They blink, change color, wiggle, make sounds and are all together attention grabbing. Overall effect is very good with lots of visitors almost unable to walk away because of sudden emotional attachment.

Here is what artist wrote about her piece:

Pufis represent microorganisms living in an open ecosystem, while the collection of objects functions as a sensitive sensory network. The visitor is subsumed into the artificially produced »biosphere« through active sensor-based interaction. Pufination is incomplete without interaction. There’s no leading role, we’re all just cohabiting. The project thus highlights our relationship to other life as an important factor to every individual’s own survival. In Pufination, we find ourselves inside a simulated projection of our everyday. Decentralised control, close stimulus response and adherence to simple rules – this is what links robots and visitors in the Pufination.

Pufi robots are based on the Arduino platform. They communicate with each other by a wireless network and with people by touch, sound, light and vibration.

Full installation credits:

Idea, concept, design: Robertina Šebjanič
Programming, advice: Luka Frelih
Technical realization: Alojzij Sinur and Janž Verbančič
Production lead: Daša Lakner
Produced by: Cyberpipe (Err0r)

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This all changed when your favorite search engine turned their lights off in order to promote Earth Hour, their initiative to remind us to conserve energy and enable power-sawing modes on our computers and other electronic gadget.

If you are wondering why your Google didn’t turn dark for that one Earth Hour, it is because it’s probably because it is not between 8pm and 9pm maybe your local Google just doesn’t want to play. Here is a quick screen shot how I noticed it on Google UK.

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This is an idea that I’m  deeply excited about. Even though hanging US congress does not affect me, I love it for the meme it brings to the world. As with Creative Commons that started as US initiative and then with time ported to most of the World countries, it brings the hope, as collateral damage, also to countries like Slovenia.

While I am not a lawyer or a political scientist, I like to think myself as a hacker and with that it makes me want to build similarly inspiring things in my local environment. It also allows me to take a look what other fellow hackers built and then start asking locals here, how this ideas map to our situation?

My call out to Slovenian and also Europeans (regarding the EU legislation) that are more intimate with political scene:

• what is our equivalent regarding US PACs and lobbyists?
• do we have “earmarks” problem?
• what are local initiatives for more transparent parliament?
• and how do we compare regarding the public funding of elections?

(adopted from C-C.org)

With some help of a local groups like e-demokracija.si or kiberpipa.org, we could firstly map in a wiki-like the differences and then start forming local issues. Hopefully with time people won’t think anymore that our Slovenian government is fully corrupt and bad because thee will be full transparent accountability that is not felt right now.

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Source: Flickr

since as it turns out, bucket has an iterator over key name.

(Discovered through patch of Mitchell Garnaat to Duplicity project).

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Source: dsevilla @ Flickr

Adoption challenges (for social network portability) and ways for solving them;

source: WebCamp wiki

Disclaimer: this is a partly cleared transcript of discussion; I didn’t follow the authors of comments in order to be able to catch as much as I can. Correct me if I quoted someone incorrectly and please don’t be angry with me.

Present at the discussion:

• Stephanie Booth, 8 years blogging, Freelance social media consultant, interested in blogging, and everything that’s online
• Gerry Shanahan, boards.ie, social media things, side of things
• Sven Latham, IT consultant, used to run blog directory, semantic web and social networking is definitly as one of the interests
• Paddy Holahan, Mobile blogging, NewBay founder and CEO; looking at this through the eyes of the operator, integrating with all the social operators
• Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta, wishing to integrate with others
• Smitashree Choudhury, doing a Ph.D. in Social media, working with media stuff
• Justin Tomboulian, Microsoft, lives in Kyoto, Japan – responsible for solutions delivery; part of the network that takes care of 80k users ecosystem; trying to solve big-company illness problems; internal private social network and return the learnings to the community
• John Breslin, DERI, interested in porting of data, SIOC, data portability initiative

The topic is: “Adoption issues”; what prevents people from using new technologies? The discussion turns to the question, why the big guys (FaceBook, etc.) are not adopting these solutions. Can we show that if we have portability, we will have more users.

40% of pictures on MySpace were referenced through PhotoBucket, so this was their biggest weakness when being acquired. So MySpace bought them, but the question is – was this a good thing for users? It means that MySpace killed the data portability of PhotoBucket. If you are looking at the photo that is sitting in photo-bucket, but is embedded into MySpace -> is this real portability or just “view-ability?”

So what portability really is? Should we copy the objects, or just reference it? It embedding YouTube portability of the video?

Quick explanation of aggregation vs. federation. News reader is aggregation -> data is on the web site, and I’m using special glasses to take a look at the data; it’s an aggregated view. Federation Is actually about “moving” data around. “Aggregation does not mean portability”; Reflection from a startup point of view: API’s are part of the discussion about portability, and the question was – why would we let others user precious data that users gave us. “It’s ours”. The point that Stephanie tried to get across: if you make your data available to other services, then this data is more valuable to users since then it will be available as parts of other sites.

The discussion turns into the fact weather FaceBook keeps a copy of your data and if you can get it removed. The right to delete the data is fundamental part of data portability. “Who’s data is this blog post? Just authors or of everyone that was there”. It is also hard from technical perspective. It’s also noted that web pages are cached and it is hard to quickly remove it from Google cache. It can be months, or days. Is it your right to delete your comments on a forum and disrupt the community. There is also a question of deleting blogs and the comments with them. The content becomes “part of community”, and with the deleting of the blog you are also removing other peoples original contribution. Users bill of right is mentioned – http://opensocialweb.org/2007/09/05/bill-of-rights/.

What is the business model of “all these services”? “The because effect” – you do not make money with your blog, but because of it. The business models should turn more into that, instead of locking down the data to their islands.
What can you “bring” with you? Do you “move” -> delete original after copying; making a copy and having two copies; or are you existing in kind of a shared space that gets synced back and forth. Is business model – we are making money “with” the users content, not “because” of it.
If this content is great, then there must be money in that? Is that a good way of thinking about business models? The value of FaceBook is monetized eyeballs; they make money with branding ads since they actually charge according on time users spend on their site. They can’t make money from AdWords, they have to brand. These big sites do not have interest to open up their data until the competition comes. Using other big players in industry is possible for them to leverage their interest to make the data a bit more open.
What users want – is freedom of data; and companies want more face time, so there is no real interest for them to open data. “Is this similar to FOSS vs. proprietary debates”.

Data portability is a lot about business models. As long as business model issues are not solved, you can offer as much technical solutions as you want, you will not get adoption. “Users can vote with their feet”. Amnesty App – enabling users to migrate in one hop to another service. Static data formats are a problem, because we can’t know what will matter in a few years.

Ideal thing is that I have a store somewhere where I have all the information that I can allow others to read it. Who’s going to build it and the fact is that you can not design it correctly for the future. You could turn around it around and charge it to providers or the users, depending on the point of view on your data. What kind of business model is behind that?

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Source: hakore@flickr – CC-BY-NOC-ATTR

My basic premise is that taking some sort of controlled top-down approach towards assembling open project allows you to build a reliable set of components that do limited set of tasks very well and do not confuse the user. Throw some excellent design into the mix and you’re almost done. That’s the basic argument regarding the OS X itself.

Taking look at the software we can see one really big problem, the graphic toolkit. Since for historical reasons the GTK and QT toolkits were not very native to Aqua/Cocoa this presents quite some problem with porting issues. So what happens to projects is that they end up taking just the core libraries (like libpurple from Pidgin in Adium project) and then rewriting the user interface part using native Apple tools.

The good news is that the amount of new code and porting efforts are improving all the time as Mac are becoming one of the most loved hackers platforms, even though many of them choose not to actually use OS X.

A bit more practical things

There is an excellent resource for all things Open Source Mac – http://www.opensourcemac.org/.

Then there are my slides from the talk:

| View | Upload your own

And lastly, there is my whole talk at vest.si (in Slovenian only).

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Process: Keynote [3724]
Path: /Applications/iWork '08/Keynote.app/Contents/MacOS/Keynote
Identifier: com.apple.iWork.Keynote
Version: 4.0 (591)
Build Info: Keynote-5910000~3
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [152]
Date/Time: 2008-02-17 15:32:34.960 +0000
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.2 (9C31)
Report Version: 6
Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0
Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'Invalid parameter not satisfying: (index >= 0) && (index < (_itemArray ? CFArrayGetCount((CFArrayRef)_itemArray) : 0))'

etc.

After much fiddling around I found a hint that this might be due to duplicated fonts that confuses Keynote so much on startup that it crashes.

Here is a quicke guide how to check if you have duplicated fonts on OS X:

First: Open Font Book (Applications -> Font Book)

Once you have Font Book open, check for any fonts that have black dots next to the name. This means that you have duplicates of this font installed. In my case I had a few dozens of duplicates on the system.

You can then either manually turn off conflicting fonts or choose Resolve Duplicates from Edit menu. This will automatically disable one of the fonts in duplicate fonts pairs. You can always turn them on later if you decide that you need the other font from the duplicated pair.

Second: Clear your Font Cache

Download neat little utility called Font Nuke (it’s free). After you run it, first Update Cache List and then Nuke Font Caches. After OS X reboot your system will automatically rebuild the font cache.

Enjoy

At this point, you can try running Keynote or any other crashing application again and it should work as in good old Tiger days.

Why did this happen?

Taking a minute to think of the scenario that created environment for this crash. When I installed Leopard I updated my Tiger installation which it seems to transfer some fonts and thus create duplicates. This does not seem to affect any applications normally so you can survive a long time before you run the Keynote for first time and it crashes. It is also possible that these fonts are stored in your user profile, because of that Keynote will not crash if you create a new user and try running it from there.

Online forums recommend full OS X reinstall in somewhat Windows-horror story like scenario. Realizing that this will effectively clean up your font resource explains why this would work.

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Source: Wikipedia

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Source: Shutterstock

I started with EnaA and entered into their search general term “headphones” (slovenian: sluÅ¡alke), since I was not really attached to any brand. This is part of output I got:

The built in search provides suggestions towards categories inside the store but fails to give you better context in which sections of store these categories are. If you are wondering, the first “Bluetooth headphones” points to “Audio/Video section” and the second to “Car accessories section”. Observant reader will also notice failure at standardization with first category using comman to separate microphones from headphones while last category uses ampersand sign (that is actually not used normally in Slovenian language).

They also sadly sell mostly cheap computer headphones so at that point I turned towards their competition Mimovrste. Same query this time returned following result:

In this case categorization was done nicely as “Headphones” in “Audio/Video” > “Audio” (section). Here as user I could see how hierarchy works. One could argue that turning this left to have the more general on left would be better since we are more used to such notation from everyday lives and also applications like Windows Explorer which opens folder from more general towards more precise.

I had another wish for the headphones, to have detachable cable since in my experience the cable fails every few months. After inspecting into more details one promising headphone I noticed something interesting:

The connector type is defined as “6.3mm stereo jack, with adapter included”. Here my question was adapter for what?

While this might seem like nitpicking it is actually quite important since some Sennheiser headphones (like HD 555 model) come with connector that will not fit into your iPod and you need a converter (which might be what is implicitly mentioned in that sentence). What would be helpful in this cases would be small link at the end of the row like “(confused?)” that would take you to a sub page with a few pictures of different connectors like the one in the iPod and such, explain the names so you would then feel confortable with your choice of headphones. This is online store after all where you can not turn the box around and see how it looks. (The argument about “Googling” is irrelevant here since you do not want your potential customers to wander away).

Since I was already noticing slips of the stores I decide to see if they could help me out with my little annoyance, that is the fact that I do not know how to spell “Sennheiser” or at least for me the usual spelling is “Senheisser” or just “Senheiser” with double letters. Since this is a big brand I would image they would know how to correct my spelling mistake:

There are two interesting facts to note. While it might be acceptable for EnaA not to suggest correct spelling, since they actually do not carry the brand – they found one match in one of their partner stores that had the actual product name misspelled! (Trying the luck with misspeling other brands also did not produce suggestions)

Mimovrste did a bit better with a large category list at the bottom, but also failed to correct my spelling. As a naive consumer that wants to buy a certain brad with hard to spell name, it should not be acceptable that I either have to guess the correct spelling or enter it into Google to get it to suggest me right spelling (even though this might produce also produce a list of more specialized online stores at the same time).

Lessons learned

Providing good search is not easy and should be treated as a separate usability review. In this case clear categorization and failure to suggest proper spelling produced breakage on my part while browsing which made me switch online store in hope that other one makes the process easier.

What interests me a bit more is that I actually failed to buy one pair of headphones since the description was not understandable to me and there was no clearly visible way how to get help on the connector part. This could be seen as part of the guidelines as “Speak users language” and “Provide help”.

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UroÅ¡ thinking I’m crazy for being amused with this cube

But then a few days ago I was wondering around old part of Ljubljana city center and I noticed that someone else had to have similar ideas quite some time ago:

There you go, proof that Slovenians know some Nintendo history.

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