Technical Ramblings

Recently, as part of the attempt to expand the realm of the full Swhack Cultural Forum experience, we’ve been investigating the possibilities for creating a virtual world. Yesterday, on the advice of Yoz, I set up a LambdaMoo based on enCore.

enCore is a nifty extension to LambdaMOO which includes a complete web interface for interacting with the MOO. This allows for object creation without learning tons of specialized commands. It makes interactions with the moo a bit easier for beginners, while still allowing “old hands” to do what they would have done in the past, via the telnet interface.

However, part of the goal of the interactive fiction aspect of the task was to have automatic interactions - without anyone else. LambdaMOO provides the equivilant of IRC+World Building, but aside from scripted tasks, there isn’t any “Quest” or other similar aspects. This makes LambdaMOO unsuitable for the task at hand, although it provides an excellent platform for initial world building, which can be used to come up with the platform for our IF world before we actually have to implement it.

However, that leaves me wondering what *is* out there for something that’s more “adventure” based. I know that Rivers Of Mud (ROM) based MUDs have this kind of functionality, but I’m not sure if they’re easy to build on. I don’t know what other kind of MUDs are out there, how hard they are to work with, or anything else about them.

Does anyone here run a MUD? Anyone know which ones would be easy to set up and allow for interactive building, while still supporting a relatively wide range of pre-built stuff so that we don’t have to do everything ourselves? Monsters, Questing, and similar abilities would be nifty, as would some pre-built world areas so that the initial environment isn’t *totally* empty.

I’m completely inexperienced in the field, but would love to hear from other people.

In the next couple weeks, I’ll be getting a new Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D) with a 18-55 “kit” lens. I finally got tired of my 2 megapixel Kodak CX4230, and I got a nice deal worked out on the camera due to some rebate offers and talking with my father, who’s buying a Canon 20D.

I’d love to hear some interesting things that people are doing with creating and sharing digital photography from relatively high quality cameras.

About a month ago, I participated in a couple of meetings at the Berkman Blog Group regarding Wikimania, the Wikimedia annual conference, which will be held this year in Boston. Talking with the local organizer, I was interesting in helping in a number of ways where I’m more useful than many other people — having a place to stay and possibly offer to other people, as well as technical skills which not everyone has that might be of assistance.

During the second meeting, I had the oppourtunity to engage with other Wikimedians who would be participating, and to get some of their feelings about the conference and the Berkman Blog Group’s attempt at trying to make things easier for them here in Boston during their convention.

I got a negative vibe from one of the people I spoke to, and later attempted to determine whether my understanding - that Wikimania was dedicated to Wikimedians, and local help in a significant way by people who were not active Wikimedia participants would be appreciated only so long as it didn’t affect the conference - was correct. Although I don’t have an exact quote of my question and the answer, the feeling was, again, negative.

The local organizer here asked me to clarify why I felt pushed away by the Wikimedia participants I had talked to, and this is what I wrote in response:

When I asked if it was the case that the purpose of Wikimania was to further the goals of Wikimedians, and that local people were not being invited to participate in the same way, I was informed that yes, this was the case: assistance from non-Wikimedians was unneccesary. (Sadly, I don’t have the log of this due to a client crash, because it’s the one thing that was said more than anything else that convinced me not to participate.)

Wikipedia has always had a very distinct aura of excluding outsiders. Although the wiki-nature of Wikipedia would seem to act as a counter to that point, many friends who have in the past been heavily involved in Wikipedia have left due to issues relating to negative personal interactions between themselves and other contributors. I have always held Wikipedia at arm’s length due to this, but given the local oppourtunity presenting itself, I thought that maybe I could be convinced otherwise.

What I stumbled into was exactly what I would have been led to expect - an elitist attitude taken by core contributors towards anyone who is not one of the “good ole boys”. Although you were extremely positive towards external help from the people on the ground, every other person I spoke to who in any way represented Wikimedia only left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

I was hoping that Wikimedia was really a good group of people, done wrong by the masses who consider themselves to be “better than you” because they participate more. Instead, I found out that that attiude is perpetrated all the way to the top, at least from my external point of view.

As a result of the general vibe and the specific statements requesting that non-Wikimedians not take part in the planning and activities surrounding Wikimania, I’ve decided simply not to bother.

Another friend of mine put it best: “The only way to participate in Wikipedia is to just edit, and ignore all those people behind the ‘Discussion’ link.”

I sometimes wonder if things may have gone too far. I’m not really sure. But whether they have or not, I’m all in favor of Long Tail Camp.

I think it’s about time that The Commune hosted a camp.

Make sure to check out the LongTailCamp homepage, for all the wiki-est info around.

(Is this humour, or just reality? I don’t know, but I’m in favor of it either way.)

I noticed someone had said Marc Canter wrote about Ning. I think that he may have missed an important part of what Ning is about, though.

Why?

Well, let’s start from the top:

I’m pleading with Gina Bianchini to have Ning PLEASE support the PeopleAggregator APIs once it’s out - and I don’t see any reason why she won’t.

No longer does the “Someone else needs to do it” mentality need apply: Applications on Ning are open source. Code can be mixed, cloned, and run any way you want to — including a way to load files and modules from other applications! So, if you have an API you want to support, support it: just develop it and let people know to use XN_Application::includeFile(), document it for ning users, and you can develop your API for whatever you want and have other users use it.

So, once the API for the website you’re talking about is complete — write some code, and put it on Ning, then get people to use it. That’s what Ning is about: Sharing, putting things together, and bringing “View Source” back to the people. This is your chance to make good on something web browsers learned that Macromedia never has: the ability to look at the way something works inside is a huge boon to development, as I think we’ll see as time goes on.

Of course, there’s also the question of whether Canter still believes that Andreesen: sure as hell hasn’t done shit since - what 1995?

In and around the Katrina relief effort, there are more than half a dozen web-broadcasting police and other radio scanners. These scanners offer the most up to the minute information about what’s happening in New Orleans, Houston, and San Antonio: incidents, activity, etc.

These streams are being recorded in text, live, onto IRC channels. These channels are staffed by volunteers, looking to help organize the information flowing in about the relief effort for those who are unable to listen, or are looking to be kept up to date on the status of events.

On irc.freenode.net, there are (at this point) 6 channels devoted to this traffic: #interdictor-scanner and #interdictor-scanner2 through 6. There is information on where the sources for these feeds are, and how to transcribe, on the nola-intel wiki, at Transcribing.

Please, if you have some free time and are able to listen to the streams and type, try to stop by #nola-intel-help: Here you can ask which feeds need assitance, get directed, and voiced in one of the channels to start helping. You can learn more in an hour from these scanners than you might otherwise in a day listening to the standard news channels. These people are working hard to get the most up to date information out to the world: Many of you have the ability to help. If you can, please do so: this is the best way to know what’s going on in the New Orleans area, and the best way to pass the information along to others.

If you need help connecting to IRC, message me on AIM at cr5chmidt, and I will help you out. Please, feel free to pass this message on: I place this message into the public domain for unlimited posting or modification by anyone.

As of today, I am no longer a salaried employee of wedü. It’s been a great ride, which has taught me a lot on everything from PHP to dealing with clients, and I hope that we can maintain a relationship as I move forward in my work. Sadly, the move to Cambridge made a commute very nearly impossible for my lifestyle, so staying on as a full time employee was simply not an option.

Currently, I am working as a freelance web developer. This entails a number of things, of course: someone who writes Javascript for inclusion in ASP pages can call themselves a developer. (I’d prefer to call them a demon from the underworld, but that’s just me.) My specific experience is mostly in relatively small-scale PHP/MySQL applications, geared towards self-maintainability. This includes the development of tools to allow users to maintain their own web sites: posting news listings, uploading images, and the like. Wedü taught me many things about the value of these tools to users and clients.

In any case, I am now out on my own. I’m currently involved in several projects, but even with that, I will be afforded much more free time, as a result of less time commuting. The Cambridge commute had me spending more hours at work simply to avoid traffic, and I’m glad to be rid of it. It’s possible that I may take some more time to work on my own projects now (assuming I can pay the bills and health insurance in other ways), since I’m setting my own schedule, it’s possible that I can include some time for “self promotion” in my schedule.

I don’t think I’ll be falling back into the RDF circle anytime soon. As I said before, too much evangelism is necesary: I’m tired of fighting the same fights over and over. It’s disapointing to see some uptake for battles I tried to fight just as I was stepping out of the way, but even my frustrations with that are not enough to drag me back into the fold.

I am going to be looking to make contact with any number of people who are looking to have websites developed, however. I have contacts with a design firm, and they are willing to work with me to improve on my atrocious design skills, leading to the development of better websites. I have knowledge of a wide array of technologies. I have a full profile of skills available under my Formal Works, and I will soon be redesigning my website to be more informative about my technical skills and experiences.

If you, or someone you know, is looking to hire a web developer or designer for work on either a new website or modifying an existing site, please get in touch. I have a rather impressive set of skills to bring to bear on most issues (at least compared to some other web developers that I’ve spoken to) and although my formal experience may not show it, I have the ability to get anything you want done.

Christopher Schmidt, Freelance Web Developer, is on the prowl.

Earlier today, someone gave me a link to a file on Microsoft.com. Since the WebKit release, I’ve been using Safari much more (even though it’s not any faster - I haven’t yet built the new WebKit) because I was reminded that it is much less of a memory hog than Firefox has been lately for me.

I tried to open the link, a download page for some driver and received an error : “Sorry, we are unable to show you the page you requested. Please try again later.”

I tried in Firefox: worked fine.

Turns out that using a User-Agent with either “Safari/312″ or “AppleWebKit” in it is enough for Microsoft to not share these files with you. Not only that, but it seems to apply to any files in their download area.

Mostly I’m just curious why they would bother.

For those of you who are not yet aware, I will be in San Francisco this weekend, arriving Thursday night (late) and leaving Early Sunday afternoon. I will be in meetings all day on Friday, but if anyone is interested in meeting up, let me know.

People I plan to see so far include, but are not neccesarily limited to: Neil, twid, leora, miker and wombatmobile (possibly) from #mobitopia. I plan to visit tourist sites, as well as stopping by The Mothership in Cupertino while I’m there. I want to ride the famous Trolley’s, I want to eat tacos in the Mission district, I want to visit Unicorn Precinct XIII (note to self, poke zool to fix sf.openguides).

What else should I be doing? Should I go to the DNA Lounge? Muir Woods Redwoods?

Advise me, dear reader, as to what you would do if you were in San Francisco for 36 hours with nothing else on your todo list! Tell me if you want to meet me, and talk about the next hack for the Semantic Web! Tell me if you want to meet me and berate me for not working on location based cell phone computing! Tell me your thoughts on my work, tell me what you’d like to cook up next. Point me out the coolest things in and around downtown San Francisco, and come with me to see them.

The rest is up to you.