Lance Wicks
Kiwi,
Judoka,
Geek,
Husband
Daddy!

JudoGeek Blog

Thoughts on the future of life... 

Big scary title huh!!! :)
recently I have been thinking more and more about life in the modern electronic networked existence we can/do live now. The implications are genuinely mind blowing and I am always scanning around to see what others are doing and also trying new ideas.

This evening I came across a post by Tantek Çelik called "Three Human Interface Hypotheses Update: Email is Efail" which talks about the way that email is becoming increasingly less useful. A bit like the telegraph and telegrams perhaps?

Browsing about I saw some of the other ideas Tantek is trying, his personal Wiki is a cool idea and of course MicroFormats.

For me, this site is a step in the direction Tantek is heading.
I decided in part to buy www.lancewicks.com because I wanted a place where family and friends could find me and once they could me stay up to date with what I am doing. My Noserub page is the latest addition to the site and expands the idea further.

NoseRub, as I've posted about earlier, is great for the initial purpose of aggregating all my online content (blogs, podcsasts, twitter, etc) and making it all easily viewable and followable.

The second idea I have for it, is to eventually become a central place where my social network will reside. For example, you can (right now) create an account on my Noserub area and like me aggregate your online content/identity here. or say over at www.indentoo.com . The big plus is which ever you choose I should be able to keep track of it and the details should stay up to date. Although this is a work in progress at this stage. So you might put a noserub installation on your home domain and I could/should be able to connect to it from mine and then we both get updates from one another.
Then if I get bored of this site, I should/could/will be able to migrate simply from here to identoo.com and your site will be updated by web magic.

The idea here being that in this modern world, automating the announcing/updating of what tools your contacts are using needs to get better. For example, my twittering I use also to update Facebook. This in turn lead to a friend adding me to her twitter contacts, which lead me to find her blog. Wouldn't have been better/easier if I discovered it via a central site of hers? What if she'd had a NoseRub site and I subscribed/linked to it from mine. Then when she joined twitter, maybe Noserub would have pinged me a message to say she'd joined?

Also recently I have been playing with tools like www.Fring.com and www.jaiku.com which bring the internet closer to me via my mobile. I already use the browser on my phone to check Facebook, Bloglines, Twitter. But a mobile client is really powerful. I am totally inlove with jaiku's integration with my contacts and diary, shame I know almost nobody that uses it and it does seem to be dieing within Google. Fring is pretty awesome, I keep meaning to try the Plazes mobile software that Tom Croucher has written. I have also said that I'd try and help NoseRub with a mobile client, but havn't quite got to it. :(

Anyway....
heres where the life bit gets brought up. What I am doing seems totally foreign to so many people I meet. In ways I understand why, it is all rather Science fiction really. Imagine, being able to tell people thousands of miles away you are popping down the road for a sandwich, or quickly letting someone at home that you saw a friend of theirs in the street. Imagine that you wife could see you were leaving the office and planning to go to the shopping centre and could send you a message asking for a bag of sugar.

It's like a movie when you look at it that way.

That said, this IS the 21st century, it IS supposed to be hi tech, isn't it?
Twitter, flickr, facebook, mobile phones, laptops, SecondLife, wikis, etc etc are what people dreamed we'd have and they are here being under used by the vast majority of people. Hopefully, I/we are the early adopters, the ones who bought the fancy horseless carraige when it first came out. Hopefully, theowrld will follow and soon I won't have to try and explain to 18 year olds why Twitter would be cool for them, more so than it is for me... if only they'd try!

In my office we try to "get it", we have a blog, we mashup/remix other RSS feeds on our site, heck we even have instant messaging links on the website. But we are in the minority, does your garage have a website? Do they have an RSS feed of the work they are doing? Does your kids teacher have a blog? Does your alarm give you an RSS feed or an IM if something happens? (this one is coming by the way: http://www.alertme.com/ ) Can you book an appointment with your doctor or dentist online? Can you read the meetings of your town council meetings online? Can you comment on those minutes?

Where you work, how do you update your customers/clients as to whats new? By telephone, by fax or letter? Bia the Web? Via Twitter? Pictures on Flickr? Video on YouTube?

How do you tell your wife/husband about your day? What about your uncle or cousin? What about your old mate from school who lives in another country now?

Lets turn it around the other way...
How do you tell your doctor you feel sick? How does your mechanic know your care is making a funny noise? How does your alarm system know to disarm because you are home? How does your boss know you've arrived at the client's office?

Wouldn't it be great if your doctor knew you were poorly, because you posted something on your blog? Or because the doctors surgery had a web application where you recorded your temperature, blood pressure etc?

Wouldn't it be nice if your boss knew you were at the clients because your mobile let Plazes know where you were. Or perhaps your client Twittered/tweeted that his/her guest had arrived.

The point I guess is that to date, these exciting new technologies have only just scratched the surfaces of our lives. They are only just starting to soak through to everyday life.

As a good geek, I am trying to expand the use, join the cause and help a new user try one today!




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Another reason to like NearlyFreeSpeech.net. 

I use www.nearlyfreespeech.net to host various sites and really like them.

Now part of this is because it is cheap, they have a pay as you go system, so you only pay for the bandwidth your site consumes. A second aspect is the great support. I have only had a couple of small problems, mainly to do with scripts, the support was FAST, like minutes fast! It was also quality, as in, someone fixed the problem right away and did not "log a call for it to be escalated".

The final part is the attitude, the name is a give away as to the attitude by the way.

An example today is the blog post they put up today ( http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/0 ... ld-you-do/ ) which talks about the wikileaks case and how they would react in the same situation.

They are proactively stating where things sit, what to expect from them, etc.
It's open and honest and I like it!!

If you need a site hosted, try them.
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JoikuSpot = Awesome! 

Hi all,
I just wanted to post a quickie about a piece of software I have discovered called "JoikuSpot" over at www.joikuspot.com

JoikuSpot runs on your mobile phone, and basically turns your phone into a WiFi hotspot. In fact i am writing this post right now on my laptop via a WiFi connection to JoikuSpot running on my Nokia E90. The E90 is connected to the internet via 3G.

Now JoikuSpot is Beta software and for example only supports http at present, but given I have never managed to get my E90 to act as a modem for my MacBook Pro it is already proving to be awesome! I have the seven fifty a month for 120gb data tariff from Vodafone, so it's not costing me much as long as I am sensible of course. The software itself is FREE!!!

I can't wait to see what later version of the code look like, it'd be cool to have support for a full range of protocols and perhaps if the system ran a bit like www.fon.com where you could allow free access to people you know and paid access to others.

Anyway, if you have a mobile with WiFi (like a Nokia E90 or N95) I'd seriously recommend giving JoikuSpot a go.

Lance
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Perl, CPAN, Perltidy, Perlcritic, Test::More and why Perl Rocks. 

A little while back I posted about how I was enjoying getting back into Perl coding.

Well, I am still enjoying it and am rediscovering why Perl is a great development language.
Here we go...

CPAN
The CPAN is awesome, it is a central repository for Perl modules. Basically if you'd like to interface with something, check CPAN. So you want to automate a Telnet connection, grab the CPAN module, need an interface to Flickr, Nokia, PGP just go grab one of CPAN.

Next...

Perltidy
Perltidy, is simple, but worth it. Especially if you are planning on letting anyone else look at your code in the future. PerlTidy formats your code to some common standards. This helps improve the chances of your being able to read the code afterwards.

Perlcritic
Perlcritic, is very clever and I like to use it in conjunction with Perltidy. Perlcritic, analyses your code and gives suggestions on how to improve it. This is based on the concepts covered in Damian Conway's "Perl Best Practices" book. Again like Perltidy, it helps ensure you do not get lazy. It helps to ensure that the code you produce is "ok" based on generic standards.

test::more
Tests, tests, tests! Test driven development is the light side of the force! And Perl is great for test driven development. Test::more is a simple, powerful tool to run tests on your code.

SmokeTests
Okay, I am getting totally into smoke testing and running them continuously.
In fact I have been automating the running of PerlTidy, PerlCritic and my test suites via a smoke test script. So I call these three items from a script that is in a cron job, or just plain looping over and over. (I have been setting it to beep if a error shows up in the test suite. I pipe the perlcritic output to a file and review it, although there is a way to use perlcritic to only allow your code to improve which I hope to implement. And PerlTidy... it keeps the indentation etc right.

So with Perl it is immensely easy to setup a robust development environment, one that automates the boring tasks that lead to bugs. Using these tools, you prevent a huge number of errors creeping into your code. Specifically, silly errors, this allows you to focus on the logic and functionality.

Community
Finally and best, Perl has an awesome community, ask a good question on a site like www.perlmonks.org and you'll get expert help and advise. Not just from skilled coders, but often from people who built the components you are using.

Perl has been right at the centre of the open source movement from the beginning, it is a powerful web language but also hugely powerful for other applications. Which in my book perhaps moves it beyond the most common language it is compared to, PHP.

PHP is great, I do lots in PHP, but it is basically a web site language only. yeah it can do more than that of course, but that's where it is strongest IMHO at least. Python perhaps is a closer relation to Perl, although perhaps it is less a web language than perl. Ruby, etc.. no comment.
As for any M$ languages... well, no comment. ;)

So, I am back into Perl in a big way, I am loving my smoke tests calling PerlCrtic etc.

Give it a go.

Lance


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Super Lego Mario 

Super Lego Mario movie:

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