Almost two years ago, but still interesting to hear Jimbo Wales talk about vision and Wikipedia for a public of the Long Now Foundation. (He mentions me and some work I did in Mali.) Thanks to Alex for the tip.
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In the beginning of November Robin asked me if I’d somehow be interested in renting a place in Amsterdam. I had been thinking of moving to Amsterdam after Trento, but I considered his question a bit preposterous. Fortunately he rented the place himself and now we’re room mates! During my years abroad I sometimes considered Amsterdam the only place left to live in the Netherlands. Going around here on foot and by bike I learn to appreciate my own country again. The bikes are amazing, transport is so efficient (if you don’t go by car). There is so much freedom and still, it’s not a mess.
Friday I went to a hospitality exchange meeting, which I found kinda weird. People were sitting in their own corner and I hadn’t seen anybody hug. So I started moving around, to talk to more people, ask them silly questions (”Do you like monkeys?”) and even hug them. It was slightly better that way.
Working for Hyves is exciting. The number of website hits is growing weekly and only Google is rating higher in the Netherlands. The complexity of the material is challenging and I’m part of a small team of very bright people. The office culture is more open, dynamic and agile than at IRST in Trento and my number of friends at hyves.nl doubled in no time.
Today I received that my abstract that I submitted to the IDLELO3 conference that will be held in Dakar from the 18th till the 20th of March was accepted. Here it is:
Wikipedia in West African languages
Wikipedia is a project for the creation of free encyclopedias in many
languages. The project has a huge potential for the education and
development of West Africa, where there are hardly any books or
educational material available in native languages.The Wikipedias in Bambara, Peul and Wolof were started in the
beginning of 2005.The interface of the Bambara and Peul Wikipedias were partly
translated and some articles had been written as part of a side
project of a Geekcorps Mali volunteer, in which people were given one
dollar for every article placed on-line (with total expenses less than
100$). After 2005 there was only sparse activity, and in December 2007
there are respectively 142 and 28 articles.Not much happened to the version in Wolof until 2006, when many tiny
articles with no real content were added to the Wolof Wikipedia. Then
in April 2007 a Senegalese student living in Italy starting adding a
lot of text in Wolof, and in November the Wikipedia reached 500
articles.We think combining an efficient distribution (e.g. through
Moulinwiki.org) and content in native languages (besides Arabic,
French, English or Portuguese) will offer great educational
opportunities to Africans. Our hope is that NGOs, universities,
Africans (both in and outside Africa) will be inspired to join in
these efforts.
I hope that I can meet up with Ibou, whom I´ve met before in Italy and with Renaud a former Geek who created Moulinwiki and did a lot more awesome work in Mali. Recently he set up an official French non-profit organization: Kunnafoni.
Sometimes I get in touch with friends I haven’t seen in a long time, but most of the time Facebook is just terribly annoying. There are the vampires and growing gifts, and many more time wasting “applications”. I also noticed that more than 50% of the requests come from less than 10% of my “friends”.
Today I went through the usual “confirm requests” and decided to check out at least the Super Wall (after tons of requests). I clicked through the sign-up process without looking, without selecting anything and no friends at all. Out of gratitude Super Wall decided to send a postcard with “how to get a boyfriend: wear slutty clothes, laugh at his jokes, put out on the first date” in my name, to all my Facebook contacts. Great. … Not.
A partly solution for these annoyances is an optional blocking of applications and requests from certain friends.
And I’m not sure how to fix the sheer abuse by the Super Wall application. Is there some kind of member feedback about applications to Facebook?
Hyves is a Dutch social network based in Amsterdam. I’ve been a member for a while now and I mainly used it to find people I know from my primary and secondary school. On the 29th of November I noticed that they were looking for people. I sent them a very short message with a link to my CV. Koen, one of the three founders, responded within 20 minutes. Exactly one week later I was in a plane heading to Amsterdam to attend the party to celebrate the 5.000.000th member. Most of these members live in the Netherlands; the majority of young people in the Netherlands have a Hyves account and many are actively using it. Officially I will start working for Hyves on the 1st of February.
There is a Hyves API (currently beta, mostly in Dutch) and will be implementing OpenSocial and some more very exciting technology. I will have to limit the time I spend on other projects but the contract I signed is quite liberal (e.g. compared to this one for CouchSurfing volunteers). On top of that, Hyves actively participates in the development of Gentoo Linux.
This weekend there will be a party in Trento. I’m moving next week, I will attend the first BeWelcome (un)conference in Antwerpen on the 19th and 20th, and I already found some places to live in Amsterdam.
I thought Salad Fingers was great Flash, but then I saw Conclave Obscurum, a beautiful interactive website…
Last week Anu wrote me about a workshop in Amsterdam about federating social networks, when I completely did not expect to be in Amsterdam…
The workshop was interesting. I didn’t attend the entire day but I sensed that it could lead to interesting results. The workshop was the first stage towards a practical framework. A myriad of protocols related to anything social (e.g. XFN, FOAF, hCard, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial) was discussed and the intention was spoken out to have a proof of concept and running code available for the conference on February 9th and 10th (SNES). There’s definitely enough momentum. Twitter and Six Apart were present and are actively supporting the effort. Hyves, a Dutch social network that just celebrated their 5 million member party, was mentioned a lot.
I have one constructive remark about organizing a workshop: Try to have some wiki space available before the workshop starts. This way you don’t depend on people sending you their notes later on, and editing wikis in a social setting can lead to interesting (and blizzardly fast) results. Temporarily use another wiki, or even permanently, if there is an existing wiki which has goals that are similar enough. Of course, first ask permission from the community (if there is one) and try to get them involved in the workshop as well, during and after.
I was happy to talk to James Burke again. I recognized some more familiar faces and while brainstorming about a name for the project (and checking out translations into African languages) we found out that we had met at What The Hack, an outside festival for hackers two years ago where I spoke about the Bambara Wikipedia. I’m totally enjoying Amsterdam…
Social networks are hot. MySpace, Facebook. Google recently wanted to open the market with its OpenSocial. Which made me think, are these efforts really social? Is Facebook a real social network? I think not
So I grabbed realsocial.org which is currently just an alias. But I will put up a wiki with my (and your?) ideas about what real social networks are. I’m thinking of distinguishing Real Social and real social networks.
I’d consider CouchSurfing, BookCrossing, and all current ride share websites that I’m aware of, as real social networks. They lead to real life connections or actual forms of exchange, with less time spent offline than online.
I could think of three that would fit my criteria for being Real Social: BeWelcome, Ripple and Hitchwiki. The capitalization comes from the way the networks, its organization and the software is developed.
I wish Nokia sold laptops. I really liked my Nokia 770, that I bought in December 2005. It’s running mostly free software, and is very Debianic. I wasn’t traveling with a laptop then, and it was a nice (and often cheap) way to get online. I also read a lot of books with the excellent FBReader. And I created MaemoDict, which never really worked very well I must admit. But, silly enough I was more focused on working on the CouchSurfing code base once I finally bought a laptop (that is seriously broken now).
I saw the announcements of the N810 a couple of weeks ago, and I was just in time to apply for Nokia’s developer program, which gives developers the possibility to buy the device for 99 euros instead of the usual price. So I’m very happy to receive that they accepted my application (”I want to have many dictionaries and encyclopedias in my pocket”). Now I’m actually reading Nokia’s entire announcement, and it’s friggin great! The N800 already had a faster CPU, a webcam, much more memory and a normal SD card, but the N810 is totally awesome, it comes with GPS and a real mini-keyboard! And, it’s great to see that Nokia has moved away from the proprietary Opera to a Mozilla based browser.
Because of the GPS it could be interesting for Citizen Logistics, and I’m really looking forward to see if it’s possible to get maps.hitchwiki.org on it!
I have to admit it, I am typing this using Windows Vista. I really needed a new laptop. I couldn’t wait for amylin to bring me a MacBook, and Apple is just too expensive in Europe. I also considered getting a Dell with Ubuntu, but unfortunately, in Europe they’re only selling them in the UK, France and Germany. And then I saw an ad of a Toshiba with 160 GB HD and 2 GB RAM, DVDRW and all that stuff, for 599 euros. So I went there this morning and got it. I had considered trying for a refund of the Windows tax but Paolo told me, you can do it with Acer, but you pay the costs of sending the laptop to Milano and having it sent back, which is more than the money you get back.
I started my laptop. Vista is yucky. Lots of stuff going on. And then, after not even 30 minutes of using it, without doing anything weird. I copyied some music from an MP3 player, nicely telling Windows that I want to eject it, and I closed the lid. So it went to sleep mode (and I hate it when laptops do that). 3 minutes or so after it woke up I got the Blue Screen of Death. This is what it told me after starting my laptop again:
Firma problema:
Nome evento problema: BlueScreen
Versione SO: 6.0.6000.2.0.0.768.3
ID impostazioni locali: 1040Ulteriori informazioni sul problema:
BCCode: d1
BCP1: B13C3158
BCP2: 00000002
BCP3: 00000008
BCP4: B13C3158
OS Version: 6_0_6000
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 768_1File che contribuiscono alla descrizione del problema:
C:\Windows\Minidump\Mini110807-01.dmp
C:\Users\guaka\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-81916-0.sysdata.xml
C:\Users\guaka\AppData\Local\Temp\WER71E4.tmp.version.txtLeggere l’informativa sulla privacy:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=50163&clcid=0×0410
Right now I’m downloading an ISO with Ubuntu Gutsy. I hope next time I need a new laptop they will come with Ubuntu out of the box.
UPDATE: I started a page about GNU/Linux on the Toshiba L40-157.
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