4th Øresund JavaScript Meetup report

The 4th Øresund JavaScript Meetup was just held at Hypergene‘s Malmö offices, yesterday night. Eight brave souls made the journey to Malmö C and came to Hypergene’s quite fancy offices. After a little pizza snack and introductory conversation, we repaired to a meeting room. Networking was in full swing, in at least three languages, when Jacob announced that he’d run his introductory JSpec presentation.

It turns out that JSpec is a BDD specification tool, which uses some Ruby to run its specs. The syntax was a mix of Ruby and JavaScript in the same file.

Mats Bryntse had quit his job to make an ExtJS web app, and he’ll be on his way to San Francisco in a few months. The app he made, Ext.ux.Scheduler is impressive.

Later, I got fiddly. Programming languages had come up in conversation. Scala! Clojure! Erlang! OCaml! So, I installed a few of them. We deciphered a bit of Scala, and tried it out. Quite entrancing, getting it to run, when four people stand around and shout suggestions. The Erlang Eclipse extension Erlide was hastily installed, but we ran out of time before we got anything done with it. And the title of the meetup is “Öresund JavaScript Meetup”. The irony was not lost on us.

“It’s dead easy to make Erlang web backends!”, I later exclaimed. “Can I quote you on that?” David retorted.

So, there’s my challenge. Using ErlyWeb, MochiWeb, and others, and perhaps Mnesia (the database), I’ll have to work hard until the next meetup to get an environment running – and make a web application.

Speaking of the next meetup, David, who’s working for streaming outfit XStream in Copenhagen, will try and convince his people that a JavaScript Meetup is just what they need to host, so we’ll probably be in Copenhagen next time.

What’s more? There were shoutouts to the Copenhagen PHP Meetup, and talk about coding dojos.

Pen buying recommendation in Malmö

Drewex has the art supplies that I need, according to my comics artist friend. She showed some pens that were also brushes.

It’s situated in a backstreet, and is cheap and popular with the active artists. These facts sum up to a great endorsement.

I’ll report back when I’ve been there.

In other news: Rainer Hartleb’s “Jordbro suite”, I’ll soon have it on DVDs.

Free RFID workshop with Forskningsavdelningen

Forskningsavdelningen decided to have a RFID workshop on Thursday (today 27 August 2009), so please come today and bring your rfid tags and readers.

RFID tags come in all shapes and sizes
RFID tags come in all shapes and sizes

As you may know, RFID is a technology used in transportation cards sucha as the new SkÃ¥netrafiken “Jojo”, Stockholm Länstrafik’s “Access”, and the London Underground “Oystercard”, as well as Öresundsbron bridge “BroBizz”, and multiple other places. These cards operate without any internal battery/power source but are powered from the radio signals sent to it from the “reader”.

Wikipedia on RFID

Please come from 18:30 to 22:00. This event is all free. Holler to me if you need instructions on getting there.

On “POLITICS OF THE IMAGINATION: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort”

POLITICS OF THE IMAGINATION: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort
by Colin Bennett


On this book about Charles Hoy Fort, that I was lent by a local sci-fi author.

Quite talky at times, wandering around the subject, which is, a sad lonely poor writer, who was either a fool squandering his life in libraries, or a hero in service of his High Work against the technology-science-complex.

A Marx, or a Barthes, much before his time.

Treatment in Bennett can be wordy, as I said. I’ll put up with that. I’m wordy myself.


See more about POLITICS OF THE IMAGINATION: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort

Kiswahili Add-on for Firefox

Kiswahili (SW) Language Pack, an add-on for Firefox.

A while ago I joined a Tanzanian mailing list called eThinkTank Tanzania (no longer online; 2018 update), which sports 1200 subscribers. It’s my source of cool East African IT news. I’ll try to republish good stuff here, and in my Delicious bookmarks feed. Some stories need some background, so I’ll try to frame them here, on the blog.

Recently, at Hacknight, Sebastian Büttrich held a talk about Tanzania and its possibility of getting Internet access everywhere. Lots of work is being done, and things happen – like the undersea cables – but Open Source hackers are needed. “Billing software, not very sexy to Open Source hackers, is needed.” Perhaps it is possible to create it, but will we be able to make it fun? Under which circumstances is it fun to build billing systems?

Full disclosure: as a kid of 11-13 years old, I lived in Tanzania, at a Swedish boarding school for children of missionaries. My parents ran a printing press for Pingstmissionens U-landshjälp, in the northern town of Arusha. Yes, that’s something like “Swedish Pentecostal Church Mission to Developing Countries… Aid” – er, my lingo-engine’s rusty in this summer heat.

Update: Via bjathr, I found DIY Mesh Guide from the Wireless Africa wiki.

Hacknight 2009 rundown

Oh, what a night! I’m home, have slept, and sitting the garden, typing up this event report.

I started my event day in the afternoon, calling the event site, asking what needed to get fetched from the city. I was tasked with getting the projector for the lasertagging from the activist café in MöllevÃ¥ngen, Glassfabriken (Swe. “the ice-cream factory”). A very helpful coffee shop worker dug out the unit for me. “They came in late at night and dumped a PA system right here in the closet, on the space where you can stand.” After thanking her profusely, I set out on foot, balancing the equipment on the back of my bike.

The hike was through excellent weather, and as I was nearing the site, I met monki. We got to talking about the newly torn-down garage near the site. “The gentrification process. The old slogan needs to be updated, people used to say ‘stop the gentrification, shoot an artist’. Nowadays it’s hackerspaces that come first to the less popular neighbourhoods.” A man was sweeping up age-old dust and junk from the ground in a nearby commercial building. I’ve never seen any non-guarddog activity there before.

We got supplies from neighbouring big-box store Willys, and went to the site. Dropping off the projector we saw that there were 40 people already checked in to the event. This was already the biggest-ever number of Forskningsavdelningen-related people I ever saw in one place. Hands were shook, and smiles flashed everywhere. I got introduced to the near-mythical mia, met myra (who was building a quite cute little robot). These two ladies are not local, but often visit, and leave excellent builds behind. Many of the locals were also already there, at T minus 4 hours. Quickly, we set out again, to fetch other supplies.

(Interjecting: Luisa’s currently working in the garden, and its charms are working — two ladies from the building have been down in the yard, one talking with Luisa about gardening, and the other bringing down lavender-based cookies for us to taste. The lavender was grown and picked in the yard. A while ago Luisa began her moves to make the yard more social: moved a table and chairs to the grass patch at the center of the yard, had a few meals at that table. Other people in the house got infected, and have been using the table for their breakfasts and evening meals.)

A timeline of events was lettered on A3 sheets of paper, and taped on a wall. Good brushes and well-covering sign paint worked great for that. Myra made a movable “current time cursor”, which pointed at the current talk’s sheet of paper. A hand-drawn map hung on a wall, directing users to activities.

A multi-media performance group was rigging up at the big stage. The workshop ping pong tables were full of ready-to-use equipment. Cooking smells wafted from the kitchen. The bar, which served two beverages (1. off-brand cola, or 2. Jolt Cola), was in full swing. Mattias Elftorp, cyberpunk comics author, was hawking his books there, too. Visitors from afar were milling about, setting up their gear.

Talks began! The cyberpunk author explained his fictional universe. I had to do some event work, carrying, helping out, explaining, so I missed a few of them, but I heard the one about brain hacking & life extension, the one about wireless connection sharing in Tanzania, and I experienced the multi-media band.

In the “Forsk Zone”, longer workshops were held, among them a re-run of “Full-body Arduino Crash Course” from Reboot 11. Also: build a Pong game using an old TV.

We did not count the people, but perhaps 100 people were there, some coming and others going.

Tip: It was a beer-free event, which made for easy cleaning.

Preparing a festival: Hacknight

Can you do something for me? I want you to tell your hacker friend: there is a 11 July hacker festival (for free) in Malmö. This URL points you right at it:forskningsavd.se.

Her friend knows others, so then at last everybody knows about it. Good? Good.

Thanks, friend on the web. (If you did it, and want me to emote thankfulness about it, comment on this post. Yay!)

On the town: met a photographer

A man walks with a stick on his shoulder. The stick has gear attached. I get intrigued, and sidles up: “Nice rig. What is it?”

He explains it is a large-format camera. 25cm square negatives! Hands me a business card that points to his website. (Oh! That website has a picture of the wonderful camera, go look!)

He also explained that his project is to take portraits of people of many nationalities, and as I left him, an English-speaking man (who would’ve fit well into The Crimson Pirate) asked the same questions I had just posed.

The evening sun was just the right kind. I hope I’ll see the pictures he made. (Other photographer Stephen does not take pictures, he makes them; I learnt that from Peter.)