Categories
'i dag' (Danish) Blogs NGOs

Det danske efterår

.........KISS!Grundlovsdag 2011 inviterede Borgerlyst, som jeg KNUS-ELSKER, til Søndags-slentre-samtalesalon, Nadja Pass, en af de vidunderlige mennesker bag Borgerlyst, havde sat os stævne i den dejlige Bibliotekshave bag (eller er det foran) det Kongelige Bibliotek, ved Søren Kierkegaard statuen.

Tak for en dejlig eftermiddag, vi kom jo vidt omkring, lad os tage det bagfra, og så vender vi tilbage til i begyndelsen, DET er da Kierkegaard inspireret 😉

Først og fremmest, så synes jeg at jeg skylder et blogindlægen artikel om Borgerlyst i anledning af 1-årsdagen, men det bliver nok ikke rigtig til noget, en kommentar er bedre, og lettere at følge! og så blev det alligevel til en blogpostartikel

Nå, man forstår jo ting bagfra, så jeg endte med at tale med en god ven, som er fra Norge, og han havde ikke så meget til overs for vores grundlovsdag, næh du 17-maj! det er noget der rykker, her var det så det gik op for mig hvad der tiltaler mig, nemlig at grundlovsdagen ikke er sådan en nationalistisk omgang, jeg fortalte min ven at jeg netop havde fejret grundloven, og viste ham indgangsbønnen til “runde 1″, han klappede i som en østers og nikkede anerkendende.

Genopfinde demokratiet, ja det vil jeg OGSÅ være med til, og imponerende muligheder de mennesker, der deltog i samtalesalonen, har for at gøre netop det, ikke just nogle hvem-som-helster, undrer mig over hvad en erklæret amatør, som mig, gør i den forsamling 😉

Faktisk har jeg tænkt meget over meningen med livet, sker jo når man når en fremskreden alder, ved at man ikke har sine forældre evigt, og heller ikke sit eget liv evigt, tror nok jeg er kommet til den konklusion at der ikke er en mening, men at det er op til den kommende generation at finde den, så det arbejder jeg på, dog ikke genetisk, hvilket nok er et stor tab når man oplevede at se en dreng lege på den måde i går, jeg havde jo mest lyst til at lege med, men nød at iagttage legen som observatør, på afstand.

At du skulle bringe Distortion og “nu er det slut” manifestet op, var yderst interessant, jeg ELSKER “fællesskabet”, og det er det der har svigtet, det beder jeg til vi genfinder <3 – jeg melder mig ihvertfald gerne under Distortion fanerne med et par ruller affaldssække, sidste år ryddede jeg et 200m2 område i Fælledparken efter karnevalet, det tog ca. 2 timer, så det er en meget let opgave at løse, hvis man tager ansvar, og der er nogle der tager teten.

Ellers engagerer jeg mig mest i andre mennesker end dem der genetisk er mig nære, det har jeg nogle gange dårlig samvittighed over.

Så var det jo også fars dag, og min aversion mod parti-politik har jeg nok fået fra min far, selv om det var mine forældre der vækkede min respekt for folkestyret ved at tage mig og min med ned til stemmelokalet når der var valg, det var jo mystisk “hertil og ikke længere, valget er hemmeligt”. Jeg kender STADIG ikke min fars politiske ståsted, men han har stemt hver eneste gang han kunne, og sikkert på samme parti.

Det arabiske forår, den spanske sommer, det danske efterår, jo det bliver varmt.

Livet leves forfra men kan kun forståes bagfra, jeg tror jeg forstår lidt mere nu!

LÆNGE LEVE FÆLLESSKABET!

Categories
Blogs Computere og Internet Education/Undervisning Hackers Historier/Stories IT Guruer Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology Undervisning Videnskab

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans… – Celebrating women in tech

March the 24th 2009 is Ada Lovelace Day, the brainchild of Suw Charman-Anderson. Suw pledged to write a blog-post about a woman in tech that she admired, if at least 1,000 would make the same pledge, and since I’ve admired and been fascinated by Ada Lovelace since childhood, and especially after I read the wonderful book The Difference Engine, so I embraced the project, but at the same time I knew that it would be difficult for me to find just a woman in tech that I admire, that is because the list is long, and I’m happy to say that it’s actually getting longer.

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 😉

Categories
'i dag' (Danish) Blogs Uncategorized

Rubadub

Kim Bach
07/02/09 09.46
(måske ikke i dette tilfælde)
09/02/09 21.27

congratulations
09/02/09 21.27

(hung-over? var du på Rubadub Søndag Nat?)
Eternal Adventuress
09/02/09 22.23
ja
Kim Bach
09/02/09 22.23
cool
09/02/09 22.24

dancehall på en søndag er vist over mine evner
Eternal Adventuress
09/02/09 22.24
jeg fik at vide at jeg dansede som en 25-årig
09/02/09 22.24

ham jeg dansede med troede først at jeg var 32 da han så mig ude i lyset
Kim Bach
09/02/09 22.25
hæ fedt nok. det er gået ned ad bakke for mig, det er 5 år siden jeg dansede som en 25 årig, nu er det vist en 55 årig
09/02/09 22.28

(hmm…journalisten siger nu at der BLEV sagt “Perle”…)

Categories
Blogs Computere og Internet Hackers Historier/Stories Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology

DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2008: Guess what, I’m the hero – Introducing Droopy your new microblogging service

The Danish Drupal community, Drupal Danmark, organised a miniconference, DrupalCamp Copenhagen, in the weekend of the 15th and 16th of November 2008 at La Oficina, a new – FANTASTIC – co-working space in Copenhagen

Show your <3 for Drupal

People that know me, also knows that I’m a big fan of the Content Management System (CMS) Drupal, and I constantly push it.

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
Drupal Droopy DogI 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:

Droopy and Droop form screenshot

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.

Drupal XMLRPC Cocoa ClientOh 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

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

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Computere og Internet Education/Undervisning Frivillig arbejde Hackers Historier/Stories Kim Blog (English) Open Source Resources Technology

BarCamp Copenhagen 8.2: BarCamp Copenhagen Intelligence Agency – Part I

BarCamp Copenhagen 8.2 - one of my bagsBarCamp Copenhagen 8.2 on the 22nd of November 2008 is over, THANK YOU SO MUCH for being such a great crowd.

I’d like to extend a special thank you to the sponsors (Signal Digital, Københavns Erhvervs Akademi, Nabz.dk, basementcopenhagen and Toothless Tiger), Ras Bolding and our fabulous team Henriette Weber, Thomas Kristensen, Anders Bendix, Troels Wittrup, Benjamin Wendelboe, Laura Kiralfy and Mark Wubben – you ALL rock, and you KNOW it!

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!

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Education/Undervisning Kim Blog (English) Kunst Music

Planning for Kulturnatten 2008 (Copenhagen Night of Culture) despite elitist selection practices by organisers

Kulturnat2008It’s time for the yearly Copenhagen event “Kulturnatten”, or “Night of Culture”, and I’m basically done planning for it.

At the bottom of this post, you’ll find a list of events I’ve saved to my profile on kulturnatten.dk, unfortunately they don’t have a RSS feed or a URL that I can share, so I had to copy/paste/edit the list :-(.

I’m planning to attend the events below, but I usually stray, and end up in strange places, my recommendation is to just go with the flow, and stay in places longer than you originally planned for, if you feel “good vibes”.

Last year the high point for me, was a visit to the old shipyard crane on Holmen, which is back this year, and Ars Nova in Marmorkirken, which isn’t :-(.

The events hit by elitism
I’ve been a huge fan of Kulturnatten for several years, but this year the organisers has decided to limit the official program, and has weeded out some events that had been running, successfully for several years, for instance the event by IT Politisk Forening.

I’ve been noticing that Kulturnatten over the years has become more and more like a carnival, and that was somewhat annoying, but I think that the strict selection of “relevant” events is an example of elitism.

This being said, the Kulturnat is an impressive show of strength, and I’ll keep on attending, even though I strongly disagree with the new policy of the organisers.

List of events I’m planning to attend:
Kultmusik og magiske videoinstallationer
Kultfænomenet Snöleoparden fylder gården med sin særlige equilibristiske nordiske version af østens musik, alt imens den verdensberømte kunstner Yang Fudongs magiske videoinstallationer tegner billed…

Time: 18:00 – 00:00
Place: GL STRAND, Gammel Strand 48

Lasershow illuminerer facaden på Charlottenborg
Facaden på Charlottenborg er hele kulturnatten illumineret med klassisk italiensk billedkunst. Lasershow arrangeret af den romerske kunstner Livia Canella.

Time: 18:00 – 00:00
Place: Danmarks Kunstbibliotek, Kongens Nytorv 1, Postboks 1053

Konspirationsteorier fra Tempelriddere til 11. sep
Konspirationsteorier er som en virus, der angriber, når immunforsvaret er svækket. Med benhård historisk kildekritik afmonterer Dan H. Andersen nogle af nutidens mest populære myter og konspirationst…

Time: 20:30 – 21:30
Place: Frederiksberg Bibliotek, Falkoner Plads 3

Polkageist Power Party
Nyd energifyldt koncert inspireret af salsa, calypso, funk, rock og balkanmusik sammen med “cool” øko-snacks.
Generel info: handicapfaciliteter, bespisning

Time: 21:00 – 22:30
Place: Det Europæiske Miljøagentur, Kongens Nytorv 6

Social networking /foredrag
Kim Sneppen, Models of Life, NBI

Time: 22:00 – 22:30
Place: Niels Bohr Institutet, Blegdamsvej 17

Herredømmet – Lykke, Thordal, Trier & Zahle
Carsten Lykke, Kenneth Thordal, Tobias Trier & Oliver Zahle pisker stemningen helt i vejret med en vittig, varm og swingende koncert om den moderne mands genvordigheder. Sangenes tema “Mænd forstår a…

Time: 22:00 – 00:00
Place: Frederiksberg Bibliotek, Falkoner Plads 3

Salsa Loca – Kulturnattens hedeste danseaften
Traditionen tro spiller Salsa Loca op til dans. Kulturnatten afsluttes på denne måde med et brag af en fest med livesalsamusik af bedste kvalitet og dans til den lyse morgen.

Time: 22:00 – 03:00
Place: Krudttønden, Serridslevvej 2

See also:

Categories
Blogs Computere og Internet Hackers Historier/Stories Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology

BarCampCopenhagen: Party for your right to geek

BarCampCopenhagen LogoAs it might have caught your attention, the second BarCampCopenhagen took place this Friday (25th of January 2008), and there was great energy in the building. It’s evident that there’s a strong interest in having an event like BarCamp in Copenhagen, and it was inspiring, just to try to tap into that energy.

On the practical level, BarCamp was a great success, especially thanks to generousity of Beaconware (Troels, Allan and Kimmy) and of course Toothless Tiger (Henriette and Thomas) and Laura who moderated the “Kangaroo?” sessions, and thanks to the sponsorship from BridgeIT (my employeer), the event could be taken to such a high level, without having to charge the participants.

I must say that I’m amazed by the group of dedicated and interesting people that showed up, this is what they do for a living, but they’re also interested in sharing their ideas openly – thank you all!

To me the greatest moments were that I, finally, got to meet some people, that I’ve been following online, in real life.

If you have to criticise the event a little, I think we had some “growing pains” – in 2006 the event was more intimate, since we could all fit around one table, this meant that we could have more of an “open space” type of event, and that is the format that I prefer.

Civilisation 0.1

I did a presentation – Civilisation 0.1 – a pun on Tor Nørretranders Civilsation 2.0 – and I had some (understatement) difficulty making my points, that most likely had something to do with the fact that I had the wrong audience, since they’re all “believers”. Knowing the audience is, I believe, number one on the list of things to remember when doing a presentation of any kind, so that was sobering.

Since I failed to get my points across, talking about Pyramids, Archs and Fountains, I’ll try to do better here.

My presentation was inspired by this famous quote from Alan Kay:

If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

My argument is that we’ve, so far, been building pyramids, but that we’ve invented the arch.

“The Pyramid”, is current ICT businesses, and their monopolistic pratices
“The Arch”, is “open source” and MM(O)C (Massively, Multiuser (Online) Collaboration)
“The Aqueducts” is the “Internet”
“The fountains” and “Temples” are the “things” we can build using “the arch” and the tremendously powerful tools and technologies we have in our hands.

I also tried to make these points:

  • Basic infrastructure should be free
  • We’re busy building “Pyramids” – using brute force
  • Civilisation is still in beta
  • We actually have the power to change things – get involved
  • The beer isn’t free – it will cost money
  • Join the revolution

Like I said, and this was obvious if you attended, I wasn’t too good at getting these points through, and to me, one of the main ideas of BarCamp, is to throw ideas on the table, even half baked ones, and have them tested, and even shot down.

My ideas was mostly shot down, and I got a “Emperor’s new clothes” type of comment: “To build the aquaeducts that feeds the fountains you already need an arch”, and someone else pointed out, that “something” was missing going from “The Pyramid” to “The Arch”, did it just appear out of the blue? I didn’t really answer that too well, my point is that the technological equivalent of “The Arch” has been/is being invented, now we can go build the aquaeducts and fountains armed with that knowledge.

Christian Schade was the most sceptical, I need people like him to question my ideas, so thank you Christian.

I’ve actually done a lot of thinking about this, basically I’m a strong believer in utopian ideas – they’ re getting a bit old, and others are better at getting them across than me.

I enjoyed the discussion we had afterwards, and I think that I managed to sell some of my ideas. It’s really quite simple, don’t wait for the revolution to happen, get involved. Like I said, this was the wrong audience, since they’re all already involved in the revolution.

My presentation did align itself, almost perfectly, with the two that followed, those of Christian Schade and Tania Ellis.

The Digital Divide

I was very pleased to, finally, meet Christian Schade, a person that I’ve been following for some time. I’ve never met him before, and I only knew him because he, sometime ago, added me as a contact on the online service Jaiku. The way he’s using a microblogging service is very similar to the way I use it, he often posts short messages that only he can understand – like a song that he had some sort of association to.

Christian talked about “the digital divide”, and he started out by stating that the difference between the things he was going to talk about, and the things I talked about, was similar to “the glass is half-full” (me)/”the glass is half empty” (Christian). You could say that I’m the optimist and Christian is the realist.

Christian got his points through, and they’re quite sobering. It’s possible that the younger generation is tech-savy, but they’re basically IT illiterate, yes they know how to use their cellphone, but the Nokia N95 they’re carrying around really is an extremely powerful computer, that they’re just using to TEXT each other.

Since the current trend is that businesses, and the public, use more and more advanced electronic solutions – yes: e-mail qualifies as advanced – IT skills are increasingly important, skills that the educational system isn’t focusing on.

So the digital divide is getting bigger, even in developed countries, and no one seems to care, like Christian pointed out, no one has really seriously looked at the problem with the digital divide, since the Dybkjær report, and when that was issued, they weren’t even sure if the Internet should be the backbone of the “Digital Denmark”.

Of course part of the problem with technology has to do with accessibility, and the general computer really is too complicated to be the basic tool of the digital revolution – no-one should have to know what a firewall and an anti-virus program is…We have a great challenge ahead of us, but no-one seems to care.

I later had a long discussion with Christian, and that was great.

Capitalism with a human face

Tania Ellis at BarCampCopenhagenBarCamp was also graced by Tania Ellis, author of the book “De nye pionerer” (The New Pioneers), and her presentation was about “Social business” – new alliances (oops ;-)) between economics and humanism.

Tania started out by showing a picture of the two choices of careers you’ve had since the 70ies, either you’re the poor, “peace and love” hippie or the greedy business man, but could a third way be emerging? A way where you can merge and/or mix the two, achieving balance and the best of two worlds.

Tania has been giving this a lot of thought, and the examples she found were ranging from the relatively well known (Life Straw), to the “interesting” (Solar Powered Vibrators) to the self-contradictory (Environmentally friendly munitions).

After Christian’s venture into dystopia, Tania presented hope for the future, maybe that is an attribute of the feminine? Afterwards she said that having children certainly helps, something that Christian tried to protest ;-).

I think that Tania managed to put words to my ideas, and present them is a structured manner – the “exercise” of writing a book is probably helpful ;-). Seen as a whole, the pre-dinner presentations by Christian, Tania and me fit extremely well together.

BTW, the splash screen on Tania’s web-site is a quote from Alan Kay. It used to be part of the name of my PowerBook, until I discovered that iTunes Music Store doesn’t like long computer-names, strangely enough the fact that I’ve written about the solution, is the biggest driver of traffic to my blog!

del.icio.us

After these three Kangaroo? tracks, it was time for dinner, and that was just del.icio.us (sorry or soz as I’ve begun to say recently).

Ruby don’t take your love to town

After the break, I decided to stay truer to my Geek roots, and attended the session “Ruby, Rails <meta>?” by Casper Fabricius. This was a great introduction to Ruby. Ruby is definitely very cool – like Neo cool – and I do love interpreted languages. I got a flash-back to the strangest language I’ve ever worked with, APL – an interpreted language that I have mainly used on an IBM mainframe.

One thing I find interesting is the trench-digging, and categorisation of people based on what programming languages they use – with the possible exception of Perl, I haven’t seen a programming language I couldn’t master with relative ease, and I’m, of the conviction that you need to have some general awareness of the different languages and tools that you have at your disposal. If Ruby can get the job done, quicker and faster, you should be allowed to use it.

Unfortunately Denmark is Microsoft country extraordinaire, and .NET is way too dominant. I totally agree with Casper that Reflection in C# is very hard to grasp, within this field Ruby is pure simplicity, and it is just beautiful.

As with all interpreted languages, there are justified performance fears, but if you can deliver solutions quicker, the benefits might overshadow those concerns.

Casper asked the question: so what can you use all this Neo-coolness for? He didn’t really have the time to answer this, but Ruby is being used to build world-class applications.

If you want to get started with Ruby, Casper pitched the web-based Ruby development environment Heroku, and it looks like a good place to start venturing into Ruby coolness. Heroku is in closed beta, but you might be allowed to pass through the Pearly Gates to Ruby coolness, by contacting Casper. [Casper has made me aware (see comments) that Heroku is for Ruby on Rails development, it’s important to distinguish between the two].

Quo-vadis?

The most surprising presentation of the evening, was the presentation by Henrik Biering of the work NETAMIA has done to develop a single-sign-on (SSO) engine, called net-safe. Net-safe is a standards based, plug-able SSO infrastructure, that also contains address validation etc. Running a successful on-line business depends on correct identification of the users, and having valid user data, also means that the users are better behaved.

Henrik knew what he was talking about, based on the experiences of the huge user base of heste-nettet.dk, which he runs. I guess it is obvious, but it really was an eye-opener to me, correct/valid information of users is extremely important, if you want to run a serious web-site.

Everyone in the room was blown away by seeing how polished a product Net-safe is, and when asked how much it had cost to develop it, Henrik answered: hmm, it was something I did together with my son…Amazing!

Embracing the chaos

Henriette talked about how to get businesses to embrace the chaos of the net, it’s a topic she’s writing a book about, and I look very much forward to it.

Engaging the geek warp drive

After all these sessions, I really needed a break, but when Michael Widerkrantz aka. MC, started rearranging the chairs, I just knew that I had to attend.

MC talked about IPv6, and why it’s important. In case you don’t know, IP is the basic communications protocol of the Internet, and the version we’re currently using, has a build-in limit of the number of allowed network addresses, that we’re about to hit, MC said that a recent session of RIPE, estimated that it would happen in less than two years.

I know just a little about networks, but this was mostly over my head, basically I’m sitting somewhere above layer 7, and just want the network to, ahem work, so it beats me why the ISPs just don’t get started rebuilding the infrastructure for IPv6, before it’s too late.

An interesting side-note is that a friend of mine just recently returned from South Africa, and I found out, because her computer acted strangely, that it was because she had been using IPv6 – as seems to be common with developing countries, South Africa is skipping the legacy infrastructure completely, a legacy that will soon hit us, and the entire digital economy, which today is synonymous with the economy.

Thank you

That concluded the official program of BarCamp Copenhagen, and what a great night it was, the air was literally buzzing with energy. Events like this are important, and I hope that this will get people talking and taking similar initiatives.

Categories
'i dag' (Danish) Blogs

Fra vores arkiver: Jantelovs Rap

Mel: Hvor du fra…

Hvor du nu? Du i Danmark
Hvor du nu? F…ing Danmark

Du i Danmark, tro ik’ du er no’et
Ellers ser vi til at du mister ho’det

Så kom ik’ her med evner
Det ku’ ske at du revner

Jantelov, Jantelov troede det var for sjov
Meningen er at dine evner gør dig flov
Så lemmingeeffekten kan trænge gennem som en plov
Og gennemsnits Jensen føler han tog det fulde rov

For hvor du nu? Du i Danmark
Hvor du nu? F…ing Danmark

Kom tilfældigvis forbi Kim Bach . Org » Blog Archive » Missed the Alicia Keys concert, og genopdagede min gamle Jantelovs Rap. Ikke just stor kunst, men jeg synes den var aktuel pga. de oplevelser en veninde, der lige er kommet tilbage til Danmark, har haft – egentlig er der vist mere brug for en Kafka Polka…

Categories
Blogs Computere og Internet Education/Undervisning Frivillig arbejde Hackers Historier/Stories Kim Blog (English) NGOs Open Source Resources Technology Undervisning Videnskab

Getting out of beta: The decade of “search” is over – ushering in the decade of “knowledge”

When “Sergei and Larry” approached Yahoo with a brand new concept of a “search engine”, they discovered, to their dismay, that Yahoo wasn’t really interested in “search”, but in selling ads. So Google was born.

How I discovered Google

In 1998 I was doing a search of myself, e.g. ego-surfing, using my preferred search engine, Lycos, and I was stunned to see that the top hits were Usenet groups that contained my name, several of them in fact, but worse: they had names like kimbach.slut.slut.slut etc.

I was a bit upset, especially since I, at that point, was being sued over violation of the marketing law by a former employer – a case that was later thrown out – but I assumed that they might have created those groups, to slander me, and I was quite sure that it wasn’t me that created those groups ;-).

I took a look at the content of the groups, and they had very low traffic, I only found some spam, which was rare in 1998, and someone who asked the question “who is Kim Bach” – a question I’ve pondered myself, but it didn’t look like it had anything to do with me.

Eventually I contacted the hotline of my ISP, Image Scandinavia, and they referred me to…GOOGLE.

Doing a search on Google, I realised that it had nothing to do with me, but that the groups had been created by a disgruntled husband, and Kim Bach was his ex-wife!

I also believe that using Google for the first time, immediately made me drop Lycos. At that point Lycos actually yielded what I’d label “better results”, but that changed quickly.

Google, originally, cracked “the search code”, and the world changed.

How I discovered Wikipedia

This I also remember clearly, and it’s quite interesting, I googled it – indirectly!

3-4 years ago I was trying find the English word for the type of dog, that is called “gravhund” in Danish, I somehow 😉 knew that a literal translation wouldn’t do, since that would have yielded “diggingdog”, “digdog”, “gravedog”.

So a Google search let me to the English Wikipedia article for Dachshund, and that was what I was looking for!

Seeing Wikipedia was an instant eye-opener, and at that point it hadn’t even dawned upon me, that Wikipedia was pure user-generated content!

Google isn’t interested in “knowledge”

Google won by doing a better job, but now “we, the people” are approaching the world with a concept of a “knowledge engine”, only to discover, to our dismay, that for instance Google isn’t really interested in “knowledge”, but in selling ads.

The difference: “we, the people”, will, surprisingly, transform Google from a “search engine” into a “knowledge engine” as well, no matter what Google does. The algorithm Google uses will give preference to “quality”, at least in the long run, and since “we, the people” are so numerous this will happen sooner rather than later.

Case in point, the best SEO strategy I know of is to create a Wikipedia article, try googling the terms I’ve created Wikipedia articles for (for instance: Kim Schumacher, DB03 and DB07).

You’re brainwashed

Google and the big companies have had us, pretty much, brainwashed to think that we have no say. This is reflected by the response to the launch of the Wikia Search engine, on the historic day, January 7th 2008.

Everyone is trying to compare Wikia Search to Google, and that’s missing the point COMPLETELY, and people should read what Wikia Search are writing:

WE KNOW THAT THE QUALITY OF THE SEARCH IS: “PRETTY LOW” (a polite way of saying that it “stinks”)

The way to help change it, is simply to get involved.

Every-time you do a search on Wikia Search, you’re offered the option to edit a “Mini Article” on the search. A “Mini Article” is just a Wiki article, that explains the search term. The “Mini Articles” will be used to improve the search index.

“Unfortunately” people seems to have been using a search on themselves as a benchmark, meaning that a lot of the “Mini Articles” are links to private and small web-sites, but that reflects the community.

Ego-surfing was also one of the first things I did, and the first hit that could be attributed to me was result number 8, and that yielded the photos I’ve taken, that are in the Flickr pool I created for Sjakket, my former place of work.

Is that my major contribution to the world? Well it’s not that far from it, bordering that I believe that it could be.

Getting involved – choose a community to “work” for

My criteria are:

Not for profit, open, free, strong community, sustainable.

The beer isn’t free however, so you’re allowed to make money, but take into consideration how the money is being made, if it is sustainable etc.

Personally I’ve chosen these organisations

  • Kim Bach . Org – My personal Internet presence with community support (some call that a blog ;-))
  • Netværksgruppen i Mjølnerparken – Volunteer to help inner city kids, of non-danish descent, with their homework
  • Æbletræet.dk – A Wiki-based community site dedicated to serving Apple users with content in the Danish Language
  • Wikipedia – The open encyclopaedia
  • Wikia Search – The open search engine

Currently I’m mostly involved in Wikia Search, I’ve found it really intimidating to be a contributor to an Encyclopaedia, so my contributions to Wikipedia have been quite limited, Wikia Search is much less intimidating, and right up my alley.

Where would you put your money (e.g. time)?

In ten years, Google has gone from no to 16.000 employees, but “we, the people” will, in ten years go from no to 6,5 billion, or how many it is that “we” are in 2018.

Where would you put you money (e.g. time)? It will only cost you time, and you’ll be involved in building a beautiful shrine to knowledge and human achievement.

Together we’ll do Google one better: crack the code of “knowledge”, and the world has changed forever.

Free at last, free at last, oh God almighty we’re free at last.

And “we”‘re hiring! No need to submit a resume, come join the fight!

Read more here:

Categories
Blogs Bookmarks Computere og Internet Kim Blog (English) Open Source Resources Technology Videnskab WordPress

Weaving an untangled web – The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project

FOAF Project LogoThe 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.

FOAF-a-matic screenshot

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:

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…