bru Archive at Chaos’n'Coffee

Author Archive for bru

Leaving a mark

Published

3 weeks and 2 days ago

. 1 Comment

I don’t know if it’s because it was Bastille day or just because for two days in a row we had mostly sun, but today it felt different, so I made a small resolution on writing down a note about it, and here I am in the heart of the night marking this last thing off the list. I’ll get better with timing, eventually.

The day started with me finding in a pocket of the jacket one of my small notebooks. I thought they were all buried deep in the stuff that still lays packed from my move, but no, this little boy was hiding there in the pocket, waiting for the right moment to jump out.
I started taking notes on the train to work. It felt so good. Sketching, especially.
I’ve always been more of a sketch-and-mind-or-concept-map person, but you can’t really do that on a computer keyboard.
Moreover, the little, continuous attention and discipline required to write in a controlled and decent way is, I think, unvaluable.

But enough of my prodigal notebook. The rest of the day has been characterized by meetings, that tends to cluster on mondays, which is good.
Headshift is in an interesting moment. Maybe the gorgeous new office space is blowing new energy in the team (again, having a LOT of natural light helps, I’m sure) but it looks to me that, even if the pressure is as high as usual, we tend to be more willing to get out, interact with the world outside and with each other.

6 Points of View from Tom Taylor on Vimeo.

Oh, today the balcony hosted a lunchtime meeting with Dejan Dinčić of Diplo, that turned into an exciting conversation on online learning and what social media practices share with it. The bottom line I soaked is that as in our case it’s more about the people than about the tools (that were the focus in early e-learning experiments), yet the right tools (not necessarily fancy or too playful by themselves) can seriously empower the community to a new level.

On other news, I spent the last few weekends extending my little FireEagle experiment. It started just after the FireEagle development meeting here in London, as a way to understand this fascinating API, and then evolved thanks to a few inspiring conversations over the course of the months into a proper, if maybe trivial, application. More to come on this subject very soon.

walking vs. driving

Published

bru

1 month and 2 weeks ago

in Chaos

. 2 Comments

Today I read on WorldChanging this post about the debacle concerning the climate impacts of walking vs. driving.
John Tierney writes:

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.

Now, Karl Schroeder in the WorldChanging post linked above already scores a few points back to the walking practice but I think he’s missing the major one: where does your food come from? I don’t have any number here but I’ve this very strong feeling that practices like the 100 miles diet can help reduce our impact quite considerably, together with possibly tightening a bit our ever-loosing bound with the local territory.
Of course this is not applicable everywhere, as I guess harvesting food in antartica would be quite troublesome, and similarly growing bananas in the uk I think (again, just guessing) would be far from eco-efficient: but do we need bananas in the uk? maybe the same principles could be found in other local products, that we could produce and consume in a shorter timespan, thus saving chemical treatments, freezing, and so on.

On the run for digital ground and its value

Published

bru

1 month and 2 weeks ago

in Coffee

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Plenty of news these days, but not the right time to talk about those.
Just wanted to quickly point out this thing that dawned on me now, sa I was finally having a closer look at Plurk.

Plurk, you may say, is yet another twitter clone. I like to say it’s twitter with added motion sickness, because one of the main features is this visualisation mode where you scroll messages horizontally on a timeline (btw, if you’re interested in this kind of visualization effect, have a look at the great SIMILE project).

$Feba\'s timeline on plurk$

The other added feature is Karma (of Slashdot’s fame), that is used to turn user’s experience in a sort of game. Higher karma means more colorful messages for you and added motion sickness fun for your readers.
All in all, a quite clever strategy to get people in, would be nice to find out if it will be able to be sticky enough and thus if it is here to stay.

So, now that the main rush has passed, today I went and tried to subscribe. Only to discover that (unsurprisingly enough, it’s three letters and pretty open to interpretations) my nick was taken. Now that’s really no big deal: I’m not particularly attached to it and in networks where 3 letters are not enough (why why why?) I use other permutations already.
The interesting thing is, that the nice brazilian girl who claimed “bru” on plurk apparently has a lot of my Italian friends now in her roster. Which, being plurk a game, is totally cool!

However, that raises a few interesting issues:
How valuable is the claiming of digital ground?
Is the whole concept of friends/followers still valid?
What happens to physical relationship metaphors when not only space and time collapse, but identities fragmentates too? People may say “I’m a friend of bru”, and being asked “yes, bru… but where?”
And maybe even Where’s the point in claiming identities, if the whole point is just connecting to more people? Just get them all!

What’s in a name, would the Poet say…..
Again, this is totally cool in a context like Plurk, but could be annoying or even awkward in other environments to find you’ve just declared your friendship with a bunch of perfect strangers :)

Oh, btw, I’m iBru there.

post BarCampLondon4

Published

bru

2 monthes ago

in Coffee and London

. 1 Comment

another day, somehow shorter than the first, but equally engaging.

I eventually did my small presentation, with the effect that I realized a good title for it just while presenting it. Here you can find the slides, published on google docs:

Geeky note #1: presenting in google docs is ok… for a barcamp at least. But no nifty transition and no timer yet :(

Geeky note #2: the speech was meant to generate a discussion, no demo was presented, although some code already exists and I’m looking forward to push it to github soon.

Among the conversations I participated to today:
* Distributed social network primer, Ben Ward exploring XFN and microformats
* Guy Rintoul on the geography of technology - from a pretty abstract start this one developed in a quite rich discussion on scenarios of possible future perceptions of space and place.
* Pedro’s Agile Low Cost Usability Testing - a few tools and guidelines to squeeze usability testing into “everyday life” of development projects
* Some eye tracking case studies (cool to see a Tobii output again after quite a long time :) )

Kudos to Ross Bruniges and the whole staff. This has been a great camp.
Oh, and thanks to the sponsor too: eBay’s rubik’s cube’s been keeping me busy since I jumped on the train (and will probably haunt me for the next few weeks).

Back from day 1 of BarCampLondon4

Published

bru

2 monthes and 1 week ago

in Coffee and London

. 1 Comment

The first day of this first barcamplondon of the post-BBC era is over, and here I am to write down a few considerations on the experience.
The overall impression is awesome, and I think the general mood is that this event is definitely up to the standard we were used, although in the morning I saw a quite a big stack of “undelivered” badges that gave me an early feeling of emptiness.
Another thing that hit me as soon as I got to the leicester square venue was the fact that the rooms are actually spread over three different non-contiguous floors of an eight floors building and, on average, quite tiny (10-12 people). I immediately thought this was going to be a logistic nightmare.
I was (happy to be) wrong: having many (8) small rooms (well, two are actually biggish boardrooms that can easily host 40-60 people) turned out to be a very good context to spark conversations, as each and every session I’ve been to turned out in a lively, often inspiring, discussion.
And about logistics, I must say that thanks to the wonderful endurance of the first floor staff that kept giving direction and routinely FOB-ing the door (I felt sorry for them), and a really awesome 6th floor terrace overlooking soho and acting as decompression space (and no, it wasn’t even raining!) the experience has been more than enjoyable.

Among the topics I’ve learned about today:
* Arduino rfid hacks (by Nigel Crawley with whom I attended the RFID workshop at the Dana Centre a couple of weeks ago - it’s been interesting, although a bit frustrating, to see where he went from there)
* Making a better system for government consults. With Harry Metcalfe from tellthemwhatyouthink, and also Rob McKinnon from theyworkforyou.co.nz.
* How to make a proper Italian espresso (no, really!) - with Carmen Boscolo and Julius Solaris, who then went on presenting his ideas on building a “proper”, all-in-one solution for event management. Thanks to a really interested audience, the follow-up conversation lead to the potential basis to start outlining and/or building something! Fingers crossed (and yes, good espresso is obviously essential to properly manage a conference, so everything fits).
* Usable Conference, a project by Jure Chalev on creating guidelines for a successful conference, something along the line of what we did in Italian on the Bzaar Wiki - note: I think a set of tangible deliverables would really help in this case, like a checklist that you can actually print and carry with you when you’re considering venues, or at the event itself.
* Usability testing for console games, with Andy Budd. A lot of interesting facts and ideas, first of all that, quite unexpectedly, most of the console games that hit the shelves don’t actually go through a proper usability testing process. Key idea: games, unlike for example office suites, cannot afford to be unusable.
* Comet web application architecture, with a cool demo chaos game session.

A great part of the day has been also, as usual, the presence of old friends with which to hang on,
and force you to talk through your thoughts.

Like a Zippo

Published

bru

3 monthes and 1 week ago

in Chaos

. 0 Comments

Yesterday while reading my daily techmeme I saw this headline:

Beautiful to use: Nokia unveils three new handsets that merge modern functionality with classic and sophisticated looks

The first thing I thought was “wow! Are they really releasing the Nokia Remade?”
Actually no, the new Nokias are just pretty neat handhelds, but nothing along the line that CradleToCradle authors would endorse, apparently.

For those who are wondering, the “Remade” project is (as Nicholas defines it):

a provocation for serious conversations at the tippy-top of the Nokia enterprise to seriously consider how upcycling can become part of the design, construction and consumption of mobile phones. Materialized ideas on a really impactful concept.

As Jan Chipchase, researcher for Nokia Design, puts it on his blog:

sustainability is a pressing issue in a billion+ products-per-year industry

While talking in the office with Tom, who met Jan and had the chance to play a bit with the Remade, and listening to his description of the experience, I thought that, apart from the upcycled materials, the Remade gives the feeling of an undying object, something that is there to stay, like a Zippo lighter.

Even if I don’t smoke but I’ve always been in love with Zippo lighters: they’re solid, their design is always contemporary, not too loud (well, at least the classic model) nor too dull, and when you have one in your hands you can’t help but play with it, in your own personal way: whether to try and light it in one clean swoop, or just spin it through the fingertips, or compulsively open and shut it to hear that distinctive, reassuring “clack” sound.
I’m definitely looking forward to devices like these.

Filo, the line that joins your dots

Published

bru

3 monthes and 1 week ago

in Chaos

. 2 Comments

About one week ago I wrote a post with a similar title on my Italian blog. It was to announce the “beta” of Filo, a small service (well, more like a weekend project) that I developed a while ago, and that turned out to be a good testbed for experimenting a bit with design ideas and development practices.

What I’m giving you here is an introduction to the project and an overview of its features, I’ll update my dev blog with more in-depth articles about the techie stuff.

What is Filo?

Filo is a website that allows you to keep track of what you want to read (and don’t have the time to do it right now). It was heavily inspired by Instapaper, a web service by Marco Arment (one of Tumblr’s developer) and basically started as an exercise to bend Instapaper’s behaviour to my needs.

Wasn’t del.icio.us / ma.gnolia / $othersocialbookmarkingsite enough?

Yes and no. Other existing services are mainly aimed at people who want to share their bookmarks with somebody else or who want to tag / archive with their own tags.
This is awesome, but requires that you actually know where to put that document!
Filo instead provides you a simple, strictly first-in-last-out list of items you want to remember.

How does it work?

Items to read in Filo are called knots (that’s a little linguistic joke, as filo means line in Italian). You can create Knots either manually (using a form accessible from everywhere on the site) or using a bookmarklet that you can drag in your browser’s bookmark bar.

Using the bookmarklet is very easy: you just browse to a page you want to “remember” and click the bookmarklet. It will contact Filo in the background and create the new knot automatically.

Once a knot is created it will be available from the website and in your personalized RSS feed.

Once a knot is accessed (either clicking on it on the website or clicking it’s title on the feed), it will be marked as read and archived. It is possible to mark archived knots as “to be read again”, as it is possible to trash knots entirely. At the moment, there is no way of bringing items back from the trash (but it will be possible in the future).

How to access the service

The procedure to sign up and sign in have been reduced to a bare minimum: when accessing the site, you’ll be prompted for an email, just type in yours; if it’s recognized as an existing user’s, you’ll be asked for your password, otherwise a new user will be instantly created so you’ll be able to start generating knots!
You’ll also receive an email to confirm your address. You’ll need to click on the link provided in it to fully activate the account (and be able to log in again in the future).

users are prompted for their email address

email not recognized, will register a new user

email recognized, will ask for password and log in

Note, the über-simplified registration process was first presented as an idea by Davide Casali at the recent ExperienceCamp.

Localization

As of today, Filo supports English and Italian.

Mobile version

Filo is already designed to be used from mobile devices (well, actually the CSS still needs a bit of love). Moreover, there’s an iPhone/iPodTouch version available at http://filo.m.bzaar.net/ (well, you can go there with any browser, but with the iPhone is cooler ;) ).

Reading from a feedreader

Filo creates a personal RSS feed for each user. This feed may be imported in any feedreader. Every time you access a knot form your feed reader, it gets automatically archived in Filo (and will disappear from the unread feed at the next refresh).

Boring Technical Details

Filo is written in Ruby, builds on the Ruby on Rails framework, and stores its data in a couple of MySQL tables.
Front end logic is powered by jQuery and the whole thing should degrade gracefully. The iPhone version uses the iui library.

Potential Troubles

. Filo is hosted on DreamHost. Now, don’t get me wrong, DH is great and considered what I pay for the hosting, the service I get is just awesome. BUT it’s not really inteneded for hosting Rails applications: we’re running on Apache + FastCGI and, well, the whole thing tends to “feel” quite slow.
The good site of it is that I put some decent effort in optimizing the code, so when eventually Filo will move to a more rails friendly service it will possibly scream (well, maybe just whistle :) ).
. The whole thing (and especially the integrated login + registration) is not thoroughly tested on a number of different environments (e.g. IE and javascript-less)
. CSS needs some love, and the same is true for the user settings page.

Where next?

Some ideas for the future:
. OpenID support
. “social” stuff, as being able to read and comment your friends knots.
. suggested reads
. offline storage of long articles

Earth Day, focus on CO2

Published

bru

3 monthes and 2 weeks ago

in Chaos

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In case you didn’t notice, yesterday was Earth Day. I’m not a big fan of whatever-days, but there’ve been a couple of interesting events in the last 24 hours that stimulated my interest.
First, Dopplr added a carbon calculator service. Discussing it last night with MattB, I mentioned the fact that for the first time a web two service makes me feel guilty, and felt a bit ashamed too when it prompted me to share the carbon profile with other travellers. He replied that the idea is to push people into starting conversations on the subject, and I think this is a good way to raise awareness. As Matt Jones puts it:

It’s not enforcing any particular course of action - it’s the weighing scales, not the diet.

What we all do with this information is up to us.

On a similar pattern, today in Milan at The Next Web Now (Microsoft event) FIAT presented Ecodrive: new FIAT cars are equipped with a sensor that register CO2 emissions; data can be stored in a USB drive and dumped in a PC for analysis and access by the driver.
The idea is kinda neat, and makes every FIAT 500 a potential 6 gears OpenSpime :)

Update: Information Aesthetics posted about this video today. Neat:

Milan Burst

Published

bru

3 monthes and 3 weeks ago

in Chaos

. 0 Comments

This week I’m circling on the Milan orbit.
My headquarters until friday will be the newly opened and very white Cowo, a coworking space in the forever up and coming Lambrate area. Monday actually started exploring the neighbourhood and ended up with an introductory coffee for Alberto to the place.
Milan these days is bursting with the usual plethora of activities, events, gallery openings and performances that accompanies the Salone del Mobile. Usually the sensation at the end of the week is that you ran around for days, missing one shiny event after the other, and getting drunk in the process.
Tonight I’ve been very briefly at the Fabbrica del Vapore, an interesting, totally cool, ex industrial space now converted to creative studios, galleries and performance spaces. Conversation and the usual nice conversation with Vanz.
Among the many, I’m looking forward tomorrow to go and have a peek at Lago’s new space, and absolutely visit the Peter Greenaway installation at Palazzo Reale.
On Friday I’m looking forward to aggregate some Openspime and Arduino crowd, let there be dork.

Coffee Warming Warning

Published

bru

3 monthes and 4 weeks ago

in Chaos

. 0 Comments

Here at Headshift we love being green. We read our McDonough, some of us cycle a lot, we even have a green (and orange, ok) logo! And we always, always shut down unused appliances, like the coffee machine.

Now, in order for a coffee machine to work it needs to warm up. It takes an average of 4′33″ to properly warm it up.

That’s a tricky number, and contemplating it sends minds haywire. So much so that the coffee machine usually ends up idling for far more than the named 4′33″.

On these occasions, Headshift people (me first) loving being green knights, literally dash to the kitchen and with articulated acrobatics that would make Trinity and Bruce Lee go hide themselves in shame, they switch off the machine.

More often than not, a few minutes later you can hear screams coming from the kitchen, as the coffee craving employee sees his caffeinated dreams vanish in front of a dead LED.

So today, I proudly armed myself with duct tape, moo cards and post-its (and not even a swiss army knife!) and made this little artefact, turning the coffee-making experience in a proper state machine (if it’s on and claimed, don’t transition to off).

there is also a generic version for the lazy (or not moo-powered):

Author Archive for bru

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