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Much like every other child of my generation that grew up in this hemisphere, Sesame Street was unbelievable formative. Not just educationally, but also in terms of constructing a worldview for an entire generation of a friendly, helpful and interesting universe (rather than the one Fox News seems to be constructing based on hyper-competitive, fearful, violence that rewards stupidity and bigotry).

So, I’m reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell at the moment, which is absolutely fascinating and insightful in its characterization of word of mouth epidemics, fads, and other social “flash fire” phenomenon. I cottoned on to it in doing background reading on the DeanSpace software and the Dean campaign phenomenon in the run-up to the last democratic candidate nomination.

I’ve been doing some pro bono work lately for (what I’m going to call for the sake of their stealth) a campaigning/advocacy organization which is trying to get off the ground and giving them some advice as to how to set up IT systems to make sure they can leverage their rather sparse human resources. It’s been interesting. Some choices have already been made at other levels as to what things should and shouldn’t be used and I have to admit that I’m not always in agreement that the best of breed things are being used.

SimplyMEPIS is a masterpiece of desktop usability. I have to say I am very impressed with it as a simple, immediately useful, and rock solid desktop Linux system that “just works.”

One of the reasons I switched to OSX was because I was constantly fiddling with Linux desktops on various distros and forever attempting to get them to work to the point where a lay person like my family members who are not computer literate could be installed and up and running with little difficulty. Until I’d encountered SimplyMEPIS it was like hunting the Grail.

If, like me, you worked for an NGO under constant surveillance by large governments and an under-assault investment bank, you’ve tended to become a little paranoid about security over the years.

The Spooks, the US NSA, actually has some excellent guides on securing systems, software, databases and hardware . Good stuff and very useful and practical.

I’m currently going over their recently released OSX Security Configuration guide redacted (pdf) and have to say it is quite impressive. Excellent stuff on the usual unix security and some excellent coverage of OSX specific stuff (beyond its excellent default security config) like FileVault and Keychain. Especially good if you’re a security whiz on Linux but need to know details on the differences with OSX.

As mentioned in the previous post, Flickr kind of rocks as a photo sharing community. Besides the taggability of photos and creation of feeds, you can even mark up photos and add notes for emphasis inside photos, tag and comment on them which is the bomb. Oh, and it has easy posting of photos to any blog service as well as creating arbitrary xml rss feeds. Quite cool.

Besides the fact it is a great little Canadian company out of Vancouver, BC they also use one of my favourite languages, PHP to get a lot of their functionality in place.

Highly informative, useful and beautifully designed Pushing Your Limits presentation by Doug Bowman for the Sydney 2004 Web Essentials conference.

Basically, tells you why and how you should design with CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. If you don’t know, Cascading Style Sheets, while it won’t save you and is not a solution for every interface problem you have, is this simple, almost boring technology which allows you to separate the presentation of your site from the actual data in it. Fantastic for design and allows almost effortless changing of site design.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from friends again about what I’m using on OSX. A friend just had to switch over to a government provided Powerbook (yes, I hate her), I managed to switch several other friends to Firefox on a bunch of platforms, and another friend is thinking of retiring her ailing NT laptop for a shiny new iBook.

So, thought I’d better update the previous list , flesh it out, and structure it a little. Only desktop apps. If I’ve missed any categories or there is other stuff you think I should have in there (or apps I should know about), please let me know. Virtually all this software is free or open source.

I was kind of sad to read the review of the latest Carmen Sandiago game this morning.

First off, I remember the original game, Where in the World is Carman Sandiego ? from Brøderbund which I thought was a fantastic platform for teaching kids geography.

It was great fun and educational. It was not just a “memorize the capitals” flashcard type thing, but taught you some details about the country and culture there and allowed you to use deductive reasoning to figure things out. It also taught you the value of researching, going and looking up something, and in a lot of ways, was an inspired title educationally. You’d use the clues, research and storyline to determine where Carmen had escaped to in the world and then track her down there and recover the artifacts. OK, it was never that big a challenge to me (I am scarily good at world geography) but after having an adult last month ask me where exactly the Netherlands were, I definitely think that some people could use it even now. The things I loved about it were that it was engaging, played well and was chock full of educational content (I can still remember that is where I learned whose currency the zloty was).

Fascinating essay from the always insightful Danah Boyd on generational differences between rss, blog and IM. Particularly interesting after the Web 2.0 conference’s vision of the future of syndication.

apophenia: a culture of feeds

The difference, as she points out too near the end (I really, really wish she’d continued on with those ideas rather than obsessing on youth IM/LJ use), is really about content versus community. Resolving that issue is really the tension that syndication needs to deal with in order to leap into the business mainstream. People only being peripherally aware of a conversation without participating are really only eavesdropping on the train. Unless they participate the usefulness is really only about newsfeed neuroses (or take and use it in other ways). The point about youth culture using feeds is that they are more involved with the conversation. IM is their community. Because communities are conversations.

On the plane to DC I had a chance to catch up on some manifesto type readings from Change This which basically re-packages interesting essays from A-listers into pretty PDFs and puts them on the site. Short, compelling and thought provoking they are perfect reading for bumpy plane rides over hostile territory when you’ve only had 3 hours sleep. You can always pull something interesting out of each issue (one every 2 weeks) and often its pretty good, very applicable stuff. Certainly noteworhty..