Friday I was just plain lazy. Very typical "thank god its friday" kind of thing, I just stranded in front of my screen watching "Fringe", "The Vampire Diaries" and "The Sarah Jane Adventures". I did not write a single word. So today, again, I had to catch up on writing of two days NaNoWriMos worth. I managed doing that being on the IRC channel (#nanowrimo on irc.goodchatting.com) fighting word wars together with others against ourselves.
The IRC bot BattleJesus is serving us with the scenery for it, where we word fighters join a war with a command, and BattleJesus tells us that we are on the war. That it is 60 second until he war. That it begins. That we are halfway through, That we are 3/4 through. And that the word war is over. Then you can tell BatteJesus the wordcount you managed to pull, and you are done. Save & backup, not to forget. That way I managed to keep up, even though I tidied and cleaned the whole appartment & had an epic afternoon nap, and procrastinated some more. Heck, I even wrote two blogposts!
A good friend of mine decided to spent one of his precious invitations for the Google Wave Sandbox on me. Expectations to that new service were high after seeing a video that promised to reinvent email, wiki, personal pages, IM as communications channels, and renew them in a way that made things easier, more collaborative and not as fractioned anymore.
I have tried it, and I must say that my expectations were not met. Without all the bots now flooding Google Wave, wave is somehow a very slow realtime web-based Multi-User-Chat. My first thought was: This looks a little bit like the realtime chat-feature in that dinosaur ICQ version from almost ten years ago. Only in colour, and with maps, and...Well, probably not bad after all.
Another expectation is also not yet met: Wave being an open protocol, based on XMPP, which enables everyone to set up their own wave service. Similar to email, for instance. Imagine email not being implementable by each and everyone with a webserver. That would, obviously, be very bad. Or would it? So if Wave claims to be the new black email+, it can not only depend on Google as an organization, can it? As cloudy as it may be. As I hear, the open part of the waveprotocol is not yet very wave-ey. Which is sad. I hope, that point, too, improves.
Since I lowered my expectations, though, from a very high level, I find it a quite useful tool. I hope, the Google Wave developers will manage to make it a bit faster, though. The user experience is definitely lacking there.
Another reason for my disappointment probably was, that my experience is based on having only a few people to communicate with. At first, there where my friends. Most of them are quite savvy with communication, so we fiddled a bit, but we did not have much to collaborate on, since we live so far apart and don't really have projects we are working together on right now. But more and more people got on Wave, and in the last week I made contact with librarians in Norway, and not least (most of the) co-organizers of and speakers at the "Free and Open Libraries" conference about F(L)OSS software in libraries next week in Bergen, Norway. So we started collaborating, and suddenly the whole map inclusion in wave made a whole lot more sense.
The second most interesting thing are public waves. I have searched for waves matching my temporary, or overall professional or private interest. I found interesting waves:
And many more public waves. Something that I did not find, though, was a public wave for knitters, and it took off very fast from zero to 101 wavers contributing as of today.
Although in the more tech-savvy wave topics people try to figure out things before they participate, many of they waves with specific topics end up becoming undertaken by people take about the Google Wave sandbox and about figuring things while they are at it. This is tiring, and I find myself not participating anymore where Waves become so bloated and cluttered with dozens or even sometimes hundreds of such messages.
What has not happened yet is the development of a certain code of behaviour, what people called "netiquette" (or something) before for this service. Some places people are concerned about it. Most places they are not. Gina Trapani and Adam Pash from Lifehacker have written the Complete Guide to Google Wave. And there is probably more to come. Not only explanations, but also features.
I am still waiting for things to get more exciting. I didn't use twitter much the first six months I had my account, and now I twitter a lot. With all the tummy-ache that follows, relying on a centralized server. So I really hope it grows on me, because XMPP is great, and I think it could become very useful.
Due to a conference, which was happening today and yesterday, I had to prepare a bunch of stuff to it on wednesday. And I was very involved with the library part of the conference yesterday. So I did not get any writing done yesterday, and only very little on wednesday. But after a private little write-a-t(h)on tonight I almost catched up to the word count aim of today. I got 8.052 words today, and the aim in the calendar shows me I should have 8335, if I was to write an equal port of word every day. So I am short of less than 300 words before the weekend, I am set up with a pushy software, that teases and nags me to write, once I sit down and start. I would say, I am pretty well set to finish this time, if I keep up with the speed and discipline. So far it has not been too hard. With my average writing speed, 3334 word a day can be done in 1 - 1 1/2 hours.
Well, lets not talk of the content, I guess, I am more on the cheesy side there. However, it is fun, and I added the first facepalm after the first 7758 words.
There has been kissing, biting and sucking, but noone has died yet. I can tell you, however, that one or two tax bureaucrats will die a violent and painful death very soon. In my novel. Oh yes.
The first days were pretty okay. Today is the first day where I dropped out of discipline/workflow. What is the best approach to this, I believe, is to sit down. And just write. What helps me with that is a very wide understanding of how my story is going to develop itself. I thought my story line would be too thin, but to describe wht I want, I actually need far more words than I initially thought. Maybe I have to many introspective - but hey, editing is for december. so for now I am going to stick with what I write in the flow. And in a few weeks I will see if it makes sense.
A very good tip is to use Write or Die, an online editor which nags you if you don't keep up with a certain writing speed. Its really hard to loose yourself in your own thought and your fears of probably getting to easy-writing or cheesy, if the consequence will be awful sounds. It also exists as an Adobe Air-based desktop app.
Right now I am really looking forward to killing my main character. And a few bureaucrats in the tax office, and maybe also some cry-baby drunk sexists. Yay, writing rocks. But the real fun will begin when I get to the SciFi parts of my story.
Last years NaNoWriMo did not really work out for me, since I was moving to another country and starting a new job. My living situtation in november 2008 was kind of improvised, and everything was overwhelming and - a lot.
This year, despite having a lot of work and other projects, I am giving it another shot. I even plan the plot ahead and draft some characters. I might cheat and start writing beforehand, but hey - drafting is allowed. I am really looking forward to it. I know that it takes time to write and plot and put in words all the thoughts, feelings and sensations for a text to become a good novel. But I think writing together with tens of thousands of eager writers in the whole world, them experiencing the same situation as I am, is very motivating. And if my novel is no good, well. There is always editing. And learning from the experience...
I think I will update my progress on the NaNoWriMo site, but I don't know if I will follow up on my blog as well. Probably, but I don't want to put the pressure up too much.
NaNoWriMo spells out "National Novel Writing Month", a yearly event that has engaged writers in the U.S. a t first, but soon led to many people in all the world participating and writing. The goal is to write 50.000 words in 30 days. No matter how. The goal is to reach this number, and editing - as they say - is for december.
Another talk that I have been to was about how to communicate design and workflow on a new site in its planning stage, by Roy Scholten. The presentation basically promoted the method of building paper models and sketch on the computer only at a very late stage.
It was interesting to see some of the paper modules, one of them made into a "screen"cast of how the site would act if the user started clicking on buttons.
Ægir is a drupal install combined with several modules and drush that helps installing new drupal sites, maintaining existing ones, backs up and rolls back to earlier version of a site. With Ægir you can package a certain site buildup with modules and themes, and reproduce it as often as you need it. It provides you a web gui to do all these tasks, so there is little knowledge needed beyond structural knowledge of "what happens if I click this button".
The biggest hold-up for me is that you need full root access to the webserver, which I don't have. But it would certainly make things a lot easier. If we could develop and package a good solution for libraries in Norway, we could make it easily reproducable and accessible to other norwegian libraries.
Tim put the different methods for connecting to and between social networks in relation to each other and explained what was good, bad and ugly about them:
OAuth
OpenID
The Hire
XRDS/simple
Activity Streams
OpenSocial
The talk was not so much about Drupal. But the point was that all those connecting methods were either very useful or very appliable. Tim argued that it was the main interest of nowadays social networks to have a centralized and locked-down user base and to own their data, and that therefore the interest of social networks weren't that big to build good open connecting methods or protocols.
Although I got up really early, I missed the first minutes of the OpenAtrium presentation. I had a look at an OpenAtrium install earlier this summer when I quickly installed it for seeing what it is like, and it looked pretty nice and useful. If you customize Drupal for your needs, it is a process that takes time, more or less depending on how good you know Drupal and how much you know about what you want.
OpenAtrium is supposed to be an Intranet-like collaborative platform to share Documents, calendars and project/task-data. It is supposed to connect members of a group or a team at work. It looks appealing and it seems to serve its purpose from the beginning. It is one of the few approaches to package Drupal into a product, to download and serve from the beginning.
The talk showed its features, and also adressed the problem in Drupal development/site/feature building, where you have the very centralized repository of core at drupal.org, and the contributed modules, too. But when you want to make packages and built more features around them, there is no existing infrastructure to do so.
What was now implemented by pingvision, who took OpenAtrium by developmentseed in use, was a feature server, that is supposed to provide this function. It didn't get very clear, is this actually solves the problem, or if it is just a temporary workaround. It seems to me, that if OpenAtrium already steps out of the cvs/drupal.org way of working - using git and github - why not make the full step and host everything in open git repositories?
In this blog I write about my interests: Writing, coding and beautiful text(s). You can also find information about my work on websites for public libraries in Hordaland, Norway. My writing is in German, English and sometimes Norwegian. If this confuses you, welcome to the club!
