Kim Bach . Org

It’s been a while since I wrote about the Jaiku online service, but it’s a service I use all the time, and I love it.

This is, mostly, due to the fact that Jaiku is filled with people, with whom I share interests, but the people there, all, seem to be more interesting than I am, so I can learn new things, and that is the thing in life I love the most.

One of the things I’m very adventurous about is my music, and another of my favourite online services, Last.fm, supports that perfectly.

Yesterday a conversation about Last.fm surfaced on Jaiku:

Jaiku | Det slår mig lige, hvorfor jeg er så vild med last.fm. Jeg kan holde liv i det ved at gøre noget, jeg alligevel ville gøre: Høre musik :-

Translation: It just struck me why I’m so crazy about Last.fm. I can keep it going by doing something, I’d do anyways: Listen to music

That is correct, Last.fm builds and extends your network by comparing your musical preferences to the other users, and it also gives you recommendations based on your listening habits.

Eventually the question was asked: What do you use it for?

This triggered me to use Last.fm again, something I usually only do once a month, and the feature I love the most, is the similar artist radio.

In April 2008 I travelled to Lisbon, Portugal, and I was so fortunate to attend a concert by Dorit Chrysler, a very talented artist from Austria, that has specialised in using the Theremin instrument, a very strange instrument that you control by moving your hands in the electrical field generated by the instrument, that basically is a bend metal-rod.

So the Jaiku post triggered me into finally ripping the CDs I bought in Galeré Zee dos Bois in Lisbon, listening to them, and then using that to listen the Dorit Chrysler Similar Artists Radio.

And what I dug into, was a wealth of wonderful music, that spans from Opera to Classical Chanson, over Russian Abstract Hip-Hop and even the wonderful Colleen, that I already knew.

Here’s a list of some of the wonderful artists I discovered:

• Robert - A wonderful French chanteuse
• Gudrun Gut - German female singer. Original member of Einstürzende Neubauten
• Ute Lempner - German chanteuse
• Susanna and the Magical Orchestra - Norwegian act that, for instance, does some amazing covers, especially one of Dolly Partons Jolene is wonderful
• Meret Becker - Another German singer that has be associated with Einstürzende Neubauten

The list goes on, and I’ll recommend exploring the artists that are similar to Dorit Chrysler, you will not regret it.

Last.fm remains one of the most impressive, and genuinely useful, online services - the list of these services is short, the big three are, to me, Jaiku, Last.fm and Flickr.

The picture used here was taken from Last.fm, and is, most likely an official promotional pressphoto, I hope my use here will go under “fair-use”

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

I love xkcd, it’s way over my own humour, which, frankly, is Benny Hilly, I bow in respect, I’m not worthy :-D.

The ones about academia, often are over my head, but my online buddies Esben, Thøger and Jacob, who introduced me to xkcd, seems to get them (faster) than me, I suspect that they’re not uneducated drop-outs like me ;-).

The computing ones, sometimes, stoop to the Benny Hill level of computing jokes, like this one:

Nah, it’s actually quite profound…Brilliant…For even geekier computing humour check the geohashing wiki, I’ll have to try that!

The Danish Office for IT and Telecommunications (IT & Telestyrelsen) is experimenting with so-called RESTful web services, and I’m very happy to hear that, because this is an indication that something finally is happening again, after years of impasse.

Services for the REST (sry) of us

RESTful web services are the predominant implementation model for web services developed by web 2.0 companies, Last.fm and Flickr are prime examples of services with extensive RESTful web services and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

A web service is a software service, or API, that software (application) developers can use to provide functionality to their applications, and thus users. The “web” refers to the fact that the service can be accessed using technology developed for the web, like a standard web-browser.

Other technologies for implementing web services exits, the best known is the web service or (WS_*) stack, often referred to as SOAP. REST is, however, much easier to use than SOAP, because it has a GET based interface, meaning that you can query a RESTful service using simple URIs for instance entered using a browser. REST is also much better understood by commercial web developers in the private sector, and the tools they use, eats REST for breakfast.

Here’s an example: http://oiorest.dk/danmark/veje?q=lindevangshusene

This retrieves the road-code and city-number of the street I live on in XML format, pretty sweet.

What IT&TS has done is that they, two years later, have picked up my idea, so that I don’t have to implement it (well it only means that I’ll never release my own code) ;-).

Concerns that history will repeat itself

I’m pleased, very pleased, and surprised that The Danish Office for IT and Telecommunications (IT & Telestyrelsen) has begun experimenting with such a relevant service, and has actually made some real-word applications available on the web-site.

But! I fear that history might repeat itself.

Something like 3-4 years ago, a sample SOAP service Address Web Service (AWS) was developed by IT&Telestyrelsen, they even had a competition to develop a sample application, and there even was a winner. But AWS never went into production, and the project dropped off the radar, that is until now. It seems that AWS soon will be released for production, and this is great news.

The problem was that I lost faith in AWS, I felt the project had died, so I didn’t really want to develop against it, and I hear the same concerns from others regarding the RESTful services today.

Do we need pseudo-standards like REST?

The RESTful experiments will probably never launch, but with the SOAP/WS_* AWS likely to go into production, we don’t really need them do we?

What we do need is an open and free infrastructure, for instance for eFaktura, it’s way too expensive to use the current providers, so I suggest that the next thing you do IT&TS, is to pick up another of my old projects

In many ways I fail to see the real need for a RESTful service, but RESTful APIs are so much easier to implement than SOAP.

What I’d like to see is light-weight data-formats, like JSON, and JavaScript APIs Google style. The light-weight data-formats are simpler to parse than XML, so I’d love to see a JSON, or similar, version, e.g. something that is closer to the internal representations of data, without going to binary interfaces, even though they’re coming back, for instance through WCF (Windows Communication Framework).

Conclusion: BIG thumbs up! (but it was overdue)

All in all BIG thumbs up to IT&TS for this initiative, keep it up, and stay above the radar in the future, please. We need widely available, and free, services like AWS, and with the competition from Google GeoCoder, which can be implemented with few lines of code - and works with other than Danish addresses, and findvej.dk - that is using it’s own, outdated, copy of data from Kort og Matrikelstyrelsen to provide a nice, URI based service, reviving of AWS, and the new initiatives, were way overdue.

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project

I really need to “get out more”, since I’ve only just now discovered the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), and I LOVE it!

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

Say what?

FOAF is an important part of the so-called semantic-web, and FOAF is just a so-called RDF specification of who you are. RDF (Resource Description Framework) is one of the basic technologies of the semantic web, and it’s nothing more (or should I say less) than an XML schema condoned by the W3C for describing resources.

Think of RDF as “the mother of all links”, RSS and Atom actually uses RDF.

The problem with links

So what is that RDF does better than the tradtional link?

When you create a link, you rarely remember to provide important information about what it is that you actually link to. At best you provide an ALT attribute (description) to an image tag. Google actively uses the ALT tag when indexing images, but if the link to an image contained more information, eg. semantics, Google could do a much better job.

Semantics means that you provide information about content and context, not just a link to it. You could call that metadata, abstracts or just “data”.

Many CMSes uses the URI of posts to provide some semantics, it’s often called SEO (search engine optimisation), the URI of this post has FOAF in it, meaning that a link to this article indeed contains some semantics.

A common standard for the WordPress CMS is that it uses year, month, day and the title of the post to generate the URI.

The problem is that this information should be provided in a structured, machine readable and - most importantly - open format, in order to make it possible to provide semantics.

I actually despise the concept of SEO, since it amounts to cheating, the only valid SEO is:
“provide interesting content”

A semantic “you”

A number of standards for providing semantics exists, one of the most interesting, especially in this day and age of social media, is the FOAF format.

FOAF is a format that describes you and your connections to provide semantics about people (you) and your connections (friends), in a standardised way, using RDF.

The FOAF file contains information about who you are, how to contact you, but most interestingly it contains links to your friends, and their FOAF files.

The beauty of FOAF is, that all you have to do, is:

1. Create a FOAF file, for instance using FOAF-a-matic
2. Put it on a server
3. Provide the URI
4. Make sure that it can be found by others (e.g. by posting a link on a page you know is indexed)

Chances are that the FOAF spiders will have a feast on your FOAF, sooner rather than later.

Create your FOAF file

It’s quite simple to create a FOAF file, all you need to do is go to FOAF-a-matic, fill in a number of fields, generate the FOAF file, copy it to a text-editor, publish it on your web-site.

Below is a screenshot of the FOAF-a-matic page.

Take back your profile, it’s…YOURS!

No need to register with social networking sites, your profile is YOURS.

Who owns the information about “who you are”? You do! Should that information be made available in an open format? You bet! RDF and FOAF is the way to go.

And don’t take my word for it, just take a look at the people who are promoting and developing RDF and FOAF…

So how did the chicken cross the road

I’ll provide you with the story about how I found FOAF, since it’s interesting to say the least.

My good buddy Sebastian Lund just recently set up his blog, Silence is deafening, and I’m looking forward to following it, he’s using a beautiful theme, the Dilectio Theme, developed by Design Disease.

Design Disease has a number of free WordPress themes available, and you can test them, when I tried that, their “Lorem Ipsum” turned out to be an article by no other that TBL, timbl, Tim Berners-Lee, Mr. Web himself, and he was writing about blogging and FOAF…

So:

• I follow Sebastian Lund using Jaiku
• I noticed that Sebastian has created a new blog because I’m indirectly subscribed to his RSS feed through Jaiku.
• I check it out
• I like his theme
• I jumped to the theme developer, Design Disease
• I stumbled upon an article by TBL
• I jumped to TBL’s blog
• I jumped to FOAF-project.org
• I made my first FOAF file using FOAF-a-matic

What an untangled web we’re weawing.

Now I need to think of a good URI for my FOAF file, TBL suggests this:

A lot of people have published data about themselves without using a URI for themselves. This means I can’t refer to them in other data. So please take a minute to give yourself a URI. If you have a FOAF page, you may just have to add rdf:about=”" and voila you have a URI http://example.com/Alan/foaf.rdf#ABC. (I suggest you use your initials for the last bit). Check it works in the Tabulator.

Ready, steady FOAF

So what are you waiting for? Create your own FOAF file, and start sharing.

And now I’m moving on to explore Tabulator, more on that later…

Software development can be extremely frustrating, and it might be true that the computer only does what you tell it to do, but these days a lot of people, besides yourself, are telling the computer what to do, a fact that complicates matters “somewhat” (understatement of the year).

The following experience documents a case, where I was sure that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and you could argue that I didn’t, I just didn’t know any better, but thanks to the community I solved the problem.

The setting

I’ve recently begun doing some PHP programming, and I like it a lot, mostly because of all the wonderful community. it’s my gut feeling that I find answers to my questions much faster when I have PHP related questions, compared to .NET questions.

So I was experimenting with generating some XML code from PHP, but when I gave the URL to the W3C validator, it told me that the XML wasn’t well-formed, and that it was the header that was the problem.

I couldn’t see anything wrong, until I took a closer look. There was a mysterious space prefixed the output when I did a View/Source, a space that I for sure knew I didn’t echo. Hmm…

I tried several things, including flushing the output, but nothing helped.

Then it dawned on me: it’s very likely that someone else has had this problem, and if they did, for sure they would have the generosity to share it, so Google to rescue.

I googled: problem php output leading blank, and hit number two yielded this article:

Script for removing blank spaces before and after PHP tags « memento

The solution

It turns out that PHP is quite sensitive if you, by accident, leave prefixed or sufficed blank spaces outside the starting and ending php tags.

So I went through my PHP files, luckily I only have two, made sure there were no leading or trailing blanks og lines, and I get well-formed XML now.

This is a rather annoying bug in, or should I say feature of, PHP, and it exists in both PHP4 and PHP5.

Once again the community came through, without it I’d still be drawing blanks.

And I love the drawing on the memento site, it doesn’t get geekier, and I think I’ll remember to strip leading and trailing blanks now.

I’m still looking for a modern development environment for PHP development (e.g. sourcecode debugging). PHPEclipse, a plug-in for the Eclipse development environment, should provide a relatively modern development environment, even though it’s not up to the standards set by Microsoft VisualStudio, that I’m so accustomed to, Microsoft has spoiled me.

iPhone Dev Center - Apple Developer Connection

Apple means business with their promise to open up the iPhone and iPod touch platform to developers with the launch of the iPhone Dev Center, and it looks quite impressive, even though it’s mainly information on how to develop web-applications, and links to already existing information for Mac OS X.

Below is a quote from the mail I just received from ADC:

Available to all ADC Members, the iPhone Dev Center is your complete source for technical information, resources, and expert advice on how to design, code and optimize web applications for iPhone and iPod touch. Take advantage of the iPhone Reference Library, web development guidelines, and sample code to build or optimize your web application. Through ADC on iTunes, you can watch iPhone experts discuss everything from user interface design to optimizing your web applications and content for iPhone.

Once your app is ready, or if you have an existing web app, submit it for possible listing on the Apple web apps page. Log in now and access all the resources of the iPhone Dev Center today.

Unfortunately I don’t think Apple is going to make the platform available to other hardware manufacturers, which is typical Apple, but wouldn’t it be great with Mono ported to the iPhone and iPod touch? And I’m confident that Mono and even Silverlight/Moonlight will be ported to the iPhone platform.

Another brilliant touch (pun intended ;-)), is that the developer resources only is available to registered ADC users, something that the open source communities would barf at, but Apple will get away with it, as usually, and I think that the open source communities should take lessons from Apple.

I think ADC will receive a huge influx of registered users because of this, and it’s a direct path to marketing of the WWDC, which will see an unprecedented surge in attendance next year, which I predict will force Apple into move towards two WWDCs every year, one for mobile and non-mobile devices.

This is yet another brilliant move by Apple - and is that a Steve Jobs version of “the monkey dance” I see on the horizon? Developers, Developers, Developers!

BarCamp wiki / BarCampCopenhagen

Ça plane pour nous! …. Ça plane pour nous! … Ça plane pour nous! … Ça plane pour nous! Nous! Nous! Nous! Nous! Ça plane pour nous! uh-u-u-uh! Ça plane pour nous!

I går holdt 3/4 af folkene bag den næste BarCampCopenhagen, planlægningsmøde.

Planlægningsmødet var rigtig hyggeligt (som videoen vist viser) og hvis i kigger derovre, så er der bonus: det var nemlig også produktivt (som det faktum, at vi “sådan set” er klar, viser).

Først og fremmest fik vi lagt skinnerne, i form af to højglanspolerede spor, der kommer til at hedde:

• Geeky sh*t
• Kangagoo?

Temaet for de to spor bliver hhv. et teknisk (Geeky sh*t) og et ikke-teknisk spor (Kangaroo?). Emytlogien for Geeky sh*t skal findes i den forrige BarCampCopenhagen, for Kangaroo? Siger jeg: FGI!

Hvis du vil “svæve” med os, så sig til! Vi har plads til i alt 50, og det tal nærmer vi os, hvilket vi er benovede over - TAK for interessen.

Ellers har vi brug for stole, sponsorer (mad, drikkevarer, t-shirts, wi-fi udstyr, gaver) og talere (vi er sådan ca. halvt besat).

Næste BarCampCopenhagen afholdes den 25-januar-2008 hos Beaconware, Gl. Kalkbrænderivej 10, kld. 2100 kbh Ø. BarCampCopenhagen afholdes i overensstemmelse med retningslinjerne for afholdelse af en BarCamp, men sådan generelt er de:

• 1st Rule: You do talk about Bar Camp.
• 2nd Rule: You do blog about Bar Camp.
• 3rd Rule: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
• 4th Rule: Only three word intros.
• 5th Rule: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
• 6th Rule: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists.
• 7th Rule: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
• 8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)

by Tantek Çelik as parodied from The Rules of Fight Club.

Pink Dildo Records’s Label Page – Music at Last.fm

Yes, I love Last.fm, and after registering as a solo artist on Last.fm (no I’ll not remind you by linking to it - for YOUR own good), I’m now managing a Record Label.

It’s of course Pink Dildo Records I’m managing, and so far I’ve uploaded the non-copyrighted tracks by Beneath Contempt.

In 2000 I investigated the possibility of issuing a CD with Beneath Contempt, called Digital Comeback 2000, with copyrighted covers-tracks, but that was too cumbersome and expensive, so I gave up on it, and the cover-tracks aren’t available on Last.fm either - it would only result it us getting promptly banned, but all the tracks has been made available in FULL and as FREE downloads. N-Joy. Be advised it’s guaranteed to be in GLORIOUS LO-FI.

But it’s quite ridiculous that I can’t make the number one hit by Beneath Contempt, a spoof on Pippi Longstockings called Hippie Longhair, available due to the copyright rules. If you know Danish, and even if you don’t, just follow the link, and make your own version instead - the ultimate in DIY.

“These” limitations will eventual disappear, but only because we now are beginning to make music available for free.

Great Label Manager

As expected the process of uploading material to Last.fm is smooth. The material has to be submitted at 128K MP3 files, and you have to bundle your uploads into releases (e.g. albums). I found it easiest to package your release into a single ZIP file, and then upload it as one release.

After you’ve uploaded the file, Last.fm validates it and I did of couse have some hidden resource forks, that I could iron out, and you’re given the opportunity to change to artist and title of the tracks. The info is read directly from the MP3 file, so remember to have it tagged before uploading it, I had no problems with the process, and considering how much time I just spend uploading pictures to a Share Point Server, this was really easy and productive.

Last.fm also offers to upload the material for you, you just have to send them the CD and they’ll take care of it for you - great customer service.

Last.fm also offers integrated promotion tools, buing of including banner ads, co-marketing deals etc. It’s really quite impressive, and it looks very easy to use.

The traditional music publishers should take note, “Houston: YOU have a problem!”

ps. Trouble in “paradise”

And then I ran into one of the “limitations” of Last.fm’s Label manager.

I tried to upload the works of another of our “artists”, Oh No, and that name was already taken by, no other, than the brother of Madlib, so now my label and the content is put in an automatic moderation queue, quite understandable, let’s see how that works, and I’m not allowed to manage my label for the next three days, while the account is being scrutinised by the Last.fm staff.

I expect no problems, despite the controversial name of the label and the LO-FI, in mono, no less.

What I expect is than we’ll be told to find another name for the “artist” when publishing on Last.fm, or keep “Oh No” away from Last.fm, which would be a “shame” ;-).

I think the policy of Last.fm makes good sense, but the ambiguty of artist names, especially short and cathcy ones like “Oh No”, is a major problem, and Last.fm could be better at handling that.

If you can’t wait to go back to mono with “Oh No”, you can listen to the tracks we have available on pinkdild.org.

Today October 12th-2007 is the day of the cultural event of the year in Copenhagen, “The Night of Culture” or Kulturnatten, and I’ve just finished “shopping” for events.

You can build a custom program on the web-site, unfortunately it doesn’t have a URL or a feed so that I can share it directly with you.

This year it seems like my theme will be Passion, Science and Christianity. Below is a list of events that I’ll try to mange to attend - it will be tough, and I’ll let the “Instincts be my shepherd” and stay for long in the places where I feel good vibes, and I’m very confident in my instincts.

It does look like my fix-points this year will be Kastellet, Botanisk Have, Humanistisk Fakultet, Glyptoteket and Marmorkirken. The previous years I had an extensive program as well, but I ended up spending hours at the Copenhagen HQ of The Danish Refugee Council, but since they’re not open this year, I might manage more.

Really there’s only ONE event I’m not going to miss, and that is Ars Nova singing English renaissance music in Marmorkirken - last year they were spectacular, and this year they’re issuing a new CD on the Kulturnat, I’ll be first in line to get a copy.

From the previous years I’ll HIGHLY recommend the Exhibition at Thorvaldsen’s Museum, the lights are turned off, and the statues are illuminated, it’s just fantastic, for me it’s been there done that this year however.

Rundetaarn is always too crowded, and the midnight concert this year is just too mainstream for my taste, but I loved it two years ago, and the storage room above the church is just wonderful.

So I wish you all a great Kulturnat, you just have to love Copenhagen for having the energy to set up such a massive event. And strange things happen on the Kulturnat, if you just let your senses guide you, and while you wait for my next blogpost, you can read about my experiences of the last two years here:

• Kulturnatten 2006: Is that a FireWire cable in your pocket or are you just happy to see me
• Kulturnatten 2005

Events I hope to cover in 2007 - prioritised order - but my full intended program is 4 pages long:

• Shantysang i Kanonkælderen - I missed that last year, but that only let to the very strange story that involved a FireWire cable and the Architect School that you can read above, only goes to show that you should just let your senses guide you!
• Opstigning i Mastekranen på Nyholm
• Længslernes Nat
• ZEITGEIST
• Kulturnatten i Kastellet
• Botaniske Have ved nat
• Skriv med fjerpen og blæk
• Monstre og dæmoner i oldtidens Ægypten
• Kolbøttemand, lysshow og rundvisninger!
• Natmusik i Kastelskirken
• Gudstjeneste om tro og viden
• Linné på Botanisk Museum
• Katedralernes mystik og det gotiske
• Dans i Natten
• Lyd og Lys i natten
• Andagt med musik og lys
• B-samfundet - et alternativ til 8-16 samfundet

Today I realised that it’s been a year since the wonderful blogforum2, and I knew that I’d have heard about it if there was going to be a blogforum this year, but feeling the urge, I went looking for the usual suspects, and it so happened that I stumbled upon The Copenhagen Project - a recent brain child of Jeppe Kabell and the “notorious” Thomas Madsen-Mygdal - and if Thomas is involved you better listen up:

We are building a catalog of media building bricks in order to reinvent the services we use to understand and keep up to date with what happens in the world.

(notice that I changed “building bricks” to “building blocks” - I find that more correct).

Their ideas seems to be related to a lot of the ideas that I have, for instance regarding collective intelligence, and how to put the computer to more use when sharing knowledge.

They also picked up on a great crowd-sourcing idea - which I’ve been considering myself, and it’s simply to tag posts with a magic tag - in this case tcp2007 - and they should show up on the reactions page automagically - Gentlemen: start tagging (let’s see if that actually works).

I’ll be following The Copenhagen Project closely in the future, now if they only had a Jaiku channel - hint hint ;-)?

So what about the blogforum?

I suppose that someone has to organise the blogforum if it’s going to happen again, I’m not much of an organiser - but I’ll sure lend a hand if someone picks it up, because it was nothing short of inspirering, and it made me blog up a storm.

Blogforum2 had some spin offs, one was a survey, BlogTjek 07, that got press from big media, the other is the Blogfond - an attempt at creating a foundation to support the blog community (and then I just discovered that the board is considering pulling the plug - if we do, let’s at least have a party ;-)).