Move me Around

For the last two weeks or so (after finishing the first edition of Paris)
I've been working on my first contribution to the KDE 4 desktop. It's a
little Plasma widget which indicates the strength of your current wifi
connection. The widget makes no attempt whatever to actually configure the
interface. This is by design; I strongly prefer to use the ifupdown
facility in debian to configure my network cards, because I've found over
the years that I can make it behave more predictably than pretty much any
other network configuration tool.

So I've always wanted a desktop or panel widget which would just tell me
what the wifi card is doing without trying to make it do anything else.

Itch scratched!

-mark

I haven't written for a very long time, mostly because I was concentrating
on a project which wound up taking a few months longer than I'd hoped:
editing a print version of the Wikitravel Paris guide for Wikitravel Press.

In case you're not familiar with Wikitravel it's a travel guide built using
the Wiki method, which is to say using a website that anybody can edit.
Those of us who have been involved with Wikitravel over the last 5 years or
so think that this sort of massive open collaboration is not just the best
way to write a good up-to-date travel guide, but really the only way that
is economically feasible.

As we've seen in the press recently the other guides, the ones you find in
a bookstore, are often years out-of-date and in many cases don't even pay
their contributors enough to visit the country they're writing about.
Wikitravel contributors have at least mostly been to the places they write
about, and are quick to complain when something is inaccurate, and remember
in a wiki a complaint is tantamount to fixing the problem.

But there's more! Wikitravel Paris also represents the first major scale
collaboration between Wikitravellers and the OpenStreetMap project which is
a project to produce a detailed street-level map of the entire planet.

The book contains 20 super-detailed maps generated from OSM data. These
maps supersede and exceed by some margin of quality the original Wikitravel
Paris maps which I made in 2004, and I'm proud to say that I've contributed
some data to them, and am deeply grateful to the OSM community to their
gift to the world in providing the platform and the rest of the data in the
map.

-mark

I started using Twitter about 6 months ago at the urging of my friend Evan Prodromou, just in time to use it to announce the birth of our baby daughter, Anoushka. He and his wife MAJ were attending SXSW in Austin, and they weren't planning on spending the time looking at my blog (who would?) but they wanted to be kept up-to-date on the impending arrival of the baby.

Up to that point I'd pretty much dismissed Twitter as another setback in the signal-to-noise ratio that defines our attention economy. But now I realize how wrong I was! Now I've come to see twitter not only as a mini-blog (or broadcast IM), though it is good for that. What I've noticed about it, as lots of other people have is that it makes a fantastic abstraction layer.

You see, I've gotten used to being able to use the web to my advantage and miss it when I'm away. But... I also carry a cellphone. For years now I've wished that I could SMS some service with ideas and TODO list items. Well thanks to twitter and Remember the Milk (send "d rtm" to twitter) now I can. I thought about trying to implement such a service about 3 months ago, but didn't invest any time, thankfully since these guys have been at it for three years. Anyhow, now I finally have the fully mobile todo list that I've wanted. Yay!

But that's nowhere near the end of what you should be able to do with this Twitter thing, in fact the more I think about it the more I think that it's a fully fledged abstraction layer for the great variety of communication tools. If I want to reach somebody who uses the thing I pretty much can choose the cheapest means available to me at the moment, and can be fairly confident that they'll see the message by email, sms, im, the web, or something.

Anyhow, I'm going to spend some time thinking of another RTM-like killer app for the thing. I'll tell you when we go alpha.

This morning at 8h30 CET or 2h30 in Taipai at my friend and collaborator Evan Prodoromou announced the α of a new website, http://kei.ki at the end of his Wikimania talk. We've been working on this for a while along with Michelle (MAJ) Prodromou, Zach and Wendy Copley, Allegra Biava, Brigitte Schuster, Sarven Capadisli, and Seb Paquet.

The aim of Keiki is to create an open content parenting manual using the Wiki method of collaboration, but with a twist: most of the user interaction and community building rather than being handled through the wiki engine itself will be done through community building or social networking software. In this case we're using MediaWiki as the wiki engine, and Drupal as the social networking software.

It's seemed for a long time to those of us who have been involved in projects like Wikipedia and Wikitravel that using plain old Wiki pages for user pages and debates have some pretty serious drawbacks, and oh wouldn't it be nice to add user networking capability.

We're certainly not the first to do something like this. Evan and MAJ have been been down this road before in building Wikitravel Extra and the amazing LastFM has been approaching it from the other direction, adding wiki-like site building tools to an otherwise mostly social site.

We think wiki+socialnetworking is the way to go for this project though, and we're very pleased to launch this limited α-release.

Something kind of special happened on the Grütli meadow on Wednesday, and since most of you reading this are in North America you probably haven't heard.

The background

Around 700 years ago representatives of three small cantons in the pre-alpine hills around the Lake of Uri gathered in this little meadow - accessible to this day only by boat and a long hike - to declare mutual allegiance in their struggle to remain independent of the Hapsburg dynasty.

The Swiss still consider this event to be the founding moment of their Confederation, and it works well as an emotional focal point to the notion of strength through unity and that this country was built upon. They celebrate this idea on the First of August each year around the country, but especially at Grütli where there's a traditional gathering addressed by whoever holds the rotating presidency of the confederation.

The Boneheads

Sometime around 2000 the boneheads, as neo-nazi youth in Switzerland are called, started using the First of August at Grütli as their main annual rally. Although the police and others estimate the number of boneheads to be only around 600-800 in the whole country, their presence can make quite an impact at an event which can only comfortably accommodate 2000 or so spectators.

Yes, bonehead is a deliberate mis-translation of "skinhead". By the time they appeared here it was well understood that there are "good skins" and "bad skins". Everyone involved would prefer to avoid the confusion.

In 2005 several hundred neo-Nazi youth attending the event shouted down National Councillor Samuel Schmidt (at the time President) when he underlined the importance of integration of new immigrants into Swiss society. Apparently the nazi skins had expected him, a member of the far-right UDC party, to deliver a speech more to their liking. At any rate they managed to prevent Schmidt from speaking for several minutes calling him a "pig" and "Judas".

The build-up

This year Micheline Calmy-Rey is President of the Confederation, and as both a woman and a representative of the left-most party in government, the Social Democratic party, it was expected that her speaking at Grütli would surely bring out the worst possible behaviour, and highest turnout amongst the boneheads. The cantons concerned having had enough in previous years tried to simply cancel the event, but Calmy-Rey insisted that she would speak at Grütli. For the last several months she's been waging a campaign to encourage families and especially newly nationalized immigrants to attend.

For weeks the press in Switzerland has been building up the event as one of huge and possibly dangerous confrontation, either at the event itself or at the boarding of the steamboat for the meadow. The cities of Lucerne or Schwitz braced themselves for a night of rioting by angry right-wing youth. Worse still, the right-wing parties in governement managed to cut off funding for the event not wishing to provide Madame Calmy-Rey with a political platform just two months before a national election.

The result

Finally a few days before the event it became clear that various community groups had raised enough money to hire the boats, security, etc. to put the event on, and so the cantons of Lucerne, Schwitz, and Uri gave their blessings. People made their hotel reservations.

It was sunny and warm on Wednesday which was a pleasant surprise in and of itself for this unusually rainy summer, and the turnout reflected the weather. Among the thousands who turned out for the steamboat to the meadow most were families, including large numbers of immigrants from all parts of the world. A band played. Fashion models in tight swiss-flag t-shirts were photographed hugging the President. All was well with the world.

Somehow it's a little bit of an anti-climax, but it just makes me grin to see the slideshow.

You get your girl
I'll get mine
We'll go out gonna buy some wine
Gimme Wine, Wine, Wine
Wine, Wine, Wine
All the time

- the Nightcaps

Hey, you've probably already seen this, but I'm going to tell you about it anyhow, just in case: Some friends of ours from Montreal, Evan and Niko have launched a new Mediawiki-powered website: Vinismo.

Now, I drink an awful lot of the stuff and I don't know very much about it, but I've love to learn. Learning about wine together is the stated goal of the website, so maybe if I keep contributing to Vinismo I'll know something about wine in a couple of years. Or maybe not.

Another thing that people have mentioned about Vinismo is that it looks great (It does! although for some reason it stopped working in Konqueror right after the launch) and that's because it doesn't look like a "wiki". I take looking like a wiki to mean looking like a Mediawiki site. Well, that's sort of inspired me to hire a web designer to fix up my main Mediawiki site: Wikevent

We were feeling a little ambitous yesterday, so we decided to make a family outing to Martigny to check out an exhibit of Picasso's cirus-related works that Allegra had heard about. Allegra, Noema, Anoushka, and Allegra's brother Dominic and I had a nice lesiurely continental breakfast while Allegra's mom, Tina attended Palm Sunday mass, then we all loaded up in the various strollers and went down to the station, while Dom went off to play Ultimate Frisbee.

The train ride took us past the vineyards, castles, and villages of Lavaux, through Vevey and Montreux and south into the valley below the Vaud Alps, and the majestic *Dents de Midi* a gigantic mountain which looms (at 3800m) above the valley like a row of jagged teeth. After 40 mintues we arrived in Martigny where the valley turns to the east into the Valais, the most alpine canton of Swiss Romande. The city itself is nestled in the mouth of a side valley which leads twisting and turning up to the Saint Bernard pass and eventually Aosta.

After we'd debarked and Allegra and Tina had dealt with the baby's immediate needs (diaper mainly) we moved on out toward the museum. In fact Martigny has more than its share of museums and points of interest, partially as a result of the town's marketing strategy but more importantly due to its history as the Roman outpost forming the northern gate of the Saint Bernard. The Roman era ruins are extensive, with sites scattered around town, some of which you can just walk right into. The town center also has a well preserved Early-Christian basilica (ca 420AD) which still functions as an active Roman Catholic church for the local parish.

We made our way through town, noting the terraces we'd like to hang out on as we passed the *Place Central*, and eventually past a water park to the Fondation Pierre Gianadda to see the exhibit. Noema fell asleep in the stroller on the way there so I pushed her around looking at the paintings while she slept. It's weird, because I went to art school and all, but I have always gotten and still get painting overload. I kindof have to live with one for a while before I can really look at it. Anyhow I spent most of my time looking at a particular cubist harlequin painting from the early 30s. Neat.

Anyhow the real star attraction for the day was the scupture garden where we spent the balance of the afternoon. Noema loved the sheep sculptures next to the little pond, and even more the real ducks in it. We sat at the concession stand for a long while and had bretzelis and red wine.

On the way back to the train we stopped at the Plantain restaurant back in *Place Central*. All in all it was a really fantastic first trip with our new baby.

Of course we forgot the camera.

Last week my friend Rich Maggi kindly forwarded an email message from the CERN IT department inviting us to hear Mark Shuttleworth speak at the Wednesday session of their Computing Colloquium In case you don't know, Mr. Shuttleworth is among other things the founder and project leader of Ubunutu, a linux distribution based on Debian. It seems to me that Ubuntu's strength has been in adding polish (and a strict release schedule) to the technically superior Debian distro, so I was interested in the subject of the talk, *taking Free software to the mass market*.

So on Wednesday I skipped lunch and rode my bike out to CERN instead. Actually it's kindof a shame because the CERN main building has one of the best cafeterias of any international organization, but I didn't have time so I just grabbed a snack.

The talk was interesting, and Shuttleworth is a pretty good speaker, but I think the main thing I took away was an angle of attack on how to think about the problem of getting free software more widely accepted. Sometimes I daydream a bit about putting Ubuntu or similar on the 3000+ desktops at the organization where I work, and with Vista maybe there's a window of opportunity, however, I realize that the main thing standing in the way is the IT departement. I think the users wouldn't care less (or even realize) if their OS was switched to Linux so long as they could still send and receive email and schedule meetings.

The IT departement on the other hand - like many IT departments out there - is by-and-large made up of people who have made a career out of knowing all about the most recent version of Windows. To at least some of them the very notion that Free Software is a valid computing environment seems like a threat to their CV, and thus their jobs and their very way of life. It's these folks who so easily takeup the "Total cost of ownership" slogan, that the rest of us realize is complete bunk.

So the question is, how do we bring these people on board? And to that point, what's in it for them?

I'm very very pleased to annouce that our second daughter was born this morning 10 March at 8:54 Geneva time. Both she and her mother are healthy and as of this writing resting at the clinic in Geneva.

We had a "fun" cab-ride to the clinic this morning at 3am, but after that things went very smoothly and quickly, pretty much as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

I have to say that if any of you dear readers are expecting or thinking about it, and don't mind travelling to Geneva Switzerland to give birth that Clinique des Grangettes is a pretty nice place to do so.

We didn't really have much choice since Allegra's doctor Serguei Khokhlov pretty much insisted, even though we live much closer to some other perfectly nice clinics. But we don't mind though, aside from the cab ride, since Grangettes is closer to my work anyhow, and more to the point is possibly one of the best maternity clinics there is.

I live in Switzerland and I don't speak German

I think something on the order of one third of all people living in Switzerland could say the same thing. Switzerland is officially quadralingual; they have Swiss-German, French, Italian, and Romansh as *Official* languages and English is widely spoken as well.

So why the heck is it that lots of websites like to assume that if you live in Switzerland you speak German? It's nuts! All they are doing is making things difficult for ~3 *million* potential users who live in Switzerland but don't speak or read German or at least not very well.

This morning I read Stephanie Booth's blog post on the subject which reminded me of just how awful and pervasive this problem is. PayPal is probably the worst offender: Once they know you have a Swiss mailing address it's over, you'd better learn German or you just can't use the damned thing. This is particularly painful since otherwise sane services like Flickr require payment through pay-pal.

When I first noticed the problem I sent them a little bug report and received a very un-helpful note back from one of their tech support people explaining how to *set my country preference to Switzerland*. I wrote back saying that I had done that and the problem was that the interface now assumed I could read German. That was two years ago and I still haven't heard back.

Since then I've had problems with Blogger, Ebay, Amazon, and others. Unlike PayPal I can usually find a work-around, but it's still annoying. Apparently now MySpace is doing the same thing.

This is not a corner-case: Geneva and Lausanne are among the biggest cities in the country (#2 and #5 respectively). Also the "German" spoken on the other side of the Sarine river is not exactly German German, but a completely different language, or more accurately 3 completely different languages. At least speakers of *Switzerdeutsch* can read "High" German so you're not completely locking them out.

So dear reader, be you a web developer, producer, site-owner, monkey, whatever: Please please please always, no matter what anybody else tells you, please make "country" and "language" two different settings.

photo by wklo

Anybody who's lived in Geneva, (and for that matter anyone who's visited) is probably aware of the big broken chair in *Place des Nations*, a piece of protest art by Daniel Berset on the subject of landmines. People who have a gripe with the UN or one or more of its member states have held frequent demonstrations under the chair. Because of the more-or-less constant demonstrations the lawn on which the big broken chair lived was usually a big muddy mess.

This week the chair is back after an absence of a couple of years during which the plaza under it was renovated. They've redone the whole thing as one gigantic concrete fountain, replacing the lawn which was there before.

An interesting point is that the chair, which arrived in 1997, wasn't originally intended to occupy *Place des Nations* perminently, but only for three months. It's not particulary well thought of in the UN where a couple of the more powerful member states aren't really on board with the anti-landmine movement. I'll let you dear reader figure out who I'm talking about.

However Handicapped International, the anti-landmine NGO which owns the chair, apparently has some friends in High Swiss Places, namely the federal counselor from Geneva, who happens to be taking a turn as president this year.