I released an updated version of PresenceRouter today that supports Yahoo’s new Fire Eagle engine. For those of you new to the app, PresenceRouter lets you route your [[Plazes]] geopresence stream to many different social networks and web services (Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, and more). This version also fixes Adium support, and adds routing the current location to Jaiku.

Our friends at Island Morning posed the question “Should condoms be made available in Island schools?” for this morning’s regular Friday-morning phone in. Yes, this is still an open question here on PEI. Sigh.

Of course we got to hear to usual range of “having condoms easily available will only encourage them” calls from people who presumably have forgotten completely what it was like to be a teenager and thus are completely divorced from any ability to be realistic about this issue (has there ever been an example in history of a teenager sitting on the fence about sex being pushed over the edge by the ‘implicit permissiveness’ that condom machines in schools are supposed to have? — “I know you think it’s wrong, Billy, but the school board wouldn’t install condom machines in the washroom if they didn’t want us to have sex”).

In this puritanical environment, those fair-minded people who can see the upside of making condoms as freely and widely available as possible are forced to couch every argument they make inside a fog of “and of course we also encourage abstinence.” Any suggestion that if teens are going to have sex it might as well be good sex would, I imagine, be greeted with expulsion, trial for heresy, or worse.

In other words, it’s somewhat okay to admit that kids are having sex — as young as 11 or 12 years old they said this morning — and it’s somewhat okay to seek a sort of “medical intervention” in the process by providing them with condoms, but these things are only somewhat okay if it’s generally suggested that sex is still wrong.

I can only imagine that the sex that results is inevitably conducted in non-optimal conditions, tinged with guilt, shame and fear of being found out, and likely often not symmetrically consensual. What kind of introduction to sex is this?

Perhaps a more useful question for the CBC to pose would be something like “What could we be doing to give our kids a healthier introduction to sex?” The longer we waste time on issues like condom availability — issues that the much of the rest of the world has grappled with and dealt with already — the longer we allow a culture of “sex as regrettable but possibly necessary evil” to persist.

Pownce, a web service co-founded by friend-of-ruk Daniel Burka, released an updated API today that adds support for “posting links” programatically. In turn I’ve released an updated version of PresenceRouter with Pownce support. And thus:

For those of you who are new to the game: PresenceRouter is a Mac OS X application that allows you to echo your Plazes geopresence stream to other web services.

• Zurich
• Zuta
• Zutphen
• Zuver
• Zwingle
• Zwolle
• Zyba
• Zylks
• Zylonite
• Zzyzx

Baghdad Bureau is a new weblog from the New York Times:

The goal is to provide a sense of the lives of ordinary Iraqis as well as of the country’s politicians, police officers and military forces, and to offer a more informal portrait of the American-led troops, the growing numbers of private security contractors and the foreign diplomats. All have a part in the painful drama unfolding here and stories that deserve to be told.

The Playmobil online store sells a variety of Playmobil figures including African/African American Family, Asian Family, and Mediterranean/Hispanic Family. You can also buy Caucasian Family and, somewhat oddly, Roman Family.

Five years ago the Provincial Library Service here in Prince Edward Island had a convenient web form that patrons could use to make inter-library loan requests. This was nice, in part, because it meant that you could build applications that depended on it.

Alas this handiness has been replaced, inexplicably, by an unhelpful page that directs one to download a PDF about inter-library loans. It appears, thus, that you now have to actually go to the library itself and fill out an “interlibrary loan request form.” With a pencil.

It’s like 1952 all over again.

There is a web-based form to make a request to have the library purchase something. Alas it too harkens back to an earlier era of unhelpfulness; read this, for example:

Patrons who submit a suggestion for purchase are encouraged to keep checking the catalogue and if the item appears, place the request themselves at that time. If the title does not appear in our catalogue after three months, assume that it is not going to be purchased.

While it’s understandable that the library can’t purchase everything that’s requested, their low level of online literacy suggests perhaps that they record purchase requests with quill pens in a ledger and review them once a year. If nothing else one can sense “exhausted, understaffed and overwhelmed” behind the verbiage on those pages; they might just as well say “look, we’re not really going to purchase anything you request, so stop asking already and go to Indigo.”

So here’s my idea: take the engine that runs Digg, the “social news” website, and repurpose it as a web application that allows library patrons to collectively decide which books the library system should purchase. Patrons would “login” to “LibraryDigg” with their regular library card number and password, and then could enter books, DVDs, etc. that they want opened up for consideration.

Every library patron would be allowed access to the list of requests, and could “Digg” — vote that they be purchased — things they want to see purchased too.

While you’d want to leave a certain amount of the book budget to librarian’s discretion to ensure a well-rounded collection, another certain portion could be devoted to “community determined” purchases.

In theory this would make the book purchase budget more responsive to actual patron interests, and over and above that utility I think it would provide an interesting platform around which to build interest in and discussion about things in the library.

Remember my Facebook ad campaign for ruk.ca? Well I ran it for over four days last week. The ad received a total of 1,332 impressions (to the “liberal and moderate people between 18 and 60 years old in Charlottetown, PE” audience). How much traffic did it generate? None.

Remember four years ago when I did some experiments with my local library’s online catalog? While I’ve returned to the project, and have released some updated code that leverages the fact that Dynix, the engine behind the catalog, can output XML for almost everything it does. The result is a PHP class: class.dynix.php.

You can try this out for yourself, if you’re a PEI Provincial Library card holder, by visiting this example page wherein you can enter your public library card number and password and retrieve a nicely formatted list of the items you have checked out and on hold. Here’s what it looks like in action:

Note that although I don’t record your library card number and password, they are sent insecurely, and as such are liable to interception by evil doers. Of course this is also true when you use the OPAC directly, albeit with one fewer point of possible evil.

In theory this should work for any Dynix system that has a website: the default URL in the example above is for Prince Edward Island, but if you can find the equivalent URL for your system, just enter it (it might end in ipac.jsp like ours does?).

For maximum fun, go and grab the PHP source code and set yourself up locally: all you need is a standard PHP5 install — there are no other dependencies.

Remember our morning traffic light bird? Well there’s been no sign of it for the past several months. But, today, a sign of spring:

[[Oliver]] noted some additional signs of spring today as well: no ice and snow on the sidewalks, and the forecast calls for rain (although preceded by snow).