Lars Pind

I’m going to be less responsive than usual this week. We’re moving into a new apartment and are going to be painting and have lots of things to take care of.

Clay Shirky: Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data

Check out this list of institutions coming to our dotLRN seminar on April 10 … there are even people coming from Guatemala and Argentina!

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• University of Heidelberg, Germany
• University of Cambridge, UK
• University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• University of Aarhus, Denmark
• Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
• IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Erhvervsakademi vest, Denmark
• Danish University of Education, Denmark
• Learning Lab Denmark, Denmark
• Netuniversity, Sweden
• University of Bergen, Norway
• Tampere University of Technology, Finland
• Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
• Universidad Galileo, Guatemala
• Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, Argentina
• Lunds Universitet, Sverige
• Birkbeck, University of London, UK
• Tre Falke Skolen, Denmark
• University of Mannheim, Germany
• Umeå Universitet, Sweden

Switch to whatever the hell you want ... a great parody on Apple’s Switch ads.

When I lived in New York, I used to go to Bar Six and have their Tagine of Chicken, with couscous, apricot and other dried fruits and nuts, Moroccan spices like cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, etc., And they’d serve it with a this brilliant hot sauce on the side.

Last night, I tried to recreate the chicken, and it went okay (too much cardamom, I think, and I’d also included dried coconut, which didn’t go over too well). But the hot sauce, I have no idea how to reproduce.

It was a light-reddish color, fairly fluid, and spicy. There was about a cup or two of it to one serving, so it’s not like those chili hot sauces where a single drop kills you. I can’t figure out what the base is … could be water, maybe dairy such as sour cream, I don’t think it’s tomato-based.

One thing I’m thinking it could be, is Harissa mixed with sour cream. But I’m not sure.

Anybody out there have any clues?

Did I tell you guys about the great get-together that we’re hosting here in Copenhagen on April 10-11?

On Thursday the 10th, it’s about dotLRN, the open source e-learning platform built by MIT, which we’re helping Heidelberg University deploy.

On Friday the 11th, it’s about OpenACS, the open source web application toolkit, which I’ve been building since 1999, and on which dotLRN is built.

We have well over 40 registrants so far, and they’re literally from all over the world: US east and west coast, Guatemala, England, Germany, Spain, Finland, Sweden, Holland, Norway, Ireland, as well as a number of people from Denmark from institutions such as Aarhus University, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Business School, IT University of Copenhagen, Esbjerg Business School, Learning Lab Denmark, and the Danish University of Education.

It’ll be an exciting and captivating couple of days, and we’re very excited. I’m sure we’re yet to see many more participants.

Here’s the link again.

I’m looking for a smart, competent, fun hacker to work with us on a project-basis in my company’s nice office in Copenhagen.

Pass it on, and send me a pointer to the best hacker you know.

More at Collaboraid’s web site.

Stefano Mazzocchi: (link)

Anyway, it’s an design pattern: “good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not”. This is extremely hard to understand, it’s probably the most counter-intuitive thing about open source dynamics.

What he’s saying is that if the code’s too good, people will just use it instead of extending it. Hm.

Clay Shirky: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too?

This is exactly what I’m doing with the For Developers section on my company web site: Do some of the up-front conceptualization and design, and hope that someone stops by to either implement it themselves, or pay us to implement it for them. So far it’s worked out pretty well.

An important point is also that things don’t always get implemented the way I had in mind. And that’s totally fine. When someone else implements it, that other developer will usually have some really good ideas of his own, and the end result is better than either of us could’ve done on our own. That’s the beauty of working together and learning together.

Mark Hurst’s Good Experience: Google and Branding.

I want to have a column like Mark’s :)

Doc Searls and David Weinberger: World of Ends – What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else.

Excellent description of the nature of the internet, with some poorly disguised puns at the recording industry, telcos, etc.

Thanks to Dalager for passing this on.

... if I may say so myself.

Today we released some major new functionality for OpenACS, thanks to MIT, Heidelberg University, and Greenpeace International. Read more about it over at my company blog.

For a while, I’ve been trying to track down why Emacs would always open my files in locked mode, so I had to unlock them. Now I found that MarkD has the answer: Emacs Locking.

Paul Graham: Why Nerds Are Unpopular.

Even though I didn’t go to school in America, I can certainly recognize the forces he’s talking about. I too had a pretty unhappy time in school, being bullied by older kids. Fortunately, I’m really happy that I was and am a nerd today.