Addington Space (Mark IV)
An all-new look Addington Space website is up! Yay!
About four years ago I first tried setting up a neighbourhood website, based on pmwiki. It sort of worked but not so much. The frameworks just weren't there to do a full Social Network site, which is what I wanted. And I wasn't in the mood to write my own from scratch in PHP, even using Drupal/Joomla/et al. So I figured I ought to try simplifying it as a blog. When that didn't work, I figured I needed to give in and try a fully hosted cloud solution. But I wanted to stay in New Zealand.... but no.
Attempt 1: Pmwiki. Attempt 2: Wordpress. Attempt 3: PeoplesTimes.com. Attempt 4: Ning.com
And finally it looks like we might have a workable platform. Yay! The downsides are Google ads and being hosted in the States. The upsides are really easy setup, automatic self-serve registration, single sign-on across multiple Ning sites, users can post content (the most important bit).
If you live in Addington - or anywhere in Christchurch and interested in social work or community development - try the site out. It's possible we could set up a network of related Ning sites if this works.
Ultimately I still want to find a local, free software, OpenSocial compliant, self-maintaining, 100% organic solution, but getting something that works even as a demo is one small step forward.
Meta: Desiderata
Here's a thing I want.
A canonical text encoding for blog posts: capturing time, date, user, categories, and markup including links and quotes. Preferably also an encoding for capturing comments.
I have to upgrade the web server here, and I need to be able to archive my posts from both Wordpress and Livejournal in a big dumb text file somewhere in case of meltdown. I don't trust webapps to not destroy my words, and some of these might be useful to look back on. Also, I need to somehow consolidate them into one big pile (or several small piles) at some point.
I'd rather not have lots of opaque XML markup, but I'm figuring there must be a canonical XML or YAML encoding by now for blog text, right? It's a simple, well-defined problem with an easy solution, so it's already been done, right?
(Crickets chirp).
Not bitter. Just very, very jaded.
Squid, Boundary, Saucer, Ploughshares
Te Papa's Colossal Squid is now defrosted and pickling in formalin. I've been watching the webcast intermittently, but the photos on their blog are probably more interesting.
(Edit: Video clip from National Geographic.)
Via the TT Brown forum, the Boundary Institute has a very interesting collection of papers on logic- and computer-science approaches to a view of physics which would include psi.
Also via TT Brown, Wilbert Smith is a key figure in the Canadian UFO scene who deserves more attention, particularly on the intersection of the 'contactee' phenomenon and psychic phenomena.
And finally: yay to the Ploughshares team who deflated one of the Waihopai domes.
Pop!
ISO: No to OOXML
Against all expectations and in the face of some pretty serious voting irregularities (hundreds of Microsoft partner companies joining up at the last minute in order to pack the vote), the International Organisation for Standardization voted 'No' to Microsoft's bogus Office document standard.
I'm impressed. It was very much like watching the UN refusing to endorse the US invasion of Iraq. A huge effort by a major player using all-out dirty tricks to bribe and coerce an international body into doing something blatantly wrong, almost getting there, and yet failing. As then, so now my respect for international democratic institutions just went up a notch. I thought the ISO was completely sold out to power and greed; turns out it's only mostly sold out. And there'll hopefully be a huge backlash against Microsoft for this. The first rule of bribing the judge is, make sure you don't accidentally try it on an honest one, and if you must, for goodness sakes don't do it right out in public, in front of the whole world. Threats, bullying, and the ability to turn off a huge portion of the world's communication grid at a switch only get you so far. At some point, to continue to rule, a superpower actually needs to have some measure of respect from its subject races and at least a pretence of lip-service to being an honest broker.
But this should never have happened in the first place. Too much of the world's information infrastructure is currently held hostage to proprietary monopoly cartels, and we now depend far too much on that infrastructure continuing to run. The world needs open, honest data standards and it needed them yesterday.
More than that, though, we need open, honest governance at the global level, and as far as I can see so far, an open Internet - while not being that itself - is our last, best hope for a place where we can start to build such a thing. Projects like Wikileaks, for instance, give me hope.
I can dream, anyway.
