Kollegans kommentar om lunch Indian Flavour: “Det här var alltså mer skolmatsalsstämning än på La Empanada.”
(Yes, in Swedish. Malmö-restaurant-related. Nevermind, you.)
Skolmatsal
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Monthly Archives: October 2008
Dictators names
Quoth Wikipedia:
In 1972, Mobutu renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (“The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.”), Mobutu Sese Seko for short.
More FabLabbery, and Siert’s windmill
Rather than going back and editing my earlier post about that Icelandic guy, here’s some salient linkage on the subject. This is so exciting I almost skipped breakfast to watch it.
Iceland’s FabLab wiki, which is run by Smári, from a previous post.
A Dutch video with music about a FabLab workshop. Video unpacking and demoing plotter and CNC mill.
Mediamatic has an overview page of FabLab technology.
I met a guy called Siert at Reboot this year. He runs a FabLab in Holland. Siert’s windmill project (Dutch text, and a demo video).
Storytelling is hard
I did a lot of thinking about storytelling this weekend. Marketing is good stories. “Stories my dad can tell” is my benchmark. No story has hit that mark better than Skype. His enthusiasm for it, and the simplicity of its value offer was refreshing.
Talking to an American who’d moved to Sweden and taught himself Swedish, I realized this. We, the IT community, need to come up with a virtualization story that he could tell. About why VMWare images (or the equivalent) are so practical and useful. It’s a packaged appliance, already “tuned in to the right channel”. No configuration. No setup. That kind of thing, but good.
FSCONS: Smári McCarthy on abundance
The man in the picture is Icelandic, outlandish, with lots of fancy words.
FabLabs (a set of machines to make any plastic object up to 1 meter in size) point to a future, and McCarthy talked about that future. No scarcity, everything “non-exotic” (which is not imbued with aura, like say, the Eiffel tower) is… available.
The intersection of hackers and anarchists: substantial, but not complete.
Freeganism got a mention in the talk. And “turkey sandwich”.
He got a government grant to run his FabLab. He said he’d looked around him, seeing only fishing industry. Digital fabrication might be a future for a place like that. A clean break with tradition.
Open Farm Tech was mentioned. OS tractors. Smari is credited with the prototype code for CNC (you know, extruders and such) on the website. The tractor is called LifeTrac. Design-for-disassembly. I’m very taken with this project. Update: See comments for direct links to videos and such.
FSCONS: Conversations are the conference
Just had an interesting micro-conversation, with a man who spoke with a slightly Indian accent. Cambodia: No landlines, but quite developed mobile phone networks, never bothering with the previous stage of tech. Leapfrogging. Related: Ericsson deployed a solar-powered mobile base station there. That press release hits all points in the last paragraph of the leapfrogging article on Wikipedia.
Now a guy from a company called Redpill Linpro will do a talk called “Hidden gems of PostgreSQL”. Full-text search (what used to be called tsearch2 is now called FTI: full-text indexing). Pretty neat. You can specify a language setting. Stopwords in English might be regular words in another language – is means ice in Swedish.
FSCONS 2008, Sunday
Listening to a guy in a red t-shirt. He talks about Debian package structure. People ask questions. He is reading from a tiny-font control configuration file. Not so good for my concentration. But, he has a good voice, at least it has some melody.
Yeah, a big corporation in search donated a Moleskine notebook in the goodie bag. In my coat pocket, I found some Sponge-Bob Squarepants stickers.
Talked about Istanbul with Bergie (you pronounce it like “burrdgie”). He schooled me on some facts: It’s the third largest city in the world. 15 million people. One third of the city is in Europe, the rest in Asia. He said that Orhan Pamuk‘s book about the city opened his eyes to some things. I am half-way through it. Pretty good stuff, but I’m mainly interested in the personal story about his complicated family.
About the conference generally: People here are friendly, but the conference has no centre. In space, I mean. Where you all go. Agora. Meeting place. Well. I’ll go around and be friendly now.
Roleplayers, everywhere
In Gothenburg, at the FSCONS conference. Henri Bergius, a Midgard developer from Helsinki, was here, and I asked him: “Is Finland small enough that you know Timo Multamäki?”
“Why, yes, I know him.”
And with that, Henri proceeded to tell me about Monday Night Larp, a 2-hour event, every week, that’s been going strong for 14 years (that’s fourteen!). “We started it when I was in high school, and others have taken it further since then.”
What a great little format. After school, short enough that you could even risk a so-so game (it would END, mercifully).
The talk is quite good, introduces Midgard 2 (experimental). Neat that it’s got bilingual examples (PHP and Python, side-by-side).
Going to Gothenburg: FSCONS
In 10 hours off we go, on the train to Gothenburg. A conference! It feels splendid. I’m going with Isak, my colleague.
Wow! Look at the schedule! Just look at it. The tracks line up so excellently. This’ll be a blast.
Circuit learning
Bought an issue of Circuit Cellar. You learn so much from a magazine in a field you’re new in!