Georg Portenkirchner portenkirchner@identi.ca

My start page in my browser is now a TiddlyWiki page with a list of my most commonly accessed pages.

One great bonus from this is that I have trivial and immediate access to something that can create a formatted preview of markup, making it easy to write pump.io posts with neat inline links. Just compose in TiddlyWiki, copy the preview, paste in a pump post.

I dressed up as an Apollo-era NASA engineer. #yurisnight

Happy New Year!

Well, I just released my first Pebble Watch App.

The Pebble C API is pretty good, and though it's plain old C, they have managed to hide most of the mistake-causing complexity of the language and standard library. The SDK tool takes care of all the yak-shaving and compiling using the local cross-toolchain. It's a pretty nice job altogether.

Anyway, now for something completely different: The Ministry of Silly Watches (also available in the Pebble Appstore), and the code is here.

Best of wishes to my friends on the pump network on Christmas.

Started trying out Known (http://withknown.com) as a microblog+  (supports longer-form content, photos, etc) POSSE service (syndicates to Twitter if you want), running at http://coffeecode.ca.

Microformats and WebMentions. This thing could work!

The code is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and the maintainers have been very receptive to my initial patches.

A day at home.

The only thing worse than building something nobody wants is NOT building something you're passionate about.

I've wanted to write up a blog post about #xoxofest, so I'm going to try to collect my thoughts here.

I went to XOXO in 2013 on the "Festival" pass, which gives you access to the parties but not the talks during the day. I didn't like it; among other things, the Festival pass was only given to people who weren't accepted for the main pass. It felt like a big "SECOND RATER" sticker, which made me feel pretty bad, and made me think darkly competitive thoughts about the other people who were given conference badges. ("What's that guy done? I'm way more interesting than him! And her? She hasn't done anything!") It's a bad headspace to be in.

So I was glad to see that there were more badges available overall this year and that the "festival" badges were optional rather than given as consolation prizes. I got a conference badge (maybe not all the attendees are happy about this, now that I think of it), and I was really looking forward to it, since people had been so enthusiastic about the talks in 2013.

Like last year, I collected the Twitter handles of people I know who are going to attend, and contacted them directly. I invited people to come meet me for pre-event beers -- both XOXO attendees and just friends from Portland -- as a way to make sure I spent some time with everyone I wanted to see. I got ~15 people together, which I'll say is a grand success. I'm going to try this trick again in the future; it can be really hard engineering 1-on-1 get-togethers with people.

The event itself was great. The talks were as good as I had heard, maybe more so. There was a definite tendency to go deep into personal territory in the talks -- Kevin Kelly, Justin Hall, Gina Trapani, Paul Ford all dug into their personal lives to give real meaning to the work they were describing on stage. I think, also, that the speakers really respected the audience -- these were their peers and they wanted to provide good value. It really showed.

But a lot of the value of XOXO is in the interstitials. There are a lot of breaks and a long lunch during the day, and I got to spend time with some pretty great people that I don't always get to see -- Kevin Marks, Alex Payne, and Blaine Cook stand out.

There's also a collegial atmosphere that makes it feel really OK to approach strangers and talk to them about their work. I found myself falling into heavy conversations with people I hadn't met before -- intoxicated by the air of passionate interest and self-investigation that the conference generated.

The night events were excellent. I watched some of my favourite podcasts recorded live, and I got to play some pretty excellent games (including a little too much of Two Rooms and Boom). The two Andys that organize the conference do a good job highlighting Portland's great culinary and drinks scene, so there is a lot of great food and drink during the conference.

There are a few things that I'd change if I could. The event is so well-planned that it doesn't leave a ton of room for spontaneous participation by the attendees. There's nothing stopping you, but there's also not a lot of room to bring your own art or robots or games or whatever. It's just not part of the culture. I don't think that's wrong, per se, but it's a notable difference from other events I went to this summer (YXYY and Burning Man).

Another is that there's not a clear year-round place on-line for XOXOers to congregate or organize other meetings. I think the community is largely coalesced around the #xoxofest hashtag on Twitter, which is great, but it's a pretty tenuous link, without much private space to, say, invite XOXOers to your house for dinner.

Finally, the two organizers, Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, are pretty far stretched. Their personal touch is what gives the conference its warm feel, but they clearly are running way over their manufacturer's recommended parameters. I hope they're able to scale the event to keep themselves from burning out without losing their important personal connection. It's going to be a real tight-rope walk for them.

I guess there are two main things that I worry about for XOXO. The first is community-oriented: the danger of groupthink. If you talk to people who attend, they'll tell you that the event is inspiring, the people are great, the whole experience is life-changing. When I hear this over and over, from the same people, it throws up a red flag for me. There's a danger, when we're telling each other this, of reconfirming each other and not paying attention to details. I think there's some value in keeping a sober and critical eye on the event and not snowjobbing ourselves. (I don't see any glaring issues right now, but I see the danger of not seeing them.)

The second is more personal. The theme of XOXO is independents building great stuff with the Internet. I found the chance to think more about, and talk about, my next project, really worthwhile. But I also wonder if hearing great talks about inspiring projects can actually keep you from building new stuff. Like, hearing about brave efforts gives you a sense of second-hand bravery and accomplishment, which satisfies your desire for personal action.

As of right now, I don't think that's a big problem, but I've made a mental note to check next year how many of the projects I heard about actually get made. I had a great dinner with Crystal Beasley and Mike Caprio on the night I left, and we all talked about our inspiration and plans for new projects. Having an on-line place to stay in touch might help people keep the torch going until they finish what they've started.

Most of all, though, I'm really grateful for the opportunity to be there. I caught Andy McMillan backstage at one point, and gave him a handshake and a hug and a thank you. He said, "I'm glad you stopped me; we do this all for you." We'd never met before, but everything they do for this conference really does make me feel like it's a personal gift to me, and it's what makes it a special event.

A few months ago, I decided to take most of my personal data out of Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.

I kept my given name, but other personally-identifying info (like phone number, address, city of residence, workplace, education) I erased.

This seems to be driving Facebook's software into conniptions. It asks me every single time I go to the site, "Hey, what's your home town?" or "Hey, did you go to UC Berkeley? 8 of your friends went to Berkeley, so we think maybe you went there. Did you?"

It also asks my friends for personal info. I get occasional updates like, "So-and-So McGee says you live in Montreal. Click here to confirm."

I'd love to turn all this stuff off -- "I'm already fully onboarded and don't need to be prompted to share more data" but of course that's not what Facebook privacy settings are for.

Mustache 27% complete.

You told me about this before.

I just added some code to let you delete an object from the major stream.

It puts a little caret in the top-right corner of an activity when you mouse over it. If you click "Delete", you get an Are-you-sure dialog box, then you can delete the object.

Let me know if you see any funny behaviour.

The "post a note" and "post a picture" modals now use an ajax call to search for an address, instead of trying to get all the people you follow before popping up.

(They still pre-load your lists, though.)

I think it makes posting faster and looking up addresses slower. I think there may be some more optimization to be done.

@portenkirchner you're not alone in this, see identi.ca/conversation/94741241 - do you miss other subscriptions, or only evan? #NIMT

Identi.ca is like twitter's geeky cousin; popular groups: linux 14064 ubuntu 13639 gnu 10668 debian 10307 python 7263 kde 5366

Cool, statusNET via adium :)