Hey, look, my picture was in the paper on Friday, raking the snow from our roof.

If you’re looking for a roof rake, I highly recommend the Garant Yukon model. It costs about $45 and has stood up to a winter and a half of punishment.

You may recall that I’ve been working on massaging Charlottetown-area transit information into open data suitable for feeding to things like Google Transit.

I’ve made good progress. There’s now a draft version of a GTFS-feed that gets spit out by a purpose-build Drupal module that assembles all the route, schedule, and stop information and outputs it in a ZIP file according to the GTFS specification.

Working with T3 Transit and the City of Charlottetown, I’ve set up a Google Transit account and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the helpful, quick support guiding me through the process of establishing Google Transit directions for Charlottetown. While there’s an open source validator that can be used when developing the feed, a validator that’s quite capable and really helped work out the kinks, Google has a closed validation tool that is even more capable and that spotted an issue with some earlier drafts (I’d run the Winsloe/Airport Collector route counter-clockwise through Winsloe when it actually runs clockwise, and this didn’t sync with the sequence of the stops on the schedule). Once the validation passes, the feed moves on to a non-public staging system for testing, and that’s where we’re at now.

I’m meeting with the City and T3 next Tuesday to review progress, and to dig into some of the still-open issues (like “where does the QEH/East Royalty bus actually go?”) and it’s my hope that we’ll be able to move to the next stage, toward a public release, before the end of February. The first version will include Charlottetown routes #1, #2, #3 and #5 along with the Winsloe/Airport Collector; I’m shortly to meet with Cornwall and Stratford officials to get the go-ahead from them to also incorporate their town’s runs into the mix, and that will likely follow in a later update.

In the meantime, you can see evidence of my work via OpenStreetMap, where I’ve added all of the aforementioned routes and started in on the Stratford routes.

I’ve been playing The Dictionary Game (who knew it had another name?) for years; it’s second only to charades in the Pantheon of party games in my book.

My friend Stephen Southall sent me a recipe for granola after Christmas and the final phase of the preparation was titled Afterdamp, a reference to a word that featured in a game we played more than 25 years ago in which the definition of note was “the time after the moistening and before the drying off.”

Beyond its usefulness in the sexual arena, afterdamp turns out to be the perfect word to describe the phase after granola comes out of the oven and before it is bottled.

Indeed I’d forgotten that afterdamp actually has a real meaning, concerned with mining and off-gassing; in my mind, the fictional definition has superseded the real one.

Surely there must be a word for that.

With the move of juice bar Rawsome into the old Dynamic Fitness space on Queen Street, directly beside juice bar Freshii, we have, I believe, reached Peak Juice Bar in downtown Charlottetown.

Let’s use the opportunity to cast our minds back to 1998 when the great Len Russo penned this column in the Eastern Graphic about Charlottetown’s first juice bar:

Next month I’ll be a guest lecturer in the University of Prince Edward Island course Philosophy 105: Technology, Values and Science, a course described like this for prospective students:

This course explores the connections among technology, human values, and science that are manifested in society, economic systems, and relationships between humans and the natural world. The study of the connections reveal the vast impact that science and technology have on our understanding of the world and our views on the future as well as on personal identity and the human body. It exposes students to critical examination of objectivity in scientific research, progress in technology and science, scientific risk assessment, and genetic engineering. No particular background in science is assumed in this course.

Regular readers may recall that I audited this course six years ago, and wacky hijinks ensued including a guest lecture Privacy and the Obligation to Explain.

This year I’m jumping farther into the deeper end, presenting four guest lectures starting February 22. 

I plan to return to the privacy well with an updated examination of some of the same issues I discussed in 2009, and also to promote discussion about open data, about experience design, about hacker culture, and about how the design of educational systems – like, say, Philosophy 105 – reflects membership in one school of philosophy of technology or another.

I am both particularly well-suited and wholly unsuited to take on this role.

I am a university drop-out with some significant doubts as to the practical and spiritual value of post-secondary education.

I am a technologist by trade and inclination.

I’ve spent 36 years immersed in the conduct of and critical examination of digital culture.

I am a technology-skeptic, suspicious of those who ready the clarion to celebrate the coming technological utopia.

I am a technology-booster, witness to and beneficiary of the transformative power of a digital metaphors in changing power relationships, self-education and community organization.

The reason I’m going ahead, and the reason I have the faith required, is because I take intellectual sustenance from a book I first read 30 years ago, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner​ (read my story about how I came to read it, or just read the book itself as a PDF). From Chapter One, Crap Detecting:

The need for this kind of perspective has always been urgent but never so urgent as now. We will not take you again through that painful catalogue of twentieth-century problems we cited in our introduction. There are, however, three particular problems which force us to conclude that the schools must consciously remake themselves into training centers for ‘subversion’. In one sense, they are all one problem but for purposes of focus may be distinguished from each other. 

The first goes under the name of the ‘communications revolution’ or media change. As Father John Culkin of Fordham University likes to say, a lot of things have happened in this century and most of them plug into walls. To get some perspective on the electronic plug, imagine that your home and all the other homes and buildings in your neighborhood have been cordoned off, and from than will be removed all the electric and electronic inventions that have appeared in the last fifty years. The media will be subtracted in reverse order with the most recent going first. The first thing to leave your house, then, is the television set - and everybody will stand there as if they are attending the funeral of a friend, wondering, ‘What are we going to do tonight?’ After rearranging the furniture so that it is no longer aimed at a blank space in the room, you suggest going to the movie. But there won’t be any. Nor will there be LP records, tapes, radio, telephone, or telegraph. If you are thinking that the absence of the media would only affect your entertainment and information, remember that, at some point, your electric lights would be removed, and your refrigerator, and your heating system, and your air conditioner. In short, you would have to be a totally different person from what you are in order to survive for more than a day. The chances are slim that you could modify yourself and your patterns of living and believing fast enough to save yourself. As you were expiring, you would at least know something about how it was before the electric plug. Or perhaps you wouldn’t. In any case, if you had energy and interest enough to hear him, any good ecologist could inform you of the logic of your problem: a change in an environment is rarely only additive or linear. You seldom, if ever, have an old environment plus a new element, such as a printing press or an electric plug. What you have is a totally new environment requiring a whole new repertoire of survival strategies. In no case is this more certain than when the new elements are technological. Then, in no case will the new environment be more radically different from the old than in political and social forms of life. When you plug something into a wall, someone is getting plugged into you. Which means you need new patterns of defense, perception, understanding, evaluation. You need a new kind of education. 

Postman and Weingartner wrote that 50 years ago, and the “communications revolution” or “media change” that they wrote about has become something they wouldn’t recognize practically, but the essential qualities of which they would see, I think, directly connected to everything they wrote and thought back then.

I truly believe that we need “new patterns of defense, perception, understanding, evaluation” and I think I have something to contribute to this discussion as someone who, relatively speaking, has lived both with the plug and without.

As an interesting coincidence, one of the class exercises for Philosophy 105, then and now, assigned by its bona fide professor, Neb Kujundzic, is to go for 24 hours without digital technology; here’s what the class was given back then:

Although I was merely a fly on the wall for the course, not a student, I went through the exercise – something Oliver will never let me forget, as he bore the brunt of the agony involved and got none of the glory. I posted my diary in this space, a diary that began like this:

And so, at least for 24 hours, we took Postman and Weingartner’s challenge. And it was fascinating.

In February, with the 21 students enrolled in Philosophy 105, I hope to use this as a jumping off point of contemporary issues in technology, values and science.

Today I’m going up to campus to meet the class of students for the first time; I’ll have a month of thinking before we see each other again and enter into a formal dialog together.

Wish me luck.

I’m in the midst of a plan to migrate this site to a secure server – https instead of http – and as part of that plan I need to ferret out all the embedded images that are called from non-secure hosts, so as to avoid mixed-content issues. 

There are 6,953 pages that make up this site — all the blog posts and “about” pages taken together. This bit of PHP code extracts all URLs of all of the images embedded in the body of all of those pages by directly querying the Drupal node table:

$query = "SELECT entity_id,body_value from field_data_body";
$result = $db7->query($query);
while($row = $result->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
  $doc = new DOMDocument();
  @$doc->loadHTML($row['body_value']);
  $imageTags = $doc->getElementsByTagName('img');
  foreach($imageTags as $tag) {
      print $tag->getAttribute('src') . "\n";
  }
}

That script identifies 4,325 images in total, ranging from the good old:

/1by1.gif

to images on hosts like Flickr:

https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1603/23977645632_c8b864d187_c.jpg

Some of these images – like 1by1.gif – are 404, and I’ll need to do some manual corrections to the HTML for those mosts; others, like that Flickr example, are perfectly fine to serve on the new secure site as they’re already hosted on a secure server (note the https in the Flickr URL). But there are a lot of images that are served from non-secure hosts that I control, like:

//ruk.ca/sites/ruk.ca/files/media.ruk.ca/email-keyboard-20160124-120123.png

For images like that, I’ll need to change the URL to either:

//media.ruk.ca/images/email-keyboard-20160124-120123.png

or

https://media.ruk.ca/images/email-keyboard-20160124-120123.png

Of the 4,325 images, 3,587 (83%) are from non-secure hosts, 244 (6%) are from secure hosts, and 494 are relative embeds with no host indicated. It breaks down like this:

• Flickr (non-secure): 1678 images
• Flickr (secure): 233 images
• ruk.ca (non-secure): 1011 images
• media.ruk.ca (non-secure): 632 images
• Third-party hosts (non-secure): 255 images
• Relative embeds without host: 494 images

My plan is to move all of these images to a secure server under my control and then to rewrite the embedded URLs to point there.

As an aside, one of the things I found out while I was under the hooking mucking about with the blog was that I’ve written 1,439,497 words here since 1999. That’s Catch-22 times 8 or Fahrenheit 451 times 31. If only mine were such quality words as those.

I’m hosting a Learn to OpenStreetMap table at the City of Charlottetown’s Inspired City event on February 4, 2016 from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. at the Delta Prince Edward Hotel. It’s free, and everyone is welcome.

If you’d like to learn how to sign up for a free OpenStreetMap account, and how to use the simple web-based map editor to enhance the map of Charlottetown, please stop by. I’ll have a couple of laptops available for you to use, and lots of stories and map tips to share.

As it says here:

OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the whole world that is being built by volunteers largely from scratch and released with an open-content license.

The map of Charlottetown and area has been evolving over the 10 years that the OpenStreetMap project has been running, but there are still many areas of the city that could benefit from greater detail, and there are new horizons to explore — indoor mapping, 3D mapping, micromapping – that can keep us all busy for years.

You can edit OpenStreetMap from your own computer in your own home or office, and the editor is simple and well-documented enough that you don’t need a lot of experience to jump in right away.

Come and seek me out on February 4 at the Delta.

A couple of years ago, just after Ethan joined our family, Oliver needed to have a tooth extracted. Ethan came with him. I just found a photo that Catherine took of Ethan and Oliver together in the dentist’s chair, a photo that had gone missing in the interim.

Olle tweeted this morning:

@ruk I use yr Comment fieldset on iPhone. Email input field does not change keyboard layout to the email-positive one. Can HTML5 attrs?

What Olle means is that when he’s entering his email address in the comment form on a post here, he would like the HTML for the email field to have a “type” of “email,” as documented here:

A field for editing an e-mail address. The input value is validated to contain either the empty string or a single valid e-mail address before submitting. 

In other words,the HTML for the email field right now looks like this:

<input type="text" 
       id="edit-mail" 
       name="mail" 
       value="" size="30" 
       maxlength="64" 
       class="form-text required">  

and this results in the iOS keyboard, when focused on this field, looking generic, like this:

This isn’t the special “enter an email address” keyboard that would have handier access to the “@” sign, and that would work to ensure that what was entered was, in fact, a valid email address.

How to make this work in Drupal 7?

I installed the Elements module, which defines a new emailfield field type for the Drupal Forms API.

Then in my theme’s template.php I altered the comment form:

function at_ruk_form_comment_form_alter(&$form) {
  $form['author']['mail']['#type'] = 'emailfield';
}

That has the effect of modifying the Drupal comment field HTML to look like this instead:

<input type="email" 
       id="edit-mail" 
       name="mail" 
       value="" 
       size="28" 
       maxlength="64" 
       class="form-text form-email required">

which has the desired effect of rendering an email-address-specific keyboard in the iOS brower:

Note that handy access to the “@” symbol and the period beside the spacebar.

The effect is similarly positive on the Chrome browser on Android devices:

Thanks to Olle for the inspiration to do this.