Too bad!
Unfortunatly simplistic schemes won’t work: I cannot skip all entries whose last edit was a rollback. I need to figure out what edits where undone by the rollback and then check whether there are any remaining edits in the current time window… Damn!
Comments on 2006-08-07 Reverted Spam Still Breaks My RSS Feed
In preparing for WikiSym 2006 I decided to print three Oddmuse T-Shirts (PDF). Printing T-Shirts in two colors in such small numbers is expensive. I bought them at Dinschrift for about CHF 60 each.
Dinschrift is a one-man show at Gasmalerstrasse 5, Zürich.
Let me know if you’re coming, too. Or add your name to the Oddmuse wiki.
Tags: Oddmuse Conferences WikiSym2006 WikiSym
A friend just sent me a YouTube link to a video showing a SkyNews interview with George Galloway.
Funny to see in the YouTube sidebar that about four other people have uploaded the same video.
As Wikipedia:George Galloway notes, he is “a British politician noted for his socialist views and rhetorical style.” Right on. There’s also his official homepage.
I also remember his speech in the US senate I wrote about so long ago (2005-05-22 USA): “Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.” [1]
I was looking for the video online. There’s an excerpt on YouTube, and apparently you can watch it on the Information Clearing House, but it requires real-audio.
Anyway. The discussion also reminds me of the HumanRightsWatch press release IDF Fails to Explain Qana Bombing: “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) inquiry into the July 30 killing of at least 28 civilians in Qana is incomplete and legally misguided, and contradicts eyewitness testimony, Human Rights Watch said today. The findings underline the need for an independent international inquiry into what took place.”
Tags: Israel Palestine Lebanon
Comments on 2006-08-08 Rant in support of Lebanon
And what a rant it is. I don’t think I have seen anyone blast mainstream media while on air like this. I actually googled for the guy’s speeches after seeing this.
– NoufalIbrahim 2006-08-08 10:13 UTC
[1] The guy’s on a roll. 
– NoufalIbrahim 2006-08-08 11:40 UTC
I saw Millennium Actress (2001) and Snow White (2005) on DVD.
Tags: Movies 
KathySierra asks in her latest post how we can get users to really use all the features the product has to offer. [1] Some people have responded that as long as the product does what they want, they don’t care about any of the other features.
So I drew this:
Generally I think it is more interesting to improve the documentation or discoverability of the existing product to get users to do what they want, instead of expanding the feature set of the product to allow the few power-users (or only the developer of the tool!) to do all the things they want.
Discoverability is a part of usability. It allows users to skip reading the manual. Knowing more or less what they want to do, they can use the tool with basic skills such as reading text and clicking links such as to better learn what they might want to do and finally do it.
Tags: Usability
Comments on 2006-08-09 Product Features and User Goals
Sure, discoverability is important, but increasing it is often very costly in terms of other important “usability” parts.
For example, icons are usually viewed as a very good thing for “discoverability”. But they draw the attention away for the “productive” control methods, like the command line, keyboard shortcuts, etc. And it’s while they are still availbale, only with icons added. It’s part of the novice/expert mode myth, I guess.
Personally, my favorite tools for increasing “discoverability” are various tooltips, status lines and, of course, auto-completion on the command line.
– TheSheep 2006-08-09 14:53 UTC
I actually don’t like icons at all. The kind of discoverability I like in Oddmuse is how you view a page, and find the history link at the bottom. If you follow it, the history page will contain another link at the bottom, showing you a filtered list of changes for the page you’re looking at, with log entries going as far back as possible. Thus, filtering of RecentChanges and listing all changes ever made to a page is hard to explain but easy to discover by users. Similarly, if you search for a term, the search results begin with a link to the list of recent changes filtered by the same term. Again, filtering of recent changes is hard to explain but made easy to discover.
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-09 15:30 UTC
Ich bin eben dran eine Applikation zu designen und freue mich übern jeden Input. Momentan denke ich, eine gute Applikation sollten
Plus das meiste was JefRaskin sagt 
Ich denke es ist extrem schwierig, Applikationen zu designen, die diesen Kriterien genügen, aber die, die es schaffen (z. B. das Web oder Visicalc) haben erstaunlichen Erfolg.
– Chris 2006-08-13 12:58 UTC
I decided to give FastCGI a try, after the awwaiid from EggplantFarms told me that using mod_perl was a security problem in a virtual hosting setup, since all CGI processes would then run as the webserver user.
When I tried to build mod_fastcgi 2.4.2 I realized that I had wiped my Apache source directories. So I got the latest an greatest Apache: httpd 2.3.3 and built it. Then I realized that the lastest mod_fastcgi is not the greatest: It won’t build. I needed Daniel Smertnig’s patch.
Anyway. Everything else is on Oddmuse:Using mod fastcgi.
Grrr. The Audacity binaries keep crashing on Mac OS 10.4.7 on my Intel-based Mac Mini. This is true for both 1.2.4 and 1.3.0b. I think I have a working Audacity binary on my laptop with Mac OS 10.3.9 – but I’ve moving all my music stuff off the laptop.
I’ve tried to get Ardour to work, thinking it would be an interesting Audacity alternative. Not so. Ardour is leagues beyond what I will ever need, I think. All I ever do with these programs is cropping soundfiles, so Audacity is already super-charged with features. With Ardour, I was unable to figure out how to import an MP3 file into the system.
Maybe I should try to build Audacity from source. I got wxWidgets 2.6 for the Mac. Compiling and installing was painless. Only later did I realize that Tiger comes with wxWidgets 2.4. Maybe getting and installing 2.6 was unnecessary. And then I found that it comes with DarwinPorts anyway. Damn, how could I be so careless as to miss this?
While building, I had trouble with libFLAC. Not being a big fan of FLAC (Wikipedia:Free Lossless Audio Codec), I decided to disable it. It took me a while to figure out that I had to pass both --without-flac and --disable-flac to configure.
Even then, compilation aborted: msgfmt was not found. WTF is that? Something involving .mo and .po files. I googled a bit and found my suspicion confirmed: GNU getttext. Installed that from DarwinPorts, finished building Audacity, started it, opened an MP3 file, everything seemed to work, tried to play it back: Got a second of noise and then silence. For all the MP3 files I tried.
AAAAARGH!
Ok, I’m deinstalling it all. All this time wasted. Makes a grown man want to cry.
In the mean time, command-line MP3 editor cutmp3 looks interesting. DarwinPorts includes mp3splt which is what I’m going to try next, after trying Audion and looking for mEdit. Both of them not really FreeSoftware. Just Freeware. And Abandonware, too. Oh well.
Back to free software! It turns out that mp3splt of OSX is a command-line tool only with no interactive use, but cutmp3 does what I need! It takes a bit getting used to the interface, but I think I was able to cut an interesting minute from a sound file that we’ll be using as a ringtone for Claudia’s mobile phone.
Hurray!
Comments on 2006-08-11 Audacity Crashes
My track-trimming tool of choice is Sweep.
– MichaelOlson 2006-08-12 15:17 UTC
Hm, Sweep looks useful. It doesn’t seem to be in DarwinPorts, however. We need a volunteer! 
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-12 19:56 UTC
It seems that Audacity 1.3.3 beta is working well on our Mac Mini. We’re giving it another try…
– AlexSchroeder 2007-06-29 22:07 UTC
As I look at my Oddmuse:Plans, I see a major revision coming up. Here’s all the stuff I plan to do regarding the list of recent changes and the rollback of spam:
Tags: Oddmuse
We went to see Angel-A (2005) yesterday. It was ok entertainment, and I chuckled several times, but all in all, I don’t recommend the movie. Life is short; too short for merely entertaining movies.
Auf dem Web gibt es ein paar vernichtende Kritiken zum Film. [1] [2]
Tags: Movies
We went to see Volver (2006), and I enjoyed it very, very much. I absolutely recommend this movie. Penelope Cruz and the other female actors are an absolute pleasure to watch.
Tags: Movies 
An ElectronicIntifada email I got [1] mentioned a UN estimate for just a single day in Gaza:
Note the small differences between the statements by the WFP (over 620 injured) and UNICEF (over 600 injured).
Overheard on the EmacsChannel:
We’ve rented the three Fantômas movies with Louis de Funès. Yesterday we watched the first one of them, Fantômas (1964).
Weird.
I don’t recommend it. Claudia was telling how I really should watch a Louis de Funès movie, and her mother recommended a few, but unfortunately Fantômas was the only one they had at the rental. Oh well.
I think James Travers says it all:
Tags: Movies
Comments on 2006-08-15 Louis de Funès
Ich kenne die Fantôme Filme nicht, aber Louis de Funès war mir immer zu bloed. Zu nervoes, zu schusselig, einfach zu dumm. Ich konnte da nicht lachen. Aber Jaques Tati in “Les vacances de M. Hulot”, da konnte ich mich totlachen ueber ganz einfache komische Situationen. Alles in Ruhe. ohne Gehuddel.
– Helmut Schroeder 2006-08-18 20:21 UTC
Ich wollte eigentlich genau nervös & schusselig sehen. Claudia hat mir immer davon erzählt, und ich kannte ihn nicht.
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-18 22:48 UTC
Bitte unbedingt “la grande vadrouille” mit bourvil und de funès sehen! Meiner meinung nach, der einzige intelligente UND lustige fil mit louis de funès. Schwarz-weiss, nimmt die engländer/franzosen im 2. weltkrieg aufs korn… Herrlich!
– mom 2006-08-30 20:06 UTC
I’ve never been a big user of Apple’s Exposé (KDE alternative: Komposé). Somehow Command-Tab (Alt-Tab on Windows) has been good enough for me. On OSX there’s an additional complication, however: If you want to switch applications, use Command-Tab. But if you want to switch windows within the same application (from one Terminal window to the next, from one Chat window to the next), you need to use Command-< (at least on a SwissGermanKeyboard).
In this context, using F9 to see all the windows of all the applications and using the mouse or the arrow keys to pick the window you want seems like a good idea.
If your applications us tabbed windows, however, you loose: You will never see windows hidden behind tabs. Just like you will never see the Emacs buffers that are not shown in a window. Is this a natural turning point for people with too many tasks?
I have no solution for Emacs, where I often have several dozen buffers open (eg. half a dozen IRC channels, half a dozen source files, an EmacsShell buffer, scratch, various directories, plus sometimes calendar or calculator). But for browsers, there is a solution: You can switch tabbed browsing on or off. So now I’m trying to live without tabbed browsing and using Exposé to navigate windows. At least for a while.
I’ve been enjoying the occasional table tennis match in a park nearby (Bäckeranlage). Today I went there and played with strangers.
There are two tables at the Bäckeranlage, two tables at the Kanzlei, and two tables each in the schools nearby.
Tags: Sports 
Comments on 2006-08-18 Tabletennis
Haben die gute Tische dort im Freien? Stein- oder Betontische sind furchtbar!Und wie sieht es mit Wind aus? Mit guten Schlaegern, Baellen, Netz und Tischbelag ist es schon ein Freude. Ich bin auch immer auf der Suche nach Spielgelenheit gewesen, habe aber kaum Glueck gehabt. Bangkok war gut, da hatten wir unseren eigenen Tisch.
– Helmut Schroeder 2006-08-18 20:09 UTC
Stein- und Betontische sind es, du hast es erraten. Und Wind gibt es auch immer wieder. Aber die Mischung zwischen Bewegung, Spaziergang, und Kaffeehaus besuchen hat es in sich. Gefällt uns beiden sehr gut.
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-18 22:50 UTC
I’m leaving for WikiSym 2006. Hope to see you there, if you’re interested in wikis.
Hopefully I’ll be wearing my Oddmuse T-Shirt, so I should be easy to recognize if you want to talk to me.
Tags: Conferences WikiSym2006 WikiSym
Angela Beesley talked about things that make WikiPedia work. Stuff I noticed.
Talking to Eugene about PurpleNumbers I mentioned that most wiki pages don’t change. I decided to look at the numbers for CommunityWiki.
Days #Pages 1000: 102 900: 128 800: 210 700: 189 600: 80 500: 251 400: 359 300: 264 200: 259 100: 466 0: 229
OpenSpace: Nobody was interested in my session, Integrating Language Minorities. I ended up listening in to a discussion about measurements.
Anrea Forte talks about learning, how students learn, how people are motivated (WikiPedia = authentic context). Are teachers required? Interesting questions:
Sheizaf Rafaeli talks about using a WikiBook. What is a book? Problems with text books: Expensive, unavailable, revenue goes not to the researches but to few writers, publishers motivated to issue new editions every semester, few non-English books. Motivation: Extrinsic, by providing a 3% grade bonus for five edits per semester, but the average is much higher. Statistically significant: High participation and better grades correlate.
He mentions WikiLiteracy.
Talking about WikiFounding with Kerry Santo. She was wondering how much effort she would have to invest in her wiki before it would take off. Intrigued, I looked at my own EmacsWiki numbers:
Month Total Top Poster Edits 2001-05 289 AlexSchroeder 222 2001-06 457 AlexSchroeder 228 2001-07 293 AlexSchroeder 152 2001-08 182 AlexSchroeder 108 2001-09 246 AlexSchroeder 203 2001-10 381 AlexSchroeder 170 2001-11 387 AlexSchroeder 191 2001-12 225 AlexSchroeder 108 2002-01 415 AlexSchroeder 131 2002-02 302 AlexSchroeder 103 2002-03 279 AlexSchroeder 96 2002-04 367 AlexSchroeder 117 2002-05 431 AlexSchroeder 168 2002-06 513 AlexSchroeder 163 2002-07 338 AlexSchroeder 102 2002-08 424 AlexSchroeder 163 2002-09 530 AlexSchroeder 225 2002-10 507 AlexSchroeder 189 2002-11 337 AlexSchroeder 129 2002-12 414 AlexSchroeder 125 2003-01 795 DeepakGoel 181 2003-02 627 AlexSchroeder 185 2003-03 1222 AlexSchroeder 225 2003-04 684 AlexSchroeder 115 2003-05 682 AlexSchroeder 214 2003-06 765 AlexSchroeder 237 2003-07 485 AlexSchroeder 65 2003-08 480 AlexSchroeder 177 2003-09 695 AlexSchroeder 221 2003-10 705 AlexSchroeder 184 2003-11 745 AlexSchroeder 130 2003-12 369 AlexSchroeder 46 2004-01 417 AlexSchroeder 79 2004-02 388 AlexSchroeder 76 2004-03 970 AlexSchroeder 105 2004-04 1202 MarkusKnittig 165 2004-05 934 AlexSchroeder 140 2004-06 1049 AlexSchroeder 212 2004-07 750 AlexSchroeder 68 2004-08 1055 AlexSchroeder 289 2004-09 1132 AlexSchroeder 296 2004-10 768 DrewAdams 115 2004-11 1104 AlexSchroeder 210 2004-12 869 DrewAdams 184 2005-01 1008 DrewAdams 114 2005-02 722 AaronHawley 53 2005-03 1002 AlexSchroeder 166 2005-04 794 AlexSchroeder 137 2005-05 653 DrewAdams 124 2005-06 817 AlexSchroeder 109 2005-07 1660 AlexSchroeder 703 2005-08 947 AaronHawley 135 2005-09 809 AlexSchroeder 85 2005-10 2565 AlexSchroeder 1438 2005-11 971 DrewAdams 409 2005-12 1570 DrewAdams 377 2006-01 1248 DrewAdams 374 2006-02 827 DrewAdams 352 2006-03 1329 DrewAdams 543 2006-04 859 DrewAdams 149 2006-05 955 DrewAdams 211 2006-06 744 DrewAdams 179 2006-07 587 DrewAdams 133
You can also search Flickr for more WikiSym 2006 pictures.
Tags: Conferences WikiSym2006 WikiSym
TedErnst has lots of money in Prosper. Basically he loans out small amounts of money $20 to $50 per person, to many persons, at interest rates of around 16% or higher. Some of these will default, but others will pay back. The reason these people accept such high interest rates is that sometimes they have credit card interest rates of 30%, and bad credit, so they can’t get money from a bank. Once you accept that the credit card companies are bastards (Wikipedia:Usury), “only” asking for 16% is starting to sound ethical.
I wonder if something like that is bound by national law. It sounds like an interesting way to invest your money. Then again: How much time do you spend doing a background check on the people borrowing your money, how much money will you be earning in interest, and what kind of hourly wage does that end up as?
Perhaps I’m better off not spending time on this. 
Tags: Microloans P2P
This is what we talked about in the OpenSpace session on “Protecting Against Dictators” – enabling stake holders to exercise their RightToFork.
I think this is what we need to offer, based on my own experience:
A danish university – teachers and instructors have a blog, there are wikis for courses. When the teachers move to a new job, can they take their data with them? It turns out that they keep their account, have access to the data, but there are no efforts underway (yet) to facilitate the export of data.
EmacsWiki – Alex has taken great pains to provide an archive of the files needed to run the site (and the site doesn’t need a database). He also has an archive of all the static HTML pages for emergencies. Setting up a copy of the site, however, requires manual intervention. So much, in fact, that nobody bothered to resurrect the site when only a short break was anticipated. Plus, the bandwidth used by the archives amounted to 20% of the site traffic, about 2G per month. This was solved by only allowing access to the archives to a small number of people. Another problem is that once the site is down, there is no simple way to find out who has backups and there is no plan for bringing the site back up.
Wikipedia – only lead administrators can make complete backups, because some of the information in the databases is only meant to be seen by administrators. The backup plans and the plans for getting the site back up elsewhere are not widely known, so we don’t know what they are.
A small wiki for about 100 users – no plans exist, adhoc backups are made, there is no license attached to the site, so the only implicit license is to modify and distribute them on the original site. There seems to be no right to fork (no free content).
See also: The same notes on the WikiSym wiki.
Tags: Conferences WikiSym2006 WikiSym
It turns out that my web hosting company is getting serious about me using Fast CGI for emacswiki.org and oddmuse.org. After some fooling around on the webserver, I decided that I needed a local lighttpd installation to get aquainted with the software.
I joined #lighttpd on Freenode and installed it. After a while, I got to a dead end and posted some questions [1]:
fastcgi.server = ( "/my/" => (( "socket" => "/tmp/fcgi-test.socket", "bin-path" => "/Users/Shared/WebSite/FCGI/test.fcgi" ))) cgi.assign = ( ".pl" => "/usr/bin/perl", )
I can now visit http://localhost/rock.pl and get the rock.pl to run correctly. That is, plain CGI works.
When I visit http://localhost/my/food however, I get a 404 error instead of my test.fcgi being run. Any idea what is going wrong?
Starting the server using sudo lighttpd -f /Users/Shared/WebSite/Conf/lighttpd.conf doesn’t produce output at the moment. should it list the processes started?
In the following setup, it looks as if the URL to a non-existing script such as http://localhost/mu.fcgi should work just as well as the URL to an existing script such as http://localhost/test.fcgi. How come the first one returns a 404 and the second one seems to work? Doesn’t the first one (non-existing mu.fcgi) trigger the same .fcgi pattern?
fastcgi.server = ( ".fcgi" => (( "socket" => "/tmp/fcgi-test.socket", "bin-path" => "/Users/Shared/WebSite/Pages/test.fcgi", "min-procs" => 1, "max-procs" => 1, "idle-timeout" => 20 )))
I guess my main problem is that I want to run two wikis on a single server. This seems to require the setup using prefixes, but the only setup I have working uses file extensions. I guess I could use one file extension per wiki but boy what a hack.
In the end, this is what worked:
server.document-root = "/Users/Shared/WebSite/Pages"
url.rewrite-once = ( "^/test(\?|/|$)" => "/test.fcgi",
"^/rock(\?|/|$)" => "/rock.fcgi" )
$HTTP["url"] =~ "/test" {
fastcgi.server = (
".fcgi" => ((
"socket" => "/tmp/fcgi-test.socket",
"bin-path" => "/Users/Shared/WebSite/Pages/test.fcgi",
"min-procs" => 1,
"max-procs" => 1,
"idle-timeout" => 20 )))
}
$HTTP["url"] =~ "/rock" {
fastcgi.server = (
".fcgi" => ((
"socket" => "/tmp/fcgi-rock.socket",
"bin-path" => "/Users/Shared/WebSite/Pages/rock.fcgi",
"min-procs" => 1,
"max-procs" => 1,
"idle-timeout" => 20 )))
}
With test.fcgi and rock.fcgi being files like the following:
#! /usr/bin/perl
use CGI::Fast qw(:standard);
$COUNTER = 0;
while (new CGI::Fast) {
print header;
print start_html("Fast CGI Rocks");
print
h1("Fast CGI Rocks"),
"Invocation number ",b($COUNTER++),
" PID ",b($$),".",
hr;
print end_html;
}
Note:
Archimob ist ein Verein, der Zeugnisse über die Zeit des zweiten Weltkrieges sammelt und archiviert. Auf der Webseite gibt es 555 Interviews, jedes davon ca. 2h lang. Wahrhaftig ein “Oral History” Projekt.
Siehe auch: DeutscheWikipedia:Oral History.
Tags: Switzerland History
Und das Essen war auch klasse: Tatsch, Pizokl, Micluns, Capauns. Das haben Claudia und ich gerne gegessen!
We spent four days in Scuol.
I uploaded the pictures to Flickr, in my ongoing quest to figure out what I want to be using in the future. Owning my own data, yes. But does that mean I want to host it myself? I don’t think so. Self-hosting is expensive. Oh well. I guess my need to argue my case goes to show how unsure I am of myself. (Note: Limiting free accounts to three sets is annoying, since this limit feels more arbitrary than not having an advanced feature at all.)
Tags: Pictures
Wow, reading about DanaBoyd @ FOO camp, I found the BarCamp site, and discovered that there’s a BarCampZurich planned for Saturday, October 28, 2006!!
Reading all the reports on previous Bar Camps [1] reminds me of OpenSpace. At WikiSym 2006, TedErnst really convinced me that OpenSpace is the way to run a conference. Maybe the Bar Campers should get rid of breaks, too.
Take a break when the time is right, eat when the time is right, talk when the time is right. Perhaps the focus on “presentations” is problematic. A presenter needs an audience, a projector, a room, and control, when it would be more pragmatic to engage with listeners right from the start, as equals, and to stick to smaller groups, thus fitting several groups into a single room.
At least they got rid of keynotes.
See also: Wikipedia:Open space conference, Wikipedia:Barcamp
Tags: BarCamp Conferences
Comments on 2006-08-30 Bar Camp Zürich
Alex, thanks for attending & presenting! I’m one of the organizers of BarCampZurich. This very first event will give us an opportunity to experiment with the BarCamp format - at this stage, it’s hard to tell whether it’s right and I think it will evolve fairly quickly. I’m sure this thing will fly!
See you there, Gabor
– Gabor Cselle 2006-09-01 08:57 UTC
At WikiSym, I implemented some Oddmuse stuff while I was disconnected from the net. The patch grew, and tests were failing, so even when I got connected again, I could not commit my half-assed patch. I kept working on it. It had some important stuff in it, and it had some weird stuff in it (renaming of parameters from “rchostonly” to “host” and renaming of variables to go along with it). It grew. Tests kept failing. I was angry.
Today I copied the current state of the files to my desktop, and started to use EdiffMode, in order to rescue the important stuff from the working copy and trash the rest. I feel so much better!
Trashing patches that keep growing is important. Extreme Programming mandates that your stuff runs at the end of the day and passes all the tests. If it doesn’t, trash it, and start again tomorrow. If you can’t get an incremental change that works today, how do you hope to finish anything at all?
But it hurts. 
Oh well. Trying to rescue more and more, I see the tests failing again. Damn!
I’m thinking of buying a NOXON iRadio thing for my kitchen. It connects to my WLAN and streams radio stations from the net. The alternative would be to buy another Tivoli Model One (see 2006-01-14 Gadgets). Negative points for such a webradio thing:
Thoughts?
(In the mean time I found that my favorite local shop for this kind of stuff doesn’t have them in stock.)
Comments on 2006-08-30 Web Radio Hardware
the squeeze box 3 seems to do everything you want and don’t want…but perhaps not in the same price range as the Noxon iradio
– PierreGaston 2006-08-30 12:55 UTC
Hm. I just read that the audio quality of the Noxon iRadio was bad. [1] Too bad!
As I’d like to use the device in our kitchen, it has to come with its own amplifier and speaker.
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-30 13:23 UTC
The squeeze box without any hesitation… The funniest is that the software inside is using Perl and available under a free software license. [2]
– adulau 2006-09-02 09:00 UTC
I see. Well, I guess that means I’ll have to get some external speakers, too. I actually think I have a pair of active speakers somewhere in the cellar. As for price on their website: Product, UPS shipping, 7.5% VAT → USD 361 ≈ CHF 441. At my favorite portable audio shop here in Zürich I can get the Slimbox3 Wireless for CHF 429, and other shops seem to sell for as low as CHF 379 + CHF 18 shipping. But then again, I like to be able to go to the shop and actually talk to somebody. I guess I’ll give them a visit on Monday. 
– AlexSchroeder 2006-09-02 14:53 UTC
I bought the Squeezebox3! 
– AlexSchroeder 2006-09-04 17:19 UTC
Tags: SqueezeBox
At WikiSym 2006, we talked about the future of wikis, and one thing I am really looking forward to is extending wiki ideas to SVG images. I use InkScape to produce SVG files for my diagrams on CommunityWiki. That gives me the ability to use some VisualLanguage.
Today, I went back and made a serious effort at installing OddmuseToInkscape that LionKimbro wrote so long ago. It’s awesome! All it needs is some more polishing and an installer. 
I also upgraded to Inkscape 0.44.
I checked in what I had, and rewrote the documentation on Community:OddmuseToInkscape. It’s looking pretty good at the moment!
I also reworked the visual documentation that Lion had written. Check it out.
Tags: Oddmuse Wikis WikiSym2006 WikiSym
EditNearLinks: WikiSym InkScape CommunityWiki TedErnst OpenSpace ClaudineChionh JefRaskin NeutralPointOfView WikiFounding WikiLiteracy OddmuseToInkscape PurpleNumbers TransparentSociety EmacsShell RightToFork WikiPedia PierreGaston EdiffMode EmacsChannel OffTopic StableCopy VisualLanguage KathySierra RecordKeeper BarnStar
Woudn’t it be neater to have it all in a simple .cgi script? You’d only upload a .tar or .zip with all the images (with meaningful names) and the rest is just automatic?
Personally, I just use an image board software to upload pictures and generate thumbnails.
– TheSheep 2006-08-02 17:11 UTC
Well, I like to interleave pictures and text, therefore a simple gallery is not enough for me. That means, I could combine the three steps I’m currently doing into one step, but I don’t feel like automating more of it.
If I were to automate more of it, I think I’d start using Flickr…
– AlexSchroeder 2006-08-02 17:27 UTC
I reduce my pictures using the following:
That typically reduces a 2M image to 160K, with hardly any noticeable difference. One can experiment with different resize/quality values.
– deusmax 2007-11-09 23:19 UTC
Wow… A comment on such an old post!
These days I find that I am in fact using Flickr to host my images. No more uploading to my personal webspace. My blog pages then just link to a single image and people interested in the pictures can follow the link to the Flickr gallery.
Example: Japan 2007.
– AlexSchroeder 2007-11-09 23:26 UTC
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