Just Imagine...

Thu 22 Nov 2007, 21:37 GMT

Thanksgiving 2007 at the American Book Center: the spoils

As I did this both last year and the year before, this has now become an unbreakable tradition. Since I'm again cross-posting between the message board and the weblog, a short intro for any non-messageboard people who weren't weblog people yet last year either (there's some, according to my feed subscription counts): English science fiction and fantasy books are somewhat scarce in regular bookstores in the Netherlands. Yet there is one place to go to, one place which makes up for it all. The American Book Center imports directly from both the US and the UK, and as such has a collection that many people from both the US and the UK have mentioned to be larger and more diverse than anything they know. Members of the ABC and students get a 10% discount. And every year at Thanksgiving, they add another 10% discount on top of this. (20% discount is a big deal in the Netherlands, especially with the lack of choice.) And so there's a yearly pilgrimage to stock up on all those books that everyone's been meaning to buy for a long time now...

This last year has been good to me, and so to give thanks I for once allowed myself to skip the ritual pass at the end of the book-gathering phase to reluctantly put books back onto the shelves. (The other reason for skipping this was that Karin (the ABC's book buyer for the Science Fiction & Fantasy section) kept following me and immediately re-stocking everything I took off the shelves, so putting any books back wouldn't actually be possible either. *g*) The final list is thus... erm... perhaps a bit excessive. Maaaybe. But hey, I had empty bookshelf space, and that just can't be allowed to exist! *g*

So, herewith, in alphabetical order, the spoils:
* Isaac Asimov - Robot Dreams, Robot Visions, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, Foundation's Edge, Foundation and Earth, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. (These all were my main goal for getting this year, same as last year I went to get all of Pratchett. Asimov was the author who first got me reading science fiction. I'd read fantasy and science fiction before him, but it wasn't until I picked up I, Robot (which my father was reading, and had let lie on the table) that I took it upon myself to go to the public library and find more. Yet my personal library so far has been pretty much devoid of Asimov. No more! Still missing is Robots and Empire, the sequel to The Robots of Dawn, which Bantam for some reason hasn't republished. I got Karin to order the UK edition of it though, so I'll be able to add that to my shelves next time I go to Amsterdam.)
* Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons. (Still cautiously exploring the Culture universe. So far I've liked two, but hated one. Of the others, this was the only one which had a coverblurb which really appealed.)
* Mark Budz - Till Human Voices Wake Us. (An author I've never heard of, and a coverblurb which didn't appeal all that very much. But the cover is shiny, and David Brin praised one of his earlier books (which sadly wasn't in stock (edit: ooh, but I see I have it (Clade) in my to read piles already, picked up from a sale at the ABC some time ago)), and I do always like to include a few oddball hard sf choices; it's a gamble which, when it pays off, often does so in a spectacularly rewarding way.)
* Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things. (I'm one of those strange people who does not worship the very ground his Neilness has walked upon, but hey, I have liked some of his books before, and so I thought I'd try some of his short fiction. I got this book in hardcover, as that was on sale and thus cheaper than the paperback, plus it's the really shiny version with the translucent dust jacket and pretty butterfly.)
* John Twelve Hawks - The Traveler. (One of the ever-increasingly large class of books set in the very near future where the erosion of privacy and the total surveillance society form the main component of the book's setting. These are subjects I care deeply about, and I know to look to science fiction authors to be able to say intelligent things about them, so this was an obvious book to pick up. I noticed a sequel as well, but it was only out in hardcover yet, and that'd be slightly too large a gamble for an unknown author. (As an aside, after long deliberations on if I should list this guy under the T or under the H, what swayed me to the H was that that's where the ABC put him.))
* Frank Herbert - Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune. (Slowly but surely I'm picking off all those old classics which I read years ago but never had gotten around to owning yet.)
* Herman Hesse - Steppenwolf. (Verily, it's true! I bought a general fiction book! Although really, after The Glass Bead Game I consider Hesse an honorary science fiction author. :) I picked this up because the way Hesse looks at life has appealed to me quite a bit in the past.)
* David Marusek - Counting Heads. (Another oddball choice; a giant (in width and height, not in thickness) trade paperback; the first novel of an author I've never heard of. But the cover features a Hancock Building amidst a cityscape which otherwise is completely anti-Chicago, and the coverblurb promises all kinds of things which to my mind seem very hard to pull off well, so it seemed like the perfect gamble. :) This also has quite a lot of total surveillance society touches, although the impact from them is likely to be decidedly less as it's set in the future nearly a century from now.)
* Jack McDevitt - A Talent for War, Seeker and Polaris. (I've picked up Seeker and Polaris so often, to always put them down again, that it was getting slightly ridiculous. Yet now they finally had the first book in this universe (written nearly twenty years ago) in stock, and so how could I not buy them? This should be space opera of the highest quality... *crosses fingers*)
* Patricia McKillip - Od Magic. (I still don't like these almost-but-not-quite trade-paperback sized McKillip volumes with their weirdly textured covers, but oh well, her writing is what it's all about in the end, and this one I hadn't read yet...)
* Marianne de Pierres - Dark Space. (She's Australia. That's really all the excuse I needed to pick up yet another unknown science fiction author. No idea whatsoever what to expect of this, so call it another gamble.)
* Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (Another book not to be found in the science fiction section! I've been putting off buying this book for so long that I don't even really remember what got me interested in it in the first place. I do know that its popularity has played a major factor in not getting it before. Still, I think the time has come for me to read this.)
* Terry Pratchett - The Last Hero. (A paperback version of the coffee table book, in a square format preserving all the gorgeous illustrations, yet being small enough to fit on my shelves, for a trade paperback price. I remember reading the entire coffee table book in some random department store in Australia a couple of years ago. I'm glad to finally be able to own this now.)
* Terry Pratchett - Wintersmith. (The third Tiffany book; I've loved the first two, and I don't doubt the same will go for this one. No one writes more adult-friendly children's books than Pratchett, and they're always so wondrously tightly plotted. I bought this one in hardcover, as it followed Fragile Things with being on sale for less than the price of the paperback, and my Tiffany books already aren't all the same size anyway.)
* Adam Roberts - Stone and Polystom. (The universes from these books sound highly original and innovative. I've picked them up quite a few times before, but never really new where to start, so decided to just earmark him for Thanksgiving. Wonderfully abstract covers, too.)
* Justina Robson - Natural History and Keeping It Real. (I first noticed Keeping It Real earlier this month in Berlin, and immediately knew I had to pick it up this Thanksgiving. Magic, elves, elementals, demons - and AI, as all of the above joined the 'real world' back in 2015. That to me sounds like science fiction gone horribly right. :) To such a degree that it gave me enough confidence to also pick up Natural History, one of her earlier novels.)
* Geoff Ryman - Air. (This cover looks almost too slick, with the coverblurb too appealingly vague. The last village in the world to go online sounds like it almost has to lead to a botched job by someone who doesn't really understand the internet. And yet, and yet... He does have a quote by Greg Bear, and that gambling urge spoke up again...)
* Nick Sagan - Idlewild, Edenborn and Everfree. (Karin gave this trilogy an absolutely glowing review, and speaking with her she compared it to John C. Wright's Chronicles of Chaos trilogy - but then actually done right (and with a science fiction slant, rather than a fantasy one). I know just enough to listen when the bookbuyer of my favorite bookstore raves about books, and so getting this entire trilogy was a rather obvious decision.)
* John Scalzi - The Android's Dream and Old Man's War. (There is only one thing I can do to describe why I laughed out loud shortly after picking up this book, and then immediately put it in my basket, and that is to quote from the coverblurb I was reading: A human diplomat kills his alien counterpart. Earth is on the verge of war with a vastly superior alien race. A lone man races against time and a host of enemies to find the one object that can save our planet and our people from alien enslavement... a sheep. Yes, you read that right. I mean, honestly... how could I resist? Old Man's War was actually the book by this author that I picked up first, and decided to gamble on as it seemed like interesting space opera, but The Android's Dream means I now actually have high expectations of the author. Really looking forward to reading these. :))
* Karl Schroeder - Sun of Suns. (Last year I picked up his Lady of Mazes, which might just have been the most forgettable book I read in the entire year (I actually had to pick it up and look at several pages of it before I remembered what it was all about), and yet once I remembered some details about it, I did realize I had enjoyed it. Sun of Suns appears to contain a similarly originally crafted world, and although it has a blurb by Larry Niven (hint to publishers: that's less likely to make me want to read the book), it also has one by Vernor Vinge, and so I figured I'd go and see if this one would be less forgettable.)
* Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. (Featuring a low-level techie working for a super-secret government agency as its unlikely hero, the entire setup is absolutely certain to appeal to geeks like me, especially knowing how well Stross groks geekdom.)
* Charles Stross - Halting State. (Talking about geekdom... This one's about a virtual bank-robbery, with the prime suspects being a band of marauding orcs with a dragon in tow for fire support. The entire setup is so much the pinacle of geek awesomeness that I decided Stross had proven himself enough with Accelerando (even though Glasshouse kinda sucked again) that it'd be worth buying in hardcover. Fingers crossed that that'll turn out to have been deserved.)
* Vernor Vinge - Across Realtime. (In discussions back when Vinge won the Hugo with Rainbows End, quite a few people mentioned how that wasn't nearly as good as his Realtime books, and so seeing this volume now, I picked it up. Looking at it and googling it a bit, it turns out to contain two books - The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. Wish I'd seen that earlier, as I already own The Peace War (and didn't think it was Hugo material), and could've probably found the other cheap in a used bookstore somewhere, but oh well.)

*gulps* So yeah... 47 books, needing three stylish large green ABC bags to carry out. Kinda shattering last year's record. I'd better find myself some extra reading time somewhere or I'm going to have trouble finishing these all before next year's Thanksgiving. *g*
If you're interested in what I think of the books (especially the gambles), keep an eye on the What's everyone reading at the moment? thread.

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Thu 8 Nov 2007, 13:58 GMT

Tristan Nitot saves the closing Web 2.0 Expo keynotes

So, sitting here in the - so far - really rather boring closing keynotes at the web 2.0 expo. Tim O'Reilly was interviewing some Nokia guy. Massive *yaaaaaaaawn* (Had fun browsing twitter streams from people attending - lots of buzzword bingo and zzzzzzzzzzzzs.) Then seedcamp-something? I don't know, I zoned out. But then Tristan Nitot (fr) came on stage to tell us a bit about the Future of Mozilla and Firefox.
One of the first things he did (before now demoing all the cool things in Gecko 1.9) was to go shortly over the history of messages stating that "Mozilla is doomed", to then ask for some audience participation.
Everyone, please stand up.
500+ people in the room. Probably quite a few more. All standing up. (Reluctantly, somewhat (what to do with all the laptops?), but still.)
Now, everyone who is using Firefox or a Mozilla-based browser, please sit down again.
Barely a dozen people remained standing.
That got quite a lot of applause. *g*

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Wed 7 Nov 2007, 13:19 GMT

Notes on OpenSocial, Typography and other Web 2.0 Expo topics

So I'm currently attending Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, a conference on everything web 2.0. Lots of buzzwords, lots of marketing people and corporate fluffiness - but also enough geeks talking about cool technical subjects that I don't need to find myself too bored. Well, except for about two hours after lunch, when the keynotes are happening. As I don't feel like playing buzzword bingo, I'm using the current keynote timeslot to write this here weblog post.
This originally started out as me swiftly writing up some OpenSocial notes right after the talk on that had finished, but then my laptop powered down unexpectedly (the power meter was still reading 16% for crying out loud!), so I never managed. Lucky for you, as it means I'll now blather on a bit more on the rest of the conference as well (okay, more blathering from me - perhaps not so lucky you after all). *g*

I trained into Germany last Saturday, and started off with a very enjoyable day and a half of hanging out with my good friend lian. Bit of an "ack!" during that, as there was a looming threat of a railway strike which'd make it very difficult for me to get to Berlin, but luckily it didn't happen, and so I arrived in Berlin without any problem. Arrived at the conference center a short bit before the opening keynote, which was Tim O'Reilly being very enthusiastic and rather completely ignoring a great many things, privacy being chief amongst them. Then we had some short introductions by various people of their upcoming talks and various other subjects. The first half of it was called "five great ideas in ten minutes", and the second was "Ignite", but it was hard to spot the difference between them, and both were a pretty mixed bag. Some interesting pitches, but nothing which really stands out anymore now (a day and a half later), while most talks were pretty yawn-worthy.

Afterward I set out to explore Berlin a bit. Last time I'd been in Berlin was right before the World Championship kicked off, meaning that silly football related decorations were blocking all the views on the main tourist attractions and I couldn't take many of the classical shots. Obviously now was a good time to rectify that. I also noticed the anomaly of there being no line whatsoever for going up to the dome on top of the Reichstag, so I promptly made use of the opportunity by going up. Quite glad I did, as the mirrored cone inside looked very pretty in the dark.


Anyway, onward to Tuesday, the first real day of the conference (Monday was workshops, and then that opening keynote).
Brian Suda started bright and early at 09:00 (well, actually 09:12, as there'd apparently been a slowdown with registrations and getting people into the building) and talked about microformats. I've attended several talks about microformats before, so the basics were all pretty familiar, but what was still cool was to see how they're being used; the line from this talk that probably captured it best was: unix pipes... for the web.

Next up was "How to run large web apps" by Artur Bergman from Wikia. Contrary to my expectations, this talk turned out to be all about the technical "operations" side of things: web servers, power usage, memcache, how to scale with boxes rather than in software, etc. I was sorely tempted to switch to a different room (the decision on which talk to attend for this timeslot was the hardest so far, as all five talks sounded interesting), but I decided to stick it out. None of that information is directly applicable to me, but I feel it's good to have awareness of it all anyway.

Tom Coates then gave an inspirational talk titled "Designing for a Web of Data", which contained a variety of real-world lessons of what he saw as being key to successful web 2.0 companies, and on why they're not the same as - for example - banks or phone companies (which have many of the same traits). If I ever decide to go the startup route, I'll definitely be sure to look up the slides from this talk again.

Lunch was spent wandering over the expo floor. Mostly uninteresting corporate stuff, though the Nokia booth had some N810s to play with, and thus probably convinced me this device isn't quite there yet as far as being a really usable replacement internet device; specifically, it seems to lack a solution for replacing the 2GB internal storage - it almost has to be more robust than a TomTom (which locks up if you get a bad sector in such a completely unnecessary file as one containing information on traffic lights), but bad sectors for critical files happen just the same, and it's slightly too expensive a toy to accept the possibility of it bricking like that. Next up were the keynotes, which meant me heading out into the city (wish I hadn't missed the clingwrap story though; I wonder if anyone took pictures which successfully managed to capture the audience's reaction). While sitting on the train, I noticed the most amazing light was shining on the Reichstag underneath gathering storm clouds, but by the time I had gotten myself over there, the only thing left were the stormclouds. Oops. Didn't get too wet, but I envy the lucky photographers who were there ten minutes earlier than I was.

Anyway, back to the conference for the OpenSocial session. Since this is the heart of this weblog post, allow me to say two words on the context surrounding this all, aiming to clarify things for those regular readers who're still following along but not that up to date with the segments of the web where these particular hype-of-the-minute phenomenons live. So, social networking sites: Think facebook, myspace, orkut, linkedin, hyves. (And to a lesser degree, think flickr, del.icio.us, etc.) The big one lately has been Facebook, which has allowed third-party developers limited entry onto their "platform" in order to run small-scale web-applications (frequently called widgets, gadgets, etc.) within the profiles of their users, assuming those users choose so. This is good for facebook, as it creates a much richer experience for their users, and it's good (?) for third-party developers, as it allows them access to a vast pool of users who'd otherwise never have heard of their application (and if the application is good, facebook's viral nature means that it can spread very fast amongst users). However, facebook uses a "walled garden" approach. They're not really open, and users get ever more locked in to their platform. This is where OpenSocial comes onto the scene. As many others have mentioned before, it doesn't really tackle the most important problem of the lock in (the inability to take your friends list and all associated data with you to other sites), but what it does is to bring hope for a "write once" approach to developing those third-party widgets in a way that'll then allow them to run on any social networking site which makes available the OpenSocial API. (Which will be most of the big ones, with the very notable exception of Facebook.) And in fact, I suspect that just this will be enough for some enterprising developer to get a long way in opening up the rest of the data, too. Specifically, I expect a generic "contacts exporter" widget to come onto the scene Real Soon Now, and that if the process for getting people to enable this widget can be made to be painless enough, it'll become the way in which new social networking sites get people to populate their contact lists.
Google announced OpenSocial last week, so the session about it at the conference (changed from its earlier topic), was sure to be a big hit, and indeed, the room was totally packed. The actual amount of useful information at this session was sadly limited though, but still, here's my notes on what did strike me as interesting. (I assume this information can be found in the official documentation as well, but I haven't looked at any of that yet.)
First, and most important of all, the OpenSocial API hasn't actually been finished yet. Specifically, the absolutely most interesting parts of the API - the security model (authentication and request signing), and the extensibility model - haven't been finished yet.
There's "sandboxes" on some of the big participating sites where you can start playing with such parts of the API as are finished, but any sort of judgement on it all will need to wait until those missing parts get filled in.
The API as has been (more or less) finalized consists of a client-side part and a REST-based server-side part. The client-side API calls are modeled on Google's gadget specification, while the server-side calls are modeled on the Atom Publishing Protocol. I don't know about google's gadgets, but yay Atom!
One of the big questions which came up from the audience was: "who owns the data?" - and the answer to that was "that depends on the individual 'container' sites". (The container site is the social networking sites which contains the third-party widget.) I expect there'll be a lot of struggle there before some truly open terms become industry standard, but don't doubt that it'll happen eventually.

There's also supposed to be a Web2Open session that'll hopefully dig a bit deeper into the specifics of OpenSocial than most of the fluff we had to endure during this session, but the web2open twitter stream doesn't yet get more specific than "this afternoon". Meh. The schedule gets determined in the morning - how hard can it be to push that to the web? We want details, people! (Edit: okay, so I walked by their "office" on the expo floor, and the dev session will be at 15:30. Edit 2: now apparently 15:50.)

Anyway, after the OpenSocial talk, Matt Biddulph gave a talk titled "Coding on the Shoulder of Giants", which to me was highly interesting, because even though on the surface it slightly resembled a product demo for dopplr, it wasn't really (lots of actually interesting real world lessons), and even where it was a product demo, it was an interesting one to me personally. Dopplr is a social networking site where people keep track of when they'll be travelling to places, so that their friends who live there (or happen to be travelling there at the same time) know they have an opportunity to meet up with them. And I'm thinking of all the ways this travel data would mesh with the Travellerspoint maps. Really need to find some empty weekend to explore the dopplr API and see what I can hack together.

The big disappointment of this first day of the conference was the total lack of human interaction. Everyone was constantly sitting with their face in their laptop (me included), and the atmosphere just wasn't there to easily connect to one's fellow geeks. (I'm sure those more socially capable (or more "popular") than me still managed fine, but for me the barrier was too high.) Together with the cold, depressing November weather, this left me feeling not really up to heading to the official party (I suspect I'd have fled it swiftly anyway; for some reason conference parties always feature overly-loud noise masquerading as music).

Today, Wednesday, I've attended three sessions so far. First up was Jeremy Keith, talking about microformats. Where Brian talked more on what you can use microformats for, Jeremy focused on the design philosophy behind them. The 80/20 rule, and always siding with ease of publishing over ease of parsing. He's always an inspirational speaker, so that was time really well spent. I particularly liked his mention of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. (Anyone else always thinking of that whenever the OLPC project gets mentioned?)

The second talk of the day was on "Location and Mapping" by one of the people from the OpenStreetMap project. Good to get an overview of what's happening with that, and how far along they are, but otherwise too general for my tastes. I guess that means it was well suited to the "Fundamentals" track it belonged to, and I shouldn't complain. *g*

Last (so far), and very much not least, was Mark Boulton on typography. The start of this talk was quite general again, but when he got to "micro-typography" rules, I took more notes on this than at any other session so far. As he said, this is the kind of stuff that doesn't really get talked about, as all designers learned it by root from some stuffy schoolbook back when, but in this age of self-taught designers (and of non-designers like me who still have to do the occasional bit of design), it gets more worthwhile to talk about it. I could just see my own typography/design improving with these very simple rules he went over. Running over the highlights very swiftly, insofar as I feel I can put them in words that actually hold true: If you have an all-caps headline, put spacing between the letters (except if you want to appear cheap). In such a headline, italicize ampersands. In a navigation menu with dividing lines, don't balance white-space above and below the menu entries, but rather put the words near the upper dividing line, having the descenders dangle in the extra white-space thus created. (As with all these rules, I can't put into words why this is important, but if you try this yourself, seeing the effect is instantaneous.) In data tables, use numerals which stick to the baseline of the rest of the text. Use a mono-space font for decimal numbers in such tables, and don't emphasize by italicizing, since the effect is near impossible to see. (Slides here.)
I suspect any designers in the audience are chuckling at me needing to write out these things, but man, it's such a revelation to me as a developer to see on screen how large the effect of such simple things can be, and more importantly (since I've seen it before, of course), to have some rules I myself can apply.

Anyway, so I have another hour and a half now until the keynotes are over and the worthwhile sessions get started again. I think I'll go post this, and then see if I can find the energy to edit and toss in a couple of pictures, too. (Edit: looks like I won't, as the OpenSocial dev session will be during that time. Maybe I'll edit this post with photos tomorrow.)

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Sun 16 Sep 2007, 18:27 GMT

Catching up

Ick. One week short of half a year without any weblog entries. I'd better get my act together here.
*looks at piles upon piles of projects that have higher priority than writing weblog entries*
Yeah, any day now I'll be back in full swing, churning out tripreports like you wouldn't believe.
*nods earnestly*
Aaaaaany day now.

But okay, I promised myself that I'd at least write something here, so this is for those who're interested in what's actually happening in my life, and haven't gotten to catch up with my in real life recently.

First of all - probably the very largest reason for time having slipped by as swiftly as it has - I should mention that nearly exactly half a year ago, I finally found myself a place to live which wasn't my parents' baseme^H^H^H^H^H^Hattic. On the negative side, it wasn't a nice small cozy apartment either, but a full-fledged two-bedroom house. Still, its location is perfect, it's affordable, and most of all, I could move in right away (as opposed to having to suffer the 3+ year waiting lists that are common with most housing corporations in the Netherlands). So, I spent a month cleaning up the house, painting the walls, putting in floors, buying an oven and fridge, etc, etc, etc. (With of course major thanks to the parental units for the amount of work they put in, too.)
The months since then have been spent on slowly filling up this place, with major breaks for travels (two months USA and three weeks Norway), which means that the pace of it all hasn't been quite as swift as I'd have liked it to be. Case in point, my books are at the time of writing still stacked together in double rows over three old completely different and mostly very impractical bookcases. But! Not much longer. Ever since I first saw the huge amount of space I have in this house, I've been craving my very own wall of books, and just this weekend I have finally taken steps toward realizing this. A trip to the Ikea was made, and seven bookcases were acquired. No impractical 40cm deep Billy bookcases, but 20cm deep Bestå-s, with tiny holes going up the entire length of the side of the bookcase, spaced just 3cm apart, meaning you can make them an absolutely perfect fit for both hardcover and paperback books, as well as CDs and DVDs. The only thing that won't fit in these bookcases are coffee-table books, but that's okay, I only have five of these anyway. (It has to be admitted though that this is three more than I had a year ago; I've sadly developed something of an appreciation for art books. Ph34r!)
Of course, no trip to Ikea can be made without the Ikea curse striking. This time it struck by them not having any extra shelves in stock for these bookcases. What's more, it turns out they're out of stock everywhere due to capacity problems, and although they might possibly get some back in stock next month, there was only a 30% chance of that. Faced with the possibility of owning seven mostly useless bookcases, I solved this challenge in typical me-fashion and bought three more, this time with the goal purely to plunder their shelves. The extra cost per-shelf wasn't even that outrageous, and if the extra shelves ever get back in stock, I can gain myself three extra bookcases for the very low price of just those shelves. :)

Workwise things are going well, with me constantly being booked full with projects (currently till the end of the year), and these projects always being just enough out of the ordinary with components or technologies I hadn't had a chance to use yet (Oracle, the Zend framework, ...) that I keep learning from it. I do still long for the carefree days when I had time to lounge about all week and read endless books, but I guess the money which gives me the ability to take long vacations does make up for that loss a bit, as does being able to pay for a house containing (soon) a wall of books. :D

To have something to do in my rare free time (heh), I've also joined the W3C's new HTML Working Group as a Public Invited Expert, and although the email-volume is overwhelming to a degree that I've mostly stopped trying to keep up, I do more-or-less follow what's going on, and hope to contribute by submitting a long list of comments no the current editor's draft of HTML5. I'm 90% done with that list, and would be working on the remaining 10% right now, but I've been struck down by a nasty cold, and so my mind isn't quite up to thinking on the level necessary for that type of work. (Hence writing a weblog entry; don't you all feel lucky?) :D

As if one work-related extra-curricular activity wasn't quite enough, I've also gone and joined the 'certification'-commission of the new Dutch "guild of front-end web developers". (It should be noted here that the word "certification" apparently has legal ramifications, so we're trying to find a good alternative for it.) My reasons here were mostly that I had great fears over how much harm badly defined 'certification' could do if it ever really took off (mostly in the long term, if it got to be too strict and inflexible, while modern techniques would be changing out from under it), and rather than vocally opposing any- and everything about it (as some people have lately chosen to do), I decided I could do some good and help prevent that from happening. I'm still not entirely positive about the long-term aspects of our plans, but I do now have faith that it'll all do more good than harm, and that I can put some trust in my fellow commission-members.

*ponders what else stands out from the crowd as being something to write about*

I guess there's been a whole lot of really rave-worthy books, but you know, if you care about my opinions on those, you can just read the "What's everyone reading at the moment?" thread on the message board, which actually breached 1000 replies back in May or June. *grins proudly at his little message board that could*

Oh, before I forget, I was silly and participated in a meme (what can I say, I'm a sucker for gifts) :) and so need to include this:

quote:

I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment requesting to join this PIF exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be yet, but you will receive it within 365 days. The only thing you have to do in return is "pay it forward" by making a similar agreement on your blog.

Despite what I said above about far too many projects on my plate, I do intend to go and work on getting the remaining tripreports out. I still have large photo sets remaining from the last two years on the subjects of Dragon*Con (and general USA), Dublin, Germany, the Netherlands, Yosemite (and general USA) and Norway, plus some smaller sets from things like the Dutch flower fields in spring, CastleFest e.a. No promises on when, but at least now you know what's currently in the planning.

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Sun 25 Mar 2007, 14:19 GMT

Tripreport: 2007-02-08 - 2007-02-11: Vancouver & Web Directions North, Part 2

As you all probably suspected when I wrote it in my last tripreport, next week has become next month (through no fault of my own - February is just a far too ridiculously short month! *nods earnestly*), but here we are at last, ready to prattle on some more about Vancouver and Web Directions North, dazzle you with pictures of pretty lights, snow and sunsets, and show the mysteriously burning building in context.

The second day of Web Directions North kicked off early at 9 A.M. As the expectation was that most people would have trouble arriving in time for this (I managed! *proud*), the organizers had had the splendid idea to reward those who'd arrived early - and published about the conference, either on flickr or on their weblogs (with this latter being more important, but the former still being necessary) - by giving away some books by the various conference speakers. I lucked out, as they counted my pre-WDN And the clouds receded post amongst such, and so I walked away from that morning in the possession of Dan's Web Standards Solutions (which looks like a great book to lend to people who want to get a start in web design), and Dave and Molly's The Zen of CSS Design (which I hope might actually teach me some things about design that will make my efforts in that area not completely suck, specifically in the typography chapter), as well as a free license for Opera Mobile (which I've promptly passed on to my father, as I stay as far away from PDAs and mobile phones as possible). I could totally deal with waking up early more often if I'd always get such results for it. :P
Once these gifts had been given out, Kelly Goto took the stage for her "Designing for Lifestyle" talk. I remember this talk as being mostly interesting - on a really global scale; calling upon people to see the overarching developments - but featuring slides with really crappy tiny graphics, that I on the fifth or sixth row already had trouble deciphering, and which must've been pretty meaningless for those further back in the audience.
Next up were Paul Hammond and George Oates, from Yahoo and Flickr (and thus Yahoo) respectively. Paul's talk was almost what I'd really come to this conference for, describing best practices for the architecture of web apps, hitting upon the model-view-controller idea, touching some templating languages and their good and bad points and similar things. But unfortunately it was all pretty high level and superficial. There were some good nuggets, but for the most part I was left feeling as if I'd just attended an introduction to software design lecture from my university days: statements without arguments or explained reasoning. What was missing was something of the form: If you wouldn't do this, the result would be .... It wouldn't surprise me if this was a result of Yahoo policy (don't tell them about our fuckups!), but either way, it wasn't quite satisfying.
George on the other hand took a real world case study - that of designing the integration of Yahoo maps in Flickr for 'geotagging' - and walked through it step by step, showing things that didn't work and how they ended up with what they have, and that ended up being really interesting, mostly because of course I've done a mapping tool with placing photos on it, too - if not on the same scale (they had 1 million photos placed on the map in the first 24 hours after release! - but they also had an actual team to work on it all, and went through a lot of design iterations and testing).
The audience questions for both at the end of the talk probably was the best of it all, with thoughts on api interoperability and openness, unintended consequences and your average user having no idea their data was available like that. All very relevant and interesting for me.

Lunch was back up in the revolving restaurant, involving Mexican food - which at least is more my style than Asian, even if I mostly just stuck to the quesadillas and the chocolate cake. :)

The session after lunch was the hardest choice for me to make - In the "developer" ballroom there was a talk about mashups, while in the "designer" ballroom Veerle and Dave would talk about "the design process", focusing specifically on how this works for independent designers running their own companies, which just appealed immensely to me. In the end I opted for the mashups talks, though, as being more relevant to the work I actually do, rather than to the process around it. I very much think this was the right choice, although I'm waiting most impatiently for the podcast of the design process talk to become available, as the notes about it resonate heavily. (For example: Dave: working in dull environments can be a challenge. I think that's the number one thing that's wrong at the location I'm doing my current project at. It's a very interesting web app (nearly ideal, really: letting me solve some pretty hard problems and learn some new things and creating something very cool), and the people working there are all very decent... but it's such a completely uninspiring environment that I need to put serious effort into not letting it get to me.)
Aaaaanyway, that aside: the mashups talk. I remember how there was trouble getting the sound system to work at the start, and instead at some point the talk from the other ballroom coming over. I think Jeremy had the microphone at that point (waiting to introduce Steffen and Ducky), and he started opening and closing his mouth and someone from the audience shouted, It's a mashup!, and there was much laughter. Once that was sorted out, Steffen Meschkat (from Google) gave a good high level overview of mashups (with a minor focus on google maps), placing them in context (for example, a slide titled "reuse": 50s: algorithms, 60s: programs, 70s: libraries, 80s: components, 90s: patterns, 00s: services), stressing the importance of guarding against cross-site script injection (well, okay, so I knew that already) :) and explaining the various concepts. Thinking back about this talk, I don't know why it didn't feel as unsatisfying as Paul's did, given that it too didn't really include very concrete examples, but I suspect it's just a side of the subject that works better at a high level.
Then Kaitlin Sherwood (called Ducky by everyone) took the stage (I forgot to take a picture of her - but made up for it during dinner that evening) and showed about a gazillion examples of all the really cool things happening with mapping applications and mashups, giving a guide to what to pay attention to if you want to choose a framework to build an app on, including a lot of focus on licensing, before exploring the more practical sides of how to do it, showing the various levels of control you have. Picked up a lot of ideas from this, and had quite a few wow, I didn't know you could do that! moments. Very cool indeed.
The final keynote of the conference was by Jared Spool, talking about "experience design", pointing out both success stories and horror stories, from the Apple iPod to an unnamed company that spent $1 million on a redesign that saw their revenue go down 20%. Also, experience design is like "chicken sexing", and I'm not making that up. At some point early in the talk - I think after a mild dig at them (probably at the Zune) - one of the Microsoft sponsors in the audience made the mistake of turning off the rotating list of sponsor names that was being projected on a second screen, so that it only showed Microsoft. Jared struck back hard with many examples of how Microsoft was doing things wrong. Probably my favorite was on Sharepoint: Implementing Sharepoint is a lot like building a house. It's like a friend of yours saying, "I know exactly what to do", and then dropping you off at the Home Depot saying, "everything you need is here," before driving off again. (paraphrased)
I don't know why exactly, but this definitely was an inspiring talk. I guess it's like experience design itself; "invisible" and "not open to introspection" - but you definitely notice when what makes it all work isn't present.

After this closing keynote I hung around for a while, talking to various people I'd gotten to know during these two days. At some point I hooked up with Chris Hold and we plotted dinner with various people. I think it took us about an hour before the group actually managed to walk out of the hotel, which hour was perhaps the nicest of them all, as other groups also plotting dinner drifted together and apart and there was much chatting and mental digestion of the conference going on. Finally got to meet Veerle and Geert who I hadn't managed to spot for the entire conference yet (nice to be able to say my name and have it pronounced right, and the same went for them, I suspect). ^_^
Dinner at a place called Steamworks (which Chris as the local led us to) was really nice. The group included Ducky and Steffen (from the mashups talk), Chris, Daniel Burka (who's at silver orange and the designer for digg - it's kinda cool how so many of the people at a conference like this are people whose work you'll end up knowing), James, Josh, and then another two people whose names I can't believe I've forgotten and which just won't come back to me (something with an F, my brain tells me about the girl, but it's just not triggering; note to self: swap more business cards). :P Very interesting conversations, and good food, too. Enjoyed this a lot, especially in contrast with the mediatemple party we went to afterward. I think I lasted a full half hour there, because the fscking music was so loud it made conversation impossible, leaving very little to do but drinking, which y'know, is just not my scene. I was glad to see that the major conference that's happened in the meantime - south by southwest - started something of a backlash against these kind of parties, with several complaints that might actually be heard and improve the scene with regards to this. Here's hoping.

And so, that was Web Directions North. I learned far more than I'd expected (if not as much as I'd hoped - but enough to justify the cost), met many interesting people and overall had a really good time. I'm still no social butterfly, and suck at self-marketing, but I'm discovering that these are skills like any other, something you can get better at through practice :) - and it infinitely helps to already know a few people to get you started. I don't expect I'll attend Web Directions North next year (at this cost I can really only afford one a year, especially since taxes only let me declare 75% of the conference costs as actual costs), but I might yet change my mind on that if the speakers and topics next year really appeal, and otherwise I'll be keeping my eye open for similarly styled conferences, with a mix of technical content that's as just good, if not (dare we hope?) even better. I can highly recommend this conference to anyone who didn't attend to; my experience with them might be limited, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and state it can easily be called one of the best.

After this I still had two days left in Vancouver. I've forgotten the exact order in which I did things, but quite a bit of book and DVD shopping happened, and I finally made it over to the Dr. Sun-Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden, it this time not being closed. The day was as cloudy as when I wandered through the Nitobe Garden for those ten minutes, once more prompting me to use a high ISO for my photographs (really, February is such a silly month in this regard!), and there even was a light drizzle at times, but despite that, I quite enjoyed my stroll through here. Albeit not as nice as the Chinese Garden of Friendship in Sydney, this garden still has quite a lot going for it. It features far more buildings and walls, and far less which is green and growing, but prettiness is distinctly present. Moreover, the place featured a large hall with free tea! Can't get much better than that. :) And did I yet mention that it was pretty?

That night I wandered back in the direction of Canada Place, as the clouds had been clearing (or at least rising), and marveled at the many shiny lights of North Vancouver, and at the ski pistes all lit up, with the light reflecting off the clouds and giving an otherworldly glow to them. Someday I'll want to learn to ski and then return to Vancouver to go and do a few runs at night there.
Btw, the second picture there features the mysterious burning building from my previous post, now placed into context. I'm still as puzzled as ever about it.

Anyway, for my final full day in Vancouver, I decided to hop onto a SeaBus and head to that north shore, from where I took a bus to the Capilano Suspension Bridge, which should feature Vancouverian temperate rainforest and some decent walking. Alas, my luck was still holding, as stepping out of the bus there, I discovered that the place was closed for repair works due to recent heavy snowfall... Or perhaps my luck had turned, for this meant I got right back onto the next bus, and continued riding it toward its final destination, to Grouse Mountain.

Up to this point I was liking Vancouver, thinking it a decent city (if with too many people living on the street), but I didn't really get it. Grouse Mountain made me get it. Here I was, one ferry, one bus and one "skyride" gondola out of the city center of Vancouver, and I was standing on top of three meters of snow (of which only half a meter from a snow machine) on top of a decent sized mountain, under a blazingly blue sky, with views right down to the city, and thousands of locals all happily skiing and iceskating in the balmy 2 degrees above freezing temperature. It was absolutely glorious, and yet nothing really out of the ordinary for the locals.
Can you imagine that? It's just too cool for words.

Although I was quite tempted to rent myself a pair of skis and go see how often I could call flat with them, I reluctantly resisted and promised myself that the next time I'd be back, I'd take out an entire day and shell out for actual skiing lessons. Instead I just wandered, enjoying the warm sunshine, grinning at the iceskating children, looking at the chainsaw sculptures and the snow hearts that were being erected for Valentine's Day, enjoying a nice - and not even too outrageously expensive - lunch while looking down upon the city, watching some corny documentaries in the movie theater up there, taking a 'sleigh ride' and just generally having a really, really good time. If you're ever in Vancouver during the winter and get a sunny day, make sure you go up there - it's totally awesome!

Late afternoon I'd exhausted the non-skiing activities possible on top of Grouse Mountain, and so I headed back down again, and thus was able to witness a gorgeously colored sunset over the Vancouver skyline. Those were some truly stunning clouds they had there. I heartily approve of them!

My last morning, the following day, was spent going out for some cheesecake (sheltering under my umbrella, as the rain had returned with a vengeance) and otherwise sitting inside, reading a book and waiting for the time to go bus and fly back. No business class for me this time, alas, and in fact I had a mostly crappy seat, making it near impossible to sleep - but despite that I survived and even managed to be back at work on time the day after - and stay awake all day long - so I'll call it a success.

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Sun 11 Mar 2007, 13:29 GMT

The mystery of the burning bush^H^H^H^Hbuilding

Editing the remaining photos of Vancouver (sorry, slow going, pretty swamped with things to do), I came across one taken at Canada Place at night, showing the North Vancouver buildings all lit up. One appeared more than just lit up though, and looked to actually be on fire.
However, a picture taken 15 minutes later shows the building completely unharmed, lights still burning in various apartments.



Needless to say, I'm completely puzzled by this. As you can see, the rest of the picture is relatively sharp, so the "flames" can't be caused by camera shake. Plus they are localized to just the one building.
Does anyone have any idea what was going on here? My best guess that's even remotely plausible at the moment is that these were somehow 'special effects' for some movie being filmed at that location, which would also explain the bright light in the lower left corner. Next up are UFOs and time running backward.

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