Latest Post - Category: Chisimba development and use
Digital business card for #Chisimba using microformats
Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:13:14 +0200
This weekend, I started a microformat based business card for Chisimba. It is extremely simple to use, and can generate a business card that links to your social networking sites, as well as standard address and other information. It is not finished yet but you can get a taste of it on this site. Just open my own digital business card.
As this is a work in progress, comments are especially welcome.
If you are running Chisimba, you can create your own card on your site but you need to update the unstable (developer) code. You will have to update the Chisimba engine, as well as security and userparamsadmin modules. Then you need to install digitalbusinesscard from the unstable package server using Module Catalogue.
To create your card, add user parameters using userparamsadmin User configuration from the user menu. Add the following parameters:
homepage (the URL to the page that is your website)
tagline (a tag line for teh top of your card)
Then you can add social networking sites such as twitterurl, facebookurl in the form SOCIALNETWORKurl where SOCIALNETWORK is one of the common ones such as slidshareurl, youtubeurl, etc. You can also add latitude and longitude to get the map.
This is still experimental, and this post is mainly for developers and people living on the edge of Chisimba.
Ways of calling it
http://www.dkeats.com/index.php?module=digitalbusinesscard&username=dkeats
http://www.dkeats.com/index.php?module=digitalbusinesscard&userid=userid
http://www.dkeats.com/index.php?module=digitalbusinesscard (only if you are logged in, and it will give you your business card then).
http://www.dkeats.com/index.php?module=digitalbusinesscard&username=dkeats&action=showjson
to get it back as JSON. Note that the JSON stuff has not been updated, so it might be broken after my changes this evening. Will fix next weekend. You will need a JSON viewer plugin in your browser to see the output of the viewjson action.
@Todo - add old fashioned stuff like phone number, etc.
@Tod0 - add more social network sites.... Which ones?
Hack with a smile
d
chisimba microformats hcard
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Previous Posts
The current generation of eBooks and readers are CRAP: #ebook_ripoff
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:18:49 +0200
We only buy things if we perceive the value to us to be more than the cost of the purchase. There are lots of factors that affect the perception of value. If I buy a good novel for R120, then I think of it as very good value, which is made up from: - the value to me as the reader
- the value of a conversation with other readers of the same book, or potential readers
- the value of passing it on to my immediate family to read (2-4 more reads)
- the value to me of having it in my bookshelf (which arises out of the possibility that others can pick it up and might want to borrow it)
- the social capital I gain when people borrow it from me
- the value to me of reading it again
- the value of being able to pass it on to a school or library when I no longer want to keep it
- the value of longivity (I know I can read it again in 20 years time)
The difficulty with the current generation of proprietary eBooks containing digital rights restrictions (DRM) is that most of these sources of value are not present. David Berlind, writing for ZDNet (http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2582) has proposed CRAP as an alternative to DRM. Richard Stallman suggested it should stand for Cancellation, Restriction and Punishment. Certainly that is what DRM does, it cancells your rights, restricts use of the materials that are disabled by DRM-CRAP, and has the potential - in the USA where stupid ideas backed by money get made into laws - to lead to your punishment if you try to regain your rights that have been cancelled.
Watch David Berlind's video about CRAP (he uses a slightly different interpretation of CRAP - but its the same principle).
CRAP also reduces the value of the item for which you have purchased a license to use, including eBooks, DVDS, computer games, etc. It reduces the value to me as the reader because it restricts where, how and when I can read the eBook. The value I would get from passing it on to another member of the family is also lost. While I could license it for another device if a family member owned such a device, it will only allow the item to be read on a computer if it is running particular proprietary operating systems and use particular CRAPPY (Cancelled, Restricted And Potentially Punishing for You) software that only runs on operating sytems that already have your rights over your computer removed.
CRAP reduces the value of having the item in your bookshelf, because nobody could access it anyway without the CRAPPY software and disabled operating sytem code. Therefore, it also removes the social capital you gain from loaning a copy of the book to a friend or colleague.
I cannot pass the item on to a school or library, so CRAP removes the potential educational value of the disabled eBook. I cannot give it away at all. Not to anyone. Actually, it doesn't exist. It is merely called into existence by the presence of some secret codes for which I have paid. It is a metaphor. It is not a book.
I can read it again, but the probability of me being able to do so decreases greatly over time. The likelihood that I (or anyone else) will be able to read it in 20 years is vanishingly small. We know that proprietary technologies come and go, and there are many proprietary formats that were common a few years ago that are no longer accessible to the people who own them.
Hence, if I take a book that is R120 as an eBook, and R150 as a paper book, the paper book has tremendous value above that of the eBook (which doesn't actually exist anyway). In making as decision to purchase, will I purchase something that is CRAP, that is missing most of its value, or will I purchase the real thing?
Personally, I like my rights. I will stick with the real thing.
Of course, it doesn't have to be that way. By allowing the publishers to coat us in CRAP like this, we are fostering a world where our rights are eroded, the value we get from a purchase taken away, and our freedoms eroded as surely as if we were slowly enslaved. We can change that. We can tell the publishers NO.
We won't buy your CRAP any more.
They will have to change. Or someone else will.
ebook DRM CRAP
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Little critters: my photos
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:29:13 +0200
Here are some macro shots of insects and spiders from my Flickr photostream. I love shooting macro, and have only just finally worked out how to manipuate depth of field at this close range. I use a Canon 50D and a couple of different flashes, including a Canon macro flash. All shoots are done on manual settings. This is created using the QUICKEMBED Chisimba plugin.
spiders insects macro
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Birdlife of Southern Africa: my photos
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:41:13 +0200
Here are some photos of birds of southern Africa that I have taken and uploaded to Flickr. They are included here courtesy of the QUICKEMBED filter. There are 80 photographs in the set at the time of writing, but of course the set will grow as I take more photographs. Most of these pictures are taken with either my Canon 50D or my older 350E with a 70-300 mm Sigma zoom lens. One was taken with a 100 mm macro lens, when a sugarbird landed on a king protea while I was photographing the protea. The secret to taking bird photographs is stealth, observation and patience. All images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, so feel free to use them accordingly.
photography birds
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Helping to test the #Chisimba #oEmbed provider
Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:27:59 +0200
Please note that you can only do this test if you have the Wordpress oEmbed plugin installed.
We are developing Chisimba to be an oembed provider. We need help testing whether the content we provide works with oembed consumers. One of these is Wordpress. The first provider is an image provider, but once that has been tested, we can make other providers.
Here are some images that are on dkeats.com that can be used for testing:
http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/testimages/IMG_2832.resized.JPG
http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/testimages/IMG_2847.resized.JPG
http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/testimages/IMG_2919.resized.JPG
I am not totally sure, but I think that these might need to be urlencoded to work with Wordpress. If so, the encoded versions are below.
www.dkeats.com%2Fusrfiles%2Fusers%2F1563080430%2Ftestimages%2FIMG_2832.resized.JPG">
www.dkeats.com%2Fusrfiles%2Fusers%2F1563080430%2Ftestimages%2FIMG_2847.resized.JPG">
www.dkeats.com%2Fusrfiles%2Fusers%2F1563080430%2Ftestimages%2FIMG_2919.resized.JPG">
The link for the base URL for the oembed version is:
http://www.dkeats.com/index.php?module=oembed&action=provideimage&as=json=
In use, the last equals sign would be followed by the image URL, which must be on the same server.
Thus, in Wordpress you should be able to insert:
[oembed:http://www.dkeats.com/index.php?module=oembed&;
action=provideimage&=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dkeats.com
%2Fusrfiles%2Fusers%2F1563080430%2Ftestimages%2FIMG_2919.resized.JPG]
In a nice textbox for you:
http://www.dkeats.com/index.php?module=oembed&action=provideimage&=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dkeats.com%2Fusrfiles%2Fusers%2F1563080430%2Ftestimages%2FIMG_2919.resized.JPG] ">
Please try the encoded ones first, and if that fails, try the unencoded ones. Please let me know if it works. We know that the provider does return the correct JSON because it returns the following:
{
* type: "photo"
* version: "1.0"
* title: null
* author_name: "Derek Keats"
* author_url: http://www.dkeats.com/
* provider_name: "dkeats.com"
* provider_url: http://www.dkeats.com/
* cache_age: 600
* thumbnail_url: http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/filemanager_thumbnails/gen13Srv30Nme10_59647_1262607351.jpg
* thumbnail_width: 79
* thumbnail_height: 100
* url: http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/testimages/IMG_2919.resized.JPG
* width: null
* height: null
}
as it should.
Please let me know the results of your test. Twitter, email, Facebook or comment.
oembed mashup chisimba
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New #Chisimba plugin for oEmbed sites: QUICKEMBED
Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:01:30 +0200
For my holiday pleasure, I created a new filter for Chisimba based on the jQuery oEmbed plugin. The idea is that you can paste a URL from any site that supports oEmbed, and Chisimba will embed the content for you. Thus it works like lots of other filters, except you use the same filter across multiple sites, including sites for which there is currently no filter. oEmbed is an open format designed to allow embedding content from a website into another page. This content is of the types photo, video, link or rich. An oEmbed exchange occurs between a consumer and a provider. A consumer wishes to show an embedded representation of a third-party resource on their own website, such as a photo or an embedded video. A provider implements the oEmbed API to allow consumers to fetch that representation. The QUICKEMBED filter enables Chisimba to be a consumer for a selected number of oEmbed providers.
The following providers provide content in a way that is consistent with the QUICKEMBED plugin:
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Provider |
Tested |
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5min (http://www.5min.com) |
yes |
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Amazon Product Images |
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Flickr (www.flickr.com) |
yes |
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Google Video (http://video.google.com) |
yes |
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Hulu (http://www.hulu.com/) |
limited to US |
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Imdb |
failed |
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Metacafe |
yes |
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Qik |
yes |
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Revision3 (http://revision3.com) |
failed |
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Slideshare |
yes |
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Twitpic (http://twitpic.com) |
yes |
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Viddler ( http://www.viddler.com) |
yes |
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Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/) |
yes |
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Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) |
yes |
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WordPress (http://www.wordpress.com) [can show blog post excerpts] |
yes |
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YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) |
yes |
The format for the filter is simply the filtername, a colon, and the URL of the object you want to embed:
[OEMBED:http://url.to.object/item.ext]
For example,
[quickembed:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgjP91xJe_I]
will embed a YouTube video into the page. This is exactly the same as using the [YOUTUBE] filter, but has the advantage that it will work with content types other than YouTube. The following will insert a Viddler video:
[quickembed:http://www.viddler.com/explore/nicolamattina/videos/7/]
An excerpt from Wikipedia content can be inserted using:
[quickembed:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content]
It doesn't look so pretty on its own, so you can also wrap it in a COLORBOX filter.
[COLORBOX:boxtype=bluebox][quickembed:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content][/COLORBOX]
Insert a photograph from Flickr using any suitable link as follows:
[quickembed:http://www.flickr.com/photos/dkeats/4213519974/]
which produces:
Important note: if you try a quickembed and it fails because the link is invalid, then it is probable that all the quickembeds on the page will fail at the same time. To fix this, delete the most recently added quickembed, that is the one that is most likely causing the problem. This is a known issue, and there is currently no way to determine if a link is valid or not.
oembed mashup filters chisimba
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Vusi discovers disabled books: an ebook metaphor
Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:19:31 +0200
This is the world of ebooks translated to the paper book world.
Vusi walked into the BooksForReaders shop in the Centralgate Mall in Johannesburg. The shop is the largest bookstore that Vusi has ever seen. It must have over half a million books.
Browsing the aisles, Vusi found a thriller by Tokahara Joshi that he would like to read. The cover is very attractive and the description of the story already has him gripped. He flipped open the book to check the writing style of the author, but much to his surprise, every page just had what appeared to be random alphabet characters, and a large message that he has not paid for the book yet.
"Interesting," thinks Vusi. "The book is smart!"
A little more flipping reveals a few segments of text that are not garbled, but they are not in the part of the book that Vusi would normally scan. Still, he liked the idea of the story, so he took the book to the till to check it out.
At the till, Vusi encountered a number of obstacles.
"Have you purchased one of our book readers?" asked the clerk.
"No," said Vusi laughing. "I read my own books."
"All books in our shop are printed on special paper, and the words only become visible on the paper if you hold the book in one of our readers," said the clerk.
"That's crazy," said Vusi. "Why on earth would you do that?"
"It is to prevent unauthorised reading of our books," said the clerk. "There are some people who actually pass on the book to someone else when they are finished reading. We want to prevent this piracy."
"But I always give my books to my sister to read when I am finished with them. You mean I won't be able to do that with your books?" he asked.
"No, said the clerk. We want to prevent that kind of piracy or our books. We believe we will sell more books that way, because now your sister will also want to buy the book when you tell her about it," said the clerk.
"When we are finished with the book, we always give it to a poor school so the kids have something to read,' said Vusi.
"You can't do that kind of piracy with our books," said the clerk.
"Piracy!" muttered Vusi.
Vusi decided to go for it, so he picked up a reader since they were almost free. The clerk scanned Vusi's thumbprint and entered it into the reader so that Vusi could unlock the words on the paper of his new book.
"Would you like to purchase one of our carry bags, or do you already have one?" asked the clerk.
"I don't need a bag," said Vusi. "I already have a backpack. I will just put the book inside it."
"I am sorry," said the clerk. "Our books are only licensed to be taken out of the shop in one of our carry bags. If you try to carry it in anything else, the words will disappear from the paper."
"That's weird," said Vusi.
"Not weird. We just want to make sure that our content remains under our control."
"Its still weird, but give me one of your carry bags then," said Vusi.
At that moment, Vusi's girlfriend Penelope appeared in the shop. Vusi paid for the bag and then handed it to Penelope, whereupon the bag suddenly turned into dust and fell to the floor.
"What the..," cried Penelope and Vusi at the same time.
"I am sorry sir," said the clerk. "Our bags are not transferable. You cannot give it to anyone else. If you buy one of our books, you must carry it yourself and you cannot give someone else the bag. The bag only works with you, and only if you hold it in your hands."
"Oh!" said Vusi, suddenly realising what ridiculous ideas are contained in these new books. He hands the book back to the clerk.
"Keep it," he says. "And keep my money. Your books are not worth owning. I wouldn't own it anyway."
Vusi and Penelope walk to Inclusive Books, just a little further down the mall. They buy ordinary paper books. The kind you can read, give to someome else to read, and donate to a school when you are done. The cost is more-or-less the same, the value considerably higher.
Have a watch of these videos:
Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother, talks about copyright, creativity and the essential nature of books. From an Ottawa International Writers Festival (www.writersfestival.org) fall preview event at Saint Brigid's Centre for the Arts and Humanities on September 28, 2009.
Part 1:
Part 2:
If you tweet about this topic, use #ebook_ripoff as a hash tag.
ebooks DRM
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New #Chisimba filter for Twitter: TWEETS
Sun, 27 Dec 2009 11:19:08 +0200
I have added a new filter for Chisimba to work with Tweets from Twitter. The filter is called TWEETS, and it works with two sets of parameters, the type of listing and the value of the query. Currently, there are two types of listings 'user' and 'query'. The filter takes the format: [TWEETS:user=username]
or
[TWEETS:query=query_code]
where query_code is any Twitter Json API query. Examples of legitimate queries
[TWEETS:query=chisimba]
[TWEETS:query=to:dkeats]
[TWEETS:query=from:dkeats&phrase=chisimba]
[TWEETS:query=from:dkeats+OR+from:charlvn]
[TWEETS:query=chisimba&to:dkeats]
For example,
[TWEETS:query=from:dkeats]
will show my latest Tweets as shown below.
As another example, to show Tweets related to Chisimba, we can use
[TWEETS:query=chisimba]
which produces the results below.
To use this filter you need the latest versions of the moduless: twitter, htmlelements, and filters. The latter two are in core, while twitter is in the modules repository. Unfortunately, the Tweet! jQuery plugin doesn't behave exactly as expected for the more complex queries. I will get in touch with the Tweet! developers to see if we can fix that. Best to stick with simple queries for the time being.
There is still some work to do on this one.
1. add the ability to specify the number of tweets and the size of the avitar.
2. add the ability to provide for live queries using juitter (can also be used to make Twitter context aware)
3. fix it so that hashtags can be used
The Tweet! plugin can be found at http://tweet.seaofclouds.com/ .
chisimba twitter jquery
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Getting Ubuntu ready for a Postgres install of Chisimba 3 - symlinks
Wed, 23 Dec 2009 10:42:41 +0200
How to prepare your developer system for a Chisimba install using Postgres as the database. This clip covers setting your Postgres permissions and symlinking your developer checkout of Chisimba into /var/www. This is my personal preference, not necessarily the only way to set up a developer machine. This post has not been tagged
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Imagine if the colour red were patented: Freedom to Innovate South Africa
Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:37:31 +0200
Tell your friends and colleagues about Freedom to Innovate South Africa! Download and share this campaign poster on your website or blog, or use it as your profile picture on your social networking sites, and link it to http://ftisa.org.za.
innovation freedom
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