thoughts of the driver

I finally was bothered enough to watch the short documentary, “The Story of Stuff”. It’s a beautifully narrated and animated documentary explaining how the current system of ever increasing consumption, is at once artificial, world threatening, and possibly against our very nature.

Great stuff, highly recommend people take 20 minutes to watch:

Today my friend Smári P. McCarthy pointed out to me his recent writeup on digital fabrication, Digital Fabrication as a Catalyst for Freedom. For those who are not familiar with the promise of digital fabrication and how it may affect the world, I suggest you read this paper, Atoms from Bits The Digital Revolution in Manufacturing, and for the really lazy, I’ll sum it up: Digital fabrication is the process in which an object is constructed physically from digital information (a CAD document for example), now we are on the cusp of an age where digital fabricators, or “fabbers”, are within the reach of regular people to build, own and operate. Couple that with cheap raw materials, and you have a scenario for a substantial reduction of scarcity, seeing how scarcity is a major factor in how the free market and our global economy functions, this could have widespread consequences.

In effect, the digital fabrication technology is the first step towards a world just-about as equally unencumbered by material costs and scarcity, as the world of software is today, and the success of Free Software stands as a shining monument to what happens when abundance and socialism meet — great benefits for everyone. [Ok, I’m a little biased, but I’m right ]

But the beauty of Smári’s article lies not in any detailed technical descriptions of how “fabbing” works, or any overly long and elaborate dreamlike paragraphs on what the future may hold, but how important it is that when the time comes, and technology has delivered us into abundance, that our political and economical thinking adapts to the new scenario, so that everyone indeed benefits and the inequality existing today recedes further into the dark ages as it should. I think Smári puts it best;

Nothing fundamental will change in our perception of the physical world by our being able to assemble a stuffed turkey atom-for-atom. We already have access to stuffed turkeys, so we already know what having them does for us as a people. Yes, certainly, there will be new options available to us, like growing skyscrapers out of diamonds, but that is not where the greatest entry point for discussion of digital fabrication lies. Rather, it is in the economical impact, which is hard to quantify.

Digital Fabrication as a Catalyst for Freedom on Smári’s blag.

Today the currency of my native country of Iceland has fallen by 5.9% and the current EURISK rate stands at 118, whereas last summer it could be found hovering around 88, so the effective drop since then is about 34%.

According the reports found on foreign exchange sites such as fxstreet.com, this is written up to the current risk-aversion we see in global markets, and the fact the the Icelandic banks’ expansion of late was mostly fueled by high-risk investments and financing.

Couple this situation with an inflation of 9% for the last 12 months in Iceland, which is sure to increase rapidly due to the following facts:
1. Iceland has an import/export trade deficit of 2.5 billion euros in 2006 (that’s according to the 118 exchange rate). Divide that amongst the 300.000 inhabitants, and you have each persons debt increasing by 8.300 EUR per year.
2. The real-estate loan market is completely financed by index-linked loans, which are linked to the consumer price index (CPI) as published by Statistics Iceland institute (statice.is), which has by the way risen 27.5% in the last 5 years. These loans since 2004 have been primarily provided by the Icelandic banks, which are now offering them at around 6.5% interest linked to the CPI, which has risen over 6% per year for the last two years.
3. The CPI includes real-estate costs, so in effect there is a possibility for a (downward spiraling value) feedback loop.

I’m not an economist, and perhaps I’m getting a few things wrong, but overall it seems the economy of my little island, which has in the last few years been rocket-propelled by endless expansion of the banks, large industrial undertakings (aluminum plants, etc), and the recent few years of blooming investments worldwide, is not braking like the rest of Europe; suddenly but with ABS, but rather crashing quite uncomfortably into concrete barrier.

Right now I’m posting this from the COSELLO conference, which is the final conference for the COVCELL project (http://www.covcell.org). Here we had a demonstration of all the tools we developed, and we invite the TEL, Open Source, and Moodle communities to use and extend our work which is all available for free on http://www.covcell.org (under the tools section).

On moodle.org there is a special COVCELL section under the Language Teaching course, http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=5368 (this is the URL to the project discussion forum under moodle.org!).

Since some of our modules currently require some expertise to set up (server side setup required) to play around with, we invite people to register on our Moodle “playpen” server, http://lms2.cms.hu-berlin.de/covcell where the latest stable versions of all our modules are installed. Teachers interested in trying out Moodle and our tools together may be in contact with me or Daniel Kuenstner at Humboldt University to get their own course set up on the playpen, for more realistic testing.

The demonstrations this morning went well, and I think our work has been well received, and I look forward to continuing development on some of the modules as required in the future, and I hope they reach considerable maturity in the next year or so, and start solving problems for more people!

-Steinn @ COSELLO

According to this slashdot post on Slashdot, iPhones are causing problems for the Wi-Fi network. Scores of them connecting at the same time, etc.

Now Wi-Fi enabled phones aren’t going anywhere, and Wi-Fi isn’t going anywhere, so this can only mean that finally we’ll be seeing developments in Wi-Fi to toughen it up, make the hardware support more industrial.

This could be the start of the next phase in the life of Wi-Fi, first we’ll see some hardware hacks by all the manufacturers, then we’ll see an extension of the standard. I also hope the mass migration of devices such as mobile phones over to Wi-Fi will cause an overall simplification in security measures, meaning tighter, simpler security for everyone.

It reminded me that I can change the world. One person at a time.

There is more important content than I can consume in my life time.

I will not dedicate my life to consumption.

It’s any system which allows me to socialize with people. What’s socializing? I am actually not sure, I think a lot of the socializing that happens might be classified as “useless” information exchange.

I happen to think (I don’t have any direct evidence though) that the information exchange between people is usually not useless, maybe not always useful in a direct sense though, but there is real, tangible, value found in the social networks built around exchanging things such as personal information which for most specific work/education-related goals is usually not relevant.

The personal relationships however can prove amazingly, amazingly beneficial for future informal learning scenarios I think.

I have taken notes on this stuff, and I have more questions than answers, but maybe I can in the next year or so find out how to analyze this phenomenon a bit, and most importantly to see why purely social software, which shares a lot of features with learning environments (messaging, forums, wikis, user presence and awareness) — yet there is some sort of social draw found in the purely social sites, which is usually not found in the more formal educational contexts!

Where does the social draw come from? It’s not enough to see who else is there, it’s not enough to know them in real life, it’s not enough to be forced to have online meetings with them (at least the teacher mediated ones), not enough to talk with them on forums — for some reason, people come into the educational system, and their mindset seems purely formal and not social.

Perhaps it’s the short time between classes in a real setting which causes socializing? Perhaps the fact that online, you’re never waiting for anything, you are either in the system, working (or let’s face it, I think 80-90% of systems are just used as word document repositories almost.. downloading), OR you are out of the system, on your myspace, your flickr, or doing whatever, just NOT building social ties with people in your online system.

My final simple questions are;
Why do on-site students make friends, off-site students don’t?
Why do people make friends over large distances every day, but not inside educational systems usually?
Is there value for education in people socializing?

I’m writing this from the iCamp developer meeting in Krakow, where we’re inching towards a better future for educators and the uneducated (read: everyone).

One of the things that I was responsible for presenting was a new spec me, and my colleagues Fridolin Wild and Stefan Sobernig at the WUW have been working on.

The spec is very simple (of course!) and provides a very simple mechanism for setting up update notifications (mostly designed to easily set up push-based feed management), we call the standard “FeedBack” for now, since it was actually born out of my idea to modify (mangle?) the PingBack to ping on updates, similar to what update services are doing with weblog.ping.

We ended up making our own little spec, within a new namespace “feedback”, and I’ve already written a simple reference implementation in wordpress, and Fridolin has written the base for a Moodle implementation, which I’ll try and finish up before the end of next week.

I look forward to testing around with it and finalizing the spec before releasing it along with implementations for various systems (there is already a python implementation from one of our project partners, that should be easily portable for plone or other zope based cms systems). We’ve also theorized about the possibilities for update notifications to point to URI’s containing Atom-PP messages for full edit/insert/delete possibilities between systems

On the COVCELL front, we are proceeding pretty well these days, after some setbacks and delays due to problems with the Whiteboard development, but now we have a new developer working on the Java side, and I’ve almost finished a new Moodle module for it which allows users to select background images and the width/height before opening a session, etc. It will be quite a big step forward from the current Drawboard-based one, and should have some fancy features such as image saving, and large background image with scrollability/draggability to reveal different parts of the whiteboard.

Anyway, back to work!

Hello my few and devoted readers.

I’m back in Vienna, after ten days in my lovely home country of Iceland–well, lovely in some respects at least–where was I? Ah yes, trip to Iceland… It was wonderful to see my girlfriend again, and now we miss each other already. But that’s life I guess.

In Iceland I had primarily been interested in moving things along with my house and my car, and of course spending time with my loved ones (more with some than others ;-)). Unfortunately my house is still unsold, and my car is still broken, and most of my time was spent sleeping and working for COVCELL.

In terms of work, my time was rather fruitful. I released a new beta version of the presence and chat module for Moodle, helped a little with the launching of a new COVCELL website. And spent a bunch of time with my friend and colleague, Halli, working on the COVCELL Whiteboard. In the last few days we’ve been squashing bugs, and working hard at finishing it, even though slightly over deadline. A public beta should be released soon, but overall I’m really pleased with how well it came along during my time in Iceland, and in the few days since returning. We had some really good agile programming sessions like we usually do when working together.

Now for my iCamp duties I’ve incidentally also been working on Moodle. Albeit a quite different aspect, I’m trying to bring the Moodle-SQI module I first wrote a year ago or so, to a state where it’s configurable and actually really useful — as opposed to the way it is now, mostly a proof of concept, still ways off from really connecting people with interesting material.

Regarding my pain, a coworker here at WUW gave me a voucher for two weeks at a local gym, which I decided to try out on thursday. It was a really fancy looking place, called “Holmes Place”. Quite frankly I felt really out of place there, wearing my cheap clothes, and carrying around the bulk of my estate, 5 euros, in my pocket. I also felt a lot of strange looks when I took off my shoes to squat. Other gym goers, most busy curling, benching, doing assisted chin-ups, or fixing their hair, looked at me like I was from another planet. Suffice to say there was nowhere you could deadlift, and I was the only person there who squatted.

I managed a pretty lame workout, did some wide- and close-grip pull downs, tried some fancy shoulder pressing machine, some cable push downs, curling, reverse curling, squats. At this stage I was so tired I didn’t dare go near the bench without a spotter, so I just decided to bust my legs completely by doing doing some HIIT. My HIIT really turned into LIIT, alternating between 5km/h walking, and 10km/h “running”, for 20 minutes, amounting to 2.5km. My legs were already shaking after squatting.

I gulped down my protein shake, which unfortunately is not whey, but a mix of whey, egg, and calcium casein proteins, hit the shower, sauna, and with trembling legs started on my way back to Fridolin’s place, where I was staying the night. Got there, had another protein shake, a tablespoon of omega-3, opti-l-zinc, and totally crashed for the next 8-9 hours.

Now I really feel I had a weak, rather lame workout, especially compared to how I would usually hit the iron up until last November, but this lame workout really did a number on me. Be it lack of stretching, too long time since I last lifted weights, bad PWO drink, or most likely a combination of all these factors — but most of my body still hurts like hell! Forearms, biceps, lats, quads — especially biceps and quads.

I take this as a sign I’m way out of shape, these 3 months of little exercise really caught up with me, and now it’s time to kick myself back in gear. Find a decent gym where people squat and deadlift, get some quality whey, zma, and start busting ass.

I’ll quote something I heard on the t-nation.com forums the other day, I think it was from a guy called Taran,

Pain is just weakness leaving the body

Now, I’m not so sure that’s universally true, but in the case of sore muscles after an exercise, I know from experience, it just means you’re getting stronger!

So that’s my status — in pain, and working on Moodle bits.

I am in Iceland.

Here I have some NOW Vanilla Whey protein (great value).

Yesterday afternoon I was hankering for some coffee, but also some protein, so I mixed up the following;

1 cup of coffee
1 tbsp. cream
2 scoops vanilla whey protein
1 tsp. 100% cocoa powder
9-10 ice cubes.

The result: A creamy, delicious vanilla chocolate coffee protein shake, with no flavors overpowering the others.

So naturally, I had one of these for breakfast this morning

First off I’ll start with saying how glad I am Richard Hammond is back on his feet, and looking like a million bucks — or as close as his skinny little self ever will

I think it’s fair to say that his boyish enthusiasm and antics on television have won the hearts of millions of viewers, and offsets Clarkson’s “grumpy old man” outlook perfectly. George or James, or whatever the name May, did however score some points by throwing Jeremy’s loudhailer under the roller in this episode. More antics like this, and he’ll get the fans to remember is name properly.

However, on the note of Top Gear, and specifically Richard Hammond, I once blew an opportunity to have a chat with him (or at least try to have a chat in the sense of an insane fan knocking on his side window). It was back in may 2005, when the top gear presenters were in Iceland doing some bit on cheap roadsters (audi tt, nissan 350z, and chrysler crossfire). And so it just happens, that I’m walking down the only real “high street” in Iceland, and I see this bloke sitting in an orange metallic nissan 350z with right hand drive. I thought to myself how unusual, this guy must’ve imported it from UK or Japan. And kept on walking. The next day at work however I found out that Richard, Jeremy and James were in Iceland filming, and it suddenly dawned on me that getting glasses might not be such a bad idea. There I was literally walking right next to Richard Hammond, at the time one of relatively few people in Iceland who had any idea who he was, had nothing to do — I could have at least come off as an insane fan I think.

Anyway, back to the show, which I felt was pretty amusing. The boys are up to their usual antics, this time with one of their ridiculous challenges, where they attempt to repave a stretch of road in 24 hours, while the job’s supposed to take a week. According to Jeremy, it’s easy, just skip all the healthy and safety nonsense, and work instead. Factor into the equation that our dear Top Gear presenters seem completely devoid of all engineering ability, this makes for excellent TV.

From a real motoring perspective however, they drive a long-anticipated car. The new Jaguar XKR. Now, in recent years I think any Jaguar which has an X in it’s name is a promising piece of kit, but the new XKR takes the cake.

Just look at that, so beautiful!

Yes, I know the engine is the same bloody V8 there’s been around for years, and yes the interior wasn’t according to Jeremy’s ridiculous standards (who else would want a fireplace in his car?). But WHO CARES?! It looks absolutely ridiculously hot, sounds amazing, goes like stink, handles better than a dog wearing sneakers, and when traffic jerks you back to life’s mundane reality, it’s a quiet and comfortable car. It’s just simply a stupidly desirable car. Personally I must add that I think it’s also less of a prat’s car than the Aston V8 (which it will of course be compared to), because well, I guess it’s just too in to have an Aston these days.

Another important part of this Top Gear episode was of course the showing of Richard Hammond’s crash. I have to say, it took a lot of guts for him to get in that jet engined steel framed accident, and to put it in his own words; “And when that happens I haven’t got 5,000 horse power, I’ve got, 10,000 horse power, and possibly the biggest accident, you’ve ever seen in your life.” — Referring to the afterburner. The crash was not taken completely lightly, as you’d expect with any such traumatic event. Looking at the recording, it’s amazing he survived, and I can imagine a bigger person (if they’d fit in the car) would not have been so lucky.

Well, I’m glad “the Hamster” is back on his feet and looking fit as a fiddle, as his presence on the show obviously prevents it from being “grumpy old men 5: the motoring version”.