A few weeks ago, the interview I did with Stephen Hui was published in the Georgia Straight — Vancouver’s main entertainment weekly newspaper. It was the geekiest article I think you will ever see in the mainstream press ever. Great stuff.

The next week, I was invited by Mack Flavelle to give a talk on the Vancouver Base at Why in the Web at BCIT. The slides I used are roughly the same as my previous talk at VanDev, but I spent more time this time surfing through some live examples. I think that worked a bit better. There was a awful lot of information for anybody to absorb — I hope the students found something there to inspire them to learn more about the semantic web.

Keeping things rolling, I approached Boris Mann with the idea of doing a mashup using Drupal’s cool new semweb features with the data from the Vancouver Base. We had a kickoff breakfast meeting on Thursday, and OpenRestaurants.org was born! It’s all about bacon, patios and beer. Should be fun.

Finally, Melanie Courtot has started up a new Vancouver Semantic Web Meetup Group. The first meeting is this coming Thursday at Waves on Broadway at 6pm. I’ll be there. Unfortunately, I had to back out of talking about #vanbase at the local Drupal meetup, which is at the same time.

I updated the RDF Vancouver pages to point people to the new meetup. I wasn’t quite ready to organize another RDF Vancouver meetup yet, and now I don’t have to. :-)

Please, please, please come to the meetup if you are interested in doing any semantic web stuff in Vancouver. I know firsthand how difficult it is to organize a new semweb event — we need people to show up in order to build a community.

With all this happening in the past few weeks, we have a good foothold and some momentum building. Vancouver is going to be the template that the rest of the world can follow for putting a city on the semantic web.

I have needed some business cards for a while. I wanted a nice distinctive design — but I’m a programmer, not a designer. I spent a few days over the last week exploring options and struggling to come up with a nice design.

Several friends suggest that I give Moo Cards a try. The nifty thing about Moo Cards is that every one can be different. So this gave me an idea: Why not generate the graphics for each one algorithmically?

I was already doing this for backgrounds on my Mac using Google Top Draw – an open source program that uses Javascript and Apple’s Core Image to generate some very nice random images. The scripts can be easily customized and there is good documentation. It’s very fun to play with.

Here is my Top Draw script for generating Moo Card images. It outputs a new PNG file sized 1040×696 pixels (roughly 300dpi) in the user’s Library/Application Support/Google/TopDraw directory everytime it is run. Here’s an example of the output:

Just change the desired ‘name’ and ‘fontName’ at the top of the file. Run it a bunch of times, delete the images that aren’t the best, and upload the rest to the moo.com website to start an order. If you want to get creative, read the docs and examples, and customize the Javascript.

It’s a bit of a hack, since Top Draw is only designed for generating desktop backgrounds. To export to a file, I had to render everything into a single layer and export that to disk.

I made a really short (2 minute) screencast walkthrough on how to run the script.

For the record, Moo Cards has a similar feature on their website called ‘textomatic‘ which also can randomly generate text designs (just not as wild).

Last night, I gave a presentation at the VanDev meetup about Freebase and the Vancouver Base. You can view the slides here and read the feedback here.

I think it went better than some of my past “semantic web” presentations. As the format was 20 minutes of presentation plus 20 minutes of questions, my strategy was to just give a very high-level overview of what Freebase is and what I want to accomplish with the Vancouver Base. I attempted to tone down the “semantic web” jargon as much as I could, and I hoped to describe the problems using more “layman’s language”, but I still ended up using too much of the jargon anyways. Standing at the front of the room, it’s pretty clear that using the jargon tends to lose a lot of people.

For the Question and Answer section, I showed a few web pages from the site, and tried my best to help the audience understand what they were seeing. I spent time answering questions, so I didn’t step up the pace enough to adequately describe things like Acre. And there wasn’t any time to show any mashups or get into some of the more developer oriented features of the platform. Reading the feedback, I guess I should have tailored the talk a bit more towards a developer crowd.

Now I’m going to rewind back in time two weeks, as I haven’t yet blogged about Northern Voice and the Freebase meetup. Kirrily Robert (aka skud) — Freebase’s awesome community director — wanted to come up to Vancouver to meet some of the local users and developers. I talked her into coming to Northern Voice to meet some of our local social media people, and we even gave a short presentation during the unconference (Kirrily made some slides, but unfortunately there was no projector).

Then on the Sunday after Northern Voice, Kirrily organized a Vancouver Freebase Meetup at the Irish Heather in Gastown. It was great to get all the local Freebase people in one place (plus Scott Blomquist who drove up from Portland! Dale McGladdery wrote up an excellent summary of the meetup and even made a video!

Finally, I’d like to organize another RDF Vancouver event sometime. I am hoping that we can convince Boris Mann to give us a version of the talk he just gave at DrupalCon – Practical Semantic Web and Why You Should Care.

Update: Boris has a post about DrupalCon.

Last summer, I discovered a unique software packaging and build system called Nix from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Building and packaging software has been my primary work activity for the past 10 years. I have maintained hundreds of RPMs and Debian packages, and have managed some very large code repositories, toolchains and build farms. It’s been fun, but I do have to admit that being a “package monkey” is not the most glamourous of software development activities.

With all that experience, I feel that I have a developed a strong appreciation for nice software plumbing. The Nix project really excites me. There are two things it does differently that make it stand out:

1. Strange filesystem layout using cryptographic hashes

   In Nix, each software package is stored in it’s own directory, under /nix/store/<cryptographic-hash>-<name>, instead of in the conventional Unix locations such as /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/include, etc.

   With this scheme, it becomes possible to simultaneously install and run multiple variations of the same piece of software, including dependencies. In fact, it would even be possible to have every computer in the world share the same filesystem, even though if they were all running different software!

2. Completely functional / declarative description of complete software systems

   Nix has a language that enables you to completely describe the running state of an entire set of software in a declarative way. You just tell it what you want — then it takes care of building it, distributing it and even starting it up and running it!

It can be used as a companion software management system on Mac OS X (similar to MacPorts or Fink), Windows (using Cygwin), or on any Linux distribution. There is also a companion project called NixOS which is a full Linux distribution built entirely using Nix.

I highly recommend looking at it. Keep in mind that it is definitely not mainstream, and there are not a lot of users yet. It is not a friendly system for traditional Unix system administrators, who are accustomed to finding their files in predictable locations in the filesystem. Systems are managed by writing expressions in the Nix language, which only has a small amount of documentation and not a lot of friendly examples.

I have done a bit of work adapting NixOS so I could get it to run inside a Xen session on my server. I am also using Nix successfully on OS X, as well as with VirtualBox, and on Debian on Amazon’s EC2.

Currently, I am working on some Nix expressions to make it easy to deploy software based on Ruby Gems (such as Rails, Merb, Rack and Sinatra) on top of Nix. You can read about my initial experiments in this post to the nix-dev mailing list. So far, I’m pleased with the results. I expect to package up a few more gems soon, and I will be using this system in production for some upcoming demos I am planning.

I have put together a short screencast to demonstrate how to access the data inside a Google Docs spreadsheet using Google’s GData REST API.

This past Monday, Darren Barefoot announced on Twitter “Let’s assemble a database of Vancouver tech scene people on Twitter: http://tr.im/gHHS. Please retweet!”

Within a day, over 180 people had used the form to add their names to the spreadsheet. Very cool!

This is the same type of information I’m collected for the Vancouver Freebase site. So naturally, I would like to synchronize the data. Instead of copying and pasting the data out of Google Docs, I was wondering if there was a programmatic way to access the data. As it turns out, there is GData API for accessing Spreadsheet data.

You can test drive the API using Google’s OAuth Playground. I put together a short HOWTO with an example of how to extract some sample data.

I acquired an iPhone last July, and I’m in love with the device.  Since I am on a 3 year contract, I figured I might as well sign up for the developer program.  I paid $100 so I could install my own apps on the phone, and I accepted copious numbers of legal agreements.

Initially, I started out by playing around with Nitobi’s PhoneGap development framework.  That’s pretty nice – you can write your apps in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and package them up for use on the phone.  You can find an ancient fork that I was playing around with as ‘gapoffline‘ on GitHub.

Some apps on the iPhone work quite well as HTML, but the performance and capability difference between those and the full native apps is quite noticeable.  So I have now embarked on the journey to learn Objective-C and the full iPhone development framework.

So far, I have completed a number of tutorials, including Bill Dudney’s “Writing Your First iPhone Application” screencast series.  It took me about two weeks to work all the way through it.  I highly recommend learning with the screencast, as I found that following along as an app is built from the ground up is the one good way to really understand how some of the more visually-based tools (eg. Interface Builder) are used.  I did get quite a bit off-track at several points.  At one point, it took me three hours to figure out that I had accidentally entered a single space in the wrong spot.   But I was able to get back on-track thanks to the forums and the sample source code.

My biggest complaint with the screencast series is that the SQLite stuff in Episode 5 just gets ‘copied in’ without much explanation, and it’s necessary to essentially backport it from the complete working example source code.   Overall, I felt the screencast was well worth the money – probably only one or two dollars per hours I spent with it.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, November 25th) at 7pm, I’ll be giving a short presentation at the Vancouver Django Meetup on my experiences using Google App Engine with Django. I hope to see you there.

And on Wednesday, don’t forget to come to the 2nd RDF Vancouver Semantic Web Users Group event — it’s at WorkSpace at 7pm. Dorian Taylor and Gerald Bauer will be giving talks. I’m going to give a short presentation about the Vancouver Base I created at Freebase (it’s a featured base this week!).

Update: I’ve posted the slides from the presentation.

Watch the video in full size on Blip.tv or get the raw video from archive.org.

The first RDF Vancouver was a success. Thanks to Michael Kalus for filming the event.

We’re having another event this month. Please join us at 7pm on Wednesday, November 26th at WorkSpace. Here is the event signup page.

I’m planning on giving a mini-talk on the new Freebase features, including the new Vancouver Base. I’ve been playing around with it, adding structured data that might be useful to people in Vancouver. As an example of what can be done, I’ve updated data for all of the local elected politicians, as well as an incomplete list of Vancouver bloggers. If anybody wants to add stuff, feel free to join!

I’m organizing a local “meetup” style event for people in Vancouver that are interested in Semantic Web technologies. We’re having the inaugural event on Wednesday, October 29th at 7pm at WorkSpace. You can sign up for it over at upcoming.org.

Additionally, I’ve set up a TiddlyWiki-based site for the group at rdfvancouver.org.

I hope to see you there!

I’ll be at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland, Oregon for the next few days. If you’re there, get in touch!