We bought a tiny solar racer from Owls Hollow this afternoon — too cool a toy to pass up. Take the car and put it in bright sun and it moves. Until it gets to a shadow. Magic. Or so it seems.

Ever since my experiments with Nokia Chat and XMPP I’ve had the picture in my mind of an XMPP-driven robot that would accept geographic locations from Nokia Chat and respond with a list of nearby Plazes. This, after all, is the promise of the “location-based future,” is it not?

Tonight I managed to hack something together in PHP, running on my MacBook. You can try it out if you like: you’ll need Nokia Chat running on a GPS-enabled device. Here’s what you need to do.

First, start up Nokia Chat and select Options \| Add Friend:

Add user reinvented@ovi.com as your new friend:

If everything goes according to plan — my robot hasn’t imploded and is still running — you should automatically receive back a welcome message:

Next, select Options \| Send \| My location (this will only appear if your GPS receiver is running, and your device knows its location already):

You’ll receive back an acknowledgement with instructions to send a keyword to look up Plazes:

Enter a keyword — in this example I entered bar, but you can enter a Plazes category, or, indeed, anything that you can normally enter in a Plazes.com search. After a brief delay you should receive back a list of the three Plazes nearest your current location that match your search:

If you move up and click on the Open link under any of the Plazes, and you have Nokia Maps installed, the location will appear on a map:

At this point you can add it as a new Landmark, or you can click Exit to go back to Nokia Chat and continue your exploring.

This is a two-hours-old alpha robot, so it’s likely prone to breakage or other weirdness; please bear with me.

This isn’t an official Plazes or Nokia project; it’s just me doing some weekend hacking.

Here’s how the process of booking a hotel at NovaScotia.com goes:

1. Use the Accommodations Search page to identify a property you like.
2. Click “Online Reservation.”
3. Enter check-in and check-out dates and number of guests.
4. Select an available room and rate.
5. End up at a page titled “Members” that invites you to “logon” or “register.”
6. Click “Need to register?” and name, address, telephone, email, username and password.
7. End up at confirmation page telling you that you need to confirm your email by clicking on a link that’s been emailed to you before you can logon.
8. Receive said email, click on link.
9. Start the entire process over again from scratch now that you have an account — the entire search has been forgotten now, and it’s a whole new day.

The heat yesterday afternoon was punishing, and so once my weekly call with [[Yankee]] was over, I rushed home, Catherine and Oliver and I piled into the car, cranked up the AC, and headed out into the countryside with hopes of finding food and cool ocean breezes.

Our first choice, The Pearl, had no room for us, so we continued to head west through Cavendish. We flirted with the idea of Pizza Delight, but decided we had to aim higher. Through Stanley Bridge and New London, we almost stopped at the seafood place on New London Bay, which is where we usually end up when we’re at the end of the line. But we continued onwards ever still to Long River, with hopes that The Kitchen Witch would be open.

Fortunately, it was.

My introduction to The Kitchen Witch came almost a decade ago. A colleague of mine was fond of holding breakfast meetings by driving towards Long River, parking his truck about a mile away, and then “meeting” during a mile-long brisk morning walk that ended with breakfast there.

We’ve been back many times, mostly on family rambles along the north shore. The restaurant was always a reliable place for a good family meal, with the food tending towards the “Island home cooking” style, with chowders, lobster rolls and the like.

And so this was what we were expecting when we pulled the car up last night.

Somebody forgot to tell us, however, that The Kitchen Witch is under new management. And the new management hails from Houston, Texas.

From the outside, much looks the same, save for the sign advertising Strawberry Rhubarb Gelato, which seemed a little out of character for the Witch.

Inside, however, it’s a completely different story: take a look at the menu and you’ll see enchiladas, Texas tamales, taquitos and spicy tortilla soup alongside the more familiar reuben sandwich, French onion soup and spaghetti. The new Texan owners have brought a good amount of their southern U.S. cuisine with them, and it shares the menu with some of the old favourites.

And that’s not all: in a fashion unusual for Island restaurants, the menu points out options for vegetarians, items that are gluten free, and dishes that use local Prince Edward Island ingredients. And the beverage menu is one dear to my heart as it includes house-made iced tea, “teamonade” (highly recommended mixture of iced tea and lemonade) and Dandelion & Burdock soda and an exhaustive menu of hot tea.

Oh, and they make their own gelato, with a constantly changing collection of flavours; last night, for example, they had gingerbread flavour, the result of a fallen gingerbread cake put to good use.

The food is good too. No boil-in-bag enchiladas here: they make their own tortillas. And their own Texas BBQ. And their own bread. And their own potato salad. The service is friendly and completely without pretense. The room is as pleasant as it ever was: old wooden chairs around old wooden tables inside the old Long River school.

Did I mention that the (clean) washrooms have kid-attachments for the toilets, and a complete changing table with supplies?

The Kitchen Witch was always a reliable place to get a solid meal. Now it’s a must-see that I encourage everyone to make a pilgrimage to: you will not be disappointed.

The Kitchen Witch is located about 45 minutes from Charlottetown in the village of Long River. Be sure to drive along the scenic coastal lands from French River to Sea View while you’re in the area, and then make a generous donation to the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust to help preserve them in perpetuity.

Here’s a graph that shows traffic, over the last day, on our Internet connection here at the office (time runs backwards from the left-hand side of the graph):

See the two “mountains” of traffic, one yesterday afternoon and the other starting at 9:00 a.m. this morning? That’s all spam. Loads of it. Floods of it. Enough incoming network traffic that our SMTP server is having trouble keeping up.

In this case it’s not the spam itself that’s a problem — most of it is so obviously spam that we can easily throw it into /dev/null — but rather the impact on our bandwidth, and the server resources needed to identify and throw the spam away.

Looking at our mail server logs, this spam is coming from all over the place — there’s no discernable pattern of IP addresses or domain names that we could simply firewall out. And so I’m sort of as a loss as to how to react, other than to hope that, like the flood yesterday, this too shall pass.

Anyone have any advice to offer?

Update, the next morning: the spam flood seems to have passed, at least for now…

Directions to a man from Alabama, looking for a mocha latte on lower Queen Street: “See that sign up the street on the other side with the sunshine on it that says Cora’s? Don’t go there. But walk there, and then go two doors up.”

I’ve been experimenting with the beta of Nokia Chat for the past few days; it’s an interesting application, with lots of promise, and is pleasantly open, in that it’s built on the XMPP protocol. This is the same protocol used by Jabber and Google Talk, and so Nokia Chat interoperates nicely with those services (you cannot, however, use an existing Jabber or Google Talk account with Nokia Chat — you’re forced to create a new “@ovi.com” account).

The tag-line for Nokia Chat is “more than just messaging” and its ability to share location, using the built-in GPS in modern Nokia devices, is the feature that is used to differentiate it from other instant messaging apps.

How this actually works isn’t immediately obvious unless you happen to be using the application to chat to other Nokia Chat users, as the location sharing features aren’t even on the menu when you’re chatting with users on other networks. Here, for example, is what my Nokia Chat menu looks like when I’m chatting with Mark, who’s using Jabber.org:

Compare this to a chat with another Nokia Chat user; there’s now a “Send” menu option, with two sub-options, “Voice message” and “My location.”

Now in this case the user I’m chatting with is actually a xmpphp script that’s signed into another Nokia Chat account. Because of this I was able to watch the actual XML being sent back and forth; what I found was that if this script advertised its presence like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<presence>
	<status>Experimenting</status>
</presence>

then Nokia Chat didn’t show the special “Send” menu. However if I modified the script to advertise that I was a client with some additional capabilities:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<presence>
	<c xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/caps" 
	   node="http://chat.ovi.com/caps" 
	   ver="1.0" 
	   ext="mobi loc-1 vim-1"/>
	<priority>1</priority>
	<status>Experimenting</status>
</presence>

then Nokia Chat took me to be capable of receiving location (loc-1) and voice message (vim-1) presence updates and acted accordingly, displaying the “Send” menu as above.

So what actually gets sent when I select “Send \| My location” to a contact from within Nokia Chat? Simply more XML, it turns out, using the geoloc XMPP extension:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<message from="#######" to="="#######" ">
	<body>
	    This message contains a location.
	</body>
	<geoloc 
	    xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/geoloc" 
	    xml:lang="en">
		<lat>46.235998566402</lat>
		<lon>-63.129852545897 </lon>
	</geoloc>
	<x xmlns="jabber:x:oob">
		<url>(mapquest url here)</url>
	</x>
</message>

(The message also contains a link to a Mapquest.com URL which I’ve removed in the XML above for brevity).

On the receiving side, when someone sends you a location in Nokia Chat, the message looks like this:

When you select the “Open” link, the Nokia Maps application starts up and zooms to the given location.

Because this is all done using XML, using published protocols, the door is open to build all sorts of interesting applications that hook into Nokia Chat. Sending location information, for example, to a XMPP-speaking bot, would provide a built-in mechanism for sending location updates to a web application.

Stay tuned for more experimenting.

I got my fresh-off-the-press copy of the new book A Good Summer this afternoon from my friend Ann.

The book features the photographs of Island photographer Anna Karpinski accompanied by text from 16 Island writers. I’m honoured to be one of the 16: I wrote a paragraph about my brother Steve’s official reprimand for not attending the Gold Cup and Saucer Parade one summer.

The design of the book, by Mathew MacKay, is wonderful: he’s come up with a design that would have worked well in 1966, looked dated in the interim, but suddenly feels exactly right for this moment.

The book is being formally launched on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. in an event — open to the public, meaning you — being held at The whY. There will be readings, signings and refreshments.

You can buy the book online from Nimbus or ask your local bookseller to order ISBN 9781894838320.

First, it’s cotton boll, not cotton ball. And the boll weevil feeds on same. Also, a weevil is not a rat-sized gopher-like mammal but rather a small beetle.

Second, if you’re Cornish you’re from Cornwall. I’d never made that connection before.

Oh, and there’s a Margate in England too (we have our very own Margate here on PEI). The things you can learn from Relocation, Relocation.