Just Bru

more and more often, in the past few weeks, I found myself in the odd condition of having something to say and that I feel "appropriate" for this place, and yet it was the place (blog) itself that didn't feel "right" anymore. People changes over time, fashion and voices change over time... and I suppose there are times for a blog to follow the same route.
So when on saturday morning I discovered that all the files I had hosted on DreamHost where gone (only temporarily, as I gladly discovered later in the day), I decided to devote part of the weekend to start renewing the image of codewitch.org a bit.

Before continuing, let me say that I still haven't achieved all the goals I'm looking forward to, but since I don't know when I'll have more time to work on this, I thought it would be better to start sharing my considerations and plans now.

I chose a few guidelines to work with:
. "simple, informal, practial" layout and typefaces
. try to reduce the number of interactors "aggregating" where possible based on task
. give the reader the opportunity to figure out (and possibly experience) the context that originated one entry, leveraging on the life stream data (the aggregated list of events collected from other points of presence on the net, e.g. flickr, upcoming, twitter, del.icio.us)
. provide, where possible, different layers or zoom factors to consider the website content from.

Clean layout and typeface

This was the easy part. I started from the nice cutline theme, recently ported to MT4 by Byrne Reese, added a custom header and helvetica-fied all of it.
I also dramatically reduced the line height, that gives me agoraphobia everytime I look at Cutline blogs. I'm still not happy with the entry metadata line, maybe I could stick it all on a phantom left column, or maybe I could just get rid of it... we'll see.

Reducing Interactors

This blog usede to have an ajax powered search tool.
Now, the search has been disabled, mainly because I don't trust perl CGI performance on Dreamhost and because, let's face it, Google has all the answers: personally I grew so addicted to its pervasive assistance that more often than not, seconds after landing on a webpage looking for something specific, I hit cmd-K and refine the search from there without even looking for an internal search widget. Moreover, as you may notice from the elsewhere column, my data is more and more spread all across the web in a series of vertical silos, thus a "local" search is less and less relevant for an "identity" blog such as this one (identity being very different from meaning personal, but this is a long story).
So the bottomline is that search (maybe google powered) could make it back, but it's lower priority (unless somebody starts screaming out loud, that is).
Archive navigation is another interesting issue: it would be nice to provide a consistent metaphor for category, date, and possibly tag oriented navigations.
In the latest version of this blog there were "select" fields to navigate through category and monthly archives. Tags were browsable through a tag cloud.
Now, tag cloud remains an interesting metaphor for tags, provided that the tagspace is kept reasonably healthy. This means pruning the dictionary, creating clusters, renaming tags to cope with the evolution of the language or the conventions... and I can't see that happening easily (at present, this blog defines 673 tags). As for monthly and category archives, categories of this blog are a lot more than necessary (partly because this blog predates the tag era) so in a perfect world I should refactor them back to a manageable 4/5 headcount; this would make the "select" navigation option pretty useless (actually unconvenient, since the 4/5 pretty determinant category names will be hidden in the select). Time can't be refactored though, and this blog has more than 5 years of archives. Even if not all months have entries, there is still a considerable amount of voices to consider, so much so that the select field could be less than ideal.
So I was thinking of experimenting with a normal list for categories, paired with a similarly styled accordion based navigation for the dates. This should grant (at least in this phase) a good balance between visible information and effort required from the reader.

This is going to be it for today, next: context through lifestream and zoom factor.

While I make myself at home in this newly installed MTOS backend (I know, the blog layout still looks the same... babysteps ;) ), I wanted to share this little trick that is maybe public domain but personally never realized until tonight...

As you know the Internet is a noisy place. Part of this noise is "visible", and is made by you and me, hyperjumping from one website to the other, leaving comments on site, writing our own blog, buying stuff on Amazon, searching google.
Most of the traffic on the net though goes unnoticed and is made by robots. Now there are good robots and bad robots. Good robots tends to behave so we're not concerned by them now; bad robots tend to either be there to spam, steal or hack into your website.
Usually there are pretty clever exploits to achieve these goals, but I find very enlightening to study even the magnitudo of damage they can bring just by being noisy.

Let me explain: it happens that I had a pretty old application that's been running fairly good for the last few months, out there in the wild, until the time, a few days ago, when it started receiving more and more traffic.
The traffic was of the "let-me-try-and-use-you-as-a-proxy" type, but even if that specific attack was blocked, an interesting side effect emerged: the session table (where temporary information about one interaction between the user and the site is kept) got quickly polluted and started growing at a scaring pace.

Now, if you're used to create web application, one of the basic tricks, together with caching the hell out of the website, is to disable all sort of unneded "user specific" data gathering. Here, for instance, there's a very good post on the topic, and on how to conditially enable sessions in parts of the site. What the post doesn't make clear (or not clear to me, that is) is that exceptions will still trigger the creation of a session. This happens, in other words, when the application can't map your request to an existing resource (action, file, image or other). Guess what, the spammy internet noise we mentioned earlier does exactly that.

If you're on Rails, one solution appears to be disabling session application-wide (even if you need them in all controllers) and then re-enable where needed. The post on Errtheblog has clear examples of how to do that.

Well, enough for this thursday night.
P.S.: MTOS indeed feels pretty sleek.

I kind of saw it coming, when google integrated gtalk with reader without letting user opt out, a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, apparently there's a wave of angst rising now at the claim that, by doing so, google ruined Christmas. Meh. Personally I agree with Michael and his "Give me a break", but yes, giving users the option to choose would have been wiser. Now don't get me wrong, I'm totally for syntactic (or interface, in this case) vinegar to "facilitate" the correct use of a tool, but there's a (not so subtle) difference between not giving me a keyboard shortcut for "trash" items in gmail and exposing all the stuff that I decided to share counting on the fact that:

page is accessible to anyone who knows its address, so all that's left to do is to let your friends know about it.

Security through obscurity is by far not the best practice, but certainly you can't blame the users for adopting it, nor you can pretend that what was shared before under that context is still perceived as "sharable" with the new push behaviour. This is also one of the issues I was pointing out and trying to solve through the Social News Reading concept: enabling people to choose who to trust and to empower with their own share of attention. Among other things that I appreciated under the xmas tree, the long awaited open source version of MT (that actually came in a few weeks ago, but I had no time to play with it so far) and, right on the xmas day, Ruby 1.9, that promises, among other things, to considerably speed up things. Now I should put those to good use to bring this website back to the techie edge it belongs... ideas are never a problem, time often is, but I still have some holidays and only a bunch of social events... ...like the SnowBall, that started as a dinner between old friends, and turned overnight in quite a massive event, considered the time (28th of december) and the place (somewhere in northwest Italy). We plan to eat well, drink better, have some inspiring conversations and, if anybody cares, maybe play a round of werewolf or the like; so if you don't have better plans stick yourself on the wiki by tomorrow morning and we'll try to add a sear for you. Oh, mind you, the snowball fight will probably have to be rescheduled, due to lack of snow itself... Update: Google promptly replied to the feedback mentioned above and adjusted reader's behavior according to that. Cute.

More than one year passed since BlogTalk, where I gave this speech about Social News Reading.
The idea was not new indeed.

However, nothing much happened in the past 12 monthes along this route: blogs are still growing steadily, new forms of user participation (e.g. twitter and facebook) became mainstream, APIs and standards are emerging both for managing digital identities (like the recent oAuth) and social networks alike (like google's OpenSocial or sixapart's elsewhere I'm)... but people still read feeds essentially in the same way as before. Feed reading is still a lonely experience, like fishing with line and hook; friends and fellow fishermen can point you to places known to host the richest schools, but finding, extracting and processing the good is still up to the individual. Well, I'm interested in exploring the concept of introducing nets, trawls and active cooperation here, moving from sport to commercial fishing, that is.

Recently there's been some effort (namely feedhub ) to algorithmically determine the subjective relevance of memes and conversations across the net... but I can't say I'm happy with it and here's the short version of why:
1. because the algorithm knows my "sources" but it doesn't know me: the reason why I'm interested in a specific topic at a given time will inevitably vary too fast or too randomly for the algorithm to pick up and adapt to.
2. because for the daily dose of mainstream entertainment, I already have Boing Boing and Techmeme, and they do quite well: they contribute to create that common knowledge texture that underlies conversation with my peers: if it's not signal, it's familiar noise.
3. it doesn't know about my social network. I subscribe to a lot of blogs: most of them are friends I like to be able to quickly sync with from time to time, plus they're on average more clever than me and occasionally come up with a brilliant connection; others are trendsetters and pundits that most of the time brag about pop topics (or themselves); others are rebloggers and nanopublishers specializing in some area of research or practice. From time to time, a sparkle bursts here or there, resonating across the network (often under disguised form) creating a chord. That's the kind of signal I'm interested in.

So I think that feedhub, like other human-driven (digg) or algorithmic (techmeme?) efforts before it, is great for picking up the general buzz and feel, even from a very customized perspective as feedhup promise, but they'll fail when it comes to extracting contextualized value (i.e. something useful to a specific goal).

Whoops, it wasn't that "short". Sorry.

Since I already invested enough of Your (and my) time with this post, I'll close it here, but expect some news on the SocialNewsReading front here soon :)--

Just had to push movable type onto an apache2 / mod_perl2 box. Just for testing, so the main aim was not performance, but just having the bloody thing work. Well apparently mod_perl 1.xx is supported, while mod_perl 2 is not. Now I'm sure there are more elegant ways to tame MT in such an environment (and actually I would appreciate if the lazyweb could point me to them, since google is of little help), but if you have no time and are in desperate need of a quick hack, this may help: just go to your .htaccess and add

SetEnv MOD_PERL ''

that will bail MT out of the mod_perl environment. Make sure also you don't have the handler set to perl-script.

This blog is 5 years old today.

Six months and one week. My last post on this blog was written right before LIFT conference in Géneva.
There, speaking with Martin, I just came to the conclusion that the image that was projected by this website was not anymore resembling the man behind it.

Masks and characters gain power and weight while you play them, until the point where the filter is just stronger than the signal. So, as 4 years ago, I put the weblog on a hiatus while taking the time to explore other voices.

These above were focused mainly on social events, thoughts and the neverending stream of consciousness.

However, the present blog has always been the best place where to keep track of geeky/techy achievements, and in these months I had the chance to realize how much of my personal learning path follows the way of technology and design. So here we go: a new post and maybe a new, gentler, stream of more focused journal of experiences.

Without further ado, since february life moved on quite a lot, so let's try to summarize how my context changed through the main points below:

Research

In the field of media, last year has been dominatede by McLuhan theories and (critical/smart) mass effects... while in these last months I've been focusing more on niche, interactive media like virtual worlds (particularly WoW and Second Life) and games and learning (forgive me if I don't use the edutainment word).

In the realm of physical spaces, while last year I tried to fill some of my huge gaps in architecture, nowadays I've been exploring object interaction (and in particular identification - barcodes or RFIDs, hardware hacking - arduino, and fabbers)

Social bla bla bla

On the events side, last year has been definitely a BarCamp year for me. 

This year, especially after the amazing RItalia experience, I've had a chance to reconsider the the interaction between tools (like BarCamps) and the people who use it: it's not (only) the people nor the tools that make the difference, you need both (yeah, basically you need the people, then the tools help in actually make them do something).

And speaking of tools, this year I've been definitely blogging less and enjoying network oriented social media like facebook and twitter more. And no, wait, this isn't exactly what was happening before: I spent years on deviantArt and Flickr, but there you needed an excuse (photos, in these two examples) to act as both a magnet and expedient to trigger the conversation. Facebook, Twitter... well, they're just about it: the ties that binds.

Last but not least...

Adding contrast to the lifescape (or of the importance of sending clear messages... to yourself, first and foremost)

I'll not explain this in depth now... but essentially this year has been a lot about letting go of sophistications. I know that my very argot doesn't suggest that but... well, bear with me for a while, I'll try to prove it :) and embracing a sharpened view of life.

For now, I'll say that I tried to switch from being serial mover to being a full time nomad, so that (maybe) eventually will understand and appreciate the settlers.

Similarly, I stepped from being a devsultant to dive into fulltime, bleeding edge hard-coder (and having fun doing it, thanks to Rails) so that will eventually slingshot back into a more defined consultantdom.

Well, that's all folks... stay tuned!

Would have been nice to write longer about this, but for the time being, let me just say that I'm rushing to Gatwick to jump on a plane to Geneve to attend LIFT07. Really looking forward to it even if the feeling is that I haven't “prepared” properly: no idea of who's doing what, when, how.

Also, I'll spend the weekend in Italy, but I reckon that resting for 24 hours straight is far too much and I thought to try and set up a loose meeting on saturday where we can have a walk, drink a coffee (or a beer, me getting british) and talk of achievements, innovations and ideas for today's web (and beyond).
I'd like to use the pecha-kucha formula for that (in short, 20 slides by 20 seconds each... and believe me, it's fun!): but go have a look at their site and then rush to the wiki to add your ideas and confirm presence.

See you soon.

P.S.: I'm officially on a recruiting mission for Headshift. All techno-wiz-ninja who wouldn't mind a office with a view of Tower Bridge please make themselves visible and let's have a chat, either in Geneva, Milan, Twitter, Whatever.

Should be in Rome tomorrow and on saturday. Should because of a funny deadline that I'm trying to hit. Just in case I can't be there, have fun.

By reading twitters around it seems like yesterday has been a sort of de-lurking day. I didn't put effort in that, so here I pay the penalty by eventually joining the 5 things about you bandwagon. For the sake of google justice, I must say that I've been tagged by Davide (at least that I noticed).
So without further ado, here we go:
1. For more than two years I regularly meditated (well, tried to) half an hour every day. That changed my perception of the world enormously. Since then, I value discipline as one of the most precious traits, even if on the other hand I still find it difficult to accept it and apply it to my life most of the time.
2. The nickname Bru is self assigned, and comes from that era of the Net when the nick was the only concept of avatar available. It's a short for brujah, which means (almost, the actual word being bruja) witch in Spanish but is also a vampiric clan in the role playing game Vampire: the masquerade. Yes, I used to be a storyteller. As a trivia, Bru came after a few unsuccessful other nicknames like "respawn" and "bodhran". (Well, this was something many people already knew, but at least maybe I can prevent some new ones from asking).
3. Speaking of role playing games, one of my (not so) secret unfulfilled dreams at that time was to play the whole Dragonlance saga once (even if I can't say to have been a fan of the novels at all). I tried three times and then gave up: everybody was getting bored after the first meeting at the inn (day 1, page 3 out of 300). Ok, it's a lousy beginning, but it gets much better after that... oh well...
4. I stil know by heart the phone number of my first "love", which dates back to the '80s. On the other hand, I don't know my current mobile number.
5. I'm really, really bad at sports, all of them. I just don't buy the idea of competition, it always made me sick (and tend to have an enormous inertia, too). On the other hand, put me in front of a mountain and I'll get to the top. No matter the odds.

Phew, done. Feeling much better now :)
Feel free to consider yourself tagged, whoever you are. As for my personal curiousity, would love to read Lilia's 5 things, especially in this moment of her life (I mean, shifting of priorities and so on), but wouldn't force that of course :)