I'm at Cloud Camp Vancouver today. It's at the Discovery Parks Vancouver venue where we had Barcamp Vancouver 2009. The Twitter hashtag is #cloudcamp #vancouver. I'll be doing updates throughout the day.

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I'm kicking myself because I've been taking far too narrow an interpretation of "an open source approach". I've been focused on getting people to release data. That's the data analogue of tossing code over the wall, and we know it takes more than a tarball on an FTP server to get the benefits of open source. The same is true of data.

Open source discourages laziness (because everyone can see the corners you've cut), it can get bugs fixed or at least identified much faster (many eyes), it promotes collaboration, and it's a great training ground for skills development. I see no reason why open data shouldn't bring the same opportunities to data projects.

And a lot of data projects need these things.

I've been saying for a while that open data is a sort of new frontier. Open source is relatively wide spread and there is a general low hum of understanding about it in many places. For me, I sum it up by saying to people that they need to understand that their "code is worthless".

The next step is coming to understand about open data, and why we should care. Why we should convince people that their "data is worthless".

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Today cleaned up another old flower bed that was badly neglected from before we moved in. As I started to work I found that the small Holly bush that I wanted to remove used to be a large Holly tree that someone had hacked off. Lots of little Holly branches were growing from the remaining stump.

The only thing to do was start digging. What a hole I made.

A couple feet around it and about three feet deep. I couldn't even get all the roots out either. I dug out what I could then cut the three roots that were a couple inches in diameter.

I was left with a big hole and big pile of dirt. The easy part was throwing the dirt back in the hole.

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On the weekend I made a trip out to Petsmart for some more things for my tank.

I got three fancy Tequila Sunrise Guppies to round out my fish population. They add some nice color and I really like the mix I have now. There is one Leopard Danio, one Red Long Fin Tetra, one Albino Cory, one Otocinclus, one blue Fancy Guppy, four Black Neon Tetras, and the three Tequila Sunrise Guppies. Those and many crayfish

I also picked up a live plant for the tank. It has been a while since I had one. When I got home I planted it appropriately and while I was doing that one of the five leaves broke off. Bummer. When I came back a few minutes later, the plant was floating, so I had to replant it a little deeper this time. A little later it was floating again. This kept happening throughout the day and got very frustrating. Leaves kept breaking off too.

By the time I went to bed, there were two leaves left on the root system. When I got up this morning, the plant was floating again, and only one leaf was attached. Grrr. Now I am starting to wonder if the crayfish are doing something to the plant.

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• 75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques - Smashing Magazine
  Here are 75 more handy JavaScript techniques that have made websites much sleeker and more interesting.

Today has been an odd day for weather. Every half hour it changes between bright sunshine, and dark overcast with snow. It's also been consistently around 5 degrees today which is really weird with the snow falling. No stickage yet though.

I'm fascinated by tools and experiences that let us "DIY". Whether it's using blogging tools to easily put content online, or cooking things from scratch, I like the fact that many things that seem hard or specialized are in fact things that anyone can do. With the Espresso Book Printing Machine, publishing a printed copy of a book has just joined that list.

Oscar's Art Books in Vancouver is one of only a handful of places in Canada that has an "EBM". The Espresso is made by a company called On Demand Books. They're looking to sell the machines to bookstores, universities, and other places where "like minded" people gather.

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This site provides a simple bookmarking service. We follow your twitter feed, and whenever one of your tweets contains URLs, we add them to your delicious.com bookmarks. Optionally, bookmark URLs in @replies to you. We'll even add a delicious tag identifying the sender if you like.

via packrati.us

• CSS Border Radius
  web tool for generating cross-browser rounded borders CSS code

In a previous Link Of The Day I had a zoom lens mug. It was cool and all, but it still looked like a mug due to the huge handle. Check out this awesomeness!

This is a thermos that looks like a Canon 70-200L lens! Totally sweet and I am totally envious of all the people who apparently got them for free at the olympics.

via Gizmodo

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I'm having a strange problem on some of my Drupal sites. Hourly a cron job runs to rebuild caches and do regular maintenance. This is something every Drupal site needs.

Some time in the last 6 months I was finding that cron would get stuck and not complete in the hour. Another would get started and block. Eventually my webhost stopped spawning processes for my user which lead to weird errors on my web page (page not found errors).

I was logged in as me, not the uber administrator when I started messing about. I cleared the cache tables, including the cache_menu table. I was planning on rebuilding the cache table, then the menu system. I was logged in with the wrong account, and I couldn't remember the administrator account. Since I had thrown out the menu system, I couldn't navigate to the lost password page.

I had royally messed up my site.

I fixed it by going into the DB and copying the known password from one user to that of the administrator account. I logged in as administrator, ran cron.php manually, then hit up the page to rebuild the menu system.

So far so good. The next day I ran into this tip: How to reset the password of user 1. A little DB query action to set the administrator account password.

I am still having the weird cron blocking issue though. Every couple days I just log in to my web host and kill the running processes and then everything runs fine for a bit. Bandaid solution that is labour intensive.

I can't figure out how to debug cron issues in drupal though. I've read some tips that running update.php can reset things, but that didn't work for me. I've read this page that suggest modifying core files to add more logging about which module is running cron. I think that will be my next step.

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My first YouTube videos! Woohoo. Well, not that exciting anyway. These were all taken while we were in Ottawa.

Skating on the Canal.

Sleeping on the Canal.

Elliot and Amy go sledding (and crashing).

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I got out for a bit of a photo walk today in the gorgeous sunshine. Most of these pictures were taken near Point Hope Ship yard on Harbour Road. The chain link fence was a bit of a pain, and it would be awesome to have free run of the place for photo taking. I imagine there is a bit of risk in that though. There was lots of heavy machinery working and a few boats in dry dock getting worked on.

Some old buildings in the area were perfect for taking texture shots.

I happened to come across an open house for the UBC Blue Whale project. There are still in the process of getting this huge skeleton ready for display, but there was lots that was ready to be viewed. This was an amazing animal and its size cannot be described easily. The section in the photo below was likely around 20 feet long and there were a few more sections before it. Then the massive head.

There were few flowers in the industrial area, but I still managed to find some.

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I saw this infographic on BoingBoing recently, and it really struck home for me. This is even more painful when you have an impatient child that just wants to watch their DVD and doesn't understand why they have to watch previews and can't skip things.

I've always wondered why movie studios think that it is a good idea to annoy and harass the customers that have paid for their product. To me that seems like a great way to drive away customers. Perhaps for my kids DVD's that we have bought, I should make a backup copy that allows me to skip the unnecessary previews and ads.

The worst previews are the ones that advertise movies coming "this spring". Once the DVD is a couple years old this just sounds silly.

via BoingBoing

Young great artists still steal.
Old great artists litigate?

I missed the news about the Apple-HTC Patent Lawsuit (Google Android) until tonight when I found out about it on Mark Jaquith’s blog.

I’m happy that these cards of Apple are finally on the table. I think Apple’s Multi-touch1 related patents have been hanging over the heads of other hardware and software developers.

I don’t think I’ve ever found myself agreeing with John Gruber more:

“No doubt some of you are nodding your heads and see this as justification for Apple’s suit. But life isn’t fair. Great ideas make the world better. Apple can rightly expect to benefit greatly from the ideas embodied by the iPhone, but they can’t expect to reap all of the benefits from those ideas.

That’s the nature of implementing insanely great ideas. The bar has been raised, and, yes, Apple did most of the lifting. That’s how it goes.”

John Gruber, “Daring Fireball: This Apple-HTC Patent Thing“, Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Right now people are in their venting phase. What comes next?

Is there an effective protest against the Apple-HTC patent lawsuit? Particularly something that Apple customers should do?

I can’t see enough people caring, particularly on the eve of the iPad.

May 5th quotes from the comments:

Ian wrote “I think Apple customers should use one finger at a time in protest.”

Mark wrote “Apple has to operate in the system as it exists.”

Terry — how can I just choose one — wrote “I do think that holders of software patents should be forced to do some sort of licensing because of the chilling effect they’re having on innovation.”

1. Multi-touch is a touchscreen technology which allows gestures done with multiple fingers simultaneously to send complex commands to the device.

Christoph Niemann's illustration of spooning

I don’t remember who gave me the link to Christoph Niemann’s brilliant illustrations1 in “Good Night and Tough Luck”, but often at night this image comes to mind.

It expresses so well my nightly ritual of trying to find a mutually comfortable place for my bottom arm.

My old standard was trying to weave it under her pillow above her head. The trouble with that move was the cold wall my wrist invariably is up against.

The challenges are currently heightened by my wife being pregnant.  The slightest variation to her pillow position affects her comfort.

Most recently I’ve been straight arming it at my side, but my arm tends to fall asleep, accelerating my turning over to actually fall asleep.

Where do you put the arm under you?

1. Spooning image ’09spooning03.jpg’ by Christoph Niemann. Published September 14, 2009. Original caption “The opposite of a mosquito is spooning: mosquitoes are awful, whereas spooning is super. The one thing I haven’t really figured out is where the person in the back is supposed to put that bottom arm.”

Happy Birthday my son. Today you turned 4! I still can't believe it.

We had a fun day today with presents, a tea party, your train cake, cookies, grand parents, friends, and auntie too. The funniest part was you playing outside in the sandbox with a new toy for probably close to an hour, completely soaked the entire time. Great day for a special son.

“It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software.”1

By Bobbie Johnson, “When using open source makes you an enemy of the state“, guardian.co.uk, Feb 23rd, 2010.

Canada is already “special”. We, Canadians, welcome these innovative countries!2

1. The information above was dug up by Andres Guadamuz, a lecturer in law at the University of Edinburgh.
2. Hat tip for the link: Zé Fontainhas.

This morning I was driving Sox to work, and the kids to daycare. We were heading along Catherine St to Esquimalt Ave. A car pulled up to a stop sign on a side street. I watched as the driver looked to her right, then proceeded to go all the while talking to someone in the car. She never looked left, the direction I was heading from.

I hit the brakes, and hit the horn. Visibly she whipped her head over to my direction and looked shocked. Yet she never hit her brakes, nor slowed. Glad I scared her.

Later today I was near Mayfair mall and I was wanting to turn right. The car in front of me wanted to turn left desptire two signs saying right turn only from 7am to 6pm. I honked and he glanced in the rear view at me. I hinked again and pointed right, then pointed to the sign. He pointed that he wanted to go left.

I know you want to go left, but you aren't supposed to buddy. It doesn't take a moron to see what you want. If you want to go left against a sign and noone is behind you, then I personally have no problem, but to hold up traffic while you make an illegal turn is moronic.

Guys with too much time on their hands. Is there anything they can't do? Some masterful work of the tape measure here.

via BoingBoing