#Open

Some quiet holiday time has finally given me the chance to polish up the code I wrote earlier this year and finally release my blog engine.

Kobayashi is finally out in the world in at least a first release form with a few tests, a basic theme and working code.

I wrote more extensively about why I’d write a blog engine here .

Kobayashi’s built to handle large blogs and still be damn fast and cache and act as if the entire site was static so (hopefully) hold up under high loads with highly optimized caching using memcache and etag http caching. The whole thing runs on heroku with a simple push.

What are the fifty most important machines to life as we know it?

Jucobowski sorted that out after his tractor kept breaking. He published open source blueprints that could allow you to make these things for a fraction of the cost and that should last a lifetime, not be built for obsolescence. Then people started helping him refine. He’s constructed eight of the fifty designs and gives this amazingly inspirational TED talk on unleashing human potential worldwide. Global maker culture for good. Open-sourced blueprints for civilization and a global village construction set So inspirational.

Great post on how not to cock up open data and how amazing it is to be even having a conversation about it at all.

1. Argue for it as a numbers game. Not all gov data sets will yield huge value, but some definitely will
2. Cease tinkering around and build something useful as a service
3. Obsessively gather information on what value is generated by people using the data
4. Keep an eye on public servants who might inadvertently share private or sensitive data
5. Mistakenly insisting that Government really should be in the business of publishing everything non-private it can

Great list actually. I really, really need to get down to some of those Gov 2.0 hack days going on in Canberra and Sydney.

Ahhh… finally, the Google Wave developer preview of Google’s HTML 5 re-imagining of online collaboration and communications at Google’s I/O conference.

The interesting idea of it as a Product, Platform (for the embedding of things in the web) and Protocols as well as the re-visioning of email if it had been invented today, kinda sorts well with actual usage. For example, in the demo, the use of email and then a sort of “in-email” IM session (we’re going to need new verbs and adjectives, I can tell) being used is pretty similar to what really happens in real life though you generally have to jump to a new app and those conversations end up being isolated form each other. So, at least that idea in Wave is sound.

Noticed for the first time in ages that my server was not set to the correct timezone since DST started. Oops. Very easy to fix on Hardy. Just ssh into your box and

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

then pick your geographical time zone.

Et voila.

Interesting presentation from MySQL Conf 09 on open source adoption and the use of open source Business Intelligence tools.

BI is about getting stuff out. Everything else is about getting stuff in. Transaction processing is a commodity, analysis is not. And really, the problem with most organizations (including my own current one) is being able to use their information, not capture it.

The problem is that DW and BI tools, at least commercially, are really expensive. My last company spent about $250k just getting their reporting and OLAP suite sorted (pricey BOBJE in case you were wondering). So, the business case upside for open source BI is huge.

Way overdue for a nation as digitally savvy and connected as my own, but Canada has finally put Member of Parliament’s voting records online just like other less-developed and less advanced nations, such as the United Kingdom and United States.

The records are now available on the Parliamentary website . The cool thing would be them providing an API to access this data from the intertubes to lead the way to some interesting political mashups.

The fine buccaneers at The Pirate Bay have published an interactive map of people seeding and leeching torrents ~~bad link~~~ around the world with data by country (percentage users and connections through country at a given time).

Great and fascinating snapshot of p2p activity globally. China is far and away the highest poller and well over 30% of world activity every time I’ve looked. Would be even cooler I think if you could divide this into seeders and leechers with these stats.

I’ve been using the Firefox beta for a week now and I have to admit, it’s a wholesale improvement over the 2.x branch. More stable, uses lower memory and the OS integration is much nicer, particularly on OSX with the default Proto theme. Works just as nice as Aranox’s GrApple that I’ve been using.

Haven’t really taken advantage of most of the newer features they’ve developed though do like the way they’ve added tagging to the bookmarking though I imagine it will be a little while before the Delicious bookmarking Add-On moves in line with it.

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)?