Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
Fourth of July and More Updates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/04/2008 - 13:01Well, it has been difficult staying on top of the various online communities that I’m part of during the past few days, but last night, I did manage to finish off dropping my 300 EntreCards for the day. Today has been a quiet day getting going, and I’ve easily met my quota.
Many of the blogs that I visited today have various things up to celebrate Independence Day. There are pictures of flags and fireworks, many of them sparkly. Quite a few blogs have posted the Declaration of Independence. I really like that, and have been talking about Independence Day with Fiona a bit today and Kim is showing Fiona a Schoolhouse Rock video about the forming of our country. Other folks have been talking about Canada Day, which was on the First. Many of my ancestors come from Canada, so it is great to be in touch with a little of their history.
I stumble across a lot of Philippino blogs and everyone there is talking about the Manny Pacquiao David Diaz fight. Other blogs are still chattering about Spain’s victory in Euro 08.
On my own blog, I’ve been continuing to add tweaks since upgrading to Drupal 6.2. I’ve mostly swapped content from the left column and the right column. The layout looks better that way. However, it makes the ads load faster but my content load more slowly. Oh well.
I also found the bug with OpenID. It should be working now, however, if you’ve signed up before, it may have lost your information and may add you as a new user.
You now have three different ways of adding comments. You can add them via Disqus, FriendFeed or directly to the site. What are the advantages? Well, FriendFeed ties in nicely to all kinds of other content, but can lag a little bit. Disqus seems like a good shared comment system. However, like with FriendFeed, the comments reside elsewhere. I have some control over the comments, but if FriendFeed or Disqus go away, so does the content.
In terms of Microblogging, I’m still very interested in identi.ca. I haven’t made any more progress is setting up my own site based on their software, but I’ll get back to that. I was pleased to see that ping.fm added the ability to feed identi.ca. However, it requires that you use a userid and password. However, I use OpenID to authenticate with identi.ca, so I don’t have a password to give to ping.fm I’ve tried a few things to tweak that, but no luck yet. Ideally, ping.fm should start supporting OpenID, both for logging in as well as for authentication with sites like Identi.ca. Somewhere in there OAuth fits in, but I haven’t looked at OAuth closely enough yet.
With all of that, I am managing to spend time with family and friends. Last night we went to see fireworks. Today, we’re going visiting, and I’ll be back online sometime much later.
Recreational Hacking: identi.ca laconi.ca xmpp OAuth OpenID OpenSim and Drupal
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/03/2008 - 09:56Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time writing some programs to interface a financial model written in Matlab with a Microsoft SQL database. It has been interesting work, and there are lots of interesting things yet to be done with that. However, during this, my unread emails have piled up and the list of new technology to explore has been expanding rapidly. So, with any luck, I’ll spend a bit of today doing some recreational hacking.
At the top of my list is identi.ca. Identica is running laconi.ca, an open source microblogging system based on a lot of cool standards like XMPP, Oauth, and OpenSim. I set up my identi.ca account yesterday, and have started trying to see if I can get a laconi.ca server running on my Linux box today.
So, why do I care about identi.ca? Edd Dumbill has written a very good post about Why Identi.ca is important. So, my first comment, is “yeah, what Edd said.” Dan York also wrote about it, The real meaning - and power - of identi.ca (a.k.a. open source Twitter) and pointed to Dave Winer’s excitement about identi.ca and Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post.
So, let me add a few additional thoughts. As Edd notes, it is still version 0.4.1, so don’t expect it to have as much functionality or reliability as even Twitter or Plurk. On the other hand, if open source developers go wild with it, expect it to leave Twitter and Plurk in the dust.
To me, there are is a very interesting parallel between Second Life and OpenSim and Twitter and Laconi.ca. The new open source version is getting kicked around and has great potential. For that matter, OpenSim and Laconi.ca are both kicking around using XMPP as part of their interaction. Hmm. OpenSim and Laconi.ca integration. That could be cool. As an aside, I have been getting emails about connecting old MOOs to Twitter, but that’s a different subject.
So, I’ve started installing laconi.ca on my Linux box. I’ve hit a few snags. It needs a Validate.php file, which I can’t find. I know that Evan is swamped, so maybe I’ll bug him later.
Laconi.ca also uses OpenID. I’ve been running OpenID for Drupal on my blog for a while. It hasn’t been too reliable, but I’m running an old version of Drupal. Between the desire for a more robust OpenID for Drupal, the desire to add Disque to Drupal and a bunch of other things, it is probably time to upgrade Orient Lodge to a newer version of Drupal. Maybe I’ll tackle that.
One thing that is still coming in Drupal is support for OAuth. Laconi.ca uses OAuth. Hmm. At some point, I want to tie my Drupal sites to my OpenSim sites and my Laconi.ca sites. That ought to be fun.
Meanwhile, also on my technology play list is twine.com and SecondBrain.
So, I’ll complete a few tasks around the house, check to see if identi.ca is stable after the latest upgrade and then start a fun day of recreational hacking.
More on Xenia
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/01/2008 - 13:59Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. As the month of July starts, I worry about what and how much I’ll write. I’ll be on vacation. Will I manage to keep my blog up to date during that time? What will happen to my traffic?
I imagine that I’ll have some posts, pictures of Fiona playing in the ocean, or perhaps simply of the waves crashing. Yet I won’t be interacting substantially on the Internet and that will take a hit on the materials I have to work with.
Yesterday, I wrote about confronting the blank page, and my friend Lars pointed me to a couple of articles in the Financial Times of London. One article was about Bloggers bringing a new reality for politicians, where politicians need to be careful about honestly presenting who they are, lest an unscripted moment derail them. Yet perhaps this isn’t a new reality for politicians. Perhaps this is returning us, back to the old reality for politics. We need politicians that are going to be real, authentic, not only when they are in front of a camera, but are authentically presenting their views all the time.
The other article was about one-time online outsiders going mainstream at Personal Democracy Forum. This reflects something I’ve written about from time to time here, and one of my big concerns. As the one-time outsiders become insiders, will they continue to talk with those on the outside? Will they build bridges where bridges have been missing? In a phrase, will they practice the ‘xenia’ that was talked about at ‘Sharing the News’?
It turns out that this lack of xenia is not limited to the realm of journalism or politics. Today, I read a blogpost entitled Cliques: They’re What’s Wrong With the Christian Blogosphere. It has spawned quite an interesting discussion there. Perhaps it is time to queue up Dar Williams “Christians and the Pagans”.
The end of the first half of 2008
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/30/2008 - 20:51I stare at the blank page. I’ve put up a blog post every day for the first half of this year. Some days have been harder than others, and today seems particularly hard, especially after the two posts yesterday.
In politics, my mailbox is getting flooded with the end of quarter fundraising appeals. In technology, I’m looking for a chance to explore several sites in my queue. I have been exploring RocketOn for a while, and will write up something about that sometime. I’m also hoping to update this site to a newer version of Drupal so I can play more with integrating other social media sites.
I glance at Twitter, Plurk and Friend Feed looking for inspiration. I was glad to see a few old friends show up on Twitter today.
Random End of the Week Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 06/28/2008 - 21:19It has been a long busy week, finished off with a drive to Lowell, MA for the New England News Forum’s conference on Sharing the News. There are a lot of things to write up about the conference, but I’m too tired to focus. Those wanting some details should check my messages on the content sharing sites and microblogs. I put a little bit up there while I was there.
I did put up one post from the day, which should count towards meeting my NaBloPoMo goal for the month, but I figured I would write something a little more substantial I also managed to drop EntreCards on 300 sites for my 17th consecutive day. I didn’t read some of those blogs as closely as I have on other days.
Last night, I spent some time exploring a curious virtual world/web mashup called RocketOn. I haven’t gotten a chance to explore it any more this evening, and that will also have to wait. However, if you’ve looked at it and want an invite, drop me an email.
All of this, perhaps, foreshadows the month of July. We are going camping. I doubt I’ll drop 300 cards a day as often in July as I have in June. I may even struggle simply to get a blog post up some days.
More later. . .
