Top Down View

The Torch Relay came through Delta today.

Helen’s selling soap at a cart in a mall down in White Rock so wasn’t going to be able to see the parade as it passed near home but the day’s relay actually started (at a rather hideous 6:30am) down in White Rock just opposite her mall. So we decided to both go down to White Rock and see it there together.

Of course we were lateish leaving home. Took the side-roads through White Rock to avoid any traffic snarl-ups and by the time we got to the mall the parking lots were jam-packed. After getting the car sorted out we ran over to the start… only to be faced by crowds coming BACK in our direction… we’d missed it. Helen started walking down the road after it but a) there’s crowds of people coming back at us and getting in the way and b) the torch is being taken away from us by people RUNNING. Never going to win that battle.

So back to the car. The people in the car next to us had done their homework and knew where the torch was going next so we headed off to the sea-front to try and catch up with it. Parking along the sea-front was nuts… simply nuts. The parking lots were full, the streets were full, the residential areas were full. By the time we’d managed to find a parking spot (you know what’s coming, don’t you?) we’d missed it again. Helen goes into panic mode and we start running down the street after it – but you already know the problems with this, don’t you? We gave it a good try, running along the sea-front for a good ten minutes but to no avail. Defeated, we headed back to the car (which by now was a long way away).

At this point Helen’s getting despondent and realizing that she really rather wanted to see the torch. We checked the clock… 7:20. Torch is in North Delta at 8:35, mall opens at 9:30… hmmmm… we can just about make it there and back.

So off we head back to home (why didn’t we think of this before I’m thinking). We got back to North Delta and parked near the route. We had plenty of time to get a good spot, run into some people we knew and watch as other people turned out and filled up the route. Then the police start driving up and down and the road’s closed. The excitement levels are building as the sponsor’s vehicles pass by – lots of official torch relay bottles of coke and life-size Olympic mascots and… wait… the guy in that truck looks remarkably like John Biehler. Hey – it is! And Miss604 sitting in front of him!

Quite a surprise!!

Then the torch arrived. Pretty cool! But at the end of the day it’s just a guy in funny clothes jogging with a flaming torch. Admittedly not something that you see every day but somehow it seemed a little anti-climactic (or maybe that was just after the shock of seeing John and Rebecca). We all had a good laugh and then headed off for our days and we got back to White Rock JUST in time for Helen to open up.

Some more pictures:

We had our Table Topics debate last night… and it rocked.

I was pretty depressed about it going into our meeting… I’d only had replies from two of our members and they’d both said “put me on whichever side you see fit”. They were just trying to make life easier for me but it rather short-circuited my evil plans: if they don’t tell me their personal preference then I can’t switch them to the opposite team. And I’d wanted SIX volunteers.

I got to the meeting early and had a quick word with the Chairman and asked him to call me up for 5 minutes before we got to the speakers.

So I stood in the middle of the stage and explained again what we were doing for Table Topics: “we’re having a mini-debate with two minute speeches. The topic is ‘Money is corrupting sports’ and I want 3 volunteers for each side of the debate”. I gestured theatrically with my arms and said “I’d like 3 people who believe that money IS corrupting sports to come and stand on my LEFT and 3 people who believe that money is NOT corrupting sports to come and stand on my RIGHT”. By asking them to come up to the front and stand on one side of me or the other I forced them to make a commitment to one preferred opinion or the other. I got my six speakers up front and then I gave them the twist.

The response was fantastic: some looks of horror, some looks of confusion, some “oh Jon you are EVIL” looks and some wide grins. I explained it again… “the people on my LEFT who’ve come up here because they believe that money IS corrupting sports, I want you to each talk about why money is NOT corrupting sports. The people on my RIGHT who believe that money is NOT corrupting sports, you’ll be talking about why money IS corrupting sports”. I explained that the purpose of the debate wasn’t to persuade people that your personal opinion was right but to make the speakers think and exercise their speaking skills.

I suggested that they think of possible topics during the first half of the meeting and then confer with their team members during the break to make sure that they’re not all saying the same things and to decide on their speaking order.

As I sat down, the person sitting next to me, one of the debate speakers, turned and said “Jon, that is SO evil”. I replied “I know. Awesome isn’t it?” – she grinned and nodded.

During the mid-meeting break, the room was a hive of activity. I could hear people brainstorming ideas and dividing up topics. Non-speaking members joined in – they went over to join with the groups and share their ideas.

Just to add some further spice, I asked for a secret vote before the debate and again afterwards. According to the pre-debate vote, we narrowly believed that money IS corrupting sports.

The first affirmative speaker talked about the Olympics and the vast quantities of money that flows in and out of that – a strong argument with which to lead off. The first rebuttal talked about children and their love of playing sports – a good argument that reminded us that ’sports’ isn’t just professional sports.

The second affirmative looked at superstars like Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant – do they still love sport or have the multi-million dollar paychecks led to their problems? The second rebuttal brought us back to the Olympics again but this time looking at the investments that the Lower Mainland has got out of the event – would we ever have got the Richmond Oval or the Canada Line without the Olympics?

The third affirmative talked about sports gambling and the billions of dollars which change hands based on the results of sports games. The debate finished with the third rebuttal speaker who talked about how money led to professional sports which in turn redefined what was possible in the field of human achievement.

Six great two minute speeches with six great opinions. I was glad I was sitting down to listen because I was just blown away by how well our members stepped up to the challenge.

After the debate the second secret vote said resoundingly that money is NOT corrupting sports. That doesn’t mean that we had winners or losers in our contest though… everybody put on a great performance. Several members said to me afterwards that it was the best Table Topics they’ve seen. I can only take some of the responsibility – the original idea wasn’t mine and it was the amazing performances from our members that really made it a winning evening. It just goes to show that when you shake things up at Toastmasters you really get the best out of your club members.

I know it’s going to be a big success but at first glance it’s confusing as to where its market is.

It’s not a replacement for a laptop:

• it has no USB ports for peripherals
• no multi-tasking (we think)
• limited opportunity to develop applications for it (developers have to work within the walled garden of the AppStore and users have to sync through iTunes)

But it’s too big to be pocketable so it’s not a replacement for a PDA like an iPod Touch.

If I wanted to actually “do” anything then I’d take a laptop along with me, if I wanted to read a book or a PDF then my gut feel is that I’d rather have an eReader (Engadget has a great comparison with the Kindle), if it’s just for casual internet access then a smartphone will do.

I think a major part of the market for the iPad is going to be iPhone users who are finding it too hard to read all the information that they’ve got access to on the screen of their phone.

Besides products, Apple are also great at making markets. Just because few people can see a need for a product today doesn’t mean that they couldn’t take advantage of it if they had one. Lots of Apple fans will buy them regardless, even if they already carry an iPhone and a MacBook around with them. And once they get the product out there in people’s hands in quantity, applications and use-cases will follow. It’s sure to be another winner.

I think most people considering the iPad will already have a smartphone and probably a laptop as well. I think we can also assume that these people carry their smartphone with them everywhere. So, if we’re assuming that technology purchases are made with the intention of simplifying our lives then will you be taking your iPad with you in situations where you previously took your laptop (which I see as a win)? Or will you now be carrying three devices (which I see as a fail)?

Continuing from that… if you’re already carrying your smartphone around with you everywhere, I see the 3G option as unnecessary for most people. Why not save the $130+$30/month (or Canadian equivalent) for iPad 3G access and tether the iPad to your phone? As far as I can see, there’s no definitive statement as to whether or not the iPad can be tethered. But you can bet that any lock-down that Apple put on it will be broken within a month or two and I’m sure tethering is one of the things that the community will enable.

Whilst thinking about phones, one of the features that interested me was the inclusion of a microphone. Whenever I see a microphone on a wireless device, my first thought is of Skype (even though I’ve barely ever used Skype myself!). The lack of a camera might be an issue for some people but, especially now that Apple have graciously allowed VoIP applications to connect over 3G, you could actually use the iPad to make phone calls. It’s probably a little on the large side to replace your mobile phone and the lack of multi-tasking means that you couldn’t talk to someone whilst you get information for them from an email or a webpage but I think it’s an interesting use-case – especially when tied to an unlimited data plan.

Oh, and we can’t talk about the iPad without talking about the horendous name. Everyone seems to have agreed that it’s dreadful.. but then is it much more dreadful than iPod sounded when we first heard it? Heck, look at all the flack that Nintendo took for the Wii and that didn’t stop it flying off the shelves. I suspect in a few months we’ll have forgotten all the feminine hygiene wisecracks and moved on. Breaking out of the i{thing} naming pattern is long overdue for Apple. But the brand recognition of i{thing} is immense… I can’t see Apple having the guts to do it and, as a result, I think it’s actually becoming an Achilles heel of the brand as much as it’s a strength.

I am Table Topics Master at my Toastmasters club this week.

It’s a role I’ve done a dozen times before and the format is always the same: the Table Topics Master poses questions and invites members to come up and talk, spontaneously, on the topic for 1-2 minutes. Stuff like “my favorite vacation” or “how would you feel if you had no internet for a day?”. It’s a lot of fun and we hear some great speeches and some not-so-great speeches but it’s always the same format.

This week I’m changing things around and we’re having a debate.

I got the idea from the Toastmasters officer training that I went to tonight. I’ve seen a mini-debate done in Table Topics before but one of the other VP Education officers at tonight’s training mentioned a twist. Something evil. And I’m stealing the idea because it makes me do a little evil happy dance inside.

The subject that I’ve chosen for the debate is “Money is corrupting sports”… a topic that I hope many of our members will feel passionate about one way or the other but also I hope that nobody will feel offended by people arguing against their point-of-view. I chose the subject from an incredible pair of lists at http://www.ada.org.nz/moots.php

So I’m looking for 3 speakers for each side of the debate – I’ve emailed out the subject in advance and asked for volunteer speakers for each side.

Usually with Table Topics you don’t tell anybody the subject in advance… that’s sort of the point. But I need to this week because I want people who are passionate about the subject to step forward. I’ve also warned them that I’d like it to be in the spirit of a normal Table Topics session – i.e. even though you’ve had the question in advance I don’t want you to do a lot of preparation for it.

Except… here’s the kicker…

At the start of the meeting I’m going to tell them all that they’re speaking for the opposite side of the debate to the one that they’ve signed up for.

It’s beautifully evil. But it’s also totally valid. The point of a debate at Toastmasters is not really to persuade people about the opinion that you hold but to make you think on your feet and exercise your speaking skills. Being forced to talk against your personally held beliefs is a perfect example.

I’m still waiting to hear back from the club members. I’ll be sure to post again after the meeting.

Here’s a little easter egg for you on the Google search page.

Don’t type anything into the search box and click “I’m Feeling Lucky”

Up pops a large number… counting down in seconds. A quick conversation with a calculator says that this is counting down to the end of the world year.

I HAVE to tell you about the coolest thing I’ve seen for a long time. I’m just bursting with excitement about this! It’s kinda scary really!

If you run a blog then people are copying stuff off your page. Guaranteed. It happens all the time. Sometimes it’s malicious (take a look at http://ecommercesolutionnews.com/ and compare it to Linda Bustos’ hard work at http://www.getelastic.com/) but most of the time it’s just for emails to friends… “Hey, I saw this…”

You can’t really prevent the former, nor can you turn it to your advantage – short of going public and creating a big expensive stink about it. But the latter is an interesting situation. Here’s someone with an interest in your work sending content to someone else… but not giving them a way of coming back to the original. They lose out and you lose out.

I was recently introduced to the most amazing product from Calgary-based startup Tynt. Tynt Insight is a simple modification to your blog which monitors your blog page and… get this… it detects when anybody copies anything from your page. The even neater thing is what it does next: it amends the copied content in the clipboard to include a tagline referring the reader back to your blog. Just when you thought that was too neat for words… it gets better still! I know, I know… I’m borderline hysterical here, but there’s a reason. The URL in the added tagline is a link back to your blog with a unique id embedded in it… when the reader clicks on it it takes them back to your blog and shows the post that was copied from with the copied text highlighted!

Try it! Try it now! Copy a paragraph from this blog post and paste it into something… an email, a text editor, it doesn’t matter. Heck, I’ll do it for you, look… I copy text from a previous post:

I paste it into an email. And look what happens:

Then when someone clicks on the link, look where they go:

Go on… tell me that isn’t cool – I dare you! Added to all of this, the blog owner gets a great dashboard on Tynt’s site with details of what’s been copied and a raft of analytics.

I met Kerri Knul at a presentation where she was demonstrating Tynt Insight and I was just blown away… I think I stood there with my mouth just opening and closing and no words coming out (disclosure: until she gave me a T-shirt). Sure, this solution’s not perfect – it only works in the more modern browsers and it’s a 2 second job to delete the tagline if you don’t want it. But for the majority of “Hey, I saw this…” cases I think it adds genuine value to the copier, the reader and to the blog owner.  If you have a WordPress.org blog then all you need to do is create an account at Tynt and add one line to your footer.php – so go try it out!

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been watching with interest Raul’s tweets about Preventable (‘The Community Against Preventable Injuries’ – a non-profit aimed at reducing the number of preventable injuries in BC).

I love what they’re doing… the idea that so many injuries are ‘accidents’ that just happen is rubbish and has annoyed me for a long time. “No – you crashing into the back of that car at the red light was NOT an accident. It didn’t happen ‘acidentally’. You hit him because you were driving too fast and/or not paying attention” etc etc. If people thought more about what they’re doing, thought about the risks inherent in their activity and took an extra minute or two to counter that risk then things would be much safer.

One of the things that Preventable point out is that the leading cause of death in BC for people between ages 1 and 44 is preventable injuries (notice that… I didn’t call them accidents). 1,200 people a year dead and 400,000 injured in BC alone.

Preventable’s big PR push at the moment is to get people to take care over Halloween. To be honest, Halloween is one of my least favorite times of the year. Probably a result of not having grown up here! It’s not the small children dressed up as princesses and pirates that annoy me. It’s not that I never get invited to the cool parties (this year’s an exception – more about that next week if I can rig up a costume at the last minute). It’s more the gangs of drunken teenagers roaming the streets and setting off fireworks. And yes, alcohol and explosives don’t mix… but they’re a harder audience to get to pay any attention!

Preventable’s been reaching out to the social media community recently. They have a great blog full of information on their website, they’re big on Twitter and yesterday they invited a gaggle of bloggers down to The Network Hub to communicate their message face-to-face (cos sometimes that’s just the best you know?) and hand out treats.

Yes, I went. Yes, I was bribed. Yes, this blog post is (partly) the result of their flagrant attempt to sway my judgment. An interesting evening was had in the company of some great Vancouver bloggers and social media folk. In the interest of transparency I should also point out that I profited from the evening to the tune of two plates of delicious sushi, a couple of handfuls of candy and a reflective trick-or-treat bag which has been passed on to a small child for use trick-or-treating – that’s one 6 year old who’ll be very safe out on Saturday night.

(OK, a bit of sensationalism here, but…)

Last weekend’s Vancouver Barcamp was my second and I enjoyed it even more than the previous year’s event. I know I’m not alone – all the comments I’ve seen have been positive. But what has it achieved? I’m intrigued to find out about things that people learnt during Barcamp which are going to make measurable differences to, for example, their lives, their products or their working environments.

I ask this partly because I’m a little skeptical. Maybe I’m attending the wrong sessions so I’m wondering what it is that I missed. The experience that I personally get from Barcamp is totally positive but it’s about soft things:

• meeting face-to-face with people I’ve only previously communicated with using 140 characters or less. Monica Hamburg pretty much fell into this category
• reconnecting with people I haven’t seen for a while – Tyler Ingram for example
• chance meetings with interesting people. For example two of the many fascinating strangers I bumped into over the weekend turned out to be Zak Greant and Steve Tannock
• comparing war stories with other developers. The “freelance is not free” and “designers vs coders” sessions were great examples of this. It’s nice to know we’re all in the same boat, nobody has a perfect solution. Did we solve anything? Nope. Did we feel better about it afterwards? I think so
• listening to how other people use technology. The “non-profits and technology” session was very interesting in that regard

So Barcamp was a great day and I can guarantee that I’ll be back again next year. But it’s hard to put a finger on any dramatic pieces of information that will change my life this week.

Do you disagree? Have you rushed into the office today armed with a new approach for something? Which session did you get the most out of? Who did you meet who changed your world? I’m eager to hear about it. Of course you might say “Barcamp is what you make it” and I agree. So what did YOU make it?

A good term at BCIT this Spring. A very good term, both in terms (oh dear!) of course enjoyment and in terms of marks.

I took the 12 week ‘XML For Web Applications’ COMP2899 course downtown. My first course at the downtown campus – it’s really nice there: very modern and shiny. Course was also excellent – interesting material… I never knew you could do so much with XML and there was so much XML capability built into every browser. I knew about basic XML, DTDs, XPATH and parsers already but the course also taught schemas, XSLT and web services – overall very interesting. The course required quite a lot of learning but the labs, assignments and tests were all very fair – basically just to show that you’d done and understood the lecture content. I got a 99% mark which I’m very pleased with – especially so because the final exam was closed book with no ‘cheat sheet’!

I took the XML course for several reasons. Partly because XML interests me – all applications need configuration data and free-format text files are a recipe for disaster. Partly because I’m trying to complete the Advanced Java Development Certificate program and none of the courses I still needed were running this term. There’s one required course which hasn’t run for at least 18 months! I emailed the part-time studies director and he recommended the XML course. The course isn’t on the Java program but apparently there’s a re-organization coming which will put it on there (although another 5 months have passed now and the XML course hasn’t been added to the Java program and the lost required course still hasn’t run).

Having looked at the XML course I noticed that it’s also part of the Web Application Software Development Certificate program. I looked at that program and was amazed… not only are all the courses on things I’m interested in, I’ve already done half of them! So now I have TWO goals.

Over the last year, I’ve come across small pieces of PHP in several places. Tweaking WordPress themes has exposed me to some, and the BCIT AJAX course has required writing some PHP to handle the server-side functionality but this has pretty much all been self-taught. So when I noticed that a PHP course, COMP1920, was part of the Web Development program and there was an accelerated version coming up, I signed up immediately.

The PHP course was really eye-opening. For starters, it was the standard 12 week syllabus condensed into 6 Saturdays – you do one ‘evening’ in the morning and the next ‘evening’ in the afternoon. The course itself started out at the basics as some of the students hadn’t even programmed before, let alone seen PHP. But with the workload doubled, I was very happy with the pace.

The course lecturer makes an incredible difference to any course and the PHP course reintroduced me to the best lecturer I’ve had at BCIT. Jason Harrison is a programmer’s programmer – he isn’t there to teach you the theory, the 20 different parameters you can use with a function, he’s there to teach you how to get results. Jason teaches the course as 80% programming and 20% business. One of the things that PHP is great for is rapidly developing web-based applications and so a lot of people make a lot of money from using it. It seemed that most of the students had signed up for the course with that in mind and so we were all as spellbound when Jason started offering advice about business strategy as when he introduced the fopen() function. Actually… maybe more so!

I’m used to lecturers emphasizing the evils of cheating and the need for students to complete their work on their own but Jason’s approach is the opposite. Yes, work that you hand in has to be written by you, but there’s nothing wrong with consulting other students for advice. After all, that’s what you’d do in the real world. In the PHP course, Jason takes it a stage further – there are sections of the course which you MUST complete with other students – some parts in pairs and the final assignment as a team. The final assignment was something I’ve never seen on a BCIT course. The brief was to form a team, research something related to the course material that might be of interest to the other students and then give a 30 minute presentation – complete with demonstration and class exercise.

The course work was great. Because we were working at double pace, the first half of the course was heavily loaded with labs to be submitted each week. The second half of the course had coding assignments, the final assignment and revision all falling over each other. This generated a terrific buzz – I was writing up our class exercise, struggling with PHP session management and guiding other students through their problems simultaneously. Again, just like the real world.

Everything came together wonderfully. The final coding assignment had two options: the easy option was marked to a maximum of 100%, the hard option was marked to a maximum of 115%. Unfortunately there was no overlap between the two projects… so you had to make a decision at the beginning and stick with it. I chose the hard option and got bogged down in session management for a bit but once I’d conquered that it came together well – I even had time to extend it beyond the requirements with a bit of personal flourish. Our presentation on email injection, form validation and CAPTCHA went very smoothly. I presented the class exercise on getting the other students to add a CAPTCHA test to an existing PHP form – went OK, most of the students managed to complete it and I think I answered all the questions well. It seems my Toastmasters experience showed through… I’d mentioned that I was in Toastmasters at the beginning of the course but not had any feedback. After my presentation I had THREE different people come up to me and ask me for more information. Because of the compressed timetable we had a short break after the presentations and then straight into the final exam, no time to rest on our laurels!

Overall I loved the course… content, lecturer, format all worked very well. Oh and I was very pleased with my mark as well… 100%

Jason also teaches an advanced PHP course but for some reason it’s only scheduled once a year. I’m itching to get on that course!

My friend Erica was asking me today about video editing in Ubuntu. First she was asking about tools to use for editing.

I’ve toyed with ‘Open Movie Editor’ in the past. If you’re familiar with Adobe Premiere then you’ll be familiar with the general layout here… a timeline of multiple video and audio tracks, a preview window, multiple clips that you mix together with transitions etc. I’ll admit that it isn’t the same as Adobe Premiere but it does cost $799 less!

Open Movie Editor is in the Synaptic package manager. It’s available through the Ubuntu repositories but it’s supported by the community, not directly by Canonical. Erica had spotted Kino which is a much simpler program. It’s more like Windows Movie Editor – a single timeline with one clip transitioning into the next clip. Kino also has the advantage of being supported directly by Canonical.  Actually I was pretty impressed with it – I think it’ll be sufficient for all of my personal video editing tasks.

Great! So now we can edit videos.

But there’s a second problem – getting the video into Erica’s PC in the first place. She had a day’s worth of footage on a DV camcorder and Kino has an entire page dedicated to capture but when she connected the firewire (aka IEEE1394) cable between her PC and camcorder nothing happened… all the buttons remained greyed-out. What to do?

This prompted me to dig out my own camcorder and connect it up… same as her setup – nothing happened. Kino’s preferences panel says the  IEEE1394 subsystem is not responding. It’s actually pretty helpful – it says “you must have read and write access to /dev/raw1394. I checked and found that
a) the /dev/raw1394 device was owned by user root, group root
b) the permissions on it were rw-rw—-
So if you weren’t the root user or a member of the root group then you couldn’t use it!

This is all fixed by a quick
sudo chmod a+rw /dev/raw1394

And then the Kino capture buttons buttons sprang into life and video capture worked fine. Erica did the same and everything was good in the universe.

For a while.

But get this… the next time I turn my PC on, the permissions on /dev/raw1394 have reset to rw-rw—- so I have to chmod it again.

I truly believe that Linux is getting close to ready for ordinary non-technical consumers but this makes me wonder if perhaps I’m wrong. It’s bad enough that I have to go to the command line and change the device permissions once, but to have to do it every time I want to import video? I can’t see the logic in setting it up like that and I can’t see that it’s something a user-friendly operating system should require.

Maybe I’m not setting about this the way that I should be? Maybe there’s an easier way?