Free Rice and Big Talk

Free rice - I'm stuck at level 38-39.

The more words you get right, the higher the level. Every thing you are correct about means 10 grains of rice donated to the 3rd world.

Greening your company... just a little

Here's an idea I'm about to pitch at work.

Our company distributes jobs to many other valuation firms. These valuation firms employ valuers to travel to locations Australia wide. An individual valuer can travel quite some distance in an average day, and quite a few of them work in metropolitan areas only.

So here's the pitch:
If you want to green your business, just a little bit, then consider paying an extra $2.50 with each of the valuations you order through us.
At the end of the month, we'll total the amount you've contributed and reward the valuers who work with us on a sliding scale. The more efficient the car a valuer drives is, the more we'll reward them.

With only 10 organizations participating in a city, each ordering 10 jobs a month; this idea could easily provide select valuers with a nice little bonus for making sound environmental choices.

Thunder! Lightning!

Since I last wrote about Lightning things have really moved along.

Recently we saw the release of Lightning 0.7 for Thunderbird - this is a significant step towards matching, then beating outlook.

I can't seem to find a screenshot, but most of the rough edges which existed in the previous release have disappeared, the UI seems polished, and the experience while using it is... pleasing.

So if you want to try this but can't really find an excuse to do so, why don't you use thunderbird + imap + gmail, and then add your google calendar too. Try it for a week, and blog about how you got on.

More feedback to the Government

I was wandering around the Green Vehicle Guide and I found a link or two about reusing their data - you just have to seek permission from the right people.

So I followed it and stumbled across this: Statement of IP Principles for Australian Government Agencies (read PDF).

It pissed me off to no end, as I've wasted time dealing with people who don't seem to be aware of this.

Basically; the document linked to boils down to:

• Open your data
• If a business a can use it; consider letting them
  
• More data, more access equals more jobs
• More access means the public is better informed
• Be flexible
  

The bit I really liked was:

Agencies should encourage public use and easy access to copyright material that
has been published for the purpose of:
.. snip ..
facilitating access to government services
.. /snip ..

So after being treated liked a moron the last time I tried to do something, the moment I saw a Feedback on Copyright / etc link; I bashed out:

This is just general feedback about public access to IP here in South Australia.

I recently contacted the DTEI here about gaining access to data - bus routes and timetables in a plain text format ('csv').

I wanted to create a 'google maps' type application to view the data on, and otherwise have better access to it. I had no commercial aims for it, and was very clear about that.

I also wanted it because the current way to view this data on the web is horrible and hard to use.

I'm a software engineer, so I [also] wanted to combine it with other data sets: for example a list of restaurants to create a 'find me a bus route to my restaurant booking @ 8pm Sunday'.

I was initially rebuffed; then after further persistence, I was invited a meeting - I thought I was in luck.

When I went in, after taking half of a day off from my full time work, I was completely stuffed around.
There appeared to be little or no understanding of 'Intellectual Property Principles for Australian Government agencies'.

I felt ridiculed by the way I was spoken to and treated.

Every question I asked was met with a look of confusion or a half hearted refusal.

While I can understand there is a balance between protecting commercial IP and public access, those I spoke to had no concept of a member of the public being able to make use of data.

I wasn't made aware of any other possible avenues or approaches I could take - basically; the matter was 'closed'.

I no longer wish to obtain this data, but I thought I'd let you know a first hand experience about us members of the public getting access to IP / data; and what (at least one) individual representing the government knows of your recommendations.

Your move, Australian government!


Update: My move again.

Dear Mr O'Connor

I refer to your email below to the Commonwealth Copyright Administration
requesting to use data - bus routes and timetables from The Department for
Transport, Energy and Infrastructure (DTEI) website. The DTEI administer
their own requests to use information from their website.

There is an online feedback form located at the following weblink
http://www.dtei.sa.gov.au/online_feedback_form.html

Regards
Commonwealth Copyright Administration
Attorney General's Department

Wanted: Ubuntu's update manager, a select all button

I don't know about you, but I'm really keen on doing really short bursts of activity and getting instant feedback.

I'd rather install 15 packages separately if they are substantial downloads than wait for them to all go at once. Infact, I'd often want to only install 3 or 4 and ignore others until later.

Its for that reason that the ubuntu update manager drives me nuts, and to the command line. If it had a 'select all/select none' toggle, I could easily clear the default select all, and life would be better.



So where do I go to whinge about this, and how do I do it?

Songbird webpage api, bits, pieces, and notes

Imagine this scenario:

You are using your media player/browser, and you stumble across a track on a webpage. You preview it. You like it. There's no information on the webpage about where it's from, but luckily, the mp3 is tagged correctly.

You hit a button on your media browser, and bam! You can find popularity information on Last.fm, prices on Amazon, full album information on Musicbrainz. Last.fm suggests a similar artist. The process rinses and repeats. You get to stuff yourself full of delicious music.

To see (some of) this in action; fire up Songbird 0.3 or greater, play some tunes, and go explore.

Last.fm's API is being used to render information that the page asked songbird about.
Sweet.

Look at the code underneath: simple javascript. More about songbird's webpage api. That's pretty easy looking.


Other notes and odds and ends:
Songbird now takes regular firefox extensions, (say hello to greasemonkey) and Freebase is awesome.

Basically: Freebase has an API, it's got data from wikipedia, and you can do things like search for episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Or shows produced by JJ Abrahams.

So, mix the power of Songbird's webpage api with the vast data of wikipedia/freebase, sprinkle in a few applications, and you've got something far more fun looking than a simple google maps mashup.

Throw in greasemonkey and operator, and you can scrape information from pages into microformats. Then export them.

Government, and Software, Department of Transport Day

I made a whinge into an email - the adelaide metro site sort of works, and lets me plan a route. It provides me with information, stuck into a PDF.

I can't remix it, it's not open, I can't copy and paste it in a meaningful way.

So, I wrote a letter:

• Can I have some data?
• I want to make a google transit type application

The answer came back:

• No, we don't allow derivative applications
  

Huh? You guys do know about jNomad, right? The Adelaide metro's timetable on your phone project?

I didn't want to take the no I got for an answer.

• I pay taxes
• Adelaide Metro is run by the Department of Transport, Energy, and Infrastructure
• Taxes made the data
• The Adelaide Metro site says just ask if you want to use our copyrighted data.

So, I wrote this:

Hi again,

First off, I just want to assure you I'm not trying to be pushy and rude, because I absolutely hate it when people do that to me. If anything below comes off like that, please be assured it wasn't my intent at all; I'm just somewhat enthusiastic about open data & web applications.

The South Australian Government - Department of Transport, Energy and Infrastructure - Public Transport Division (DTEI-PTD) does not currently distribute this type of data set for the purposes of development of derivative products, for example the nextbus application quoted below.

Are there any kind of circumstances in which you guys would?
I'm aware of what's been done with jnomad; but I don't have access to it (not owning a phone). I think it's a great idea to improve the use of public transport and keep the public informed.


I have a problem though. My problem is that the Adelaide metro site has a trip planner - and it's reasonably good. It does most of what I want, most of the time. For the rest, I have to pick up a phone and hassle your call centre staff.

The trip planner can work out that I want to go from A to B; and tell me the timetables to read to do it. Unfortunately, that's a lot of

1. Input data
2. Download multiple pdfs
3. Compare each
   
4. Find the right time, date, bus number
5. Repeat until I get it right

It's very hard for me to do something like: find a restaurant, find the relevant transport options, then make a booking. There's a considerable amount of effort involved in merging the two bits of data.

Using something like google maps/google transit ( http://www.google.com/transit); I can get a lot more information a lot quicker; and I can visualise it ("Oh, I can get off the bus right near X", and "The restaurant is located at X, I need directions from my house to there").

It's really frustrating to know that all of the data is there, tucked away, and have no easy way to use it together.



As a php developer; and knowing that the Adelaide metro site (and trip planner) is written in PHP ; it doesn't seem to be a huge (design/technical) problem to produce plain text data[1] from whatever database you guys are using behind the scenes.

I'd suggest that given a little over two weeks full time, a reasonably competent PHP developer could read information from that database and produce the data.

I can't imagine any scenarios in which sharing this data does harm to the Adelaide metro/transport department - most programmers don't run rival bus companies. If anything, I'd suggest this kind of thing achieves some of the spirit of the 2006 e-Government Strategy [2]. With careful licensing you could ensure non-commerical use only.

So; my questions are:

• What licencing agreements were reached with jnomad's solution provider Laborotech?
• Would the DTEI ever consider similar agreements with Google [3]?
• Would the DTEI ever consider similar agreements with private citizens (in the form a of developer key or written agreement)?
• Would the DTEI ever consider open licences for their data[4]?
• Would the costs of developing either of the above be considered prohibitive; or outside of the current IT resources available?
• Are there more appropriate channels to pester with these kinds of questions?
  

[1] http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.htm#transitFeedSubmit
[2] http://www.agimo.gov.au/publications/2006/march/introduction_to_responsive_government
[3] http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/help/faq_transit.html#adding_an_agency
[4] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

which got me an invite:

Thanks Daniel for your comments. I would like to meet with you to discuss the content of this email further, and while we are at it show you the great things we are doing.

Wow! I thought. I've pierced the layers of red tape and communicated with this person, who has the ability to act on things.

So today, I went in for the meeting.

When I came out, I'd never felt so dismayed with government before in my life.


The subtext of the entire meeting went:

I didn't read your email fully. You are one of those annoying people, and I've brought you in here to shut you up. Since you are a young person, I also must speak to you like a 5 year old, which you obviously are, on account of your youth. Q.E.D.

The spoken meeting went more like:

• We are already doing that internally! Here's an internal web application, which I'll click through, on my side of the desk, and not actually show you. IMPREZZLED? I AM!
  
• Open data? What's that? Obviously, we can't let you use any of our data. I mean, who do you think you are, someone who's paid for this kind of thing? You are John Q. Public, and I can't imagine a single use for you to have this data. No use for you, despite the fact there's enough data to keep me in a manager's position at this department, and manage all sorts of people who spend all the time in the world working with it.
  
• What do you mean, "is Jnomad a commerical company who sought us out, and sold us a solution, or is it a company that responded to a tender"? We have a contract. It's spelt... k-o-n-t-r-u-c-t. You are john q public, and we don't make contracts with you, you need money before we'll talk.
  
• Don't worry, concerned member of the public. The government has it all under control.
  
• Since you are using big words in your questions, if I furrow my brow and talk about something else, I don't have to answer the original question.
• Oh, you're leaving after only 8 minutes of this? IF YOU EVER WANT A JOB YOU HAVE MY NUMBER! WOW I HAVE REALLY FIXED THE PROBLEMS OF THE WORLD TODAY!
  

There was only snippets of information that were actually valuable amounted to:

• We don't know what open government is
• Data is OURS, ALL OURS!
• ... and one other which I won't mention here, for a while.

I should have known, as this is the same government who used EDS to build a registration site - when launched, it had "click here" in plain text on the front page.

So I left, knowing that there was no way I could ever communicate what I was trying to this person.

In other news:

• Renewing my drivers' license didn't suck
• Except the website misled me about the cost (it said: $30 to renew, periods of 1-10 years available), not ($30 per year, so you can register for 10 years ($300))
• The new tram has an awesome tram stop
• It's neat that its free for some sections
  
• For all of the money spent on the damned thing, the tram seats are rock hard. The old tram was far more comfortable.

Songbird 0.3RC1

Songbird 0.3 RC1 is out.

Yahoo on DRM; and where Songbird really whips the llama's...

I want more of people standing up for what I want; and I want it now.

Yahoo says no to DRM.

So far, my favourite bit:

But the content experience on the Web is crap. Go to Aquarium Drunkard, click an MP3. If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB? It makes me insane.

Hey, you want to get yourself some SongBird!

Why oh why!

Why do I have to optimize TortoiseSVN Cache manually?

Surely, every time I make a checkout, that should be added to a whitelist. If I put in removable media or copy an svn checkout from somewhere, there should be an easy way to 'right click and whitelist'.

I Still Hate The GIMP

How do I draw a rectangle in GIMP?

Since Gimp is an image manipulation program and not a painting program it doesn't include tools to draw shapes like squares and circles. However this doesn't mean you can't paint them, in fact there are some interesting options regarding this subject when it comes to the gimp. The solution is to use the selection stroking capabilities of the Gimp.

OK, GIMP, that's fine. You claim to be an image manipulation program, not a drawing tool. Good for you.

Who the hell put you in my distribution of Ubuntu!?

I want:

• Something I can use to quickly do mockups and screenshots
• Something I can use to draw very simple flowcharts

So my requirements boil down to:

• Good cropping features
• Cut, & paste
• Movable selections
• Resizable selections
• Undo
• A box tool
• A line tool
• A text/label tool
• A zoom tool

Since GIMP doesn't really have the line & box tools; I don't really want GIMP. I want paint.NET. I want pbrush. I want anything but GIMP.

I don't care how marvelous an interface you give it, it still isn't doing what I want.

In that case:

And yes, I'm still just as angry as last time.

e-government, SOA and Microformats

The Australian Government appears to get e-government. I'm still waiting on an email reply, to a whole bunch of question I had though, so maybe the AGIMO isn't the most responsive government department...

Anyway, this leads me to ask:

• What government sites would benefit from basic microformats the most? (vcard, vevent, addresses)
• What raw data would benefit you the most?

For me, when it comes to work, it's getting hooked up to a title/deed search webservice - it's currently a complete pain and splintered between many different offices.

Personally, I like what the National Archive of Australia has done - rdf for all with AGLS!

Also useful for business is the ABRRegister SOAP services - exposing simple functionality to lookup ABNs.

So readers, what would make you as a private citizen quite pleased to have?

Dan 8:6-8

... and the managers spoke unto the IT department: we've sold something to our clients!

And woe fell upon the programmers, who clutched their hair and wailed their lament.

A manager stood up, and cried unto the programmers: "Do not fear! Management may try you, test your souls; but you are worthy of...

"PIZZA! PIZZA FOR ALL PROGRAMMERS!"

And the crowds breathed their sighs of relief.

Here at work, we have the 'IT Bible', which until recently only contained instructions and tutorials like:

• How to fix a server when the lead systems administrators are dead
• Where's my bagel? It's probably behind the firewall

However, due to recent workplace pressures, we've decided to bash our own scripture to document the way it is, it has been, and will always be.

There's nothing better than programmers with faith.