Category: Uncategorized

My favorite hosted wiki: MindTouch Wik.is

MindTouch Wik.is Back in May I started looking for a hosted wiki for the EdmontonTweetup. I wanted a wiki so that others could contribute and help to organize our meetups. I also wanted a hosted wiki, because I didn’t want to mess around with running yet another system with yet another database. My only other requirements were that I wanted it to be free or very low cost, and relatively simple and clean (I would have been fine with some advertising).

I tried a bunch, including Wetpaint, Wikidot, PBWiki, StikiPad, Wikispaces, and finally Wik.is. I’ve had experience with both PBWiki and Wikispaces and like them both, but it was the last one that turned out to be my favorite. We’ve been using Wik.is by MindTouch to power the EdmontonTweetup wiki ever since! And today, I setup another one for Edmonton Code Camp.

Wik.is is a hosted version of Deki, the enterprise wiki solution that MindTouch sells to businesses. There are two account levels – Basic which is free, and Pro which costs $99 USD/year. The Basic level includes:

  • 100 MB of storage.
  • WYSIWYG editing.
  • The ability to have a public or private wiki.
  • Themes and the ability to edit CSS to further customize the look of the wiki.
  • Integration with popular sites like YouTube and Flickr.
  • RSS feeds, templates, redirects, and other common wiki features.

The Pro level gives you 10 GB of storage, the ability to customize the HTML, and the ability to use your own domain name.

I love that Wik.is is fast and contains no advertising! It’s simple to get started – all you need to do is choose a domain name prefix, such as “edmontoncodecamp” in http://edmontoncodecamp.wik.is. After you’re logged in you can make your wiki public, upload your own logo, and choose from one of the 20 or so pre-installed themes (or you can customize your own). You can enable anonymous editing, or require users to create an account before they can edit pages.

When I first started with Wik.is, my only complaint was that the WYSIWYG editing didn’t work in Opera or really anything other than IE and Firefox. That was fixed quite a while ago though, so I was complaint-free until today. After setting up the second wiki, I realized that there’s no such thing as a “Wik.is account”, which means I have two “mastermaq” accounts – one for the tweetup wiki and one for the code camp wiki. It would be much better if I could use just one account to login to both.

That’s a fairly minor issue though! In general I’m really happy with Wik.is, and I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a hosted wiki solution. I’m also a fan of MindTouch! They have an active blog, and a few of them are quite active on Twitter, such as the founder, Aaron Roe Fulkerson. Keep it up!

Finally, here are a few things you probably didn’t know about Deki (the software that powers Wik.is):

  • It started in July 2006 as a fork of MediaWiki (the software that powers Wikipedia)
  • The frontend is built using PHP, while the API is written in C# for Mono and the .NET Framework
  • It powers the Mozilla Developer Wiki

Windows 7 Feature Request: Presence & Status API

When RSS feeds were all the rage, Microsoft took notice and built support into Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista. I think the Common Feed List was a great addition to the operating system – why try to manage and synchronize a different list of feeds for each application? It makes far more sense for the OS to manage it. This situation is a good example of how Windows can make your life easier.

I would like to see a similar feature added in Windows 7 – a common presence and status API.

Presence is your availability, such as “Available”, “Busy”, and “Not Available”. There are dozens of applications that support this type of functionality in their own way. I’ve got three running right now – Windows Live Messenger, Skype, and Pidgin (well and Exchange, I suppose). You’ve probably got a similar list, perhaps with a few more applications.

Status is the short text description of what you’re doing, such as “Working in the office”. Think Twitter and Facebook. Many software applications have this type of functionality as well, including Windows Live Messenger and Skype.

Here again, the operating system should be taking care of this to make life easier. When I want to change my presence from “Available” to “Busy”, I currently have to make that change in every single application. Likewise, to update my status I need to copy and paste it to a bunch of different places. Too messy, too much work.

Here’s what I’d like to see in the API:

  • The ability to set the presence and/or status of the currently logged in user.
  • The ability to query the presence and/or status of the currently logged in user.
  • An event subscription mechanism to be notified when the currently logged in user’s presence and/or status has been updated.

That would be very cool, I think. I could then change my presence or status in Skype and it could be reflected in Windows Live Messenger and other applications. This information could also be displayed in other places, such as the Welcome screen, or in my email signature, etc.

But we can make it better – let’s hook in Windows Live support! Extend the Windows Live Presence API to support status updates as well, and let me grant access to third party services. That way I could potentially hook in Ping.fm and other services. When I update my presence and status on my computer, it updates Windows Live in the background, which in turn updates any other services I’ve added.

With that in place, this scenario becomes a reality: I open a gadget on my desktop, change my presence to “Available” and my status to “Writing a blog entry” and it’s reflected in Windows Live Messenger, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I’d love to have that functionality! Perhaps it could work with the new location API too. I’ve got tons of feature requests for Windows 7 (as I’m sure everyone does) but this one would definitely be near the top of my wish list.

Use Google Maps to find Edmonton Transit schedules and trip plans

Earlier today I stumbled across this thread on Connect2Edmonton which pointed out that Google Maps Canada now has Edmonton Transit schedules and trip planning features. I immediately jumped over to the website to check it out, and sure enough, it’s all there!

The ETS website has offered trip planning for quite some time now, of course (an average of 89,000 trips were planned each month in 2006). It works well enough, but it’s awkward to use. Everything you do seems to open a new window/tab, and it’s not the fastest service in the world. But the main drawback has always been that you have to know far too much information in advance.

When you need to get from point A to point B, you typically know the address of each, but you don’t know the bus stop number near each one and you certainly don’t know which bus to get on!

That’s where Google Maps absolutely destroys the ETS website. Here’s an example.

I need to get from my apartment building to the current Questionmark office in the west end. I live at 10350 122nd Street, and the office is at 11434 168th Street. Let’s start with the ETS Trip Planner:

  1. Date and time of travel are no problem. The “arrive by” feature is particularly nice.
  2. Enter Starting Bus Stop # or Choose a Landmark. Uh oh, what’s my bus stop number? I could go outside and look or I could try to look it up. Let’s look it up.
  3. Okay not bad, enter my address and click Get Bus Stop #. Okay wow, now I have to choose from 14 different stops! I’m not entirely sure which direction I want. The office is northwest from my house, but do I want a westbound stop or northbound? I’ll choose the first one, heading west.
  4. Now I repeat the same thing for the office address. This time I have a list of 7 stops. Again, I’ll choose the first one.
  5. Now I can get my trip plan! Or not…some sort of error just popped up – “Error in Trip Solution Results”. Excellent. Honest I’m just doing this as I write.
  6. I’m really not sure why I got that error, but I did the whole thing again and after about 30 seconds or so, I got my trip plan – six different route options. Shortest time is 46 minutes.

Now let’s do that with Google Maps:

  1. I enter my home address.
  2. On the pin that comes up, I click “From Here” and enter the office address.
  3. Next I click “Public Transit” on the left pane.
  4. That’s it! I have three suggested routes. Shortest time is 34 minutes, and each one includes walking directions too.

If you want, you can do a few more advanced things as well. Clicking “Show options” will let you choose the “Depart at” or “Arrive by” times, just like the ETS website.

directions

And it gets better! There’s no way for me to get back to that trip plan I made using the ETS Trip Planner. Unless I printed it right there, I’d have to do it again. With Google Maps however, my plan has a permalink! Very nice.

I would love to see ETS link to the Google solution. Competition might be a concern, but it’s probably a better use of resources to help Google improve their system than to continue building an inferior one. I think it’s funny that the “Local agency information” link at the bottom of the results pane is broken. You can thank the new Edmonton.ca website for that!

Of course, the Google Maps solution isn’t yet perfect. It doesn’t seem to contain as much information as ETS, nor does it include Strathcona Transit or St. Albert Transit (as Michael Wilson pointed out to me).

Still, if you need to look up transit information in Edmonton I’d highly recommend you look at Google Maps before trying your luck with the ETS Trip Planner.

UPDATE: Found the official list of cities with transit information at Google Maps. Edmonton is not on the list yet. The currently listed Canadian cities include Vancouver, Fredericton, Ottawa, and Montreal.

How do you define mainstream?

Lately I’ve been thinking about the word “mainstream” and what it means. Princeton’s WordNet defines mainstream as “the prevailing current of thought” while Merriam-Webster defines mainstream as “a prevailing current or direction of activity or influence”. I think many people have a different definition however, something more akin to the one at UrbanDictionary:

Mainstream is what’s the new trend. When one "style" gets old, a new one is reborn; a mainstream person is someone who jumps from trend to trend so that they fit in with the rest of the crowd.

That definition has 514 positive votes and only 51 negative votes. There are a few others there too, but that one is the most popular. The definition at Wiktionary is similar.

Two recent articles got me thinking about this. On October 27th, the Wall Street Journal said that Twitter is going mainstream:

When the service first appeared a couple of years ago, its appeal seemed largely limited to narcissists who wanted to let everybody know what they were doing in real time. But, like blogs and social-networking sites, Twitter is starting to cross into the mainstream, as a wide range of people find interesting uses for the brief notes.

Is the WSJ right? Has Twitter crossed into the mainstream? I think that depends on which definition you use. Based on the one in the dictionary, I’d say they’re wrong.

The second article was from The Economist. They say blogging is mainstream now too:

Blogging has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death.

Hold on a sec – blogging has only just entered the mainstream? If that’s true, how can Twitter possibly be considered mainstream? Seems the “mainstream” media have different definitions for the word too!

Maybe everyone has a different definition for the word? I think it all depends on what your litmus test is. For instance:

  • Has Twitter been mentioned on TV and in the newspaper? Yes, it’s mainstream.
  • Does anyone make money using Twitter? Yes, it’s mainstream.
  • Do my parents use Twitter regularly? No, it’s not mainstream.
  • Do all of my friends use Twitter? No, it’s not mainstream.
  • Will a random person on the street know what Twitter is? No, it’s not mainstream.

I think that’s pretty close to what my litmus test is. Replace “Twitter” with “Google” or “Facebook” and all of the answers are yes.

What’s your test? How do you define mainstream?

WebKit inside Internet Explorer? No thanks

webkit Inside every web browser is something called a rendering engine. The browsers get most of the glory, but it’s actually the rendering engines that do the heavy lifting. Firefox uses Gecko, Opera uses Presto, Chrome and Safari use WebKit, and Internet Explorer uses Trident. There are a few others as well, but those are the main ones. Gecko and WebKit are open source, Presto and Trident are proprietary.

Much was made of the fact that Google decided to use WebKit inside Chrome instead of building yet another rendering engine. I agree that it was the right move. Should Microsoft follow suit and replace Trident with WebKit? Steve Ballmer made some interesting comments today on the topic:

"There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service," Ballmer said, adding, "Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."

That prompted more than a few people to wish for Ballmer’s comments to come true, including Steve Hodson who said:

This idea of IE switching over to using the WebKit engine is interesting on a couple levels. First this would put two main browsers on an equal footing as far as rendering ability which would make for a much easier development cycle. It would also make for a better browsing experience for the users as developers would no longer be forced to program against the vagaries of IE.

I hear that last point all the time and it drives me nuts. Yes, Internet Explorer 6 was a nightmare to code for. But that’s simply not the case for Internet Explorer 7 or the recent Internet Explorer 8 beta. At least not in my experience.

I’d hate to see Microsoft adopt WebKit, for a few reasons:

  • Competition is good, and WebKit needs worthy competitors to continue to push the boundaries.
  • There’s nothing wrong with Trident. Why throw away something that works well and is continually improving? And I’m not just talking about the version of Trident in IE8. Microsoft has had full support for things like contentEditable since IE6, something Mozilla/Gecko still hasn’t gotten right.
  • It’s not like the existing versions of Internet Explorer would magically disappear! This would be yet another browser/rendering engine combo that developers would need to test against.

And there are good reasons that Microsoft won’t adopt WebKit too, not the least of which is licensing. Backwards compatibility is a concern also.

It might sound appealing at first, but I don’t think it would be a good thing if all the major browsers used the same rendering engine.

Talk Sex with Sue Johanson in Edmonton

sue johanson Last night Sharon and I went to see Sue Johanson speak at the University of Alberta. She was brought to Edmonton by the Students’ Union as part of their Revolutionary Speakers’ Series. We decided to eat at SUB before the event, to ensure we had plenty of time. It’s a good thing we did, because the line was probably 100 people deep over an hour before it was set to start! I guess we shouldn’t have been that surprised – I’m sure everyone has seen her show at least once!

Sue spent most of the two hours lecturing. Unlike most of the lectures I attended during my time at the U of A however, I wasn’t bored to tears. Quite the opposite in fact – Sue is really funny! She manages to bring all the humor from her show onto the stage. And it wasn’t so much a lecture as a story. Sue essentially told us the story of how we grew up without learning about sex. She’s fond of saying, “there’s so much to learn!”

Some highlights:

  • She wasn’t afraid to act out the things she was talking about – very entertaining!
  • As expected she was very honest about everything. I particularly liked that she admitted that talking to her own kids about sex was incredibly difficult!
  • Sue said that most girls are told “nice girls don’t do that” when they are little, and that’s the main reason they don’t learn about sex and their own bodies as well as boys do. She repeated that quote many times as much of what she talked about related more to females than to males.
  • Another expression Sue repeated over and over was “but nobody told you that” or “we never told you that”. Really good for dramatic effect! She’s kind of like a motivational speaker in that regard.
  • Sue’s favorite sex toy is “the bullet” – she shared a bunch of them and listed the pros and cons of each.
  • She talked about fantasizing and said she likes Richard Gere and firemen!
  • By popular request, she demonstrated how to use a condom at the end of the event.

She didn’t talk much about homosexuality, only making reference to it once or twice. Though she did save time before the question period to express her concerns about anal sex (not specific to homosexuality of course). She called it “high risk” behavior and encouraged everyone to get properly informed before making a decision. That was the only topic that she got a little preachy about.

Sharon remarked that the talk wasn’t quite what she was expecting. Instead of a lecture, she anticipated something more like Sue’s show on TV (more question and answer). That would indeed have been entertaining, and it would have been good to have more time for questions. Still, I thought Sue did a great job of making everyone laugh while learning.

I thoroughly enjoyed the talk and I’m glad I went. If I could do yesterday over again however, I think I would have stayed home to watch the election results. It was pretty cool when someone yelled out “Obama won!” and the entire Horowitz Theatre erupted into applause and cheers, but I still feel like I missed something (though I was constantly refreshing the NYTimes on my iPod).

At least I’ll never forget where I was – listening to Sue Johanson talk about sex toys!

UPDATE: There’s an article on the event in the latest issue of The Gateway.

Barack Obama wins the election!

I’m so happy that Barack Obama is the president-elect! He will be sworn in on January 20th, 2009. I’m very much looking forward to the governing phase of things, and was glad to hear Obama talk about tonight being just the first step. The real work can now begin.


Photo by Ozier Muhammad, The New York Times

Here’s the story from the New York Times: Racial Barrier Falls as Voters Embrace Call for Change. And from CNN: Obama inspires historic victory.

For more information in the coming days and weeks, be sure to check Wikipedia.

Congratulations Barack Obama!

How I plan to track the election online

barack obama Finally, it’s election time! Tomorrow evening either Barack Obama or John McCain will become the next President of the United States. Like most of you, I’ll be watching the results closely. Exactly four months ago Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, and I hope tomorrow is the day his campaign comes to a victorious end. I’m so excited! And also a little glad that it’ll finally be over, to be honest.

Here are a few of the places I’ll be watching tomorrow:

Know of any great resources I’ve missed? Let me know. Go Obama!

UPDATE: As expected, Mashable has a giant list of election resources. Check it out.

Netbooks are trendy

dell inspiron mini What kind of computer do you use? Most of my work is done at a desktop or workstation; a tower attached to three monitors. The rest of the time I’m using either my laptop or tablet. I’ve also got a little Sony UMPC but it doesn’t get used much. It was kinda cool for a while, but it’s not all that fast. And once I got my iPod touch, that pretty much fulfilled my small device needs.

My favorite to use is probably my tablet, even though it’s the slowest of the bunch. I think I like it mostly because of the form factor – it’s pretty small for a laptop (at 12 inches) but large enough that I don’t sacrifice a keyboard or full operating system.

A couple years from now though, my tablet might seem rather large thanks to the netbook trend. What’s a netbook? From Wikipedia:

A netbook is a small to medium sized, light-weight, low-cost, energy-efficient laptop, generally optimized for internet based services such as web browsing and e-mailing. Netbooks are also sometimes, but rarely referred to as a sub-subnotebook.

The form factor of a netbook is smaller than that of a notebook and they are very light in weight (usually 2 to 3 pounds). Common features include a small screen (usually around 7-inches to 10-inches diagonal), wireless connectivity, but no optical disc drive, and a smaller sized keyboard (usually 80 percent to 95 percent of normal size). There is also a trend of using solid-state drives instead of traditional hard disk drives.

Maybe it’s just me, but every second article on technology these days seems to mention netbooks! The blogosphere made a big deal this week out of the fact that Windows boss Steven Sinofsky demonstrated Windows 7 running on a netbook. And today, PC World declares that netbooks will soon cost just $99:

Subnotebooks like the Asus Eee PC, the Dell Mini 9 and the HP 2133 Mini-note will soon cost as little as $99. The catch? You’ll need to commit to a two-year mobile broadband contract. The low cost will come courtesy of a subsidy identical to the one you already get with your cell phone.

A monthly service fee for mobile broadband doesn’t appeal to me at all, but a $99 netbook certainly does. Heck, I’m already tempted by the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (pictured above) and it’s nearly $500! If the cost of components fell enough so that a netbook was about half that price, I’d have no hesitations about picking one up and I doubt anyone else would either.

Netbooks are definitely trendy, but I think this is one trend that will last. A small device to check email, read and post blogs, and update Twitter is something that appeals to lots of people. Okay maybe not that last part 🙂

Recap: EdmontonTweetup3

edmontontweetup I had a great time tonight at EdmontonTweetup3 – our third meetup for Twitter users in the Edmonton area! We had just over 20 people come out to Devlin’s on Whyte Avenue, with a nice mixture of familiar and new faces! I thought the restaurant did a nice job of accommodating our group, and it was good to hear so many people say they’d never been there before. We might as well experience a bit more of the city at these events!

I only snapped a few simple shots tonight, but @bruceclarke, @tonyratcliffe, and @fusedlogic all took nice sets of photos: here and here and here. Thanks guys!

EdmontonTweetup3

As our community continues to grow, I think there will be increasing demand for these face-to-face meetups. It’s nice to be able to get away from the computer for a few minutes to meet the people you chat with on a daily basis!

Once again I’ve done my best to add all of tonight’s attendees to the wiki page, but please add yourself if I missed you. Feel free to add links to your photos, blog posts, and other bits of social media too.

Thanks again to everyone who came out tonight – see you at EdmontonTweetup4!