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It’s a little strange this year. I haven’t had to struggle to get a daily shot yet. Hope I’m not jinxing it…

I’m actually really happy with the project’s photos so far, and it’s fun to see the recurring themes both within the first month, and compared to the first month of 2008. About the same number of photos of the Bow River in Bowmont. Photos of coffee/muffin breakfast taken on almost the same day of the year. It’s kind of cool to see constants, and how they change over time.

The Cylons were created by Man
They rebelled
They evolved
There are many copies
And they have a plan.

Exhibits A and B:

I’ve been using Drupal to power websites for several years now, since 4.6 was the latest and greatest. One of the constant, ongoing, relentless complaints from our users has been that Drupal is (or seems) too complicated. It seems hard to use. It takes some care and feeding to initially set up a site. For example, when installing Drupal and creating a site, there is no option to have a rich text WYSIWYG editor, out of the box. Sure, übergeeks would rather gnaw off their paws than use a rich text editor, but Real Live Humans™ need them. They need to be able to edit text visually, and to upload and embed media, without having to follow recipes or read through pages of instructions.

I’m in the process of setting up a new website for a prof, so she can use it with her 200 students as a collaboration hub. Setting up the site (Drupal 6) took maybe 5 minutes. Installing extra modules like Organic Groups and Views? Maybe another 5 minutes. The site is working pretty much perfectly, about 10 minutes after starting to set it up. Yay, Drupal.

Except, I can’t get a rich text editor working the way the students will need it. They need to be able to just start typing, and to upload, resize, and embed images. I’ve got the wysiwyg-api module installed (and why in hell does it not INCLUDE an actual rich text editor? seriously.) and have been farting around with various image-assist and image-api and image-embed and image-etc… modules to get an “embed image” function working. And I can kinda/sorta get it working, as long as I can expect students to be geeks. But they’re not. We need a nice, simple, clear “upload image” button as part of the rich text editor. And that’s just plain not working.

Interestingly, while writing this blog post, the WordPress “Upload/Insert” media bar above the text area is exactly what I need in Drupal. I can’t just use WordPress, because I need to use the collaboration features offered by Organic Groups – and that’s just not possible with WordPress.

So, although I got the skeleton of the website up and running in about 10 minutes, I’ve been farting around for 3 hours now, trying to get a fracking “upload/insert media” function working at the level that will be required by the students. I’ve almost got it working, but the result is something only a geek would really use. And a geek wouldn’t be using the WYSIWYG editor in the first place.

Why in hell is a fully functioning rich text editor not included with Drupal Core? And why in hell is it not as fully featured as the WordPress one, with media uploading and embedding? I’d be willing to bet that the addition of a functional WYSIWYG editor would go a LONG way toward improving the perception of usability of Drupal. Heck, WordPress is GPL – just yank the one they use…

Wow. While surfing the NFB archives, I found the trailer to an upcoming film called RiP: A remix manifesto. An open source film about copyright.

From the NFB page for the movie:

Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 21st century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.

A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.

Which side of the ideas war are you on?

Oh, man. I need to see this film. I need to screen it on campus. I wonder if it’s too late to contribute to it somehow… Have I mentioned how much I love the NFB?

So the National Film Board of Canada has flung open the vault to make many national treasures freely available online. Wow. This is such an amazing set of resources, covering the entire range of Canadian culture. Films that helped define who we are.

Documentaries like Being Caribou. Churchill’s Island. Short films like 23 Skidoo. Art films like 21-87. Animated films like Afterlife.

I will now do my best attempt at channeling The Reverend…

One of the crown jewels. Log Driver’s Waltz.

Or, perhaps, Balablok, which still represents tolerance and diversity (and what happens without them) in my mind.

Blackfly?

Cat Came Back!

and, of course, The Sweater

The other crown jewel would be *cough* Bambi Meets Godzilla, but that doesn’t appear to be online yet… (but thankfully, there is at least a temporarily available illicit copy on the Tube).

I grew up with the NFB. I love the NFB. And now it’s (at least partially) available online. Gods bless teh intartubes. I could spend days mining this archive, and I probably will…

The WordCampEd Vancouver 2009 website was just moved from a PBWiki site to a shiny new WordPress site. It was odd not using WordPress to power the website for a WordPress-related event, but initially I thought it made more sense to just use a free, low-friction service like PBWiki.

But, now we’ve got a WordPress site, configured to behave kinda wiki-like. Anyone can login (either by creating an account or by using OpenID). Once logged in, you can edit any of the pages, including Sessions, Attendees, Logistics, etc… You can also create new pages (although new pages _may_ need to be “approved” before going live).

If the new site gives any grief, please let me know ASAP.

The evil spammers have websites listing blogs that are ripe targets for their filthy spam, so it’s only fair that we also share ways to successfully beat them back into submission. I’ve been using Akismet pretty much exclusively on my blog since switching back to WordPress. It’s been pretty good, but sometimes goes into “large-bore sieve mode” and lets in gobs of nastiness. I’d tried Mollom, and while it’s interesting, it didn’t have much luck against the particular flavours of spiced ham that get thrown at my blog.

But, I’ve found the combination of Akismet and TanTan’s Simple Spam Filter plugin to be extremely effective. Here’s my Akismet spam history graph. See if you can tell when I activated Simple Spam Filter…

November 13, 2008.

The graph doesn’t show spam that got published, only spam that Akismet had to nuke. The number of spamments that were successful is quite minimal.

With the two working together, the amount of spam that actually gets through to be (temporarily) published on my blog is almost zero. Maybe one or two per day (sometimes slightly higher, sometimes none at all).

what is it with twitter that makes people forget how to find things on their own, or how to communicate using any other medium? I now refuse to respond to tweet messages that are essentially “I’m too lazy to google, but am hoping you can google for me” or “I want an answer, but don’t want to read the tonnes of great, in-depth resources available online. please spoonfeed me.”

fracking twitter.

I love the look of this forecast. The piles of snow are melting quickly – hopefully I’ll be back on the bike early next week

this doesn’t bode well…

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