I spent the day at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery preparing for the [[Plazes]] demo this evening. It was mostly a day of banging my head against intractable firewalls, trying to get iChat AV to talk, through the Centre’s military-grade network protection, to [[Felix Petersen]] in Berlin. Never did get it to work; I’m thinking of starting a “firewall rights organization” to support all my disaffected librarian and curator friends who are held hostage by the need to protect the network from the Russians, therein neutering much of the DIY potential of the Internet.

In the end we had to be content with a SkypeOut call to Felix’s mobile phone (18 minutes; €3.80; did I mentioned that Skype rocks?). Which actually worked pretty well, all things considered. Kudos to Felix for extreme patience (and for staying up past midnight to talk to invisible strangers about technology). And kudos to brother [[Johnny]] too for putting up with 8 hours of “can you hear me now?” iChat testing. And to my mother [[Frances]] for looking after Oliver during my distraction.

The day ended around 9:00 p.m. with a 3-olive martini at [[Mavor’s]] (I don’t usually drink martinis, but it seemed like the Right Thing To Do). I got a chance to hang out with Serious Art People, which was novel and interesting; they use words like plinth (“A block or slab on which a pedestal, column, or statue is placed.” — they gave me one to balance my laptop on) and maquette (“A usually small model of an intended work, such as a sculpture or piece of architecture.” — art people are drenched in maquettes, it seems).

Nonetheless I was struck with how similar artist Don Gill’s “art stuff” is to the “digital stuff” of my peers: in a sense what he does with scrapbooks is what [[Plazes]] does with bits. Which I suppose was the whole point of having us share the podium for the evening.

Amidst all this I picked up a phone message from one of my oldest and dearest friends: he and his fiancée are considering getting married in Berkeley, California at the end of the month and wanted to know if we could come. This happens to be Oliver’s last week of freedom before Kindergarten starts, so it might in fact be the perfect time to travel.

Must sleep now. Although I’m certain I will dream of NAT and default gateways and managed switches and port 5090.

A reminder: tonight, Wednesday, August 3rd at 7:00 p.m. at the Confederation Centre of the Arts (in the Art Gallery), Felix Petersen, co-founder of [[Plazes]], will drop in via video from Germany to talk about the history, development and future of the system. Felix will answer questions from the audience, so if you’re curious about Plazes, or just curious about bootstrapping a web system, bring your thoughts.

Felix will be followed on the programme by artist Don Gill who will talk about his approach to urban landscapes and his project Erratic Space created during his residency in Charlottetown this summer.

The event is free.

It promises to be an interesting night.

I am the person least qualified in the world to speak on matters related to Microsoft Windows, as, save for a Virtual PC installation on my Mac that lets me continue to use Quicken, I’ve managed to make myself completely Windows-free.

That’s what I told reporter Sarah Lyseck when she cold-called me to ask for my reaction to Microsoft’s plans to bake piracy checking into their Windows Update service. She said that didn’t matter, that she wanted the views of the unWindowed too. As a result, you’ll find me quoted as follows in this itbusiness.ca story:

“The heavy-handed, smash people over the head, police state way of controlling software piracy just doesn’t work,” said Rukavina. “If it worked, there would be no software piracy.”

Starting August 7th with Casablanca you can watch movies outside under the moon at the Confederation Centre of the Arts. Details at Moonlight Marquee. Cool. Link from Rob.

Rob Lantz is blogging at freelantz.ca.

I’ve taken the simple Ruby for Plazes code that I hacked together last week and used it to create a very basic GUI launcher:

The launcher is Mac OS X-specific in its current form, only because it makes a system call to launch the Safari browser; making it cross-platform should be trivial.

It’s the very most basic launcher: all it does is use the [[Plazes]] XML-RPC server to send your username, password and developer key to the Plazes.com server, which has the effect of “logging you in” to Plazes. Among the information that the XML-RPC call receives back is a URL that represents your current “Plaze” — the application simply takes this URL and feeds it to Safari.

The application doesn’t do any regular pinging of the Plazes.com server, download and display of buddy information etc., but it should be easy to extend it to do this.

To use the launcher, you’ll need:

• PlazesLauncherRuby-0.1.tar.gz, which includes my Ruby for Plazes code.
• A Plazes developer key.
• Ruby and Tk for Ruby (which, at least under Tiger, are all present by default; see here for earlier versions of OS X)

If you do a Google search for ‘air canada seat sale’, this is what you’ll see:

Clients often ask me how they can improve their Google search results ranking: I always tell them to simply write about what they do, using commonsense language. If you’re going to have a seat sale, for example, don’t title your page “New International service System-wide seat sale now on!”

[[Karin LaRonde]] makes what is arguably the best iced tea on Prince Edward Island and sells it from her stall at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market (they do make a good glass at the Trailside Café in Mount Stewart too; Karin’s it a pinch better, though). Two weeks ago Karin concocted an iced tea that was flavoured with rooibos a plant that hails from South Africa. And it was iced tea to die for, crisp, refreshing, and eerily reminiscent of the “Mind Demuddler” I had in Santa Fe at the Longevity Café last year and have hankered for ever since.

Alas word of Karin’s iced tea excellence has spread, and so when Oliver and I arrived at the market this Saturday at 11:30 a.m., Karin had just served her last glass. Next week we’ll have to go earlier.

All this thinking of iced tea prompted me to dig up an old episode of Off the Beaten Track, a summer series I produced with Matthew Rainnie for CBC Prince Edward Island’s [[Mainstreet]]. The episode is the best of the series, I think: I took a passion and pursued it to the ends of the earth, and had much fun doing so. The piece was later picked up by CBC’s syndication service, and I spent a heady afternoon talking to CBC afternoon show hosts from St. John’s to Yukon delivering the same spiel. I’ve attached the original Mainstreet audio here so that you too can learn everything you might ever want to know about iced tea.

Kings Square is perhaps the most sensible of the four squares that organize themselves in the quadrants of downtown [[Charlottetown]].

Rochford Square has a tony patrician air, with a formal garden and fine houses lining its borders. Connaught Square was ravaged by Hurricane Juan, and has the pall of its former life as “Jail Square” hanging over it. Hillsborough Square is the workhorse of the bunch — it’s always filled with kids at the playground and people walking their dogs — and it hasn’t quite thrown off the taste of being “on the wrong side of the tracks.”

Kings Square, though, faced by the MacLean funeral home, Sterns laundry, Holland College and the Central Christian Church complex, is solidly middle class. It’s workaday without being down and out. It’s got the most flourishing trees of the bunch. It’s the CBS of the town square set to the PBS of Rochford Square, the ABC of Hillsborough Square and the Fox of Connaught Square.

As such, it was the perfect location for Hon. Shawn Murphy, Member of Parliament for Hillsborough, to hold his Strawberry Social this past Wednesday: Kings Square embodies the kind of centrist “everyman” image that the Liberal Party strives to maintain.

Being a sucker for offers of free ice cream, Oliver and I walked over with G. around 6:30 p.m. to see what we could see. We joined a motley crowd that included a good selection of stalwart Liberals, a good selection of politically agnostic free ice cream seekers like ourselves, and a smattering of weirdos.

If you’d told me ten years ago that Shawn Murphy would be good at the kind of smalltalk and gladhanding that is required at events like this, I wouldn’t have believed you; much to my surprise, though, he seems like a natural. He and G., for example, share a distant relation and they spent a good 5 minutes carving up their family tree together before Shawn was pulled away to shake someone else’s hands. He may not come by it naturally, but if he’s faking it, I can’t tell.

The most bizarre event of the night was when a tall older man stridently walked through the middle of the square shouting “Shawn Murphy’s for Faggots” at the top of his lungs. To their credit (I think), the crowd paid him no heed. And I can’t imagine what would have been a useful response (stoning?).

The ice cream — an ADL product Tom Cullen told me — was good; the strawberries, alas, a slurry rather than fresh (Catherine Callbeck served fresh when we went to her social; she was Premier at the time, mind you). Oliver decided he didn’t like Liberal ice cream, so I had to eat a helping a a half, and so felt mildly dizzy for the rest of the night.

As Shawn shook hands and we wolfed down our ice cream, and the homphobe ranted through, a solitary musician, accompanied by a Muzak-generating electronic band, stood on a flatbed truck and filled the air with country ballads.

After half an hour, we got up from our seats on the grass, waved our goodbyes, and stole off into the night.

I’ve done some work this week expanding on the work I wrote about in the post Talking to Plazes from Ruby: I’ve now created general-purpose Ruby module that implements all of the [[Plazes]] API methods, both the Launcher and the WhereAmI.

Here’s what you need to start talking to [[Plazes]] from Ruby yourself:

• Download PlazesRuby-0.4.tar.gz to get the Ruby module plazes.rb and associated code.
• Read the documentation (also included in the download)
• If you don’t have one, request a Plazes developer key.

Note that my implementation is very Mac OS X specific because of the method I used to grab the MAC address of the current gateway; it should be trivial, however, to modify the code to accommodate other operating systems (there are plenty of comments in the code to suggest where and what).

And here’s (primitive) proof that it works: