Lars Pind

Fra dr.dk: Men film får oftere premiere samtidigt over hele verden, og så er det også nødvendigt med sikkerhedsforanstaltninger i lande som Danmark, siger Joachim Kundert.

Kan vi så til gengæld slippe for regionskoden på DVD’er, tak?

Cucina Media, the company behind PublicSquare, founded by Christina Wodtke and myself, is now incorporated in Delaware. Just-in-time incorporation, as the product launch is now imminent.

Yeah, the title is not a typo. Check out the screen shot. “Ikke ryger” means non-smoking. As far as I know, all SAS flights are now non-smoking. And this is on a newly redesigned site, so it’s not something left over from back when you could smoke on flights. One wonders.

Ajaxload.info is really cool, but in order to figure out which indicator is best for my need, I need to go through all 17 of them, generating one of each. And then I can’t even compare them afterwards.

That’s why I made this page where you can see them all side-by-side. Enjoy!

Name	Example
Circle ball
Indicator
Kit
Arrows
Indicator Big
Snake
Bouncing ball
Bar
Bar 2
Bar 3
Circling ball
Hypnotize
Wheel
Expanding Circle
Radar
Refresh
Flower

Now head on over to Ajaxload.info and generate that spinner.

I have now found a system for taking notes that I am exceedingly happy with, thanks to a combination of both Jacob Bøtter, Mark Hurst, and Harry Max.

First, at EuroGEL, which by the way was amazing, you should definitely go next year, Mark handed out these tiny 3×5 inch notebooks from Staples. I looked at it and winced. Way too small to be of use to me. I normally use an A4 size notebook, with plenty of space.

A few days later, I was with Jacob, who was fervently taking notes on Post-Its, mentioning how good it was that they were so small that he could always have it in his pocket. Having myself been caught without my notebook, I could see the point. I tried the Post-It note for a day, but it was too clumsy. That’s when I recalled Mark’s notebook.

The final touch was the pen. At first, I was using my standard Space Pen, but as I was walking around New York City day after day, often without my bag, I’d carry the notebook in my back pocket, and the Space Pen didn’t appreciate that. Enter Harry, who a few weeks before had shown me The Bullet. It’s tiny and opens up into a full-sized pen. You can sit on it, and it won’t complain. And if you’re not familiar with the space pen, the key feature is that it’s pressurized, so the ink will always flow, whether or not you hold it upwards or downwards. (In Europe, buy it here, you’ll get it in just a few days.)

This simple kit has served me really great for almost two months. When I’m at meetings or read stuff, I’ll take notes. If there’s an action item, I’ll put in on a the left page with a box next to it that I can check when it’s done. I’ll keep several running lists of things I need to talk to so and so about, or ideas for food to cook for dinner, and on and on. And the more I use it, the more ideas I get. It’s pure magick.

A big shout-out to all three of you.

UPDATE: Mark tells me that Cat Fitzgerald was the one who picked out the note books. Thanks to you, too, Cat!

See this URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Instant-Italian-Elisabeth/dp/0071421157/.

When did they start doing that? They were always the grand master of convoluted URLs. And now speaking URLs? Nice. Now I just wish they cut out all that session crap from the URL.

Our land line is working again now, after having been out of commission for over two months as we’ve been traveling, but also struggling to get someone to own up to and fix the problem.

Our internet connection is paid for by my wife’s job at DR, and supplied by TDC, both large former-monopolies. The challenge was to explain the problem to my wife in terms she could communicate to DR’s helpdesk in a way that would convince them to request TDC to come and fix the problem.

The first mistake was telling the truth, that we could exchange two cables to make the land line work but not the internet, and that of course we chose to have internet working over phone service. That was too complicated for them to handle: “If it’s your land line that’s broken, then it’s your problem, not ours.” Ok, let’s pretend we flipped the cables and go back. “Hey, guys, now the internet’s broken, fix it!” “Oh, but we have a different VPN solution now.”

In the end, we took a photo of the cable that was broken, took it to the helpdesk at DR, who immediately ordered the TDC guy, and the next morning (that’s today), he was here to fix it.

Of course, he left behind him some funky telco device, and I’m sure we’re going to have a blast trying to return that.

It strikes me as odd that in a city as wholly dependent on bikes to commute to and from work, there’s so little innovation in the bike repair space.

First, any decent car repair shop will loan you a car that you can drive while yours is getting fixed. Not so with bike repairs. You’re supposed to just live without, and, I don’t know, take the bus or something. Personally I never use buses, the investment to figure out which lines go where and when is too much work to be worth my while, given the limited use I make of them. (Trains are easier to figure out because they need rails, not roads, and there are less of them, so keeping track of various lines is much easier.)

Why not offer me use of a bike for a nominal fee? I know there’s going to be wear and tear and the risk of breakage, but you’re a bike repair shop, you should be able to deal with that, no?

Next, or alternatively, opening hours from 10 AM to 5.30 PM don’t do me much good. How about accepting my bike for repair at 8 AM and fix it the same day, so I can do hand it in as I get to work, and then have it back in time to ride back.

Or if you’re in a residential area, accept it in the evening, fix it during the evening and night, and have it ready for me from 7 AM the next morning.

I know that we live in an expensive labor country, and that’s why this will probably never happen, but I’d really like to see this happen.

Does any of you know what the situation is like in other bike-intensive cities like Amsterdam? Do Stockholmers ride their bikes a lot? Helsinkians? How has your city tackled this, if at all? I’m sure in Beijing they’ve gotten this down a long time ago. Guan, you’ve just been there, did you see anything like this?

I wasn’t aware of geonames.com until just now when I read this blog post from Greenpeace IT.

It’s looking very neat, and I think we’ll want to build this into the Boxes and Arrows events calendar.

The system we currently have where people are just entering the name of the city of course allows for typos, and doesn’t let us do any kind of proximity search.

It’s much easier that trying to build and maintain your own database of cities and places, like others are doing. So this looks promising.

Does anybody have experience with it?

Riffing a bit more on Derek Powazek and his 8020 Publishing, what’s interesting is that while he, Threadless, OpenDemocracy, Boxes and Arrows, and others are all prime individual examples of we media, what we’re doing is really democratizing the tools needed to do we media.

What I mean by that, specifically, is that 8020 Publishing has spent significant time and money building an outstanding platform. And so has Threadless. And so has Boxes and Arrows, for that matter. But while these other platforms are just for them, we’ve built ours for everyone to use.

What we ultimately want to do is empower a whole generation of community-first, user-driven, collaborative, social, or simply “We Media”. We believe that there’s going to be not just a handful of businesses doing publishing this way, we believe it’s a trend, we believe it’s the way to produce everything from global news to niche publications. Anything from national news to local news, trade journals, company newsletters. All the areas where a community of people need to share stories and insight in ways that benefit them all and strengthen their sense of community, and, by the way, they don’t have as much time and money as they’d like.

There’s so many of these groups, and so few of them can afford to hire the talented web designers and engineers required to build their own solution. That’s where we can help out. We make it cheap, and we bend over backwards to make people save time.

So if you haven’t already, sign up to be notified when we launch at http://publicsquarehq.com/. We’re laboring hard to polish the last bits and pieces based on all the good stuff we’ve learned from being in real-world use for over 9 months, and we can’t wait to open our doors for business.

Just a quick note to say that I do not recommend chopping off the tip of a finger. Not that I did, but I got eerily close on Wednesday night when I cut halfway through my left pinkie in addition to the carrot I actually intended to cut.

Lessons learned, or as I like to call them, my Rules of Pinkie:

• First rule of knife skills: Accuracy over dexterity – I’d seen someone on TV and wanted to force myself to go a bit faster
• Use a fairly light knife that’s easier to control – my regular knife is dull, so I’m using this other one that’s much more heavy than I’m used to.
• Don’t practice speed when you mind is elsewhere – I was mulling over some programming problem not really paying attention
• Throw away the last bit of the carrot – better that than throwing away your finger. I was brought up to not waste food, but there’s clearly a point where it’s better to just eat it right away or throw it away – or get a dog.

All in all, the tip seems to stay put and the wound seems to heal weel. I still don’t have any feeling in the tip of the finger, but so long as it survives I’ll be happy. And I’ll try to be a bit more careful in the future: It turns out that finger is used for more than you’d think.

There’s a webcast up of Derek Powazek’s talk about community-first publishing at the Knock Knock conference. It’s definitely worth viewing, it’s a very interesting and hot space—and exactly the market we’re targeting with PublicSquare, due out within the next month. Exciting!

Some good points from his presentation:

• Threadless rocks!
• Design for selfishness—what’s in it for your community?
• Design for all 3 of creators, editors, and consumers
• Let people publish their stuff elsewhere—the value is in the community, not in ownership to the content
• Loved the phrase “scarcity of scarcity” about a world with an infinite number of pages

(Via Jacob Bøtter.)

Everyone’s doing it, and so are we: The Boxes and Arrows Job Board is live!

The staff frequently gets email from people asking if they can help fill a position—well, now we can.

So if you’re looking to fill a position for an information architect, web designer, icon analyst, interaction designer, or developer, go on over and list your job.

My server got hacked once again. I’m not sure what I’ve done to attract this kind of unwanted attention – I’m doing all the obvious things like keeping the system patched, passwords secure, moved SSH to a non-standard port, monitoring the logs, etc. – but if you’re reading this, please don’t do it again!

Thankfully, nothing was lost. The upside is that each time is a learning experience, and a chance to harden and tighten things up a bit more.

This time, I took the opportunity to switch from Debian to FreeBSD. From my brief experience with it, I like it a lot better. I thought I was going to miss some of the great GNU tools, since it’s not GNU/Linux, but that hasn’t really been an issue. I also thought I would miss the Debian package manager, but I like the flexibility of the ports system with the option of binary packages a lot better.

The key productivity advantage, though, is that it’s easier to get up-to-date software. When you’re developing in Rails, you tend to want the latest version of software. On Debian, that means you’re always mixing and matching from stable and unstable, and sometimes you even have to go to testing to get what you need. For example, I ended up giving up on trying to get Apache 2.2 installed under Debian. With FreeBSD, there just wasn’t a problem.

From a security standpoint, I’m hoping that the fact it’s a smaller target is going to help some. Plus FreeBSD has this nice daily security email. And finally, I find that the FreeBSD ports system lets me install a set of software closer to just the stuff I need—and less software is always more secure.

Finally, I’m caving in and getting a firewall. The folks who taught me always taught me that firewalls don’t matter if you just close off all the services and ports you’re not using. It seems logical, but I don’t want to take a chance with this anymore, so now I’m getting a firewall put in front. It feels a bit like buying the extended warranty for a fridge, but what are you gonna do?

The most annoying part of this was that we were down for so long. 24 hours in total. Of that, the 15 were spent waiting for HostEurope to get the OS reinstalled. I sent in the request at about 2 AM, half an hour after the breakin, which my SMS alerts had alerted me to. The OS reinstall wasn’t started on until around noon the next day, and wasn’t completed until 5 PM, which makes 15 hours total. Obviously, that’s not acceptable going forward.

So we’re looking at moving to a different host, and while we’re at it, we should probably get one in the US, since that’s our primary market, though the bandwidth we get in Europe is insane compared with the US plans (5.000 Gb of traffic included in all plans starting at EUR 100/month). Compare that to both Rackspace and Tilted, which gives you 150 Gb in the basic plan, that’s 1/33rd of HostEurope.

What are your recommendations for a serious host that can also help us keep our systems secure and optimized?

The next question is when and how to move beyond the current single-box setup. Right now, there’s ample room to grow on that machine. We could easily host 20x the traffic we currently do (which is mostly thanks to Boxes and Arrows), and I haven’t even started optimizing yet. But the problem is downtime if something breaks (or someone breaks in)—the 15 turnaround time on a reinstall is not something we can afford.

One approach would be to move to 2 boxes first, one being web and application, the other being database, but replicate the database, and have them do failover. That way we add both redundancy and distribute the load. Then from there, we can move to 4 when we need it.

What’s your experience with this, what are the pitfalls and things to look out for, and how much should we expect this to cost us? Your help is greatly appreciated.

Most sites have a “Remember me” checkbox of some sort, which will store a permanent cookie, rather than a session cookie, so you don’t have to login again the next time you visit.

JPG magazine takes that a step further with the following note:

“We won’t log you out automatically, so if you share this computer with anyone else, be sure to click “log out” (at the top, right of every page) when you’re done.”

I just realized that my production servers were running the Ruby version of the MySQL driver, to the tune of a performance penalty of 10-15%, according to Riding Rails.

It turns out the compilation had failed because it couldn’t locate the include files and library files, which get strewn around the file system in Debian when MySQL in installed using “apt”.

After trying various things, it turns out this worked:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config

Don’t ask me why, it just worked for me. I’d suppose that compiling your own Mysql and installing it /usr/local would work as well, if you use thi—with-mysql-dir option instead.

Do you ever get the feeling that the captain has simply forgotten that the fasten seat belt sign is still on? And thought it’s probably because they’re not themselves affected by it?

Yes, I’m back in Copenhagen for a while now. Big hugs to all our friends in New York, you are amaazing!