Vi har set mange brands udskifte deres website med en Facebook side, men denne Japanske by går all-in på Facebook.

Kunne I forstille jer, at nogle danske kommuner gjorde noget lignende og hvilken effekt ville det have?

Det kunne være et glimrende PR stunt fra en af udkantskommunerne, der er svært pressede.

Det fik mig til at komme i tanke om en “udveksling” jeg havde med min kommune for en måned siden.

Så: debatten er kort…svaret er JA! (sjovt at være i dialog med kommunen om hvorvidt jeg kan få adgang til at rette fejl på deres hjemmeside, antager at der STADIG er fejl her http://htk.dk/Fritid_og_Kultur/Biblioteker.aspx – jow jow – mangler stadig en opdateret Google Maps API nøgle SELV om der IKKE er GIS integration på siden – CMSet inkluderer – som standard – en GIS .js).

Mit take: ingen kommuner har brug for en hjemmeside, tilgengæld skal de være på facebook, og alle borgere skal have mulighed for at blive admins på facebook siderne.

Al selvbetjening skal overføres til http://borger.dk og kræve NemID. KAPLAH!

ps. Til jeres information er her min brevveksling med kommunen, jeg synes da bestemt at medarbejderen gør en glimrende figur, og han kan næppe gøre mere, så længe han ønsker at beholde sit job, man kan så undre sig over at han gør det…

pps. Jeg kan jo også have taget fejl, og ser “ting” på min computer, og det er jo næppe vigtigt for kommunens drift at dette virker.

——————————-klip————————
Fra: Kim Bach [kim.bach@gmail.com]
Sendt: 7. juli 2011 15:13
Til: Kommune
Emne: Fejl på hjemmeside på adressen
http://htk.dk/Fritid_og_Kultur/Biblioteker.aspx – mangler API nøgle til Google Maps

hej HTK,

I har en fejl på hjemmesiden på denne adresse: http://htk.dk/Fritid_og_Kultur/Biblioteker.aspx – i har ikke registreret siden korrekt hos Google Maps (mangler API nøgle)

I kan selv se fejlmeddelelsen hvis i prøver at gå ind på siden.

Testet i Google Chrome under Windows 7, men da problemet er på serveren, bør problemet være der uanset user-agent.

I kan evt. sende mig FTP-login og/eller login til CMS, så retter jeg det for jer.

Venlig hilsen

Kim Bach
Lindevangshusene 58,st,th
2630 Taastrup
Skype:kim.bach
Facebook: http://facebook.com/kim.bach
Twitter: http://twitter.com/kim_bach
——————————-klip————————

Svar fra kommunen

——————————-klip————————
11. jul. 2011 15.03 skrev B :

Tak for din henvendelse!

Jeg har testet med både Chrome og IE 9 på en windows 7, og jeg får ingen fejl.

Får du stadig fejlen?

Dit tilbud om hjælp må jeg takke nej til, da det vil være et brud på vores sikkerhed.

Mvh

B
——————————-klip————————

Svar fra mig:

——————————-klip————————
Fra: Kim Bach [mailto:kim.bach@gmail.com]
Sendt: 11. juli 2011 17:44
Til: B
Emne: Re: Fejl på hjemmeside på adressen http://htk.dk/Fritid_og_Kultur/Biblioteker.aspx – mangler API nøgle til Google Maps

Hej B,

Så må jeg jo hjælpe os, ja jeg er borger i Høje-Taastrup Kommune,, så godt jeg kan, og havde nok ikke forventet den tillid til borgerne som jeg forventede/ønskede

Fejlen er der stadig, den er sikkert ikke hos dig, fordi du sidder inden for en firewall og har måske andre IP adresser og/eller DNS navne.

Vedhæftet en skærmkopi som det ser ud hos mig.

Så vidt jeg kan se ligger fejlen i det inkluderede script
www.n-gis.com/mapscript.js.aspx?view=422 – som har en reference til www.n-gis.com/gkey.js.aspx som ser ud til at have en Google Maps API nøgle i sin href, jeg gætter på at fejlen skal findes her:

document.write(”<script src=’http://www.n-gis.com/gkey.js.aspx?server=”+top.window.location.href+”
type=’text/javascript’></script>”);document.write(”<div id=’nm_gmap’
style=’width:400px;height:400px’></div>”);

altså i gkey.js.aspx ASP-NET siden.

Venlig hilsen

Kim Bach

ps. “sikkerhed” er et frygtiligt begreb som gør ting der er lette som at rette denne fejl, f.eks. ved at fjerne referencen til GIS interfacet helt, da i tilsyneladende ikke bruger det, svære – action is cheaper than control
——————————-klip————————

Svar fra kommunen

——————————-klip————————
11. jul. 2011 19.49 skrev B:
Det er skam fra min egen private maskine og linie jeg har testet, og ikke fra en maskine på rådhuset.

Nu har jeg testet på 3 maskiner – både XP og Windows 7 samt IE 8 og 9 samt den nye Chrome. Jeg får ingen fejl.

Jeg tager en snak med vores leverandør tirsdag.

Der er vist ikke mange virksomheder der vil give adgang til deres CMS for andre end egne ansatte – det er den sikkerhed jeg taler om.

Jo vi bruger faktisk N-Gis – det er det system vi bruger tila t vise simple kort på vores hjemmeside, så henvisningen kan vi ikke fjerne.

1000 tak for at du gider hjælpe med fejlsøgningen.

Mvh

B
——————————-klip————————

Svar fra mig – bliver næppe besvaret

——————————-klip————————

underligt – jeg har kun testet på min Netbook som kører over Telia 3G

ps. et godt råd; drop Google Maps og skift til Open Street Map )

pps. Mht. sikkerhed, så er HTK IKKE en privat virksomhed, men
borgernes ejendom, derfor forventede jeg at få lov til at redigere
hjemmesiden

ppps. ja, jeg er anarkist
——————————-klip————————

1. Create a page for an organisation
2. Create an event for that organisation
3. Invite people to the event
4. Update the people of the organisation
5. Update the attendees of the event
6. Create a campaign to promote the event and/or the organisation

All of the above, is possible to with facebook in approx. 15 minutes.

So take the Pepsi-challenge g00g+

Crossposted to | g00g+ | twitter | facebook | Illustration from the brilliant comic XKCD – Fanø you Mr. Randall Munroe for luring me to Google+, guess I made a splash though

ps.

I’ve included a link to a discussion about the challenges businesses are facing with g00g+ from Advice Digital (in Danish) advice digital: Google+ udfordrer virksomheders digitale position by René Clausen Nielsen and Birgitte Raben. They have answered my questions: “you can’t do this – yet”. I really doubt g00g can top facebook on this – but we should all embrace, and welcome, the competion, and g00g are good at “stealing” ideas.

Update: July 19th 2011

I’ve included a link to a discussion from “digitale tanker: Thoughts on Google+ and links to great reviews” – someday I might “get” “circles” – I’ve focused on a business oriented use-case here.

Update: July 25th 2011

I’ve included a link to an article by Henriette Weber “The social network on steroids – my first thoughts on Google +” – she’s also talking about “circles” – which I still don’t get. BTW, the only reason I noticed this article was because she shared it on…Google+

har besluttet at blokere for “Freedom Fighter” skribenter, skribenterne er (var ) lette at identificere da de markerer deres indlæg med #ff efterfulgt af deres Freedom Fighter nummer, f.eks. #ff911.

Information begrunder deres handling med at de blev ramt af “spam”, facebook har siden lukket “Freedom Fighter” applikationen, næppe udelukkende pga. Information. Senere er applikationen så åbnet igen, og så lukket igen, man kan følge med på facebook-gruppen Freedom Fighters Lounge.

Før vi går videre, lad os kigge lidt på definitionen af “spam”!

Definition på spam er, løst, ifølge Engelsk Wikipedia “uopfordret, anonym, post, sendt helt uden hensyn til modtager, som regel automatisk”.

“Freedom Fighter” er ikke spam under denne definition, det der kunne være tale om er “nyhedsgruppe, eller usenet, spam“, som f.eks. består af gentagne afsendelser af de samme beskeder.

Men Information driver ikke en nyhedsgruppe, de driver en avis, og kommentarer er at betragte som læserbreve. En avis som Information har næppe offentliggjort et eneste læserbrev, der ikke har været gennemlæst først, en praksis der ikke ser ud til at gælde for kommentarer, i hvertfald så længe de skrives af godkendte, registrerede skribenter.

I stedet for at blokere brugere, så burde Information afsætte ressourcer til at fjene de såkaldte spam-indlæg, inden de bliver offentliggjort, og lade de relevante og gode indlæg slippe igennem, uanset hvem de kommer fra. Denne modering skal så ske døgnet rundt, for at sikre at debatten er frisk.

Min påstand er at det Information gør her er at “fodre trolden”. “Freedom Fighters” udviser det jeg vil karakterisere som “trolde adfærd”, og alle regler foreskriver at man ignorerer dem der gør det. “Trolde adfærd” går ud på at opføre sig på en måde der er bevidst provokerende, de eneste der kan få trolden til at stoppe er hvis man ikke giver dem opmærksomhed, men bare ignorerer dem.

Troldene har masser af andre steder de kan boltre sig.

At drive et online medie er “high-maintanence”, hårdt arbejde, hvor det skal være så let som muligt at deltage, men det stiller krav til aktiv indsats fra dem der driver mediet, man skulle mene at Information har ressourcerne til det. Hvis ikke, så er jeg sikker på at man let kan rekruttere. 10-20 af de seriøse brugere til stå for at moderere, de vil sikkert sætte pris på at blive inviteret på en kop kaffe engang i mellem, men ellers er de billige i drift. Denne “massernes intelligens” fungerer fint på ægte online medier, Information kan frit kopiere det.

Det kedelige er at den manglende moderation resulterer i endeløs meta-snak, om alt andet end politik, og det er vel ikke formålet, men man kan da godt have Liberal Alliance mistænkt for at have iscenesat dette for at få omtale, vel vidende at det ville provokere, og navnet “Freedom Fighter” giver da “visse” associationer til rebel-baser og onde imperier.

Vi kan godt stille krav til seriøse aviser, som Information, at de modererer mere end de gør, for jeg anerkender at de allerede gør et pænt stort arbejde med det i dag, andre medier, som Ekstra Bladet, har jeg opgivet, de har vist ambitioner om at nå YouTubes kommentarspor i nyttesløshed. Lige nu tyder alt på at Information bruger en masse tid på at lukke konti, i stedet for at blokere indhold.

I øvrigt er Informations egen side, naturligvis, blevet ramt af noget andet ødelæggende, indholds-spam, nemlig “Godwins lov“, man skal ikke længere end til kommentar nummer 9 i artiklen “Spillet om magten” før den rammer, ak ja, så meget for moderation!

Hvorfor Liberal Alliance, eller andre politiske partier, så overhovedet anvender facebook fatter jeg ikke, ingen af de store online medier har noget som helst tilovers for retssikkerhed og ytringsfrihed, og de kan tilenhver tid lukke sider ned, uden at give en begrundelse, og Liberal Alliance har vel ressourcerne til at udvikle apps der ikke bruger facebook.

ps. denne artikel er henvendt direkte til Information pga. den aktuelle sag, men den er tiltænkt alle seriøse danske online medier, jeg elsker jer!

pps. Stor, stor tak til @informeren – Informations twitter-konto, for at deltage i debatten på twitter, og udfordre mig til at skrive denne artikel. (beklager min trolde-agtige “limpind” )

Items not yet shipped:
Delivery estimate: October 21, 2009 – October 23, 2009
Shipping estimate: October 19, 2009
1 of: Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6″ Display, U.S. & International Wireless, Latest Generation)
Sold by: Amazon Export Sales, Inc.
1 of: Patagonia Kindle Case (Fits 6″ Display, Latest Generation Kindle)
Sold by: Amazon Export Sales, Inc.

I’ve been waiting for the Kindle to be launched in Denmark, I’ve wanted one since I laid my hands on one at Reboot 11 in June. So now I know what I’m getting for my birthday.

Yes, the Kindle has it’s problems, and I fear that it will end in my hardware graveyard, alongside my Palm Vx (which I loved, and read books on) and my Compaq PDA (which I loved, and read books on), but the Kindle is a different creature, much like the iPod, it’s focusing on a specific application and has connected that with a clear business model, I see it as a connected object, a beautiful combination of form and function, something Microsoft has never understood, and that Apple has abandoned, except with the iPod Shuffle.

KISS!

For those oblivious to what a Kindle is, it’s an eBook reader developed by Amazon. Amazon’s vision is to make all books ever published available in digital form, and Jeff Bezos can repeat after Steve Jobs: “we have xx millions of accounts, AND they come with creditcards”. I believe that it will take talent for Amazon to fumble this.

This post will be updated throughout the day

https://twitter.com/timeline/home#search?q=%23talkhttpday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/

HTTP/1.1 200

The fun thing is that this little game started on Facebook, right now I’m using a combination of Facebook and Twitter to co-create the revolution of the mellemrumssingularitet .

ps. it’s unfortunate that I have to use twitter and facebook, because Jaiku can do it all…

http://www.jaiku.com/channel/talkhttpday

In the end it turned out to be quite simple to name one single woman in “tech” that I admire, a woman that I’ve admired for 2,5 years since I met her at the wonderful BlogForum 2 – an initiative that we really need to revive – and almost did at Copenhagen Twitterfestival.

Since 2006 the woman I have in mind has become quite the celebrity, due to her uncompromising and relentless pursuit of the truth in the murky waters of the Danish tech-business, and this year she’s the natural selection, she’s the woman behind the mainstream breakthrough of the blog-media in Denmark, she is – of course – Bizzen/Toften: the journalist and blogger par excellence Dorte Toft.

Love/hate relationship with “tech”
I have a love/hate relationship with my field, the field known as “tech”. Tech is definitely one of the places where change is happening today, and I feel blessed that I’m involved in bringing this change.

But “Tech” is a field that is riddled by paradox. On one hand it’s crawling with greedy snake-oil salesmen, on the other it’s home to the most revolutionary, idealistic and altruistic people ever as well as some of the most wonderful concepts that humankind has ever come up with.

The problem with the snake-oil salesmen, is that, until now, they’ve pretty much got away with cheating their customers, the authorities, the business community and worst, their employees, and a lot of the snake-oil has been sold under the heading that Denmark is number one in tech.

It’s been a constant embarrassment to me, and I actually left the business four years ago, and it took me two years of “repenting” before I felt that could return to “tech”, and today I’m luckily to be employed by a tech-company that doesn’t carry any snake-oil.

Emperor’s new clothes
I’m just going to, briefly, mention the fact that Dorte Toft was the woman that noticed that Stein Bagger and IT Factory didn’t wear any clothes, thus exposing one of the biggest scams the Danish tech-sector has seen to date, but thank you Dorte for exposing these people, so that we can be protected against these predators and making it possible to feel proud about working in “tech” again.

Feminism isn’t “low-status”
What I’d rather celebrate today is that Dorte Toft is a self-proclaimed feminist, even though it’s – in her own words – a field that is “low-status”, and her labour of love “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland” (”Almost happy in Geekland” – something got lost in translation sorry about that), where Dorte Toft has been writing and writing and writing about the benefits young women would have if the choose to join the so-called “though” fields, technology and science, a very noble cause.

I noticed that Dorte Toft also wrote a blog-post in observation of Ada Lovelace Day today. In this blog-post Dorte is pledging to return to “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland”, I’m so, so happy to hear that, Dorte Toft has been toiling away, trying to ease young women into the fields of tech and science, and her work deserves so much more attention than the perpetual Stein Bagger saga.

To all the wonderful women that I’ve worked with, am working with and will work with in the future, thank you so, so much for putting up with us, we need you, and remember how far you’ve come.

When I mentioned to my father how much I loved having female managers, he simply said that he could never ever imagine have a female manager, I was appalled.

Women, “tech” is too important to be left to men
Women please don’t stop now, so that next time I’m in a position where I’m hiring tech-staff, I hope that I’ll receive applications from women. Looking at the number of students at the IT University in Copenhagen I’m quite optimistic that that would be the case.

DORTE TOFT: Please go work on “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland”, I’m waiting for it, unlike the book about “Banditterne i habitterne” (”The Bandits In Suits”) – and remember feminism isn’t “low-status”!

YOUNG WOMEN: We really, really need you in the tech-sector. Tech is far too important to leave to us men, and listen to, and get inspired by Dorte Toft!

Celebrating the Enchantress of Numbers
I’ll close this post with these wonderful quotes.

We may see aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves
Lady Ada Lovelace

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans – everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers
Charles Babagge, inventor of the Analytical and Difference engines

Notes
If you want to learn more about the fascinating life of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, by many considered the inventor of programming languages, I’d strongly recommend “The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter“, “Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture” and “The Difference Engine“.

I’m also building a “shrine” to Ada Lovelace on Algorim.dk, a result of “mellemrumssingulariteten” which was inspired by a young woman I know, this woman is, BTW., working in the purest field of them all

One of the main reasons I LOVE Drupal is that it, besides the pure open source license <3, also tries hard to support standards, rather than doing “clever” things in core. This is in strong contrast to other tools, that attempt to make it easy for the user, but then locks you in.

Personally I love HTML and the constant cry for a rich editor in core is lost on me, but then again, I’m writing this using the off-line client ecto

A restless 2008, but where’s the inspiration
2008 has been an amazing year for me, and I’ve attended several events that should have made me so inspired that I’d blog up a storm, but somehow this failed to happen, and I was reluctant to sign up for DrupalCamp Copenhagen, because I was also involved in the organisation of BarCamp Copenhagen the following weekend – I was afraid to overcommit myself, resulting in me burning out.

It turned out that I was “pushed” – nah let’s say inspired – to sign-up by a guy I’ve never met in person, but knew well from the Danish Mac community.

“Unfortunately” I got so inspired that I even had the audacity to suggest that I should host a session at DrupalCamp Copenhagen – oh no what a fine mess I got myself into, this happens every time I get inspired, like I said, I tend to overcommit myself.

Then all was quiet for a while, like forever, and DrupalCamp Copenhagen was only four days away, when a preliminary schedule was sent out to the participants, which, by the way, was now exceeding the capacity of the venue, pretty Fanø amazing!

Hmm, my session wasn’t on the schedule, ok, I guess I don’t have to prepare anything then

So you want to be a Drupal Star, well the stage is yours!
On Wednesday night the final schedule was sent out, and lo-and-behold, my session was actually featured, “Using Drupal as a Web Application Framework“, hmm I’ll be addressing a bunch of hardcore Drupal professionals, and they have payed a fee, albeit a nominal one, to attend, but still this is the first time ever that I was to address a paying audience, pretty daunting when you think about it.

So I started thinking hard about the theme of the session.

When I sugested the session, I had promised that the session would be much more of a participatory session, than a presentation, and that I was hosting it to learn from the failures I had trying use Drupal as a framework for web-applications.

In my mind a different idea began to take hold, one that focused on the things that I learned, and was succesful in achieving instead of focusing on the failure of my projects.

I decided that I’d start by asking the question: “What is a web-application?”, and inspired by one of my “failed” projects, I decided that I’d do a walk-through of how you could build a Twitter like site without any, or close to no, coding on your part.

Twitter is the perfect candidate for demoing a web-application implemented using Drupal, since it’s all about content and simplicity. Strangely enough my choice of Twitter as a model for a sample aligned itself perfectly with the Miki’s session, Modules 101, on Sunday, even though he took a different approach than I did, and actually did a fair amount of coding.

One could have the idea that we had co-ordinated this, we hadn’t, so I’ll just rack it up to coincidence, and the fact that Twitter is the second most hyped thing on the Internet these days.

Guess what, I’m the hero
I won’t go into serious details about my session, but it saw me show praise for open source and Drupal, do a hands-on step through of how to build a Twitter clone, called Droopy, and demo my first Mac OS X Cocoa application EVER!

Droopy is a fictonal web-application, the name was inspired by the Tex Avery cartoon, but it also sounds like Drupal.

Droopy allows you to post microblog content using a simplified form. Microblog content, or “Droops”. A “Droop” is a standard Drupal content-type, that you can submit to the site by using a custom form. Implementing the form took some 10 lines of code to implement as a module.

At your service
The real star of the show was, however, the wonderful Drupal services module. If you install the services module you can access Drupal using a varity of web-service standards, but as default it support XML-RPC, so that’s what I focused on.

The services module implements a number of methods that you can use, I focused on the node and the user services.

The node service implements methods for retrieving, deleting and updating nodes, the user service implements methods for login and logout.

One of the nicest features of the services module, is that it has a nice UI for browsing and testing the exposed services.

A KISS from Droopy
You can, of course post content using /node/add/droop, but like I said I’d like to do that a little smarter/simpler, so for that purpose I developed a small module that utilises the Form API to implement a simplified data entry-form to post the content-type a “droop”.

This was quite simple to do, the only problem I had was that I wanted to tag my content (flat taxonomy), and in order to do that, you can’t simpy use the standard mechanism to save a node, this is how I implemented a method to create a node programatically including creation of tags, the vid that is hardcoded to 2 might be problematic, but the thing to focus on is the line:

$node->taxonomy['tags'] = array($vid => $tags);

/**
 * Create a droop node programatically.
 * @param $param
 * Either a droop - enabled node type or a $node object with at least valid $node->type.
 * @param $title
 * The body of the droop post.
 */
function droop_create_node($param, $title, $tags) {
  if (is_object($param)) {
    $node = $param;
  }
  else {
    $node = new stdClass();
    $node->type = $param;
  }
  $node->title = $title;
  $node->body = $title;
  $node_options = variable_get('node_options_'. $node->type, array('status', 'promote'));
  // If this is a new node, fill in the default values.
  foreach (array('status', 'promote', 'sticky') as $key) {
    $node->$key = in_array($key, $node_options);
  }
  // Get the content-type settings as default
  node_object_prepare($node);
  global $user;
  $node->uid = $user->uid;
  $vid = 2;
  $node->taxonomy['tags'] = array($vid => $tags);

  node_save($node);
  return $node;
}

In order to have the custom form show up, I decided to do a theme hack, this could probably be done much cleaner, but it’s really simple to have a form show up on a page.

print(drupal_get_form('droop_simplified_form', $currentGroup));

Below is a screenshot of a simple theme that shows the simplified form:

Fat client
I already had a functional XML-RPC client written in PHP, but I wanted to do something a little smarter.

Fundamentally I believe that the web is extremely ill suited to host applications, what you can do with a full client that has direct access to the rich presentation services that the operating system exposes, is just so much easier to develop, than trying to support x-number of browsers. I’m a huge fan of applications like iTunes, since they combine webcontent with a fat client, I think that’s going to comeback in a big way, powered by the mobile platforms, that, due to limited resources, forces us back to writing applications that tagets specific platforms.

In my daily job I work with Microsoft .NET on a standard Lenovo pc, but when I’m at home, I swear by my beloved PowerBook G4 12″, and that doesn’t run Windows and Visual Studio, so how could I develop a fat client to use to demo how to shout “DOWN BOY!” to Droopy, I had never ever had any success developing for Mac OS X? OTHO, that was a challenge, and I love those, even though this was now late Friday morning, and my presentation was less than 48 hours away!

Schizoid development platform from the last century
Development for Mac OS X is strange, Apple does bundle the development tools you need to target Mac OS X with Leopard, but that’s basically where the help stops.

So I knew that I need to enlist the help of Google, and I already knew what I was looking for, so how difficult could it be, well it turned out that it was.

For one, development for Mac OS X is not very widespread, but I did manage to find a number of samples, one of them implemented what is know as a framework, which basically extends Mac OS X with additional features, but hey, I just wanted to call a service using some simple XML that I wanted to post using HTTP, did that really require a framework?

Another strange fact, was that the samples I found were really old, but I found out that Mac OS X actually contains some nice high-level APIs that you can use to call web-services, they’re all prefixed with WS, for instance WSMethodInvocationCreate, WSMethodInvocationSetParameters and WSMethodInvocationInvoke, the strangest thing about these interfaces was that I saw several warnings against using these functions, strange.

Oh well I manged to find a suitable sample here: Ranchero Software: Cocoa XML-RPC Demo, and I managed to change it so that I could call the node.load method exposed by the node service, but this was when trouble arose.

The node.load service allows you to supply a list of node-fields that you want to to have returned, if you supply an empty list, you’ll get all the fields. I tried several things, to no avail, my service kept returning node not found errors, this was a problem that I never manged to fix.

The problem has something to do with the way Apple’s API serialises it’s parameters, Drupal is expecting a list, that will get de-serialised into a PHP array, I couldn’t get that to work.

I then decided that I’d try to interface with the user service instead, and that faired better, and I manged to login to Drupal from my client, heavenly bliss .

OK, next step would be to add an additional button to my client, called “Login”, and have two buttons in my application, this was when I hit rock-bottom, I just couldn’t figure out how to hook up an InterfaceBuilder push-button with an Objective-C eventhandler.

This is something that is super-simple to do with almost any other development tools, why oh why has Apple decided to stay in the 80ies, I want a double-click in the designer to generate a stub and open my event-handler code in the editor.

Oh well, my application works, but I think that I’ll follow the advice, and stop using the WS* APIs, and start interfacing directly with the HTTP POST API, and serialise/deserialise the XML myself, another benefit of this approach, is that it’ll also works on the iPhone

Below is the code required to do a login to Drupal using XML-RPC from Mac OS X.

- (IBAction) doUserLoginLogin: (id) sender {

	/*
	Called when the Login button is clicked.
	*/

	int ixState = [numberField intValue];
	NSNumber *stateNum = [NSNumber numberWithInt: ixState];
	WSMethodInvocationRef rpcCall;
	NSURL *rpcURL = [NSURL URLWithString: @"http://localhost:8888/droopy/?q=services/xmlrpc"];
	NSString *methodName = @"user.login";
	NSDictionary *result;
	NSMutableDictionary   *params;

	params     = [[[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init] retain];

	[params setObject:@"user" forKey:@"username"];
	[params setObject:@"password"            forKey:@"password"];

	/*First create a method invocation.*/

	/*First parameter is the URL to the XML-RPC web service.
	Second parameter is the name of the XML-RPC method to call.
	Third parameter is a constant specifying XML-RPC protocol.*/

	rpcCall = WSMethodInvocationCreate ((CFURLRef) rpcURL, (CFStringRef) methodName, kWSXMLRPCProtocol);

	/*Then set the parameters. (There's just one in this case.)*/

	/*First parameter is the invocation created above.
	Second parameter is a dictionary containing the parameters.
	Third parameter may be an array specifying parameter order.
	(Since there's just one parameter, NULL is passed for parameter order.)*/

	WSMethodInvocationSetParameters (rpcCall, (CFDictionaryRef) params, NULL);

	/*Do the actual XML-RPC call and get the result.*/

	result = (NSDictionary *) (WSMethodInvocationInvoke (rpcCall));

	/*Display the result.*/

	if (WSMethodResultIsFault ((CFDictionaryRef) result)) /*error?*/
		[resultField setStringValue: [result objectForKey: (NSString *) kWSFaultString]];

	else /*no error; all's well*/
		[resultField setStringValue: [result objectForKey: (NSString *) kWSMethodInvocationResult]];
	} /*doLogin*/

Lessons learned

• It’s easy to develop a web application with little, or no, coding using Drupal.
• I’ve actually learned a LOT from my failures
• Work with the framework, not against it
• I can haz OS X apps
• Oh and: Don’t hack core

Thank you to the organisers
DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2008 was a tremendous success, 100 people, including visitors from as far away as Canada, a venue filled with energy, amazing sessions, especially the sessions hosted by Miki and Acquia filled with practical advice, but it’s also amazing that the Danish newspapers showed up, ready to share their experiences on how to performance optimise Drupal, I guess that print media is finally getting the Internet and the concept of open and free, and it fills me with optimism!

I’m now ready to face the world with renewed faith in Drupal and my own abilities to put it to use, gentlemen start your Drupal engines!

One more thing
Come to think about it I should have named my Twitter clone, Sylvester, OTOH Sylvester never manages to catch “Tweety Bird” does he

External links

• Ranchero Software: Cocoa XML-RPC Demo
• Drupal services module
• #drupal @ Jaiku.com: DrupalCamp Copenhagen http://drupalcamp.dk is in full swing, first speakers for advanced track were delayed
• #drupal @ Jaiku.com: Another great session hosted by Robert of Acquia on using the ApacheSolr Seach engine with Drupal
• #drupal @ Jaiku.com: DrupalCamp Copenhagen: “miki” is on about module development in the big room now
• #drupal @ Jaiku.com: DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2008: It’s a Wrap! Thanks to the organisers for putting together such a great event! See you in May 2009!

Droopy is a trademark of and copyright MGM, Sylvester and Tweety are trademarks of and copyright Warner Brothers. I claim fair use

BTW! We’re trying to build a community site at barcamp.dk, so check back often for updates

Pre-camp game
I’m a 3 time veteran of BarCamp Copenhagen, and this time I had multiple roles, primary Henriette challenged me to host a pre-camp game, and this article is focusing on how that unfolded.

My roles were these:

• Co-organiser
• Co-host
• Host of pre-camp warm-up – hmm, it was freezing wasn’t it – event
• Co-sponsor through Nabz.dk – reseller of the Nabaztag
• Speaker (accept my sincere apologies for that disaster of a session, but I did learn some important Xcode/Interface Builder tricks)
• Webmaster at barcamp.dk

Phew! I think that’s about it, no wait, I also found time to be a participant!

“Un-conference”
For those of you not familiar with the concept, BarCamp Copenhagen is part of the world-wide phenomenon BarCamp, and can best be described as a conference with a twist, a so-called un-conference.

I’ll try to illustrate the differences between a conference and BarCamp below.

Conference

• The list of speakers usually is announced and scheduled
• Active participation is neither required nor the norm
• Speakers are invited and often payed
• Attendees usually pay a fee

BarCamp (un-conference)

• The list of speakers and the schedule is made up just before the camp starts
• The audience is expected to participate actively
• Speakers are volunteering, and access is only limited by the number of presentation slots

Technological treasure hunt, huh?
My major contribution to BarCamp Copenhagen 8.2 was being organiser of the pre-camp warm up.

As mentioned, the task of organising a pre-camp warm-up was given to me by Henriette Weber, she had envisioned a “technological treasure hunt”, and I immediately jumped at the chance, but what to do?

Technology and treasure hunt, we’ll that should be something with GPS, isn’t that something you can assume that people have these days?

After looking into what existed in the market, and even considering if we should try to build our own, I was sort of stuck for at while.

I suspect that Henriette was getting a bit worried, so she sent Mark Wubben to the rescue, and that was great! Mark is probably the coolest guy I’ve ever met, and it’s hard to believe that he’s only 22. Mark is destined for greatness, and I’m humbled by his presence!

I quickly started down an avenue of sending the participants out to research the history of the neighbourhood where the event was to take place, but Mark, in diplomatic terms, told me that that sounded too boring, I instantly agreed, it did sound like a school project didn’t it? I guess my short career as a school teacher had a bad influence on my creativity .

Brainstorm
On October 28th I met with Mark, and he made a couple of important points.

• The game must not be boring
• The game should be “hackable”
• The game should be directed using SMS by the game master

We had a great brainstorming session, and immediately we were turning in the direction of spies, conspiricies etc. Mostly because I instantly made the connection to November 22nd and the mother of all conspiracy theories, since November 22nd is the day of the JFK assassination.

So what we came up with was the concept of a spy-game where you were supposed to find an assassin, take a picture and return with it to the headquarter.

The assassin would be meeting with a contact at an undisclosed location, I thought of Nørrebroparken because it has a “grassy knoll” .

The participitants would be divided into teams, and then sent around in the area looking for codes that, when found, should be relayed to HQ, resulting in another hint about the whereabouts of the assassin.

Planning
On the 8th of November Mark Wubben and I met to investigate the area, and we found several places that would be suitable for waypoints, we decided that Nørrebroparken would be too far away, since we only had two hours for the game, and wanted 5 hints/waypoints.

I didn’t really work too much on the detalis of the game, after the 8th, but when the 22nd of November approached, I suddenly decided that we needed a website to support the game, and what you can whip together in two shakes of a rats tail using Drupal is just amazing, I had a full community site with full geolocation support up and running in a few hours.

Calls for participation
Approx. one week prior to the event, we issued an e-mail with a call for participation, and people were asked to sign-up for the pre-camp event, this was before I had configured the website, so I received a possitive answer from a few people.

Teaser
On the eve of the event, I then sent out this e-mail to the people that had responded to the call for participation:

Dear Agent,

You’ve been selected as a prospect to lead a team at BarCamp Copenhagen.

You will be given a mission that requires that you operate as a field agent from 10am to 11:59am.

Any technology you bring can potentially help you, but you’ll need, at least a camera and a cellphone.

There will be a briefing at 10am on November 22nd @Lygten 16.

Until then you can get updates at the barcamp.dk site, so check back frequently. http://barcamp.dk/content/barcamp-copenhagen-intelligence-agency

If you choose to accept the mission I’ll need your cell-phone number.

Kind regards
Kim Bach aka. K.ox
BCCIA Director

I received commitment from 4 people, I picked them as team-leaders, so that we would have four teams, and now I started building the website, having specific locations geocoded on the website helped me produce nice maps, so all I needed was to finalise the plot.

In the week leading to the event I had enlisted two of my friends to act as agents, and one of them is an experienced role-player so she helped me debug the game, she suggested that I should get rid of the good/bad distinction, and focus on making it much more confusing what was good and bad.

We met the night before BarCamp and decided that the mission should be for the teams to located the whereabouts of an agent, deliver documents, that they should document the handover of the documents, and return to base. What they weren’t aware of was that there was a second agent operating, and that he should steal the documents and disappear.

Hackable game
As mentioned, Mark Wubben tought me the importance of the game being “hackable”, this means that you should be able to bend the rules, so what I came up with was this:

• Information about the waypoints would be made available on the website once the teams had departed
• It would be possible to guess the access-codes, and get the hints faster. I choose these numbers for the 5 codes that should be gathered: 13-21-34-55-89 – does that ring a bell? Not? Well it’s the 5 two digit Fibonacci numbers
• You could get help if you asked for it

The plot
I ended up with a plot where the participants were sent out to locate field agent Szeba, they would be guided by hints that were given to them once they had gone to a waypoint and located the access code and sent it by SMS to HQ

The mission was to hand over some documents to the agent, and return with proof that the documents were delivered to the agent, and return to HQ.

The twist
What the participants didn’t know, was that I had also enlisted another agent, Petrus. The idea was that the agent would steal the documents once they were delivered to agent Szeba.

Game-on
On the eve of the evening I met with agents Szeba and Petrus (aka. Signe and Kim, thank you for helping me, you guys rock).

We went over the plan.

Szeba would be at Nørrebro Station at 11:30 waiting for the documents, Petrus would be lurking, wait for the next train, steal the documents and jump on the train just before it left.

We were ready for the game – mu-ha-ha-ha – it will be GREAT!

Stay tuned for the part two of this where you’ll be told how the game actually unfolded.

The picture that accompanies this article was taken by Karin Høgh, it’s copyright Karin Høgh and she has allowed me to use it here. The picture shows one of my bags!

Yesterday, the 14th of October 2008, Apple had an event titled “The spotlight turns to notebooks”, where they unveiled a refresh of the MacBook Pro, a new version of the MacBook in aluminium and a new Cinema Display.

Clever spin
All of these announcements were already confirmed and leaked days before the event, Apple can’t or won’t, contain the leaks, and the new strategy seems to be to use the leaks to drive the hype.

Remembering how secretive Apple events used to be, I sort of, expected Steve Jobs to pull something out of the sleeves of his turtleneck, “one more thing”, but he didn’t, or did he?

One more “thing”
One notable thing about the event was that Steve shared the stage to such a high degree. This is a trend that has been going for some time, especially when it comes to events that focus on the Mac, it’s a bit like Steve isn’t that passionate about computers.

Luckily others are, and at this event Jonathan “Jony” Ive shined – and I’m not referring to the reflections from his shaved head.

It was simply a thrill to see this low-key, soft-spoken, man talk about the manufacturing process involved in producing the new MacBooks, the attention to detail, the months spend refining the new trackpad etc. etc.

Over the years, speculation as to who might take over the position as CEO of Apple after Steve Jobs, has been growing, and my first reaction was that I’d love to see Ive in that position, he’d be a natural.

But really that would be such a shame, so I’m convinced that Ive will stay in his current position, and there’s many more iconic designs hidden in that shiny bald head of his.

So watch the video where Ive talks us through the manufacturing process of the new MacBooks, it’s simply breathtaking.

Risky strategy?
The MacBooks themselves? To me they ooze quality. Apple has obviously decided that they will not address the current trend towards cheap notebooks, aka. netbooks, when asked Steve called it a “developing market”.

The strategy is risky, it defies the market, but I welcome it, and it will only mean that Apple will grow it’s market share in terms of revenue, instead of units moved. With these new notebooks, there’s no doubt that Apple owns the high-end market, and that’s where it’s the most fun, and profitable, to be.

The old MacBook product line has been plagued by quality problems, hopefully the new MacBooks addresses this, I’ll bet that this is the case, these are, to me, the first true Intel based notebooks, designed from the ground up for the Intel chips.

I’m tempted by Ive’s new industrial sculpture

The picture of Jonathan “Jony” Ive, that accompanies this article, is a frame from the video issued by Apple for the launch of the MacBook Aluminium, it’s Copyright Apple Inc. I hope that my use here is considered “Fair Use”.

Currently the video is available on the Apple Website here, it’s likely to be moved, and it’s a good guess that it’s already on YouTube. The video is produced much like a documentary, really professional marketing on Apple’s part.

Since rumour has it that Apple is softening up to rumour sites: if you don’t like me publishing this rumour: SOSUME.

“Gi’ mig Danmark tilbage” by Natasja is blasting the Cupertino speakers!

Steve Jobs takes the stage

(applause)

Welcome, and thank you for coming.

One first thing:
Apple has realized that we can’t compete with Linux and has decided to make an investment in Linux. So we’re discontinuing Mac OS X in favour of Linux with KDE, all Mac OS X developers will instead be working on contributing to Linux, ending years of, mostly, passive and luke warm support for the open source movement. Apple wants to appologise for this mal-pratice, and all code will be shared back with the community.

The next version of Mac OS X will be renamed Linux Snow Leopard, and it will be licensed under the GPL – meaning that it can be freely copied, and installed, on any computer.

(oooooh)

Linux Snow Leopard is available as a free download from Apple AppStore, and it is available…NOW!

(applause and cheers)

The reason for this change is that captalism, as we knew it is dead, instead of competing to death and the focus on economic growth, that is destroying the planet, human kind will instead work to improve the quality of life for all.

Democratisation of technology will be instrumental in bringing these changes.

Apple wants to be part of this.

(Steve moves the cover on the table, pulls out a picture frame with a picture of Richard Stallman on one side and Nicholas Negroponte on the other side, from this frame he pulls out a beautiful sub-notebook)

So today I’m happy to announce the insanely great TuxBook, developed in coorporation with Asus.

Asus is bringing the change, and since our old notebooks really weren’t anything but repackaged Asus products anyway, we’ve decided that Jonathan Ive will now be working full time making Asuses look cool.

The TuxBook comes with 2GB RAM, 32GB SSD, WiFi, Bluetooth, a 3G modem and A-GPS. It sports 8 hours of batterylife, and can, optionally, be solarpowered.

Demo:
(The splash screen is a Penguin holding an Apple)

Isn’t that beautiful? KDE 4.1: BOOM!

The TuxBook will be priced at $99, and it is available…NOW!

Thank you all for coming, and Karl Marx was right.

(applause)

One more thing:
Since you can’t make money on stock, APPL will be unlisted from the stock exchange, Apple will in the future be a Section 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charity.

One final thing:
How do you like them Apples?

(standing ovations and wild cheers: T-U-X what’s that spell? TUX!, what’s that spell? TUX!)