Balisage Deadlines

 Conference, Technology  No Responses »
Mar 282008
 

Bal­is­age is this new XML++1 geek­fest, put on by some of the people who used to put on the Extreme Markup con­fer­ence, which is aimed to get the brain cells run­ning again after sum­mer. It’s being held in Mon­tréal in the middle of August, which means all those street-level res­taur­ants, and brush­ing up on French cuisine (if not the language). 

Oh yes, the deadlines… 

If you want to speak at Bal­is­age or the Pre­con­fer­ence Sym­posi­um on Ver­sion­ing, you need to sub­mit your full paper by April 18th, using the sup­plied tag set. If you want to attend, advance regis­tra­tion closes on August 1st, so you have time for that. Hotel reser­va­tions must be made by July 1st if you want to stay in the con­fer­ence hotel. The con­fer­ence should be fun and mind-bog­gling at the same time, at least if XML-related the­or­et­ic­al mus­ings are your idea of fun.

1: this means XML is one of the sub­jects dis­cussed there, and most of the oth­ers are in some (albeit tor­tu­ous) way related to it. 

Personal NV Musings

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Mar 132008
 

I just got back from the North­ern­Voice organ­iz­ing com­mit­tee’s post-con­fer­ence lunch. The con­fer­ence motto is per­son­al blog­ging and social media but lots of people who attend or speak are inter­ested in the pro­fes­sion­al or cor­por­ate aspect as well. As a res­ult, one of the per­en­ni­al top­ics we talk about is who the con­fer­ence is for, and what do par­ti­cipants want to listen to. I touched on some of this in my Ebbs and Blogs post­ing. Per­son­ally I’m more inter­ested in the per­son­al blog­ging aspects than the com­pany PR aspects (YMMV, of course).

Which raises some inter­est­ing ques­tions — why would per­son­al blog­gers come to a con­fer­ence? I can think of a few reasons:

  • to learn more about tech­niques, e.g., how to pod­cast, or how to embed video
  • to get ideas for content
  • to learn how to write bet­ter, to express ideas better
  • to meet up with people with some related interests

I guess there are a lot of people who blog who would nev­er come to a blog­ging con­fer­ence because what and how they blog is enough for them and they don’t see any need to change any­thing. But there are also people who don’t do well in crowds, so one issue I see is how to encour­age people who are less com­fort­able at con­fer­ences (even small ones), how to make them more com­fort­able. I don’t know what the answer is; I’m an intro­vert but it sel­dom stops me going places, so although I sym­path­ize with those for whom it’s a prob­lem, I’m not sure of what to do to help. If, indeed, any­thing can be done at the con­fer­ence organ­iz­ing level to help.

Asus eee: first looks

 Technology  No Responses »
Mar 112008
 

I got an Asus to take on hol­i­day (vaca­tion) with me, and to play around with. They’re cute and small and way easi­er to lug around than a laptop. With the small screen doing ser­i­ous work is more dif­fi­cult (a plus when you’re not meant to be work­ing) but I can still check email and web sites and maybe even catch up on some blogging.

I got the 4G ver­sion, and had the RAM increased to 2 GB in the shop so the war­ranty is still val­id. Just in case. Not to men­tion which, it cost all of $15 and 5 minutes for them to do it, and it would prob­ably have taken me longer to find the right screwdriver.

First impres­sions: it’s cute. The “easy desktop” is mostly use­ful, and the selec­tion of applic­a­tions reas­on­able (Fire­fox, Thun­der­bird, Skype, Open Office, Pidgin). I’m try­ing to restrain my inner geek and see how much I can get done with the easy desktop before I revert to type and install the full desktop. Some things don’t change though; one of the first things I did was find where to update soft­ware (add/remove pan­el) and update everything. You get this weird mes­sage for some applic­a­tions, such as Skype, say­ing that you can remove the pack­age after updat­ing, without say­ing wheth­er that’s just to clean up the pack­age remains after they’ve been installed, or wheth­er it really does remove the whole thing. Giv­en you can­’t remove (most of?) the default soft­ware, I’m assum­ing it would actu­ally unin­stall those applic­a­tions that can be removed; maybe when I have time to do the delete/reinstall cycle I’ll try out that assumption.

I’m not sure how far I can get without installing and con­fig­ur­ing some extra stuff. Some of the instruc­tions and scripts the on Abso­lute Begin­ners Wiki look use­ful so I’ll prob­ably break down and try them out. Part of the reas­on for restrain­ing myself on this is curi­os­ity — what does a Taiwanese com­pany think that “house­wives, office ladies and stu­dents” need in a mobile inter­net device? Part is also to fig­ure out wheth­er I can recom­mend this sort of device to non-tech­nic­al people I know, or wheth­er I’ll also have to tell them to do X, Y, and Z to make it usable.

More later, after I’ve played with it a bit more.

Minor WordPress Plugin Problems

 WordPress  No Responses »
Mar 102008
 

I real­ized while installing the latest Word­Press upgrade, that I had­n’t yet blogged some solu­tions to issues I had some time ago. These are all issues related to plugins. 

Prob­lem 1: I installed the Organ­izer plu­gin to help organ­ise my pic­tures. It would­n’t show them, which some­what defeats the pur­pose of an organ­izer. Look­ing at the errors with Fire­bug (one of the most use­ful Fire­fox exten­sions I’ve found) revealed that the organizer_jump_directory func­tion was­n’t defined. One of the com­ments on the plu­gin solved the prob­lem: copy the con­tents of the general.js file to the index.php and view.php files.

Prob­lem 2: flex­ible upload seemed to be activ­ated, but I could­n’t see any sign of it in the “Write” page. The “add field” box was miss­ing from the upload part of the page, as well as the oth­er use­ful items. The solu­tion: I needed to turn off the mod_security Apache mod­ule for the admin dir­ect­ory in the .htac­cess file. There are more details in Word­Press sup­port for­um. I also needed to chmod the plu­gins dir­ect­ory to 755.

Prob­lem 3: I have anoth­er blog, and wanted to show the post­ings from this blog via the Atom feed. I set it up, and it seemed to work, but it nev­er updated the list to show the latest post­ings. After try­ing out a lot of dif­fer­ent ideas, I dis­covered in the serv­er logs that I had a 403: Forbidden error, which gave me a new and dif­fer­ent set of things to try out. In the end I dis­covered the source was that the Bad­Be­ha­vi­or plu­gin was block­ing the requests. So I added the IP address of my blog into the bad-behavior/whitelist.inc.php file, and all now works as it should.

Middle East Complexities

 Books  No Responses »
Mar 072008
 

Tim poin­ted at a piece list­ing immor­al solu­tions for Gaza, a piece which nicely proves that find­ing a good solu­tion is impossible, and find­ing the best of the bad solu­tions often seems equally impossible.

I’m sure I’m not the only per­son flab­ber­gas­ted by the whole Israel/Lebanon/Palestine mess, and I’ve read a few books try­ing to make some sense of it. The only one I whole­heartedly recom­mend is Thomas Fried­man’s From Beirut to Jer­u­s­alem. The book is old; it was first pub­lished in 1989, but it is (unfor­tu­nately) still rel­ev­ant in that none of the prob­lems it describes have been solved. Many of the people are no longer in power, or no longer on this earth, but the prob­lems they did­n’t man­age to solve are still here, still affect­ing the lives of those who live in that part of this world.

I’m not going to try to sum­mar­ize the book; there are lots of reviews out there. Suf­fice to say that if you don’t know much about the Middle East, but do want to know some­thing about why people dis­agree so viol­ently and why a solu­tion still seems so heart­break­ingly out of reach, get this book and read it. You may dis­agree with lots of it, you may find char­ac­ters described with­in it worthy of respect or you may find them despic­able. I learned a lot about some of the fault-lines with­in Leban­on, Israel, and Palestine soci­et­ies, and the hor­rible con­sequences that have come of well-mean­ing actions.

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