Louis Gray asked why we use identica and less than an hour later he had received 20 public replies. I think there’s a story right there!

Most reasons center around freedom, decentralization / autonomy [FR], rapid development and a greater sense of community. I mentionned multiple languages too. Can’t wait to read his post on the topic!

I mentionned this last week after I went and took the liberty of converting the audio to speex:

1. Why Copyright, talk by Michael Geist 58 minutes, 9 MiB
2. Why Copyright, question period 49 minutes, 8 MiB

Here are a few new features coming our way to Identi.ca and other federated microblogging websites:

• Favorites,
• contact import,
• more Ajax,
• direct messages,
• twitter integration,
• initial postgresql support,
• etc.

Here’s what the new README had to say about these:

New features in version 0.6.0 include:

• Invitations by email.
• Users can mark messages as “favorites” (only Web, not API).
• A bridge to push messages on the Laconica instance to an account on Twitter.
• Direct private messages between users on a server (only Web, not API or IM or SMS).
• Restructured off-line daemons.

Copyright is supposed to be an incentive, a limited time monopoly offered to creators, to enable them to make more and better works available to the rest of us.

Pascal Charest, whom Patrick tells me was sitting just behind me but I never really met, had this rant about the comments:

“But this rant is not about Michael Geist or his presentation, which, again, was very good and will soon be available - it’s about pseudo-scholars plaguing this kind of conference. I’m sorry but I really can’t stand people asking 5 minutes question ending in “Am I right?” Especially when this question was a summary of the last 75 minutes presentation… Arggg. Please, getting a job offering public recognition of your mental skill is easy - very easy - don’t do that while other people are interested.” — Pascal Charest

I think two, maybe three questions were of that type but the rest (well, I had one question and offered a comment) made a lot of sense. Why are we only reacting, as Patrick asked. What about IsoHunt sueing CRIA?

I have to admit this particular presentation left me a little bit on my appetite. But I had great expectations, after reading all the fine analysis by Mr. Geist. I wish he can come back in 6 months, in a greater venue (I organized Copyright 2005 with Stallman, CC Canada, Digital Copyright Canada, etc. for 300 people so I know they’re interested).

I also liked the comment on our two solitudes, and was a bit sad Michael didn’t reckognize that fact we live with in Québec, more particularly in Montréal.

Lots of Linux activity in Montreal. Red Hat arrive à Montréal, ouverture du bureau de Savoir-faire Linux à Ottawa (SFL est une compagnie de Montréal) et Canonical (Ubuntu) engage.

And Free software activity in general:

À la prochaine Rencontre Linux-Meetup de Montréal, on discutera entre autre de l’avenir incertain du site web GULQuébec. C’est le 5 août 2008 à 19 heures au Café Noir, métro Crémazie, 430 Crémazie est.

Koumbit is hosting another Montreal Drupal 5@7 vendredi 1ier août 2008. Geek Montreal is moving ahead with its plans to open a geek space. Finally, Heri’s Startup drink report at Montreal Tech Watch is full of great news.

microID are provided for profile, rss and xmpp feed, enabling you to claim URLs you control with your email or jabber uid. For instance, the third party claimID shows which URL I really control. Otherwise, anyone could setup a profile using my name, whereas this way, I have a microID to show it belongs to me.

Finally, identica now provides opensearch for people and notices. If anyone has suggestions to use this, I’m all ear.

So you’re using twitter (or plurk, brightkite, pownce, maybe even identi.ca or one of its siblings) and you like it realtime, so of course you’re using SMS or Instant Messaging (Jabber, AIM, whatever). You’ve got your friends, your subscriptions. Wouldn’t it be nice to follow words too? And I don’t mean hashtags (words preceded with “#” to mark them of separately). I mean anything. Interested in what/when people get up or go to bed? Track “morning” and “night”, and watch the flow.

So, when did identica add this feature? Last night was supposed to add a bunch, like multilanguage, hashtags, etc. but tracking isn’t one of those announced features. It’s been coded separately by Dustin as I mentionned earlier, using the liberal feed laconi.ca provides as specified in the Open Microblogging spec and generous CC-BY licence.

To use tracking on identi.ca or another server (they’re all connected, remember. This is like email, where anyone can talk to anyone, no need to make hostages out of users), simply add laconica@west.spy.net to your Jabber buddies & type ‘help’. It’s basically the same as in twitter. “track KEYWORD” to track it, “untrack KEYWORD”, “tracks” to see what’s your tracking.

I love the laconica community! Keep it up! Oh, and for hashtags and multilingual support, it should be coming out very soon, probably after the icommons summit.

I saved a speex file of the Prentice interview on Bill C-61 to reform copyright. I can’t wait to see people tear his answers to shreds! Digg it!.

Python code ahead. Depends on gtk2 and xlib. Get Gravity Mouse No Potentiel Yet pre-alpha version while it’s in stock!

So, the only alternative is to write two halves of a chat script, separating writer and reader roles, and make it a little smarter to support editing: moving paragraphs, deleting and inserting chunks, and plain old typing. Ideally, you should be able to attach this writer client to any textarea so it sends its editing actions to the server where they get forwarded to all listening reader clients.

With javascript, you dive into DOM territory to quickly find 3 kinds of supported actions:

1. onkeypress sounds simple enough and bandwidth efficient, but it’s probably very easy to mess up;
2. onchange is just bruteforcing it, but it’s a good enough start and a nice way to get back in sync when things go wrong;
3. Firefox 3 supports oncopy, onpaste and oncut events but I haven’t played with those yet. (Running Debian stable keeps me away from lots of temptations, one year at a time.)
4. (yes I can count) another method would ask the writer to jump through certain hoops in order to help the script determine what kind of editing action is going on.

I haven’t given much thought to the reader side of things yet. If you have any ideas, please share! In the meanwhile, I’ll go play a little bit and see what I can actually come up with in terms of code and a demo.

millette@boss:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
2486 ls
1934 cd
498 rm
398 btdownloadgui
395 kaffeine
375 mv
266 htop
242 df
239 watch
210 vim

PS: my history is 10000 lines long. I like to use CTRL-R a lot :)

The Actions module has been in development since Drupal 4.7 and made its way into the Drupal 6 core. It’s the dedicated work of John VanDyk, co-author of the Pro Drupal Development book with Matt Westgate (of Lullabot fame). Anarcat, one of the Koumbit founders, also contributed to the actions module. PDD is a great book if you’re a programmer looking for an excellent overview of the Drupal mecanics, but I’d wait until this summer to get the second edition which will cover Drupal 6 (current edition is for Drupal 5), including Actions and Triggers.

The module is available in two flavours for Drupal 5:

“The actions 5.x-1.2 module with the old-style actions is deprecated. It is available for download below but all further development will take place in the 5.x-2.x branch (which corresponds to the code in core in Drupal 6 and higher).” — John VanDyk on the Actions module page

We know that Drupal 6 only gets bug fixes since new features going into Drupal 7 (which probably won’t be release for another 9 months). I’m afraid to interpret that quote to actually mean the Actions modules, as it’s available in Drupal 5 as a backport of the Drupal 6 core version, won’t see any new features :(

In Drupal 5, I’ve seen a few patches to make use of the Token module in the Actions Module, but they were all written for 5.x-1.2 when we’re using 5.x-2.5 (the current Drupal 6 backported from core). Instead of patching the module, I decided it was simpler (and cheaper too) to write another module, extracting the current email action code, and rewriting only that to use tokens instead of actions’ own variables. The proper thing to do is probably to go through all the actions and rewrite them all for tokens. There’s the display message action, what else..?

The code is going online in a few minutes. It can also serve as an exemple to build other actions in Drupal 5, using the new style. I will contact John, the current module maintainer, and ask his opinion. If he wants, I’ll roll a proper patch using my module, and deprecate it on my end. No biggie. Release early, release often, I hear ya.

The Actions token email module for Drupal 5, Actions 2 compatible, is now ready for mass consumption.

One final though. Since Actions version 2 is so different then version 1, perhaps it would have been better to release the new version as another module, not just another branch. That would make it much easier today to distinguish between the two different APIs and dependent modules. Is it too late? I’ll ask John that, too, while I’m at it.