Olle blogs about Sean Treadway’s Danish plight. Short version of the story: Sean, an American, has been a freelance worker in Copenhagen for the last seven years, but has recently been told he must leave the country because his small (one person) company “doesn’t contribute a type of company to the Danish labor market that doesn’t already exist in Denmark.”

[[Olle]] and I discussed the issue this morning and agreed that this is a more general and more serious problem than it might first appear, a problem not specific to Sean nor to Denmark: the tendency of the state to discount the economic importance of “micro” businesses (like Sean’s, like Olle’s, like mine).

Unlike larger companies, micro-companies inevitably develop a sort of “digital ecosystem” with each other, and rely upon partnerships (ephemeral, short-lived or otherwise) to thrive. While this isn’t unique to the digital economy (plumbers and electricians have always installed furnaces together), advances in travel (and thus mobility), communications and work now make it more possible for the ecosystem to cross regional and national lines: if I’m living temporarily in France, working with Olle in Denmark on a German open source project that sits on a server in Canada, where “am” I? Where is my economic activity being generated? Who do I pay taxes to? And whose economy is benefiting from my activity?

From what Olle tells me, Sean has grown to become an important and vital part of the Danish digital ecosystem, and his economic impact is out of proportion to what a strict traditional economy analysis might suggest — his presence in the ecosystem, in other words, enables others to be more effective, which has a cascading effect, and so on.

We face related challenges here in Prince Edward Island, where our provincial government seems to exhibit a single-minded obsession with catching Big Important Technology Fish, and largely ignores the important (but largely invisible, at least to them) economic activity generated by small one- or two-person companies.

In the case of both Denmark and Prince Edward Island, you would think that the “small is beautiful” ethos upon which both depend for their cultural survival, would inspire economists and bureaucrats to realize the beauty of the small that lurks within.

The GeoTraceAgri project has set out to “define a methodology for the sampling, acquisition, utilization and processing of georeferenced data that will be used to generate agro-environmental indicators at various geographical scales.”

What I think that means is that, at least in part, they’re working on systems that would allow me to learn more about the geographical route my food took to get from the farm to my plate. Which is not only a cool idea, but one that many consumers, I think, would clamor for.

It also represents one of the Great Hopes for small agricultural economies on the edge — like [[Prince Edward Island]]. We’re never going to win on price; we can hope to win the information race.

I know, from work on a project with [[Rob]] several years ago in Kinkora, that there’s interest and willingness into the agriculture community to enable this sort of thing. Some of it is happening already in some sectors — FoodTrust is an early adopter program that’s driving some of this.

Thanks to Ogle Earth for the pointer.

Henriette introduces an excellent new word into my vocabularly: Københavnerprotokollen, or “the Copenhagen Protocol.” Perhaps one of you in the Danish-speaking readership could shoot me an MP3 to let us in on how it’s pronounced?

By the way, the HTML entity for ø is ø.

It’s a “snow day” here in [[Charlottetown]] today — schools and offices are closed, and the streets are all but empty. [[Catherine]] found me a mysterious pair of felt-lined rubber boots in the mud room; they barely fit, but they were enough to insulate my feet to work (although my left foot did spasm several times on the way here, as they’re about two sizes too small). When I arrived at the office there was a giant German Shepherd named Gail on her way out; this turned out to be [[Nathan]]’s parents’ dog Kayla (the blazzardic winds had caused my hearing to temporarily fail). Personally, I think she’s a better dog as Gail, and will continue to call her that.

The past three days have seemed like an continuous eating party: [[Mom]] and [[Dad]] arrived by air on Thursday afternoon, and we haven’t stopped eating since. Thursday was dinner at our house, Friday was dinner at [[Johnny]] and [[Jodi]]’s house, Saturday we all went out (minus [[Oliver]]) to the Harbour House restaurant, and Sunday was a repeat performance at our place. In addition to the wardriving fun, we’ve been out to see the Curious George movie, did a Saturday Morning Market Run with [[Dad]], and have had many Serious Discussions About World Issues around the dinner table.

In other news, [[Catherine]] says that her taxi driver told her that the much vaunted “downtown grocery store” slated for the old Carter’s space on Queen Street has imploded; something about the intractable dividing wall between the two halves of the building.

Speaking of implosion, part of our Market Run on Saturday included a stop at the Indigo store on University Ave., where the day before an out of control SUV had driven into the children’s section (nobody was seriously hurt). The hole in the wall was still there, and we were able to get a good look at it; apparently the building that houses Indigo is essentially “disposable,” as the walls appear to be made of steel studs and tissue paper (a fact that probably prevented a lot of cement black carnage, but doesn’t bode will for Historic Charlottetown moving north of Euston St.). Inside they were doing a brisk business, although not in children’s books, as the entire section was roped off to allow for emergency construction work. And to think that I’d recently started to let [[Oliver]] alone to browse while I shopped for magazines: no more.

Otherwise, today was [[Mitch Cormier]]’s first day in his new role as newsreader on [[Island Morning]], a role formerly ably filled by Kerry Campbell, Barbara Nymark, current host Karen Mair and, back at the beginning, Whit Carter (among many, many other over the years, of course). I’ve always enjoyed Mitch on the radio, and he’s a welcome addition to the morning; at the same time, I’ll miss Kerry Campbell, who did a bang-up job, especially on the “patter with Karen” front. I hope he has another local role to jump into, as it would be a shame to lose him.

Gail and Nathan are back now, and the [[silverorange boys]] are starting to muster for their Monday session of power-working in the front room, so I best sign off and hunker down for some serious snow day working.

Honest Tea-brand iced tea has returned to the Shopper’s Drug Mart in [[Charlottetown]] with a vengeance: they now have what looks to be about 200 bottles ready for purchase in the cooler in the health food section at the back. If you’re an aficionado, now’s the time to stock up.

I have an arcane technical request for any of the readership within spitting distance of where I type this in [[Charlottetown]]: my [[Dad]] wants to test the ability of his IBM ThinkPad’s DVD reader to read DVD RW disks burned in the “InCD” format. He’s here until Monday evening. If you have a DVD RW burned in this fashion that we can borrow for a bit, I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

A perfect storm of technology became available this morning that allowed [[Dad]] and I to go on a wardriving expedition around [[Charlottetown]] — an upgrade from my earlier warwalking experiments.

We ended up finding just over 200 wireless access points; put on a map they look like this (red markers are secured wifi access points, green markers are open ones):

In terms of gear, our setup looked like this:

• IBM ThinkPad T-20 laptop.
• NetStumbler software running under Windows 2000 on the laptop.
• An ancient Entrega 4-port USB hub.
• An ancient Holux GPS receiver, borrowed from [[Dan]], plugged into the USB hub, and using some sort of weird “make my USB port into a serial port” driver.
• TRENDnet 54Mbps 802.11g Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter plugged into the USB hub.
• 400 W Eliminator Power Inverter from Canadian Tire.
• 2000 Volkswagen Jetta.

NetStumbler worked very well with Dad’s cheap USB wifi card and Dan’s GPS receiver; we needed the inverter in the car because the ThinkPad battery only lasts 15 minutes, and it only has one USB port where we needed two, thus the powered hub and the need to plug it in someplace.

I would be horrible if every asked to run a “grid pattern search” in a search and rescue situation, so our wardriving pattern wasn’t exactly comprehensive; we tried to get a representative sample from several neighbourhoods, but my sense is that there are 10-20x more access points out there that we missed.

Not sure how that one marker ended up out in Charlottetown Harbour — we didn’t actually drive the car out there.

If you want to fool with the raw data we gathered yourself, here are a couple of files:

• NetStumbler Binary Logfile
• Google Earth KML

I created the Google Maps map and the Google Earth datafile using the excellent GPSVisualizer site: it simply slurps in the NetStumbler files and spits out maps. Neato.

Some kids go hunting with their Dad, some kids play ball; I run wires all around my Volkswagen and go hunting for radio signals with my Dad.

I’m suddenly confused. I know that, in Chinese characters, [[Oliver]] is spelled ???. And when I just pasted those characters into my Safari, it looks right. But I’m almost certain that when I save this item, and it gets rendered as a web page, it’s not going to appear as Chinese to my readers. I know how to handle this for a specific web-page by changing the text-encoding for an entire page. But this blog post will appear in many different places (here, in aggregators, in blog search engines, etc.) — how do I universally indicate “these characters here in this chunk of text are in Chinese?”

Postscript: As expected, my Chinese characters ended up as “???”. This might be because of limitations in the MySQL database where I’m storing the post, or because of text encoding problems in the browser. Or maybe I’m just in the dark. Please advise.

In September of 1992 I spent 36 hours on [[Prince Edward Island]]. It was my first time here — a quick vacation on the way back from driving a friend from Ontario to Halifax. The flip of a coin sent my travel-mate and I to the Island rather than into New Brunswick. Coming off the ferry, we walked into the tourism information centre in Borden only to find that, given that the season was over, it had been re-purposed as a kindergarten. We visited Cedar Dunes Provincial Park and the lighthouse at West Point, came into Charlottetown for a night and stayed at Strathgartney, and did a little touring around in-between. I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever been.

I loved PEI so much that six months later [[Catherine]] and I were living here.

We forgot to leave.

The CBC is reporting that the theme of this year’s PEI tourism marketing campaign is “P.E.I. isn’t just a nice place to visit – it could change your life.” My old colleague Greg Arsenault from Tourism PEI is quoted as saying “The trick will be to show how Prince Edward Island changes people.”

As someone whose life was dramatically changed by a visit to the Island, I completely agree with this thrust.

Above and beyond just the tourism economy, I think it’s high time Islanders stop being so timid about how special and different and transformative a place we live in. The world does need a little more Prince Edward Island.

Of course it’s entirely possible that the Grey Worldwide (the Island’s new agency) could screw this up entirely, and leave us with some wacky half-baked cartoon of a vision of the Island’s super-powers. But as a starting point, this is one of the better ideas I’ve seen, and if they do it right, it could be dramatic.

Out with “come play” and in with “come rock your world.”

[[Olle]] has joined the PlazesPHP development team, and has made good strides with generalizing the code today so that its “grab the MAC address” features can be made to work more universally.

This is my first “co-creation” experience, and it’s enabled by SVN and the SVN repository I set up for all my open source meanderings. It was quite neat to sudden see the revision number on the code uptick without having to do anything myself.

My next goal is to start building a few useful sample apps on top of the new PHP class.