Uncarved

The Wall Street Journal ran a story on 30 May, titled On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired.

From the article:

Shelter attendants say the number of laptop-toting overnight visitors, while small, is growing. SF Homeless, a two-year-old Internet forum, has 140 members. It posts schedules for public-housing meetings and news from similar groups in New Mexico, Arizona and Connecticut. And it has a blog with online polls about shelter life.

The article didn’t link to the “SF Homeless” forum, but I did find this site, which is actually a wiki. If anyone can find the forum of which they speak, please leave a link in the comments.

Robert Livingston, 49, has carried his Asus netbook everywhere since losing his apartment in December. A meticulous man who spends some of his $59 monthly welfare check on haircuts, Mr. Livingston says he quit a security-guard job late last year, then couldn’t find another when the economy tanked.

When he realized he would be homeless, Mr. Livingston bought a sturdy backpack to store his gear, a padlock for his footlocker at the shelter and a $25 annual premium Flickr account to display the digital photos he takes.

It’s amazing to me that he sprung for the $25 Flickr account. I wonder what he’s photographing, and whether he’s doing something interesting with them; the article doesn’t say.

Livingston surprised me with a poignant perspective, sharing:

… his computer helps him feel more connected and human. “It’s frightening to be homeless,” he says. “When I’m on here, I’m equal to everybody else.”

The article is peppered with vignettes of various personalities from other members of the American homeless population, as well as social services professionals involved in providing Internet access and computer training in shelters, since many housing and job applications must be submitted online.

Check it out social service, technology, wow

So after a false start a couple of nights ago, I’m finally getting to watching the 1987 Schwarzenegger classic, The Running Man, which I believe it fair to describe as a movie that foretold modern culture’s infatuation with so-called “Reality TV”. For those unfamiliar with it, the movie is basically Survivor meets ancient Roman gladiatorial event.

Credits on that one go specifically to Stephen King, who wrote the book upon which the movie was based.

I would simply like to add that — apart from predicting the whole “Reality TV” fad of our time 15 years in advance — the very first sentences of the movie’s opening titles happen to read:

By 2017 the world economy has collapsed. Food, natural resources, and oil are in short supply.

One dead-on prediction is enough, thank you.

General Thoughts film

A new website, Microsyntax.org is opening its doors. It aims at an attempt to offer some canonization to emergent linguistic conventions that grow organically on Twitter.

Stow Boyd, the site’s founder and only present author, writes:

… [W]e are launching a new non-profit, Microsyntax.org, with the purpose of investigating the various ways that individuals and tool vendors are trying to innovate around this sort of microsyntax, trying to define reference use cases that illuminate the ways they may be used or interpreted, and to create a forum where alternative approaches can be discussed and evaluated.

I’m fascinated by the mission of Boyd’s new site because it implicitly reframes language as action — an event unfolding — rather than a thing. It is a recognition of order emerging from chaos, aiming to assist its development and refinement.

This perspective stands in compelling contrast with arguments that are critical of the influence that technologies such as Twitter (or texting, instant messaging, and the rest) are affecting upon the modern written language; particularly as practiced by young people still in school, who are likely to apply these linguistic practices in “inappropriate” contexts, such as when writing papers.

The main reason language (both written and spoken) serves humankind’s communications needs so well is that we’re able to largely agree upon practices around how to encode and decode ideas, such that their meanings largely survive the transmission.

Notably, Boyd’s new website seeks to bridge the gap between emergent linguistic practices and informal canon.

[via TechCrunch]

Check it out, language language, linguistic evolution, microsyntax

The Symfony project has recently launched the Symfony Components sub-project and website. Its goal is to produce a collection of standalone libraries for PHP.

Although these libraries were initially born for use in the Symfony MVC framework, the talented developers involved in the project have designed them to avoid any interdependencies with any of the other parts of the overall framework. This effort has resulted in components that may be used individually in any other PHP project without requiring the use of any of the rest of the Symfony framework.

The initial round of components include:

• YAML, a parser that translates data between YAML and native PHP arrays;
• Event Dispatcher, which provides a generic event dispatching framework; and
• Templating, which provides parameterized and scope-isolated templating functionality.

I’ll be keeping a keen eye on this project.

Check it out API, PHP, Symfony, Symfony components

CNN has posted an article about a new zombie movie, called Colin, that is causing a stir at this year’s Cannes festival.

But this isn’t your father’s zombie movie:

Online social networking was an invaluable tool in both generating buzz and cheaply sourcing the undead: “We went on Facebook and MySpace and said ‘Who wants to be a zombie?’”

Oddly, I’ve recently mentioned in three separate conversations to friends how I really want to be in a zombie movie before this life is done, so I’m a little chuffed to have missed out on the casting call.

Here’s the trailer:

It also apparently cost a mere $70 US to produce.

Marc Price, the film’s director, explains that the money was spent on “…a crowbar and a couple of tapes, and … some tea and coffee as well — not the expensive stuff either, the very basic kind… Just to keep the zombies happy.”

There’s something deliciously brainy about crowdsourcing the undead.

Check it out Cannes Film Festival, cinema, crowdsourcing, film, social media, zombies

The Iranian government has blocked access to Facebook. This in the run up to its June 12 presidential elections.

The blessing hiding behind the headline to this story is that this action boldly demonstrates just how much Ahmadinejad’s administration fears the thought of what may be possible if its governed citizens have the opportunity to communicate with each other in such a public and open forum.

Good luck ousting the douche bag, Iran.

General Thoughts elections, Facebook, Iran, politics, wtf

I’m so excited about this, I couldn’t wait to post about it before diving in. I present proudly to you Data.gov.

From the site’s home page:

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often.

Thank you, Obama Administration, for sincerely treating federal data as belonging to the People.

Check it out, Linking Out data.gov, government, Obama, web service, wow

I broke down and hacked my MIE. But just a teeny bit, though: I simply installed the Flock browser and added it to the application launcher.

I needed to know it could be done.

Having satisfied my need to see the proof-of-concept, I intend to return to using the non-hacked configuration (by disabling what I’ve done) for a little while longer, while I complete a review period during which I use the computer with only the applications found on the default system.

That said, I will mention that am rather pleased with the initial results of my efforts in hacking this thing.

Once I’m done assessing its performance and capability as configured in its “out-of-the-box” mode, I intend to hack the hell out of MIE. Maybe I’ll even manage to fix the damned issue I’m encountering with the Mail widget on the home screen that HP’s customer support facilities have utterly failed at helping me resolve… but I’ll get into the saga of HP’s epic failures at customer support in a future post.

Read more…

General Thoughts, Tutorials Flock, hacking, howto, HP Mini, Linux, MIE, tutorial

I’ve recently been working on Symfony / Propel projects that deal with particularly large data sets. In such cases, Propel’s documentation recommends a “lazy hydration” approach.

This “lazy hydration” of Propel’s looks like this:

  [#!php]
  // query all the author entities as a Creole ResultSet
  $rs = AuthorPeer::doSelectRS( new Criteria() );

  while( $rs->next() )
  {
    $author = new Author();
    $author->hydrate( $rs );
    echo "{$author->getLastName()}, {$author->getFirstName()}";
  }

The code above does the following:

1. it queries the database for all records in the author table, and loads it into a Creole ResultSet object.
2. enters a loop, iterating over each result (ie, table row) in the ResultSet, and with each of its records, it:
   1. creates a new, empty Author object
   2. hydrates the empty object with the data in the ResultSet‘s current row
   3. writes the author’s last and first name to the output buffer

In this way, only one Author instance is in use at any given time. Each iteration discards the previous instance and creates a new one.

But I hate it — it’s ugly and unwieldy.

This overt use of the ResultSet object is an awkward practice when using an ORM. The primary design goal of ORMs is to allow the developer to work at a higher level of abstraction than SQL queries and database result sets.

So what should it look like? Read more…

Tutorials announcement, development, laziness, PHP, Propel, Symfony

I recently bought my very first non-Apple computer. It’s a netbook — the HP Mini 1120 NR. It comes in two flavors: Windows XP and Linux. The Linux is a heavily customized version of Ubuntu 8.04, which HP calls MIE (Mobile Internet Experience).

As a years-long Mac user (since 1991), the decision to purchase a non-Apple computer was not one I settled upon lightly.

Read more…

General Thoughts Apple, HP Mini, Linux, Mac OS X, MIE, netbook