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If I am sitting in a chair in Portland, Oregon, traveling at zero MPH for 8 hours a day, five days a week, how long will it take me to get to South by Southwest Interactive in Austin? Yes, you guessed it, I’m not going—maybe I’ll get there next year. One small consolation is that SXSW does a pretty good job of getting podcasts up on sxsw.com. While it is far inferior to being there (and picking from a mindboggling array of events), at least I can listen from afar at the comfort of my desk and get an idea of what the power players in the industry are talking about.

Yesterday I listened to “The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007,” which was pretty entertaining, especially considering the viral marketing ideas that fly around most advertising agencies, including ours. Having crazy ideas is a healthy thing, but in these cases the agencies went through with them and failed miserably. When you’re in this field you have to be willing to laugh about things like that because you can imagine them happening to someone you know.

I’m excited to listen to “Video Production for the Web & Mobile Devices” as well as other panels with names like “Creating Findable Rich Media Content,” “Quit Your Day Job and Vlog” and about a dozen others. Keep an eye on the list as it continues to grow as the festival progresses.

It’s also worth noting that similar podcasts are online from last year. Of particular interest is “Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields” and “Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer.” These are great for multitasking because you can just have them running in the background without being too distracted.

A friend recently showed me a local site called “Urban Edibles” that bills itself as “a community database of wild food sources in Portland, OR.” It’s a fantastic combination of ideology and technical functionality where you can easily find free fruit, vegetables, herbs, berries and so on. The site is equally geared towards people looking for food and those posting sources of edibles, making it easy to submit and search, either by category or location. The authors have taken care not to encourage people to abuse the information and you will find warning notes all over the site like “The status of this source is unknown. Ask before you pick!”

Currently the database is not extensive, it is in the process of being built, but it is clearly a fun project for those involved. Urban Edibles employs a variety of technologies including a very active wiki with recipes, resources and information on identifying plants, and discovering what is in season. Perhaps most impressive is the “Browse by Category” section which uses some nice Ajax and javascript animation effects (using the Prototype Library), and then ties into a link to Google Maps.

This is not the sort of website that will see huge traffic but will likely see some repeat visitors who completely fall in love with it. Sites like this make me glad to be a Web developer in Portland, Oregon. There are great ideas everywhere with folks willing to make them real.

KGW ran a story on Urban Edibles as well:

In the ongoing crusade to find new band names inspired by concepts related to information technology here at Respond2, let’s talk about Systems Administrators.

There’s a reason why systems administrators have the reputation of being hard-nosed, inflexible jerks who control your company’s information infrastructure. There’s a reason why the cover of O’Reilly’s “Essential System Administration” book has a picture of a well-armored armadillo on it. There’s even a reason for the plethora of amazingly satisfying fiction written about the weird, rage-filled escapades of systems administrators.

Aside from this, system administrators are here to stay. They are our only bridge between our imaginary world of business and the imaginary world of computer engineering. We couldn’t do what we do without them and the incredibly complex sets of systems they maintain. After all, somebody needs to start twitching uncontrollably whenever there’s a hint of a power outage.

To be a good systems administrator, one really does have to resemble something of an armadillo. It takes a very special person to fend off well-intentioned, disastrous suggestions from people in power who don’t have the time to understand the details of their server farm. An iron will is required to patiently explain to the boss what can and can’t be done with limited budgets. A person has to be made of pretty stern, flexible stuff to fight off the misconceptions spread by marketers while seriously considering genuinely new ideas as they come along. Metaphorical plated armor is a must, which means a good system administrator makes a dinosaur-like impression on people who are expecting exciting, neon-lit, techno-geek gadgetry from cool, googley-eyed IT staff.

In honor of all the hard-nosed, inflexible, well-armored, weird, rage-filled, twitchy people who proudly call themselves sysadmins, the band name of the day is The Armadillos.

I’m usually dumbfounded when it comes time to find a website deemed as cool or innovative. Why? Because it is estimated that there are 15 - 30 billion pages on the Web. That puts me in a pickle, how can one person with two eyes and 10 fingers possibly find the coolest ‘best of?’ So this week I decided to blog about the best future—here’s a video of Blaise Aquera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs at TED2007.

When we find ourselves completely in awe of the newest Web trends (like Flickr and Youtube), think back to this video and imagine the possibilities. If there were a way to implement this cross-syncing technology for information data mining into one conclusive article of relevance when doing research—instead of having to sift for hours through Google pages—how great would that be? This thought may sound ridiculous, but with the ability to visually search photos and congregate them into a large photo, text/information congregation shouldn’t be a problem. And that’s just a thought I had while writing this, the rest is only a matter of time, thought and sweat.

For anyone who doesn’t know what TED is, it’s a conference/community for forward-thinking and exploration. Their topics typically stray into technology, entertainment and design—though with a slogan of “Ideas worth spreading,” I’m certain they’ll listen to anything.A few blog postings ago I gave kudos to Philips for their ShaveEverywhere.com campaign. Well, seems like the folks over at TED already unearthed this hysterical site months ago. Their aim is a little higher, aiming not at humor but at the health of bloggers everywhere. This is a danger to us all, so please take a few moments and be enlightened.

The past couple of years have seen boundless development in the world of user interactivity. The Nintendo Wii and Apple’s iPhone are two wonderful examples of user interfaces that, while not unprecedented, surprised a lot of people with their elegance and near-perfect execution. With an increasing faith in the fact that such magical things can happen, there seems to be a growing community of creatives who are using devices enabled with motion and touch sensitivity (as well as other physical inputs like light and sound) toward unexpected ends. Many of these projects are purely for experimentation and entertainment, but they are without a doubt pushing the next generation of interface designers to create new applications in everyday life. Applications like MAX/MSP and the Open Source application Processing are a key intermediary between real-world, physical inputs and actions either on-screen or in some other real-world output. Here are three exciting projects in that vein; stimulating and unpolished.

The mad scientists at Grafitti Research Lab Vienna use a projector, lasers, Processing and a Processing plug-in called “laser marker” (which is free on the GRLV website) to create gigantic, impermanent graffiti. GRLV was recently featured in a Make Magazine Blog entry.

This fellow uses a Wii-mote as a MIDI controller in Ableton Live.

This demo uses the free application WMIDI which allows you to use a Wacom Tablet as a MIDI controller.

At what point should your Internet provider be allowed to control, or even influence, your Web practices? The answer–there’s no time, nor place, when it’s acceptable for your Internet provider to regulate how one uses the Internet. For example, if I Google something in Portland from my Comcast high-speed connection, I should get the same results as if I Googled the same exact thing from a Time Warner cable connection in Ohio, right? You’d think so; after all, net neutrality is just as important as freedom of speech, food and water, etc., right? I believe so, but–unfortunately–some big Tel Coms don’t agree. Why? Put simply, it’s about money… ahhh, yes, of course…

See, you’re not necessarily your Internet provider’s only revenue source, as it’s possible for money to be made in their Internet users’ experience too. Comcast in particular is making news with allegations of regulating use of BitTorrent, a legal and legitimate file transfer protocol. The $1.77 trillion in fines Comcast is facing, in my opinion, isn’t the biggest issue. Rather, I’m concerned about my freedom to surf—net neutrality to me more precise.

Fortunately, there are groups of organized radicals trying to save the Internet, and a number or resources, online of course, dedicated to proactive net neutrality education and awareness. Now, in video:

In the spirit of open source technology, Jona Bechtolt, aka YACHT, an electronic musician here in Portland has decided to give away instrumental versions of his music for free. This is his explanation:

“I download music. I download a lot of music. I don’t purchase music often, so I completely and totally understand when kids come up to me at shows and look me straight in the eye and tell me they’re not going to buy my record tonight because they’ve already, or are going to go home and, download it. There just isn’t any reason to show animosity towards this new-ish way of communicating; to me, this feels like a natural way of weeding out assholes and the people that aren’t smart enough to make interesting work.I want to give back. Here are three ZIP files of instrumentals. Download them, use them for karaoke, perform as YACHT or The Blow, chop them up and make your own remixes, make your own new songs.”

It’s a cool idea that I imagine will lead to some free publicity, and most likely some new collaborations. It reminds me of a Mirah album that came out last year called “Joyride: Remixes” where a bunch of different artists remixed versions of Mirah songs for a 2-CD set. YACHT was one of the collaborators, coincidentally. That CD wasn’t free, and I could imagine this YACHT venture turning into some sort of similar compilation, a physical CD for example, potentially for some profit.

This gets back to my previous claim about this being an open source style of behavior. A common misconception is that because open source technology is free, there is no money to be made in it. To the contrary, think of all of the designers, developers and system admins who have jobs because of their intellectual investment in technologies like Apache, Linux, PHP, Subversion MySQL, Wordpress, Drupal and on and on and on. While a certain aspect of all open source technology is free, what is not is the time and skill needed to implement it, the people that ARE smart enough to make interesting work.

As a Web developer himself, I imagine Jona is aware of these similarities. I’m excited to see what comes of his decision to release his music in this fashion. Hopefully “Freedom Music: Remixes” is on the way.

Today our department is buzzing in anticipation—Mitch and Mike seem to have made a full recovery from the disappointing college football season. Patrick and Christina are battling East Coast weather while on a book tour, and most of us used our lunch break to do last minute shopping for today’s annual gift exchange. The office vibe is downright festive. There were even holiday-themed sprinkle donuts this morning (Thanks, Mitch!).
As Holiday Season 2007 closes in you might be wondering what to get that special blogger in your life. Here are a few gift ideas from a department full of people who are never far from their keyboards.

1. A comfy, ergonomic office chair.

2. We often talk here about social marketing and Web presence. Now you can read about. This book is getting great reviews for examining the extent and possibilities of viral marketing.

3. A good roller-ball mouse and headphones.

4. Anyone putting content online should have a dictionary, thesaurus and “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White within reach. Even in the holiday season there is no excuse for bad grammar on websites.

5. We spend so much time at our desks that they soon become littered with crumbs, hand sanitizer and random printouts. Improve the look of a blogger’s desktop with goofy or practical desk decorations including the USB Doomsday Device Hub and or the Stapleless Stapler.

Rock band names should be somehow cryptically reflective of real life. This is the first part of a short series of descriptive band names for a systems administrator at Respond2 New Media.

Back when I was a kid in grade school we had a custodian we called “Archie.” First impressions of Archie were always a little weird. He’d rarely look straight at us unless we weren’t looking at him, and we never could tell if he had really wide hips, or if he was just carrying a lot of keys in his huge pockets. He was always moving.

He was an incredibly good janitor. All 1,000 of us kids spent our time messing up the school, which was a central, shared resource. He cheerfully spent his time fixing and cleaning it. He’d take care of toxic spills of sodium hydroxide in Mr. King’s science room, he’d know what to do with extremely long boogers proudly placed on the bathroom mirrors, and he even had a magic can of stuff that would take care of the permanent pen scribbles on the chalkboard. Whenever it got really bad, we called Archie, who would show up with a smile of love for us kids, any pride evidently discarded in the bottom of one of those big pockets. Five minutes later he’d be gone, and so would the problem.

Here at Respond2 New Media, we have a huge, virtual library of the work we’ve done. It’s what some people call a “versioning system.” It’s built on software called Subversion (SVN for short), and it helps us keep track of graphics, source code, server configuration and technical documentation. When we make a change to a website, we “check” the change into the SVN repository: it’s a record of everything we’ve done. It keeps a history of what changes happened, where those changes occurred and who made them. We can access this repository from anywhere on the Internet, so we can set up our sites on any machine connected to the Web. It works on Macintosh, Windows, and pretty much every flavor of UNIX and Linux.

This all sounds great, and it is. However, nothing is ever deleted from SVN. All our developers make changes to this shared resource. It’s also not perfect. It’s like living in a small, cluttered classroom with a lot of other people. This means that someone has to come along and clean it up from time to time. Sometimes somebody makes a really, really big mess and we have to come in with our magic can of stuff that will take care of the problem. So, one of the jobs we do here at Respond2 New Media is custodial work on our SVN repository. Thus, the new band name, The Janitors of Subversion.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was completely disheartened by programming with Javascript. My comfort level was limited basically to opening windows, creating rollovers and slideshows and other common tasks. But as any respectable web developer these days will tell you, a solid handle on manipulating Javascript is key to creating visual effects, usability features and user interface elements.

Like many, my relationship with the language changed drastically upon experimenting with some of the magnificent free Javascript libraries out there. Probably the three most popular libraries are jQuery (my current favorite), Mootools and Prototype (as well as the Prototype effects library Scriptaculous). These libraries simplify the use of Javascript by creating common, reusable features which are collectively written and shared in an Open Source fashion.

It’s understandable that Javascript is such a pain to learn. For those used to seeing a cause and effect relationship between what they program and see on screen, Javascript does complicate things slightly. While the language is completely logical, the Document Object Model is not the most glamorous or obvious thing in the world. What these Javascript libraries do fantastically well is hide a certain level of complexity from the programmer. While this may seem like a loss of control, you can still get in there and rewrite the Javascript library to your liking, for good or ill. Regardless, the whole situation is a very good thing.

Like many aspects of technology and design, this perceived loss of control can be a bit troubling. If you don’t write all of your code aren’t you just a second-rate hack? While that may in fact be the case, at some point you have to make peace with the existential pitfalls of working with Open Source technology, or any technology for that matter. There are numerous benefits of NOT writing new Javascript for every project, the biggest one is that it’s a big use of time. Aside from that, Javascript libraries provide a reliable set of well-documented tools that are cross-browser tested and demonstrate how to write good code, a valuable learning lesson rolled into the super-useful fun.

The fascinating thing about all of this is that Javascript really hasn’t changed a whole lot in the last 10 years. Sure, modern browsers are a lot more consistent in their interpretations of the language, but the real change is in the evolution of thinking. No longer is Javascript programming a secret art but rather a sophisticated community effort.

I have a sense that you are excited about this, so go forth and read your first tutorial. If that’s too heavy, go play with this instead.