# (0) 07 Feb 2010, 10:09PM: Travel Plans: I'm setting up travel plans for the rest of the year. I'm about 95% certain I'm going to WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin in late May, although I need to find someone to room with (anyone have some spare floor at the Concourse?) and buy tickets. I submitted a talk to OSCON (Portland, Oregon, July 19-23) and I'll find out next month whether that got accepted. (OSCON is right after HOPE in NYC, which I really should check out.) I'm also thinking about going to WorldCon in Melbourne, Australia in early September, because I have a number of friends and acquaintances there, and when else will I have time plus multiple reasons to visit Melbourne? Since DebConf in early August is in New York City, I'll probably be there at least for the social bits.

And there are a metric zillion other events I'm at least somewhat interested in, from LibrePlanet to the Netbook Summit to QuahogCon to Open Source Bridge and the Community Leadership Summit. So this coming week I have to suss out what's quality, think up some strategy, and prep a bunch of talk proposals. If you want to suggest anything, please email or comment!

Right now I'm in Washington, DC, visiting my sister and enjoying the snow. Yesterday & today I accidentally visited ShmooCon because various DC-area geek women inveigled me into dinner, then some sort of "party," then oh Metro is closing early because of the snow, oh look, this person's hotel room has an empty second bed! And then breakfast and more hanging out and it's afternoon already? In more short-term travel plans, I'm hitting various promising sites to help me figure out whether I can get back to New York City tomorrow.

# (2) 05 Feb 2010, 11:48PM: Another Change: I'm no longer working with Collabora Ltd.

In the first several months after I joined Collabora in April 2009, I served as lead project manager, got the new website up, and started putting some new project management processes into place, especially in research and development. Then I shifted to personnel management, and created and began implementing a performance assessment system. All the while I gardened the wiki, aggregated and edited weekly internal reports to keep the company on the same page, blogged about our work, and generally gave people the information and the nagging they needed to make informed decisions. (In retrospect, I played facilitator, historian, and journalist a lot, plus mentor to 50+ Collaborans.)

Collabora's a different place than it was ten months ago; I helped move them from a startup to an enterprise footing. Management structures change as needs and capabilities become apparent, so the directors and new hires (including the awesome Martin Barrett) will carry this work forward, and I offer them my best wishes. I'm happy to talk more in detail about what I did at Collabora, especially if you're interested in what I can do for your organization.

In the near future, I'm taking some time to relax and take care of existing obligations before I incur new ones. Then, starting in late February or early March, I'll be volunteering fulltime on some open source/free culture projects for several months. I haven't yet decided which ones, or in what capacity, so feel free to recruit me.

# 03 Feb 2010, 04:18PM: Change of Plans: Image nicked from Leo Antunes. (I thought about creating some sort of Belgian-waffle-with-a-NO-sign-on-it but this services.)

I'm not going to FOSDEM this year; change of plans. Perhaps next year.

# (2) 30 Jan 2010, 02:41PM: Insta-RSS Feeds: A Case Study In Freedom: If you use Google Reader, now you can subscribe to any webpage as though it had a feed and thus automatically get alerted whenever it changes. When the Colbert Report free tickets page opens up new dates, or my slang dictionary adds items, you'll know.

Leonard started providing a version of this service years ago with his Syndication Automat. Now he only needs to use it to generate one feed: new publications from Dover. Sites have gotten sensical and started providing their own feeds. If you want something to run on your own server to make RSS feeds for pages that don't have them, you can use his free Scrape 'N' Feed code.

(I learned of this Google Reader feature via Matt Cutts, and his readers imply that there are paid services the change will undercut. Just another reminder that packaging up a free open source script with lovely UI can make you some cash -- for a while, until it turns up as a free feature in a popular app or OS. That's the S-curve of innovation, or temporal arbitrage.)

An RSS feed gives you data in an easy-to-mess-with format. For example, it would be easy enough to plug an RSS feed into a version control system so you could track diffs, reading the change history as easily as if it were a wiki page. Or you could use it in something like the Launchpad bug tracker's remote bug watch. You can enter a bug in Launchpad and if it's a duplicate of a bug in someone else's bugtracker, Launchpad uses that other bugtracker's API to keep an eye out, and lets you know when the remote bug's status changes. Enlarge your scope from software to something like MediaBugs (an RSS feed is basically the simplest possible RESTful API) and you can set up your system to automatically watch for particular journalists citing the same sources over and over, or calculate the proportion of an e-publisher's new releases that come un-DRM'd.

If you want to do forensic economics like Suresh Naidu, then the ability to get an RSS feed of any random webpage is especially cool. And do you remember the people who used Leonard's Beautiful Soup code to catch an international arms dealer? Quote from the lead investigator:

Anyway, the ViktorFeed is a development of basic python scripts I've been using for some time to collect data on certain aircraft movements through Sharjah and Dubai Airports. Both of these place all movements on the Web, but neither of them provide anything like an RSS feed, which is why I began scripting, in order to save checking them myself.

Whether it's deliberate or negligent, making a webpage without an RSS feed is a way of disempowering readers, and of making it slightly harder to vacuum that data into the market-flattening maw. It's like how certain archives will keep a controversial document in a room and only let people read it in that room, no cameras, no notepaper. Google plays nice with these kinds of restrictions, so site owners can opt out and then Google Reader users won't be able to make or read feeds for those pages. Not an antifeature, per se, but definitely a technical restriction on the user to enforce other people's whims. Scrape 'N' Feed has no such scruples, of course. If you don't want me to know what's on that page, don't put it on the web.

# (0) 29 Jan 2010, 12:18PM: "Of The Other Insectoid Worlds, I Shall Say Nothing": Just finished Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker after a year or two. I was reading it at about two pages a day. But more happens in two paragraphs of Stapledon than happens in most entire novels. Entirely ordinary example (Ch. 8, "The Beginning and the End," Section 2, "The Supreme Moment Nears"):

The supreme moment of the cosmos was not (or will not be) a moment by human standards; but by cosmical standards it was indeed a brief instant. When little more than half the total population of many million galaxies had entered fully into the cosmical community, and it was clear that no more were to be expected, there followed a period of universal meditation. The populations maintained their straitened utopian civilizations, lived their personal lives of work and social intercourse, and at the same time, upon the communal plane, refashioned the whole structure of cosmical culture. Of this phase I shall say nothing.

# (0) 28 Jan 2010, 11:06PM: Grace: Comfort music: Tally Hall's Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, They Might Be Giants' "Thunderbird" (from Spine). There's a moment in "Thunderbird" that always snatches my heart and holds it up to the light -- Linnell's "am" in

Man oh man my throat is dry
Man are you thinking what I
am
well what about it then

Comfort TV: InfoMania, Rotten Tomatoes Show, Psych, Leverage. Eitan and I stood in toe-numbing cold for hours yesterday to get standby tickets to Colbert, and got in. You can hear me in the audience, the only one clapping when Arthur Benjamin reveals why 2520 was his childhood favorite number. I thought more people would be with me on that one.

N.K. Jemisin's third gripping sample chapter for her upcoming fantasy novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is up, my ex-boss is spreading the gospel that software testing is a neat career for nonprogramming geeks, Erin Ptah's "Castle Down" is highly entertaining magical Colbert/Stewart slash, and John Darnielle is (as always) passionate and enthusiastic about something:

Well, I stumbled across it somehow, I'm not sure how, and I watched it, and I had one of those experiences you have sometimes with a band you've never heard playing a song you don't know. One of those transformative reaffirming experiences, which you then get religious about, even if religious isn't exactly the word you'd use but trust me it's the word you actually mean: you start thinking, everything should be like this all the time, anything that's not like this is a ridiculous waste of time, I want peak experiences and only peak experiences because life is all about peak experiences and people who consent to have less than constant peaking epiphanies all the time are missing out, etc., etc., all infantile nonsense of course but as feelings go a bracing & pleasant one. The permanent reoccurring 19th summer is a nonstarter as a governing aesthetic stance, but as a tool in the kit it's not without some merits.....

...[the song] becomes a radiant source of self-regenerating power and wonder and lights start to go off in corners of the room where a guy didn't know there were actually any lights, and the guy goes, wow, this is so cool, I didn't expect to run across anything this cool today and I'm so glad I did, I'd really love to run across more things like this during my daily walk down toward the grave.

# (0) 27 Jan 2010, 09:52AM: A Reminder: Amanda Marcotte, thinking about the phrase "pro-life" (the rest of the post is much more controversial):

...Life, for most people, is about being in this world. It’s about enjoying food, enjoying sex, having goals, making plans, creating relationships, loving each other, developing beliefs, thinking thoughts, learning, enjoying a good night’s rest, listening to music, enjoying drama, enjoying quiet, kicking your feet up and petting the cat, diving into your work, making a difference, helping others, selfishly hiding away and doing for yourself, falling in love, grieving a loss, the thrill of winning, the sorrow of losing, the ambiguities of the human spirit, the bright light of reason, the joy of discovery, the curiosity inspired by mystery, a walk in the park, a Christmas with family, a loud concert, a good book.