Amnesty International (disclaimer: who I work for), has just released their 2007 Annual Report which outlines the state of the world’s human rights.
Available in five languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic).
Lotta stuff going on in the world that people don’t know enough about, or even worse, are doing nothing about when they do know about it.
I have a love/hate relationship with Apple’s Mail.app. It’s pretty and powerful and has good rule based filters, ok junk mail detection and good support for imap, pop and even Exchange accounts.
However, at times I have to say I’m looking longingly at other mail clients, in particular Thunderbird (so don’t even get me started on the fact I should already be back on Ubuntu… I’m looking for a good laptop before moving back.).
If, like me, you use the excellent Meteorologist toolbar application on OSX to keep track of weather in loads of different places (especially handy for travel, though I just noticed I track London, Paris, Vancouver, Kelowna, Whistler, San Francisco, Mexico City, Toronto and Amsterdam… ahem…) you were probably put out this week when it suddenly stopped working.
Normally, when this has happened in the past, it has been a problem with parsing the XML data that weather.com sends.
Just big props and a huge, hearty congratulations to my very dear friend ZA, the hottest greenpeace toxics campaigner and evil genius behind the Green My Apple campaign.
Steve Jobs’ announcement yesterday in the change in Apple policy (GPI’s take on it ) basically addresses many of the major points in the campaign and is a victory all round for the Greenpeace campaign, and most importantly, people and the planet.
Well done Ze! You kick ass!
I’m constantly shocked at the quality of software that is consistently available on the OSX platform every day. Despite my love of all things linux and a need to move back to ubuntu based laptops to start walking my own talk, OSX makes it harder every day.
Today, for instance, Actiontastic , the Getting Things Done app with tight integration for rapid to do making via Quicksilver announced it would be completely free as in beer and speech. Yep, better than what commercial companies have tried to develop, the developer has open sourced it as well. I’ve been using it in beta for a while now and have to say it has really allowed me to focus on the things I really need to get done at work. Highly recommended.
Past posts have probably nailed me by this point as a huge fan of Ruby on Rails and the Ruby language in particular.
While I think a huge mythology now surrounds how much more productive it makes you which causes difficulty in separating the hype from reality, my personal experience has made me a raver about it in terms of just getting things done. In one (ok, mostly sleepless) weekend, I managed to get up a canvassing and get out the vote application, web enabled across the internet that was used successfully and to great effect in a Canadian federal leadership campaign (and the person ran rings around the other candidate partly because of its contribution). The party in question had been unable in several years of trying to accomplish the same thing.
One of the things that made it very hard to leave my old office was just how many great and cool people worked there. Even people who weren’t working directly with you would just be amazing to work with.
Part of the TV production crew for the music label was doing a timelapse test of some of their equipment out my office window the day before I left and I asked them if they’d give it to me. Absolutely no problem. Thanks C!
I’m sitting here a spoiled brat compared to this woman. I am smack on the doorstep of the world’s largest urban park whereas this woman fought a hard battle of urban renewal to not just bring the first piece of green space adjoining the river to the polluted, overindustrialized and woefully badly urbanly “planned” South Bronx in sixty years (try and think of living someplace with nothing green for 60 years), but has also led an entire “green the ghetto” movement which has revitalized the area proving that not only is green sustainable, it’s also commercially profitable and good for the inhabitants.
When I was a kid , I harboured fantasies about driving the Paris-Dakar road rally . People who have seen me swerve through traffic will not think this is completely out of line. And when I lived in Paris I came so close as to almost sneak in as a navigator for a realdriver though it just didn’t happen.
Still, even here on the Western edge of civilization and an ocean and continent away, I haven’t given up hope.
I think it was Lawrence Lessig who said words to the effect that open source is good, but Open Culture is everything… and the Creative Commons will become a much bigger battle with private firms and IP advocates in the coming years (and this is why you need copyright laws that favour innovation rather than dusty old companies lobbying to extend their tired old revenue streams ad infinitum).
Examples abound of how it has changed how we do with knowledge, for example take a look at how transformative Wikipedia or Open CourseWare at MIT has been, but where does the rubber hit the road in terms of changing the world in real, substantive terms (ie. stuff that doesn’t just matter to geeks)?