Continuing our 2008 Toronto Wiki Tuesday Guest Speaker Series,
Vanessa Peters (PhD Candidate, OISE) will lead discussions next Tuesday at Toronto Wiki Tuesday
at another new location, GROUNDHOG PUB.

http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/twiki/bin/view/TorontoWikiTuesdays/WikisInEducationMay2008

Here’s Vanessa’s description:

In this meeting I will discuss a new wiki-based scripted activity that was created for secondary school biology students. Using a co-design method, the researchers collaborated with two experienced science teachers to create a curriculum unit where 114 grade-ten biology students developed a knowledge base of ideas about human physiology, then drew upon those ideas as resources for subsequent curricular activities. Results demonstrate that this innovative lesson fostered collaborative knowledge construction as well as individual student learning. This suggests that a carefully designed wiki-based activity can complement and enhance the value of a collective knowledge building community within secondary school settings.

Please sign up at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/468369/

Who should come and why:
Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

• Managers and leaders responsible for evaluating the use of wikis
• Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki
• Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins
• Wiki users Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives:

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on the use of Wikis.

Toronto Wiki Tuesday’s May Meeting is sponsored by the Society of Internet Professionals.

–
Martin@Cleaver.org

When I first arrived in Toronto in 2004 I found very little in the way of Tech community. I was told that the Dot Com Crash had pretty much annihilated every shred of enthusiasm this city had left to offer.

Today, in 2008, there’s no doubt in my mind that we have a vibrant community, with many events competing for our attention.

Here’s tonight’s choices:

1. Startup Camp - startups get together to practice their pitch (closed event) http://www.startupnorth.ca/2008/04/22/startupcamp-toronto-2-what-we-expect-from-you/
2. Toronto Tech Talks - in preparation for Toronto Tech Week (Sept), “The event brings together professionals from the technology industry, and other industries such as advertising, accounting, public relations and finance come out to exchange ideas and make new business connections.”. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=14399969049
3. Case Camp - PR and Media firms look at case studies of Social Media http://www.casecamp.org/index.html
4. CIPS Unified Messaging http://www.cipstoronto.ca/activities/event_info1.php?402

Finally, if you are interested in Tech in Toronto, no matter where you go before, you need to end up here:

SummerCamp Dance Party, A Toronto Creative Mashup
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want any part of your revolution.”
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=12682267965

Start Time: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 9:00pm
End Time: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 3:00am
Location: CiRCA - Ballroom and Kid Robot Room
Street: 126 John Street

See you at CIRCA!

Last year I commented:

Legal precedent states that your ISP is a Common Carrier. This means that they are not responsible for policing what kind of packets they deliver to your house, nor do they have any right to go poking around in the packets delivered to you. So, if you want to read the political views of an ousted dissonant your ISP is not responsible for enforcing that rule. Their role is to get the information from one place to another, with neither interest nor responsibility for the content.

While it is fair that ISPs should be able to charge for the amount of traffic, (this bears down on their infrastructure) why should they have the right to select what that traffic is used for.

From a business standpoint, your ISP doesn’t want to provide just the roads. It wants to sell Ice Creams and to transport Diamonds. More than that, it wants to levy a toll on anyone that uses its roads for such value added services. They want their fingers in every pie.

Last week, Bell Canada took this to a new level. They started not only filtering their own customer’s traffic, they started impacting resellers, wholesale providers that buy bandwidth in bulk from Bell and sell to their own customers. In filtering the types of traffic those ISPs could deliver doing so they excised force in the market, trashing the business models of tens of ISPs across the country, directly impacting millions and scuppering technology innovation by organisations such as Canada’s Broadcasting Corporation:

On Sunday, CBC offered a final episode of reality TV program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister for download via BitTorrent, a file-sharing service. The release was an experiment for the public broadcaster in new ways of offering its programming.

However, downloaders who blogged about the experience on the Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister site complained about very long periods required to download the show.

One user received a notice that it could take 2½ hours to download, while another was quoted 11 hours. The bottleneck is occurring because ISPs such as Rogers and Bell limit the amount of bandwidth allocated for file-swapping on BitTorrent.

Michael Geist reports:

“The CRTC has to date largely avoided the net neutrality issue, however, that is about to change. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, Canada’s largest ISP association, has filed a Part VII application with the CRTC asking it to direct Bell Canada to cease and desist from throttling its wholesale Internet service. The application, which was filed late yesterday and is not yet posted on the CRTC site, is the most significant legal development in the Canadian net neutrality debate yet since it places the issue squarely before the Commission. The filing provides additional insights into Bell’s action - the throttling has reduced speeds by as much as 90 percent - and marks an important milestone since the outcome will provide a clear answer on whether Canadian law currently protects net neutrality or if legislative reform is needed.”

What you can do
Check out Steve Anderson’s Campaign for Democratic Media and the Stop the Throttler campaigns. Share your story.

1. http://www.stopthethrottler.ca/
2. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10734109708
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5UvAKcxTGE
4. http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/business/story.html?id=4ac678a5-38e7-40dc-8d80-80e6e8e01aeb&p=2
5. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/04/02/tech-bell.html
6. http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/407730
7. http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insights/2008/04/03/and-then-there-was-two-bell-canada-seeks-to-wipe-out-isp-competitors/

My thanks go to my friend Sandy Kemsley for the link.

As part of the 2008 Toronto Wiki Tuesday Guest Speaker Series, Adrian Fritsch (Software Consultant and founder of debatum.org) will lead discussions at Toronto Wiki Tuesday at Epicure Cafe, Here’s Adrian’s event description:

What: Toronto Wiki Tuesdays: using Wikis to Debate

The problem:

To form a well-reasoned opinion, you need the best arguments on different sides of a debate. Wikipedia stresses neutral point of view and so make it’s content hard to contrast with your current understanding. While every wiki houses content, a method is needed to help the community express contrasting opinions.

The Debatum solution:

Debatum is a wiki with a method that guides uses to document and interconnect arguments. Examples it uses include debating controversial issues such as:

1. Can computers think?
2. When is a declaration of independence reasonable?
3. Does God Exist?
4. Should there be Net Neutrality?

Debatum overlays a methodology over the wiki to encourage the growth of disparate viewpoints to inform and persuade readers. This provides users to enrich the arguments and powerfully inform and influence others.

While Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Debatum wants to be an interconnect of arguments, ideas, and lines of thought. While Wikipedia stresses a Neutral Point of view, Debatum’s goal is to write the best arguments of each side and include weak, yet popular arguments together with (strong) counter-arguments. Unlike Wikipedia, which accepts content only if it is written outside, Debatum seeks to mesh arguments with original thinking from participants.

Debatum’s goal is to well-thought-out opinions, rather than to facilitate “winning” debates. Debatum’s motto is “Knowledge by debate”.

Additional topics:

• We will discuss other attempts to approach online debates (wiki-based or not) and compare them to Debatum.
• We ask whether Wiki is actually the ideal format for documenting debates.
• We question whether (controversial) subjects be learned faster from a “debating construct” instead of a “plain” layout?
• We discuss whether a wiki format discourages rhetoric and ask whether this is a good thing.

After Adrian’s talk we’ll turn the conversation to the audience to discuss how, where and why Wikis are usually used in Politics and in what ways Debatum offers something new. Expect a lively discussion of the opportunities and resistance to wikis in politics.

When and Where:
6:30pm, Tuesday 8th April at 502 Queen Street West in the Front Room: http://www.theepicure.ca/event.html
Please sign up for this event at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/444745/
Join our mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/torontowikituesday/

Who should come and why:
Interested in the topic? Got an opinion or unique use of a wiki? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

• Parties interested in expression of contraversal or political material on wikis.
• Wikipedians responsible for promoting a neutral point of view
• Anyone who thinks that wikis are not the place to express dissent
• Technical writers responsible for documentation tasks
• Managers and leaders trying to understand the potential of wikis
• Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki
• Wiki users and Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives:
Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives, a wiki consulting firm based in Toronto, and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on the use of Wikis.

• http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/
• http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/03/toronto-wiki-tuesdays-march-april-and-onward-2008/
• http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/05/wikisym2008-im-chair-for-demos-and-posters/

About our Sponsor:
April’s Toronto Wiki Tuesdays is sponsored by the Society of Internet Professsionals. See http://www.sipgroup.org/ and http://www.sipgroup.blogspot.com/

Upcoming Toronto Wiki Tuesdays
See http://www.torontowikituesdays.com for the dates and the topics for Toronto Wiki Tuesdays for the next 3 months.

From the team at Avaaz:

Dear friends,

In just 7 days over 1 million of us have signed the petition supporting human rights and dialogue in Tibet - the fastest growing internet petition in history! After decades of injustice, the Tibetan people are crying out to the world for change, and the world is answering.

As China’s leaders decide whether to respond to Tibetan grievances with increased repression or dialogue with the Dalai Lama, an International Day of Action has been declared for Monday, March 31st. In 4 days, thousands of people in cities across the world will march to Chinese embassies and consulates, and stack hundreds of boxes containing our petition outside them. 1 million signatures makes a mountain of boxes - it’s a powerful way to deliver our message.

We have just 4 days left until the petition delivery, so we’re redoubling our efforts to build the petition even larger - to 2 million signatures - in that time. Please sign below, and then forward this email to all your friends and family:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_end_the_violence/73.php/?cl=67201776

China’s hardliners are lashing out publicly at the Dalai Lama–but many Chinese leaders believe dialogue is the best hope for stability in Tibet. Governments around the world have begun calling for dialogue, and there are many hopeful signs that, if we can keep the pressure up, China will agree. Already, we have had constructive discussions with Chinese officials about the message of our campaign.

Chinese President Hu Jintao values his country’s international reputation, and he needs to hear from us that the ‘Made in China’ brand and the upcoming Olympics in Beijing will succeed only if he chooses dialogue over the hardliners’ repression. An avalanche of global people power is moving to get his attention. Our petition recognizes the concerns of Chinese leaders that riots and separatism could lead to dangerous instability. But we support the position of the Dalai Lama, that the best path to stability and development for China lies through dialogue and respect, not repression.

This is the most promising moment in decades to address the injustices of Tibet - but already the media is moving on to other stories. We need to seize this moment with a massive statement of global support this Monday — for the next four days, let’s pull out all the stops for Tibet.

With hope,

Ricken, Graziela, Ben, Iain, Pascal, Milena, Galit, Paul, Esra’a and the whole Avaaz team

PS - Here are some links for more information:

Reuters reports unrest continues:
http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed1/idUSPEK369654

China allows first journalists back into Lhasa, monks speak out:
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/china/local%20news/tibet/2008/03/27/149167/Tibet-monks.htm

Europe and the US step up calls for dialogue:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/27/europe/27europe.php

Prominent Chinese Intellectuals call for fair approach to Tibet:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/24/asia/chinasub.php
———–

DSL: Not only has Bell imposed this on their own customers but also on their wholesale resellers, organisations such as Teksavvy, who they have started traffic-shaping, cutting off many of the newest services on the internet.

Cable: Rogers have been traffic shaping for a couple of years now, but this week stated that they will charge overlimit fees.

That both operators act so definitively, so drastically, and within such a short pace of time must get the attention of our government and the CRTC who must act on their responsibility to ensure competition in the marketplace. From an economics standpoint, these simultaneous industry moves look nothing short of collusion.

While it is in industry’s interests to promote high fees and high profits on data delivery, technologies exist to make data delivery very cheap to deliver. Industry has a mindset and investment model for traditional business models. It is in the public’s interests, and society’s to get to low costs.

> > On the Wordpress professional developer’s forum, Skaneateles Design said:
> > Working with and customizing WordPress MU requires quite a bit of
> > integrative skill, since the development docs are limited for the
> > program (often, the code itself is the documentation!), and the system is not trivial.
> >
> I wrote:
> Please excuse the off-topic, but just to let everyone know, there is an
> (underloved) section on Codex wiki for wpmu, at
> http://codex.wordpress.org/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&target=Category:WPMU&hideminor=0&days=180&limit=50
>
> And… until someone revamps the forums to make the wiki prominent, the
> documentation will likely remain just as fragmented and limited.

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:33 PM, kingler wrote:

Are you suggesting a better WPMU codex page with INDEX? Maybe it is time to start a new maillist for WPMU users and developers as well?

Hi Liang,

The http://codex.wordpress.org/Category:WPMU page is a reasonable start page. What is lacking is the wiki’s prominence in the mu forums. As the majority of people only use the forums the bulk of the most recent information is in the forums, and the pages on the wiki are not very useful.

Although a wiki provides the means to refine and os to accomplish terseness and high relevancy, blogs and in particular, forums, generate sprawl and disconnectedness. (See http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/28/wikis-compared-to-email-discussion-groups-and-blogs/ and maybe http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/06/blogs-are-like-plastics-wikis-are-like-leaves/ )

Now, forums have their place for conversation but they are not the means for generating reference material. (People do summarise in forums, but these summaries also get swept away in the flow of conversation). We need both, conversation and reference, and we need the means to harness the people’s efforts appropriately.

Given that most content is already in the forums, we need to find ways to link the forums to the wiki, and indeed, the wiki to the forums.

Our audience has barely embraced the Codex wiki so there’s little mu-specific information useful to them (although the single user wordpress information is pretty reasonable). To make Codex appealing to mu-users and to keep it front of mind, I think we need to automate the linkage between forum and wiki. This will help the community navigate from knowledge socialised in a particular conversation, to information definitively documented in the wiki, and back again, so viewing the wiki shows conversations discussing the concepts of the wiki.

If this linkage can be made convenient and appealing enough for users to traverse, they will iteratively travel the conversation (forum)-documentation (wiki) pathway, pulling the concepts they have just internalised from the new conversations into the reference documentation. Then, the user editing the shared reference has the opportunity to consolidate their new insight or understanding into the logic shared with everyone else. The reference information, being the product of the many, is comprehensive (rather than the conversation, which will typically address only a few points).

Comparing an idea or notion proposed in conversation to the comprehensive helps the editor think through the idea inside constraining context of the knowledge already known. When a user edits the reference she align herselves with the masses, and begins to engage with all the factors needed to pull the masses toward her idea.

In a forum talking in one thread provides little or no exposure to users not following that thread. A mailing list has the same issue. The lack of exposure means good seed ideas can miss growing up, and that bad ideas get pursued for too long because their authors miss a constraint that is known somewhere. A wiki, with a community properly engaged on it, will factor seeds of ideas into pages where the idea can grow, be pruned and cared for. Ideas placed on forums and mailing lists can too easily get lost.

While some communities get away with hosting conversation on the wiki itself (and there are advantages to doing so - my favourite being that the conversation can be pruned of overly verbose, poorly written or just plain wrong information), the simple fact today is that many communities do have that separate forum that the community likes, so the question is not how to eliminate the forum but how to create the relationship between the wiki and the forum.

At mu forums, what I’d like to see is this:

1. On the front page it shows the list of mu-recent-changes as well as the category entry point. This continuously informs people what reference information is being built.
2. At the bottom of every forum post show content from wiki pages. This linkage could be implied from the tags on the post in view, or via a tag generation method.

On Codex, I’d like to see:

1. a method whereby users can expand a twisty or something and get all relevant conversation items
2. the menu bar shows the mu entry points: mu-recent-changes as well as the category entry point

This method could work for both multi- and single- user versions of wordpress. Indeed, I believe for many communities today it would improve the knowledge-information (SECI) flow.

Feedwordpress is documented at http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/ and is run by the incredibly busy Charles Johnson (RadGeek). I think it would be better if Charles put a wiki for Feedwordpress at radgeek.com, and indeed I asked him to do so a few months ago, but until he does, at least people who need to use his software can collaborate with one another. You can find this wiki at http://feedwordpress.pbwiki.com/

It is a basic human need to collaborate. Cooperating with others saves us time, and helps us share our expression so at a minimum guarantees that we did what we can. Commenting on blogs does not provide the deep blending of perspectives needed for real value to be added to knowledge. In the FeedWordPress case users have asked for a forum or another means to collectively pool their time, but a wiki not only adds this but changes the sequence in which information is presented. (Actually, the password reset on the feedwordpress blog doesn’t work for me!)

Whether this Feedwordpress wiki will take off will depend on a lot of things. Whether it is seeded compellingly (including from the gems of existing content), whether people subscribe, whether people share their problems and help one another solve theirs, and what signal:noise ratio occurs on it.

We can each do our bit. Pooling our bits to be together can save us all time and energy. I hope this feedwordpresswiki will help.

A bit of news - I’ve been asked to be on committee to hold the position of Chair for Demos and Posters at WikiSym 2008 in Portugal this September.

This is great as I’ll not only see breaking ideas as they happen around the world, but also be responsible to evaluate them and help them meet standards to deliver for general interest.

Important Dates
* May 3rd: submissions deadline for research papers, practitioner reports, workshops, panels, and tutorials
* May 17th: notifications for workshop submissions
* June 11th: submissions deadline for posters, demos, and DoctoralSpace proposals
* June 25th: notifications for research papers, practitioner reports, panels, tutorials, posters, demos, and DoctoralSpace proposals
* July 19th: final revised pdf’s are due
* Sept 8th-10th: WikiSym 2008 days

Updates
Keep an eye on the Wikisym blog, and of course here, for updates.

1. This month only, Toronto Wiki Tuesday will be the following week, the 18th March. Damir Sudarevic (Industrial Design Engineer) is talking this month, will talk about on how he uses a wiki to drive a website. We will be in the Front Room at the EPICURE CAFE (502 Queen Street West, between Spadina and Bathurst) for this
2. April’s talk 8th, will be by Adrian Fritsch on a wiki-based debating technology called Debatum.
3. May’s date, 13th will be Nelson Ko, probably talking about Social Networking
4. June’s is by Vanessa Peters (OISE) talking through educational uses.
   • Vanessa’s title is “Co-
     Designing Pedagogical Scripts for Knowledge Building in Secondary
     School Science”
   • As not everyone knows, here’s what http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org/ says about Pedagogicalisms
     

     Patterns are designed to capture best practice in a specific domain. Pedagogical patterns try to capture expert knowledge of the practice of teaching and learning. The intent is to capture the essence of the practice in a compact form that can be easily communicated to those who need the knowledge. Presenting this information in a coherent and accessible form can mean the difference between every new instructor needing to relearn what is known by senior faculty and easy transference of knowledge of teaching within the community.

5. July is open, let me know if you want to talk about something.
6. August is open, let me know if you want to talk about something.
7. As September’s second Tuesday clashes with WikiSym 2008, in Porto, Portugal, and as I hold the position of “Posters and Demos Chair”, we’ll find another date so I can attend! I’ll likely run this session, to summarize the submissions into the posters and papers track.

I’ll likely and the group with updates from the WikiSym sessions throughout the year anyway, as its good to get your impressions of new innovations as we go along.

Regards and thanks,
Martin

–
Martin@Cleaver.org

http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/04/3m-to-showcase-a-micro-projector-for-handheld-devices-at-ces/

http://www.letsgomobile.org/en/3032/samsung-mbp-100-microprojector/

Fancy that, using just a full-size roll out keyboard, a 32GB SD card and a pocketsize projector capable of a 1m+ picture, you’d end up with full sized facilities in an ever-so lightweight and tiny 9″ bag.

I suppose though, with a roll-out keyboard and a micro projector throwing a full sized picture, some would find carrying the 7″ keyboard / screen combination less desirable than something phone sized that you can just carry in a pocket. Indeed, maybe the logic for the pc can be modularised to plug into the handsized projector.

Oh, the ever stomping march of technology!

PS. Projector rumoured to come out in March in South Korea, and world-wide shortly after, starting prices around $200-$300. I found no decent pictures of the projected output nor mention of screen resolution.

At 11:45 PST I’ll be on their Ask The Expert panel answering questions your about wikis.

I’ll actually be in Toronto, attending PodCampToronto at the time, but will nip out to do a video webcast.

Anyhow check out on http://www.slingcommunity.com/group/discussion/26840/Slingplayer-Linux-Install-Script-1.0b/

I just love this eeepc!

PS. If you think that slingplayer on the eeepc is ridiculous, check out this effort to run vmware player on the eeepc.

Slides here

Despite howling winds driving a blizzard conditions and a late change of venue, 16 people successfully ventured toInsomnia on Bloor and Bathurst. My thanks to Marc Laporte, who was visiting from Montreal to run Tiki Fest Toronto, and who surfaced and reminded several wiki people I’d not yet met in Toronto. Also, thanks a lot to Nelson Ko of Citadel Rock for going well out of his way to make sure we had a projector.

I am happy to say, the audience was not disappointed - Gerald Matlofsky, a progressive lawyer and friend of mine emailed me to thank us for the talk.

“After the fact”
Connie mentions in her blog the killer distinction that started my love for wikis:

One distinction is that with knowledge management systems, the emphasis is submitting documents and analysis after the fact. Wiki use emphasizes work in progress and collaborating on the end result.

Arthur Andersen used to have a “repository” where you were supposed to “clean up” and “file” work you had finished with. Using a wiki creates an ongoing meeting context where everyone mushes in their thoughts, creating engagement on both side. Contrast this with boring “after the fact” repositories, after all would you rather:

1. read a book and guess whether it applies to you or
2. listen to the author pitch and then have the opportunity to converse.

Its only when both parties are benefiting that energy is reciprocally produced and sustainable. Knowing where someone else is going seeds specific opportunities for synergy going forward.

So, it was exactly my conviction that wikis could act as a medium for negotiating or “modelling” knowledge: because it makes touched ideas interesting to both parties. And such ongoing discussion, which feeds collaboration between live projects, is a real first step towards giving people in an enterprise the means to collectively join the dots and really think together.

Would you like to talk at Toronto Wiki Tuesday?
I’m committed to making Toronto Wiki Tuesday a venue for your stories. No matter what your use case, e.g. an interesting personal use, powering a public community to generating new levels of harmony or disharmony within the firm, we want to hear about it.

Give me a call. 416-786-6752.

Talks at Toronto Wiki Tuesdays usually last about 30 minutes and speakers will anchor the night in something of personal interest. (About Wikis, of course). As we have a private floor at Rower’s pub we get there about 6:45pm for food, and have the talk from 7:30 and discussions thereafter.

I am pleased to announce the following confirmed line-up:

• Feb 12th: Connie Crosby - Educator / advocator in Libraries and Legal firms - talking about the use of Wikis in law firms
• March 12th: Damir Sudarevic - industrial design specialist - “How to make a stupid website a little bit better” (working title!)
• 2nd Tuesday in Apr: Adrian Fritsch - to be decided.

While Toronto Wiki Tuesday is not in itself technology-centric, wikis would not exist without the technology that powers them. Mike Pilling (a regular at Toronto Wiki Tuesdays) of HighProductivity.ca introduced me to Tiki a few months ago and since then I’ve met more users and seen more sites using this extensive php-based wiki platform.

During the day on 12th Feb, Toronto Wiki Tuesday is hosting TikiFest, (a codefest for Tiki) based on the popular open source project Tikiwiki and chaired by Marc Laporte who will be down from Montreal.

TikiFest Toronto (Facebook event invite) continues their roadshow. To quote Marc:

At the January 08 Codefest held in Montreal, the topics were “Microformats” and “Wiki Translation”. For Microformats, a number of CMS added or enhanced support for it, and support for hCalendar was added to TikiWiki. For “Wiki Translation”, we had a workshop to define user requirements and the overall plan of the project.

To date, topics tentatively lined up for the TikiFest are as follows:

• WikiNetNav
• Wiki Translation
• Improve integration between image gallery and wiki pages

But refer to
TikiFest Toronto wiki page for the latest version. (You should indicate if you are going).

Rowers will be opening the pub early, at 11am, for us on the 12th so we can get started. We’ve promised to eat there to say thank you. They have both a projector and wifi, so its a neat setup.

I hope to see you there!

For some reason Slingmedia has no Linux version and, bafflingly, is silent on the prospect of one. (Though I did see it acknowledged on SlingMedia’s Where Should SlingPlayer Go Next The Top 10 Unsupported Platforms)

The following is an extended version of posting I made to their forums.

Anyone fancy bundling up Andrew Butkus’ Singbox on WINE solution as operating system vmware (or maybe xen) image?

This will reduce the steps needed for someone to install to just one, and get the WINE (Windows software emulation on Linux) setup usable and quickly testable.

It’d then need listing under http://vmware.com/appliances/

Quoting: http://www.news.com/Virtualization-homes-in-on-desktops/2100-7339_3-6208181.html

VMware Workstation is geared for power users such as administrators who want to test software patches before distributing them across a company, said Jerry Chen, senior director of enterprise desktop software at VMware. Chen himself uses it to run three separate virtual machines: one for work, one for home and one for his Slingbox video player.

That said, http://www.slingcommunity.com/forum/thread/10288/Verizon-Wireless-Cellphone-Access/#3333 has an unverified claim that slingplayer and VMware can’t co-exist.

And http://www.game-over.com/reviews.php?id=571&page=features says:

We also tried installing SlingPlayer on a remotely accessible virtual machine with VMware but the virtual machine lacked the requisite graphics card to even get to the screen where you can change network settings.

Jerry Chen from VMware does not say whether he is running it under Linux or Windows. If Andrew Butkus’ solution bundled up as a xen or vmware image works it would provide access to those many of us who have dropped Windows in favour of Linux.

If I can’t get my Slingbox to work on Linux I’ll investigate using MythTV to work remotely. The whole point of paying Slingmedia is to gain easy access to remote TV content. Having to jump through hoops like this defies the allure of the product’s promise of an appliance for placeshifting TV.

This is especially pertinant at the ultralight end of laptops. My Asus EeePC is a diminutive (7″) laptop running Xandros, a windows-look-alike version of Debian Linix, had a 4GB solid state drive, built in wifi and webcam. The cheaper ones (surf models) don’t have webcams. Here’s the http://wiki.eeeuser.com/eee_hardware_faq

It’s great for being on the move and mine’s officially my backup laptop. (I’m planning to buy a Mac subnotebook, announcement due at Macworld Jan 14th 2008, i.e. next week).

Now, Asus just announced at CES2008 the 2nd generation eeepc, due in April, and featuring slightly larger screens and built in Wimax. But the hacker culture doesn’t wait (http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=5417 already has people adding bluetooth and increasing internal capacity 20 fold).

With my IBM X30 down, one has buy when one needs: I couldn’t handle not being able to work when mobile.

My XP laptop (an IBM X30) died last month. As the data was backed up this was not catastrophic disaster in itself.

I’d been running my accounting system(QuickBooks) under Windows 98 in VMware Player, reasoning that I needed isolation (no other software could interfere with it). I stored the data on what looked like a network drive, mapped through a virtual network drive to a regular directory on my laptop.

I’m in the process of shifting to light-as-possible on the road (I just bought a 4G solid state drive Asus EEEPC 401) coupled with a beefy server (quad core) at home running CentOS hosting the free VMware Server plus a Synology Cubestation 407 Network Attached Storage device with mirrored disks. Made possible by ubiquitous network connectivity. Many of my clients use VMware environments now, so both increasing my own competency and having the facility to host their environments in intrinsically important to me.

My company, Blended Perspectives Inc is relatively young. In itself I don’t have to use QuickBooks. Indeed, Wikipedia shows a tremendous range of packages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_software

Further, as http://www.hostingforum.ca/2017288-post15.html puts it:

Forget about it, once you are in Quickbooks its nearly impossible to move
to anything else. The export from Quickbooks leaves lots of things out.
I’ve been using Quickbooks for 15 years so I’m stuck, I run it in VMware
and I grit my teeth and pay the subscription fees. For someone who is
just starting a business I’d recommend that you look at alternatives but
it you have been using it for a while there are no good options for
switching to anything else.

I don’t much like Quickbooks. I find it outdated, confusing and the interface somewhat clumsy. Yet, book-keeping is not my strongest competency, for that I rely on my accountants, Bass Murphy. While I need to enter data, my needs become somewhat subservient to whatever os needed to keep my company firmly on course and compliant with regulation. So I defer, to the preferences of my accountants. I’m assuming they want Quickbooks. (Writing this prompted me to email then to check today, as I realised that I’d never actually asked them about alternatives!)

Nevertheless I suspect there is currently no decent, free, solid, alternative. I suspect it’s still a time off before something will have the features, the fiddly region-specific tax table updates, and the support from accounting professionals.

Further, although there are Open Source personal solutions, such as an interesting http://www.thezeal.com/software/index.php?Money_Manager_Ex, I rather agree with the opinion from the same thread:

Any one of these things that says “personal money manager” will not make the grade for any business, large or small.
One has to have inventory control, purchase orders, billing, asset accounting, and payroll.

Further, I use Neat Receipts about which I have many opinions, both good and bad. That is targeting Quickbooks as its center of gravity for integration. I’d wager it’ll be a very long time before they support anything open source.

So my current plan is to continue to submit defeat to the almighty Quickbooks:

Virtualization is a great solution. I run a Win2K VM on top of Fedora. Win2K has the advantage of
not having the Activation requirements of XP, it’s also faster. As a
Linux user I don’t give a damn about any of the OS improvements that they
made in XP, none of that matters to me. All I need is for Quickbooks to
work, which it does. I’m also not interested in any of the fancier
Windows networking features, all I care about is that the VM be able to
see a SAMBA share, which works fine in 2K. However if you don’t own a
copy of 2K then XP works fine on VMware.

Further, Neat Receipts works under VMware too:

I’m running VMWare Fusion so that I can use Windows XP when I need to, for example, I have a Neat Receipt scanner for my scanning my expense receipts. It won’t work on OS/X but absolutely works nicely on Windows, without a hitch. VMWare is working nicely and again I can thank Richard for his recommendations as I would have probably gone with ether Basecamp or Parallels. Glad to be using VMWare.

Not only will I be able to use this setup from home, but from the road. And not just me, but so too will my accountant. (If I use Win2K I’ll install Terminal Services). Time to sharpen my firewall.

• Slipstreaming Windows + Service Packs

After too many years of frustration with Windows XP and confirmation from most of my friends that Windows Vista is a disaster, I have resolved to switch to MacOS. I’d been holding out for a mac subnotebook, and rumours were plentiful last October that this was imminent. Finally that rumour has now been “confirmed” by Apple for a 15 January 2008 announcement at Mac World.

I’m buying my first desktop in years, having been laptop-centric since I went to Australia to do my MBA in 2002. I figured I need a desktop for 1) multimedia playback 2) downloads while I am disconnected 3) to efficiently work with virtualisation technologies such as Xen and VMware, which I am increasingly using with my clients in my wikiconsulting practice to help fit rationalise their infrastructure. I of course will still get a laptop but with everything going web-centric and with my change to being self-employed I want my laptop to be less powerful but more portable than ever.

With the Mac laptop purchase imminent I did consider purchasing a Mac desktop. But, those Mac desktops are really extremely expensive for the processing power they provide. And besides, I’d need another machine for running Linux and a few MS Windows Apps I can’t do without. (Some of these I ran in VMware workstation on my defunct X30).

So there I was, thinking through the dilemma, should I buy an overpriced desktop Mac or get a PC? Or both? (I also own a Playstation 3 running Yellow Dog Linux and on which I am typing this article). Here’s my conclusion…

Like the PS3, older Apple Macs (G4’s, iBooks, etc) run on the PowerPC chip making them fundementally unlike PCs which use the x86 family of chips. However, newer Apple Macs (iMac, MacMini, MacBook, MacBookPro) do run on x86 chips, making them very like PCs. So alike, in fact, that since the 2006 switch to x86, Apple Macs are, operating system aside, pretty much using commodity piece of PC hardware inside those branded shiny (and overpriced) Apple boxes. Branding does nothing to detract escape hardcore techies who of course immediately jumped on the challenge of making MacOS run on PCs.

A year or so ago the effort needed to get OSX running on generic X86 was out of the reach of most tech-centric people. Not enough was known about which hardware components and not a big enough community was looking at the problem. I think that has changed. The OSX86 (or Hackintosh) project is really alive, with very well documented lists of what works and what doesn’t and thriving message boards talking through issues. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still the realm of techies: there’s a lot of configuration steps to follow.

So, with this in mind, I set out to buy components that wouldn’t just satisfy my virtualisation needs but to function with osx86 too. After all, in the world of Windows and Linux PCs practically everything can be made to work so the hardware cost is never going to be wasted if I happen to get the exact components that the OSX86 project works best with. My criteria was very simple: buy cost-effective components that demanded the fewest headaches and workarounds. The choice of graphics card is especially important.

With that in mind, here’s what I bought in Toronto, totalling $1060 CAD + taxes, yesterday:

• Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R - $155 CAD
• XFX 7600 GT 256M PCI-E - $145.00 CAD
• Intel Q6600 Quad Core 2.4/1066FSB 8M Cache - $279.99 CAD
• Pioneer 212D 18xDVD-RW SATA - $31.50 CAD
• Seasonic S12-550 550W Energy Plus - $119 CAD
• WD500AAKS - $101.99 CAD
• Silverstone Lascala SST-LC13-B Black ATX - $113 CAD

The above were from Filtech, except for the case which I bought from Canada Computers. I usually shop at Canada Computers but they were out of stock of the CPU and graphics card and when things go wrong its easier to have just one company to resolve issues with. The people at Filtech seemed like nice guys

I’ll pick it up this afternoon as Filtech kindly offered to put it together at no charge.

So, what’s next?

1. Partition disk (OS only - I keep data on a RAID Synology Cubestation I bought last month)
2. Hypervisor install - XenExpress or VMware Server on a CentOS base
3. Operating System install - at least Ubuntu, Windows XP - get all programs up so I can work productively again
4. Think about running osx86 inside either Xen or VMWare

If (4) doesn’t work out I can dual boot the machine osx86 and vm, but hoping to get everything subserviant to the hypervisor. After all, what’s the point in having a quadcore machine if you can’t tax it a little?

More than ever, right now is a really busy time. I can see my evenings being booked for weeks ahead!

Footnote:

Apple do prohibit the use of MacOS (OSX), their Operating System, on non-Mac branded hardware. Nevertheless, in this world of increasing remix, such a stance is ignored by many in the tech community. Indeed, many believe that Apple would be well served to encourage the use of their Operating System on PCs whilst Microsoft is hurting from the widespread distaste of Vista. (IfI recall correctly, Apple’s penetration of the laptop market jumped from 23% to 27% from June 2007 to December 2007 while their desktop penetration remains less than 10%).

‘‘I will be heading to Rower’s Pub to this month’s Toronto Wiki Tuesday, Toronto’s dedicated Wiki event. We’ve had some great topics, talking about how using a wiki efficiently creates knowledge, how we can use them to couple thinking to the output of systems or eliminate wasteful email, and how they create a social context that spurs innovation in and between organizations. Plus, Tuesday is 2-for-1 wings night and the pub has terrific beer and a range of food.”

It’s nice to get some press. I’ve been running Toronto Wiki Tuesdays regularly since 2005, with the first event more TWiki centric event back in 2003!

I hope to see you tonight - among other things, today we celebrate Torontopedia’s first birthday!

The web has seen a plethora of sites become platforms, each site now holding some fragment of our digital lives. From that stems a problem: many of us find our attention fragmented across these sites.

David has come up with a differently positioned site that competently aggregates across many of these different media. Onaswarm will go off and fetch snippets of webfeeds and stitch them together into a coherent lifestream for you.

Further than that, it can place you in the context of others you associate with, and who associate with you.

Check out http://network-toronto.onaswarm.com/ or, indeed, see what others from the Toronto tech community have lately said about onaswarm, using the following embedded search: http://network-toronto.onaswarm.com/:search:onaswarm

It’s useful stuff and a worthy tool for regular use.

Technorati : aggregator

Shove over Rogers, Bell and Telus.

I’ve been long griping about the Canadian Telcos and their stupid, exorbitant data rates:

[Canadian oligopolistic Telcos] will only voluntarily drop their prices if they thought that they’d make more money by doing so. Their duty is to please their shareholders, not the public, though they could stand to make much more if they can get usage up:

“That’s because […] Rogers/Fido and Bell Mobility do not understand the idea of a mass consumer commerce model. They would rather have 50 pissed off customers and charge them $1000 a month each, rather than have 1000 happier customers and charge them $50 a month each.

I even e-mailed the investor-relations departments of each of Bell, Telus and Rogers:

Dear Rogers Investor Relations:

As an investor and customer at Rogers, I am concerned that the opportunity to serve the Canadian mobile data market is hugely under exploited. Rogers could make a lot more money by serving a larger market at a lower price than fewer customers at a high price.

Like many I know, I turned off the data on my wireless account rather than feel swindled by today’s pricing.

Also, there is a risk that this issue could get the attention of the Canadian Government - regulatory control is not in investor’s interests.

Well, last week (reported here by http://www.wirelessnorth.ca) public protests have finally taken notice of:

In announcing the rules to the upcoming (May 2008) advanced spectrum auction, industry minister Jim Prentice has blasted open the doors to new wireless competition in Canada. Here is a quick overview of the new rules:

• 40 of the 105 available megahertz will be set aside for new entrants
• Incumbents will be required to allow roaming on their networks at reasonable rates (this is crucial as any new entrant may start regionally and take up to a few years to establish full national coverage)
• Incumbents will be required to share towers with new entrants (significantly reducing startup costs and redundant infrastructure)

So, in short, Telcos of Canada, you lost your trusted position through your own actions. Let this be a lesson to the other cartel-like industries. (Indigo-Chapters-Coles: you and your monopolistic pricing could be next).

Lastly, a quick plug for Wireless North.ca - this site is was launched just a few days ago by my friend Thomas Purves. Tom is probably best known for his expose of Canada’s Mobile Rates being worse than 3rd World Countries.

Here are some recent talks:

• Professional Administrator’s Forum - Aug 16 2007 (Private)
• Office 2.0, San Francisco - Sep 5 (Public)
• McMaster University - Wikis and Social Software as it applies to Knowledge Management - 12 Nov 2007 (Private)

And some upcoming ones:

• Society of Internet Professionals: Talk - Weds 28th Nov 2007 (Public)
• CIBC User Experience Conference (Private)

I love socialising and translating hardcore technology into easy-to-understand terms . Just give me a call. 416-786-6752.

I’ll be giving a short talk at Social Networking night at Society of Internet Professionals on Weds 28th Nov, starting 6pm. I’ll discuss how wikis and related technologies work as open intranets and extranets, and how Social Networking techniques have and can been applied to wikis.

Their event will be at the Metro Convention Center, room yet to be announced.

This is an open event, with discounts available to SIP, AIC and CTN Members.

I arrived last night in Montreal for the Wiki Symposium at OOPSLA after a brief trip to the UK. http://ws2007.wikisym.org/space/start is the wiki.

Come join us on IRC channel #wikisym on freenode.net.

I’ll be running an Open Space session on http://WikiConsulting.com/ looking to hear how to quickly add value to our field.

Today I’m wearing a grey with black stripe shirt… I shouldn’t be too hard to find!

Cheers, Martin 416-786-6752

Technorati : wikisym

The reason Rogers is tight-lipped about why it hasn’t struck a deal to bring Apple’s iPhone into Canada is because it would involve an embarrassing admission: To make the iPhone financially attractive, Rogers would have to cut the rates it charges its customers for data. And what company wants to cut its prices when there is no pressure on them to do so?

Well, that pressure is beginning to rise.

Canadians would have to pay $400 for the iPhone, and to use all the iPhone features, about $300 a month in voice and data fees (the iPhone is a heavy user of mobile data transfer). By comparison, AT&T, the sole company offering the iPhone in the United States, allows a plan for $100 that includes 1,350 minutes of voice calls, unlimited data, video voice mail, 200 text messages and unlimited use nights and weekends.

We can’t blame Rogers for their monopoly position. The blame belongs to the CRTC for allowing Rogers to buy out Fido, the assimilation handing the entire GSM space into only notional competition. Indeed, I’d have advised Rogers to buy Fido, it was a win for them on every level.

I had the opportunity to take an iPhone as part of my deal to talk at Office 2.0 last month in San Francisco. But really, what’s the value to me if I’d be paying through the nose every month on the bill? Nope, I just become a non-consumer.

My thanks to David Janes for the link.

Called Pseudo Cron (or wp-cron), the facility alleviates the need for external programs to trigger internal events, using for example, the unix cron command.

Users of a Wordpress site can’t usually see the events scheduled, so I built a simple plugin to show what’s due to run.

(more…)

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
privacy@idatecorp.com
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13): 550 : Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table

That said, I left a voicemail with Rob Stauber, Inc. their special council lawyer, asking him to confirm receipt of my email, which I had CC’d to him.

To: privacy@idatecorp.com

CC: http://www.stauber.com/lawoffices/

Dear iDateCorp,
I would just like to point out that the actions of your website quetchup.com to hijack the address books of your users and use the entries to falsify further invitations is:

1) a violation of decency
2) theft
3) classified as phishing (passing off)

2) and 3) are a criminal acts. 1) alone is enough to sink your firm’s reputation and to put into jeopardy those of your directors.

iDateCorp company is receiving a great deal of bad press due to this activity. See my blog post on it and others: 1 , 2

I don’t know whether it is to late to avoid a class action lawsuit but it is my opinion that you should cease and desist immediately and seek legal counsel.

Respectfully,
Martin Cleaver

–
Martin@Cleaver.org MSc MBA
+1-416-786-6752

In my opinion, this could well become a landmark legal case that sets out not only new law but also safeguards.

For instance, how come sites can actually masquerade the email as coming from a third party? The inbound mail programs should alert, the owner of the email address should get to veto, etc.

Technorati : idatecorp, legal, phishing, quetchup

To quote Dwight Silverman:

If you get an invitation from a friend inviting you to join a social networking site call Quechup delete it. Joining up and making the wrong decisions in the process could result in the site spamming everyone in your address book.

Googling confirms the bad press:

To me, this is Phishy :

phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques.^[1] Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. [Wikipedia]

In this world, trust is everything. Most people are trustworthy: if they err, it’s seldom through malicious intent, rather bad judgment. But when sites overstep the mark, and refuse to take corrective steps, the world needs warning.

Maybe bad press is Quechup’s owner (iDate) intention. After all, bad publicity is still publicity, and once they hit a certain limit they can change a policy, no skin off their nose. Well, I wonder how they’d like so much spam? The site owners have their site registration details public in the domain name registry:

They’ve also got a US address, in Las Vegas.

This led me to http://www.idatecorp.com/management-team.php who’s bio’s read like those of decent people that value their reputation. Are their http://www.idatecorp.com/advisors.php (Loeb & Loeb LLP, Ronald J. Stauber, Inc.) doing a good job? It doesn’t seem that Quechup even conform to iDate’s own privacy policy

iDate Corporation Privacy Policy

This site is owned and operated by iDate Ltd. Your privacy on the Internet is of the utmost importance to us. At iDate, we want to make your experience online satisfying and safe.

If users have questions or concerns regarding this statement, they should first contact iDate by sending an e-mail to privacy@idatecorp.com.

Request and Address Please send notices by care of e-mail to: legals@idatecorp.com

Maybe someone local would like to pay them a visit? Or send their privacy or legals internal teams or council a few carefully chosen words?

World, be warned. iDateCorp, get smart or be damned: your Quechup policy is splattering your advisory teams, as well as yourselves.

Technorati : phishy, quechup

It’s the wrong vision to take today’s apps from the desktop and put them out to the web. Instead, innovation will be from finding new simple apps that do new, different things.

You have to look at the value proposition: reduce costs, improve productivity. Look back at the fundamental changes in the past such as e-commerce, search and email. These were not clones of existing applications, but something new.

If you listen to today’s market, and provide people what they are asking for, you don’t need to sell. If you have to sell, you are working to hard. Small business are where the innovation happen: these are not constrained by existing IT infrastructures and they will move where they see value, but they don’t have the ability to invest for 3 year in technologies. Departments have similar characteristics. There much need for small, applications.

An example of need is that we need applications that are smarter, that filter out the noise and work with existing content, such as email. Mobile applications have to work when offline, just being online is insufficient.

Innovation hits reality in the integration. The efforts to standardize the plumbing (REST, SOAP) are elevating interoperability. Feeds really help, using the feed as a trigger, and we will see more applications that filter and action on it.

The shift to Software as a Service is having a massive impact on IT: all these thousands of external applications. Yet, IT is made responsible for corporate adherence to process regulation e.g. through SOX.

Solid integration capabilities needs to become part of the fabric of the internet, we are only at the start of these technologies. Once standardized plumbing becomes ubiquitous, we can blend platforms and their widgets, and rapidly deploy custom solutions,

Technorati : o2con

Therefore, I’ll pushing for shorter posts, especially when reporting events such as Conferences.

Google may finally be preparing to re-launch wiki service Jotspot, nearly a year after it acquired the company.

Google acquired JotSpot last year, bringing it into it’s over widening portfolio of office-related services. Jotspot was not only a decent wiki, it contained a veritable suite of groupware features capable of giving any vendor a run for its money.

Will surely be a worthy component in the Office 2.0 contenders

Technorati : Google, Jotspot, Wiki