To a certain extent the activityPub (or fediVerse) related coder and helpers community is some how scattered not only in the federation itself but also over tons of platforms, including github, own wikis and forums, git instances and alike.
At the same time friendica itself is and pretends to be like the interconnecting node between as many platforms as possible.
Wouldn't it be reasonable and positive for the fediVerse as a whole to gather around some place to improve communication, interoperability and so on? Same consideration might apply for git.friendi.ca.
Not sure how much work for example in terms of moderation this very support forum implies, and if such a proposal would mean more work load for those who are in charge of both subdomain projects, but in general it looks to me that on one hand a lot of work is wasted on maintaining all those scattered sites and on
To a certain extent the activityPub (or fediVerse) related coder and helpers community is some how scattered not only in the federation itself but also over tons of platforms, including github, own wikis and forums, git instances and alike.
At the same time friendica itself is and pretends to be like the interconnecting node between as many platforms as possible.
Wouldn't it be reasonable and positive for the fediVerse as a whole to gather around some place to improve communication, interoperability and so on? Same consideration might apply for git.friendi.ca.
Not sure how much work for example in terms of moderation this very support forum implies, and if such a proposal would mean more work load for those who are in charge of both subdomain projects, but in general it looks to me that on one hand a lot of work is wasted on maintaining all those scattered sites and on the other, this could be a step towards escaping centralized dependencies, better support for the fediVerse in general and in the case of github maybe even a step forward for the independence of the coding community around actvitypub.
friendica and it's community has a long enough trajectory in the space to imply enough trust as for being a serious and respectful offer to all I think.
To begin with @Hypolite Petovan, the original idea is to offer for example to projects like @YunoHost :neopossum_box: or @Castopod :podcasting2: a profile on forum.friendi.ca, the same way our very @Friendica Support works. Most #fediVerse platforms have profiles on their own platform and/or a #mastodon profile, because that's the kinda standard thought and behavior. But actually to me it looks like the #friendica #communityForum page capabilities exceed by far what mastodon or others have to offer. Well, I haven't digged into the fedi clone of reddit to see if that would be an even better option. What is true tho is that forum.friendi.ca is already long standing and our community has gone a long way, so there is in general terms "no single point of failure" like in other projects that depend on one main figure and that's it.
I consider our helpers community experience here, with all the followers of our helpers page getting resend the help requests posted to the forum, chiming in to help out and solve issues, very positive. So this is a proven setup and could help lot's of other projects out here too. Actually I do think that if implemented and adopted, it even could have a positive feed back loop for friendica itself, but that's like something on another page.
So having forum.friendi.ca already up and running, why not support the fediVerse community opening our doors to those who fulfill certain basic community standards?
This server here (tupambae.org) as well is only mend to be a forum server, and of course it's doors are open for any #fediPlatform that likes to have an own forum page over here, yet somehow to me it look's like forum.friendi.ca is the first natural and ideal candidate for something like that.
Right now in general terms the fedi lives on using some tags or maybe some a.gup.pe addresses, but it's actually us who hold and develop that option for more than a decade now inside the federation itself.
@utopiArte Unfortunately some features of Friendica groups are only available from Friendica, like the !-mention that transfers post ownership to the forum account, which means it isn't distributed to your followers that don't also follow the group.
So I don't think it's a good all-purpose solution for the larger Fediverse.
Looks to me that I have to disagree @Hypolite Petovan in the sense that their may be certain specific extras only friendicans have, but that does still mean that the rest is available for others, and that that is already a lot.
Actually my main experience and focus is with mastodon federation, and for what I can see, addressing forum pages I follow makes those toots show up on the forum page and is reflected back to federated instances of followers. (or am I wrong 🤔 )
Also, if the the !-mention that transfers post ownership to the forum account is something implemented by activityPub specifics and useful, it's more likely that other platforms start to consider to code that implementation too, if they see that it's used and useful. So in any case that would be one of the positive feed back loops I was referring to.
@utopiArte I don't exactly know how the !-mention is handled protocol-wise. Maybe @Michael Vogel can expand on it. On the other hand, you're right that the @-mention works from any Fediverse account as the post is automatically reshared by the group account which is a native ActivityPub feature.
> The ! simply is meant to transmit that post only to the group account that then reshares it.
In other words, it acts on the server side that sends the post, addressing only the forum page at the other instance as recipient with a public post, right?
Doesn't sound like any negative or restrictive effect for the rest of the fedi platforms.
btw Traviling thru helpers profile here on troet.cafe (mastodon). Looks normal, besides the disruptive display of single answer toots.
@Steffen K9 🍮, here are some questions and consideration that I guess concern you in the first place, can you have a look at them?
Inicial post hat geschrieben:
Not sure how much work for example in terms of moderation this very helpers support forum profile right here implies, and if such a proposal would mean more work load for those who are in charge of the subdomain project.
Steffen K9 🍮 26/01/2024 hat geschrieben:
Concerning the need for moderation on the groups node forum.friendi.ca: If I remember correctly, I took over the hosting and administration of our community node in 2016. In all these years there were only one or two cases where moderation was necessary. The administration is not a big deal, either.
From my point of view the best way to advance and improve community support is having people answering questions an
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@Steffen K9 🍮, here are some questions and consideration that I guess concern you in the first place, can you have a look at them?
Inicial post hat geschrieben:
Not sure how much work for example in terms of moderation this very helpers support forum profile right here implies, and if such a proposal would mean more work load for those who are in charge of the subdomain project.
Steffen K9 🍮 26/01/2024 hat geschrieben:
Concerning the need for moderation on the groups node forum.friendi.ca: If I remember correctly, I took over the hosting and administration of our community node in 2016. In all these years there were only one or two cases where moderation was necessary. The administration is not a big deal, either.
From my point of view the best way to advance and improve community support is having people answering questions and giving hints how to use and run Friendica. We have made much progress in that. Some years ago there were only a few active supporters in our groups/forums. These days I see much more people who are helping others. tupambae.org/display/c7f7fa91-…
So we can assume that in general terms this shouldn't be much different for other developer projects and communities. At the same time the back end moderation panel is related to the admin account and can't be handled by other than the admin or an admin team. That moderator panel access basically would be needed for server and user blocking. Being more exposed to general attention that pressure in theory could increase.
The first line of moderation is of course as always the side of the community profile as it is able to block or mute contacts.
Than there is:
Inicial post hat geschrieben:
Same goes for the server setups
How is the server load right now and what could be expected if other projects open helpers forums on forum.friendi.ca?
@Hypolite Petovan Can you try to mention @Steffen K9 🐰 for me please, somehow it feels like he doesn't get my mentions and respective questions on this topic here.
Wieder Ostsee-Kabel kaputt – die NATO schlägt zurück!
Symbolbild: schon wieder ein kaputtes Kabel in der Ostsee Es ist wieder passiert: Ein Unterseekabel in der Ostsee wurde beschädigt. Wahrscheinlich mal wieder von einem russischen Schiff, das rein zufällig genau dort langfuhr. Aber keine Sorge, die NATO steht bereit, mit scharfen Protestnoten und beispielloser Entschlossenheit.
Schweden ermittelt, Lettland ist besorgt, und die NATO entsendet Schiffe und Flugzeuge, um intensiv zu untersuchen, was ohnehin jeder ahnt. Doch was wird die Reaktion sein? Wirtschaftssanktionen? Ein Stopp russischer Schiffe in NATO-Gewässern? Harte militärische Maßnahmen? Nein, natürlich nicht.
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Wieder Ostsee-Kabel kaputt – die NATO schlägt zurück!
Symbolbild: schon wieder ein kaputtes Kabel in der Ostsee Es ist wieder passiert: Ein Unterseekabel in der Ostsee wurde beschädigt. Wahrscheinlich mal wieder von einem russischen Schiff, das rein zufällig genau dort langfuhr. Aber keine Sorge, die NATO steht bereit, mit scharfen Protestnoten und beispielloser Entschlossenheit.
Schweden ermittelt, Lettland ist besorgt, und die NATO entsendet Schiffe und Flugzeuge, um intensiv zu untersuchen, was ohnehin jeder ahnt. Doch was wird die Reaktion sein? Wirtschaftssanktionen? Ein Stopp russischer Schiffe in NATO-Gewässern? Harte militärische Maßnahmen? Nein, natürlich nicht. Es wird telefoniert, beraten und schließlich ein gemeinsames Statement veröffentlicht, das Russland aufs Schärfste verurteilt.
Vielleicht schreibt die EU noch eine neue Resolution, in der Putin sehr, sehr nachdrücklich aufgefordert wird, das bitte nicht noch einmal zu tun. Deutschland könnte sogar erwägen, die Gorch Fock auf eine symbolische Patrouillenfahrt zu schicken.
Und Moskau? Dort wird man sich vor Lachen den Wodka verschütten. Während russische „Fischerboote“ offenbar weiter ungestört Kommunikationsleitungen zerstören, bleibt der Westen seinem bewährten Kurs treu: Er zeigt sich tief besorgt.
Das ist Diplomatie auf höchstem Niveau – und eine Einladung für die nächste „ungeklärte“ Beschädigung.
Ein Unterseekabel in der Ostsee ist beschädigt worden. Die schwedische Staatsanwaltschaft ermittelt wegen mutmaßlich "schwerer Sabotage" und setzte ein Schiff fest.
Das war wieder einmal notwendig. Es gibt Tage, an denen ruhe ich mich einfach nur aus. Vom Leben, vom Denken, von den Ängsten, von der Sehnsucht. Ich ruhe […]
Was wir brauchen wäre ein Verbund an kleinen Websites, die sich miteinander austauschen können, aber dezentral und ohne Profitabsicht FÜR die User, nicht irgendeinem Konzern. Aber sowas haben wir ja nicht, weil niemand sowas betreiben kann.
oder so.
Meine Reaktion war nur ein 🤦.
Wenn die nur wüssten! Das in dem Video war die beste Beschreibung vom Fediverse, die ich gehört habe. (Notiz am Rande: ich schaue mir sowas gelegentlich gerne immer wieder mal an, weil ich mit meiner Bubble aus AdBlock, Lemmy, ÖR-Mediathek, FOSS und co. absolut nicht mitkriege, wie beschissen das Internet alleine schon in den letzten wenigen Jahren geworden ist.)
Ich finde Lemmy einfach nur geil. Ich liebe "die" Community, "den" Content und "die" Seite verfickt nochmal großartig. Alles nur in Gänse
Was wir brauchen wäre ein Verbund an kleinen Websites, die sich miteinander austauschen können, aber dezentral und ohne Profitabsicht FÜR die User, nicht irgendeinem Konzern. Aber sowas haben wir ja nicht, weil niemand sowas betreiben kann.
oder so.
Meine Reaktion war nur ein 🤦.
Wenn die nur wüssten! Das in dem Video war die beste Beschreibung vom Fediverse, die ich gehört habe. (Notiz am Rande: ich schaue mir sowas gelegentlich gerne immer wieder mal an, weil ich mit meiner Bubble aus AdBlock, Lemmy, ÖR-Mediathek, FOSS und co. absolut nicht mitkriege, wie beschissen das Internet alleine schon in den letzten wenigen Jahren geworden ist.)
Ich finde Lemmy einfach nur geil. Ich liebe "die" Community, "den" Content und "die" Seite verfickt nochmal großartig. Alles nur in Gänsefüßchen, weil ja jede Instanz und Plattform anders ist und jeder sich seinen Content selbst herauspflückt.
Noch nie hab ich mich online so gut aufgehoben gefühlt wie hier. Online-befreundet bin ich mit nur wenigen, aber ihr seid sowas wie die Nachbarschaft für mich, weil Feddit irgendwie ein Dorf ist, in dem jeder jeden kennt.
Ob das, wenn wir irgendwann mal anstatt unseren 5 Usern momentan mal halb Deutschland als Userbase haben, sich immer noch so anfühlt, kann ich nicht sagen, und eigentlich ist es mir auch egal.
Solange die Leute von demokratiefeindlichen Big-Tech Plattformen, die aufs übelste stinken, wegkommen und hin zu einer vernünftig geführten Alternative wechseln ist das Bums.
Ich hab es satt, dass niemand aus der "normalen" Bevölkerung (Nicht-Nerds) von uns jemals gehört hat, und jeder den Status Quo ungewollt hinnimmt, dass sie von TikTk, Twtter und co. (aufgrund individuellen Filterlisten unkenntlich gemacht) wie eine Kuh gemolken, ausgequetscht und dann verwurstet werden.
Social Media ist inzwischen unter vielen Leuten, insbesondere meiner Generation (Gen Z), ein Synonym zu Hetze, Hass, Zeitverschwendung und Enshittification geworden, und trotzdem hängen meine Bekannten 24/7 dort herum, weil sie nicht anders können.
Wie können wir, als "die Nerds", Feddit, Mastodon, Pixelfed und co. den "Normalos" schmackhafter machen?
Wie, in erster Linie, können wir Anderen überhaupt zeigen "HEY, HIER DA, UNS GIBT ES!"?
Hol dir hier den NordVPN-Deal + 4 Bonus-Monate → https://nordvpn.com/spacefrogsRisikofrei mit der 30-Tage-Geld-zurück-Garantie von Nord!✌️Das Internet ist ni...
Als im vorletzen/letzen Jahr die ersten Wellen von Twitter kamen, haben ja auch einige Medien Accounts oder sogar eigene Instanzen (bspw. Heise, DerStandard, Böhmermann, ....) im Fediverse gestartet. Meines Wissen aber ausschließlich mit Mastodon, weil das das einzige war, was sie kannten. Es war leider auch das einizge, was sie bekannt machen wollten. Alle Versuche, Medienleute mit etwas Reichweite dazu zu bewegen, nicht nur über Mastodon zu berichten und vor allem nicht ständig Mastodon mit dem Fediverse gleichzusetzen, sind leider gescheitert. Wenn überhaupt eine Antwort kam, hieß es: - Mastodon ist nun mal der größte Dienst, die anderen seien "nicht relevant" - Es würde die Leute überfordern, wenn sie erfahren das es verschiedene Möglichkeiten gibt. Daher besser nur Mastodon, nur die "offizielle" Mastodon-App und nur mastodon.social empfehlen - Es ist ja schon so komplziert, dass die Leute eine Instanz wählen müssen, das sei eine riesige Hürde. So werde sich das Fediverse nie "durchsetze
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Als im vorletzen/letzen Jahr die ersten Wellen von Twitter kamen, haben ja auch einige Medien Accounts oder sogar eigene Instanzen (bspw. Heise, DerStandard, Böhmermann, ....) im Fediverse gestartet. Meines Wissen aber ausschließlich mit Mastodon, weil das das einzige war, was sie kannten. Es war leider auch das einizge, was sie bekannt machen wollten. Alle Versuche, Medienleute mit etwas Reichweite dazu zu bewegen, nicht nur über Mastodon zu berichten und vor allem nicht ständig Mastodon mit dem Fediverse gleichzusetzen, sind leider gescheitert. Wenn überhaupt eine Antwort kam, hieß es: - Mastodon ist nun mal der größte Dienst, die anderen seien "nicht relevant" - Es würde die Leute überfordern, wenn sie erfahren das es verschiedene Möglichkeiten gibt. Daher besser nur Mastodon, nur die "offizielle" Mastodon-App und nur mastodon.social empfehlen - Es ist ja schon so komplziert, dass die Leute eine Instanz wählen müssen, das sei eine riesige Hürde. So werde sich das Fediverse nie "durchsetzen". Dann noch vorab zu wählen, ob man nun lieber Microblogging, Macroblogging, Fotos, Videos oder was anderes als Schwerpunkt möchte, sei nicht vermittelbar.
Sogar bei der taz, die schon (auf Eigenintiative einer Mitarbeiters) seit ca. 2012 einen Diaspora-Account hat und die seit 2021 auch mit ihren bereits bestehenden Mastodon-Bot-Account aktiver geworden ist, bringt immer wieder diese Darstellung. Bspw. in der aktuellen Wochentaz: "Für freie Feeds": Hier wird zwar das Fediverse zumindest erwähnt, aber wohl nicht verstanden, was es ist und was es schon gibt: "Seit Jahren arbeiten Entwickler daran, auf dieser Grundlage soziale Netzwerke zum sogenannten „Fediverse“ zusammenzuführen: „Ein Nutzer soll auf einer beliebigen Plattform ein Konto erstellen können und sich darüber mit allen Nutzern auf allen anderen Plattformen austauschen können“ – diesen Zustand streben die Fediverse-Macher:innen an." Ansonsten wird dann Bluesky gehypt ...
Wir haben echt viel versucht, aber dass jemand mit Reichweite nach außerhalb des Fediverse das Konzept zum einen versteht und zum anderen bereit ist, es nach außen zu tragen. Aber bislang leider weitgehend vergeblich...
Um der Macht der Tech-Bosse etwas entgegenzusetzen, arbeiten Entwickler an alternativen sozialen Medien. Ihr Ziel: die Feeds verschiedener Plattformen kombinierbar zu machen. Wie kann das gelingen?
Dann noch vorab zu wählen, ob man nun lieber Microblogging, Macroblogging, Fotos, Videos oder was anderes als Schwerpunkt möchte, sei nicht vermittelbar.
Billige Ausreden für 300 bitte.
Beim "klassischen" Social Media muss ich ja auch gucken, ob ich mich bei YouTube, Reddit, Xitter, Facebook oder Instagram anmelde. Der Unterschied: mit einem Xitter-Account kann ich nicht auf Reddit Posten. Mit einem Mastodon-Account aber auf Lemmy. Theoretisch ist das Thema also sogar weniger relevant als bisher...
Wie soll ich einen Film besprechen, der die Vorbereitung des Holocaust zum Gegenstand hat? Kriterien, die an einen (auch historischen) Spielfilm anzulegen wären, versagen hier einfach. Eine nüchterne Dokumentation ist das auch nicht. Doch angesichts der intendierten Verharmlosung eines Begriffes wie „Remigration“ ist dieser Film die notwendige Einordnung.
Wie soll ich einen Film besprechen, der die Vorbereitung des Holocaust zum Gegenstand hat? Kriterien, die an einen (auch historischen) Spielfilm anzulegen…
Kein Esel, kaum Enten, nur andere Vierbeiner. To get a Google translation use this link. Ich glaube, niemand weiß, wieso dieser Tümpel Eselteich heißt. Zu anderen &Ou…
🔥The 🇷🇺Ryazan oil refinery/depot was completely fucked by 🇺🇦Ukrainian strike drones again.
If you start destroying something, you have to finish it 😊
❗️It is about 500km from the state border of Ukraine.
@JusuMakonis
tl;dr I created an extension for the GNOME desktop on Linux, so that folks can stream and listen to music from The Indie Beat – an online radio station powered by independent musicians sharing music in the Fediverse, via Bandwagon.
Background
Independent musicians, creatives, artists, makers – these are all folk who often struggle to connect with audiences, and where retail and tech platforms tend towards squeezing their ability to make money from their work (see the excellent Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow – essential reading for today’s world and understanding how it systematically squeezes creatives). Over the Christmas period, I finally deleted my Spotify account, after
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tl;dr I created an extension for the GNOME desktop on Linux, so that folks can stream and listen to music from The Indie Beat – an online radio station powered by independent musicians sharing music in the Fediverse, via Bandwagon.
Background
Independent musicians, creatives, artists, makers – these are all folk who often struggle to connect with audiences, and where retail and tech platforms tend towards squeezing their ability to make money from their work (see the excellent Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow – essential reading for today’s world and understanding how it systematically squeezes creatives). Over the Christmas period, I finally deleted my Spotify account, after reading about yet more awful ways that company is destroying authentic creativity for their own profit.
Cancelled Spotify. One of those things I'd allowed to roll far too long for no good reason (not paying attention), and the "ghost artists" stuff has made me feel particularly unfriendly towards the platform. harpers.org/archive/2025/01/th…
I’ve been a huge fan of independent artists for a very long time. Back in the MySpace / MP3 / Napster days I came across folks who I now count as friends, amazing musicians such as Cindy Alexander, and Alex Cornish.
Up until recently there was a wonderful streaming station, RadioFreeFedi, that offered music from artists who had a presence in the Fediverse. Sadly, that has now gone away.
Over the past couple of years I’ve been attending Fediforum, an online conference where people building in the Fediverse gather to share projects and ideas. During the events in 2024, I came across two fantastic people with an interest in making things better for artists and musicians: Ben Pate, builder of the Emissary platform, which has a music-centric edition called Bandwagon; and Kirsten Lambertsen, a multi-talented web creative who runs Patron Hunt, and who spun up an alternative streaming station, The Indie Beat. The Indie Beat builds on Bandwagon, so artists who share their music in the Fediverse via Bandwagon, can also choose to add them to rotation on The Indie Beat.
Some inspirations
I was nerd-sniped, I mean, inspired, to make something with The Indie Beat, in part through a nice blog post shared by Neil Brown (which was apparently prompted by me, so that’s nice and circular!) about how to add the streams from The Indie Beat into Linux music apps such as mpd.
I don’t use mpd, and to be honest I most often live on Apple platforms (but I do keep a Plex server, which I intend to move to Jellyfin this year as I work on improving my self-hosting and homelab situations). I was pretty sure that I’d seen a taskbar music player for GNOME, though. I usually run GNOME on my Linux systems – the exception being my MNT Pocket Reform, which is Sway with a minimal set of other desktop apps.
The player I was thinking of is the SomaFM internet radio extension, which is a menubar app that lists the SomaFM station streams, and allows the user to choose between them.
The process
The first iteration was a straightforward copy/edit hack of the SomaFM extension, replacing the list of channel streams with the equivalent ones from The Indie Beat. Easy! I excitedly sent a screenshot to Kirsten to show off!
There were quite a few things that I felt I could do better, though. First of all, the artwork was missing. Also, I knew that the whole point of The Indie Beat was to be a showcase for the artists on Bandwagon, and that there was supposed to be metadata in the stream header that contained their link information.
After a lot of poking at the MP3 stream, I realised that The Indie Beat is built on a streaming server called Azura Cast, which has an API – and The Indie Beat API had that data, and a whole lot more that I could use. In order to use it all though, I had to fully re-think how the extension would work.
So, I started over, from scratch.
I hand-traced the “catellite” artwork and made a minified icon for the GNOME top bar – the full design was not great at a tiny size.
I kept a similar look-and-feel to the SomaFM extension – an icon, a player, a list of channels – but, I removed the settings and favourites options from my scope, to keep things simple. I also have the menu expand to fit the channel names, which I don’t love as it means it changes size, but it works.
a little thing that I’m fond of is that the extension uses the configured accent colour – recently added in GNOME 47 – for some of the text.
I did a lot of reading and poking around at GNOME Shell and gjs, the JavaScript API that enables extensions to be built. I also learned a lot about GStreamer, the engine that GNOME apps use for access to audio and video media. This was all a long, long way from my past work coding for GNOME, ~20 years ago, back in early Anjuta days! I’m not naturally a JavaScript person at all, so I made a lot of mistakes here.
huge shout-out to the author of the JustPerfection extension, who carefully and helpfully reviewed my submissions to the GNOME Extensions site. This thing would be a lot more crashy and messy without that oversight!
the extension contains a small cached implementation of the Azura Cast API, which enables the extension to query the available channels, rather than needing to have a static internal list of streams updated if a channel came along or went away (a concept of “mixtapes” is on the roadmap for The Indie Beat in the future).
I needed to add a way to access an artist’s page, which comes from a property that’s stored in the now playing data, so building an API layer that sits parallel to the radio stream player seemed to work nicely.
The Indie Beat is evolving – within a few days of starting work on this side project, Kirsten switched the branding from pink to green, so I updated the artwork. She also added a Bonk Wave channel – and the extension seamlessly picked it up! That was a nice win.
OK… so what does it do?
I’ve posted a short video which covers the basic features: choose between channels, play/stop, open the Bandwagon page of the currently playing artist in a web browser, or directly jump to Bandwagon’s Explore page or The Indie Beat main page. I’ve aimed for simple and clean, as befits the GNOME philosophy.
If you like it, a comment / review on the GNOME Extensions page would be very welcome. If you have issues or ideas, do leave those on the GitHub project. There is a donation button in the GNOME Extensions page, which is of course entirely optional.
Don’t forget to click over to Bandwagon and check out the artists you hear that you like.
What’s the future?
The world and the internet are kind of bleak right now, but actually – we’ve got the power to make it better.
There’s a lot of opportunity for creatives in the Fediverse!
Castopod is a great way to self-host a podcast with native ActivityPub federation. Bandwagon exists, where you can create a Fediverse profile for yourself and your music. You can share it through The Indie Beat. I’ve personally got my eye on Libre.FM (like Last.FM, but free, and with a renewed / reinvigorated interest in building new features like ActivityPub and IndieWeb support – here’s my profile). Beyond those, there is also Faircamp, a static site generator that helps musicians self-host their content and avoid enshittification through other channels and platforms. I’m excited! We can work together to make our spaces better for musicians and other artists!
More features for the extension?
This has been a fun side project!
I’ve got a few barely-formed ideas for things I can do with this in the future, as both Bandwagon and The Indie Beat evolve. Stay tuned. 📡
Oh, and through making this extension, I found and purchased an album I’m obsessed with, which has inspired me to do some other new things… so watch this space.
Where do I get those stickers?
Come find me at FOSDEM in Brussels next weekend, I’ll have Bandwagon+The Indie Beat stickers to share 👍🏻
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Today, I noticed an exchange between the brilliant Sara Joy and Stefan Bohacek on Mastodon, in which Stefan accidentally reminded me of something interesting that I hadn’t properly explored the first time around.
Rewind
About 20 years ago – actually 24 years ago, according to this Wikipedia article – there was a thing called FOAF, or Friend-of-a-Friend, an early online vocabularly / ontology for describing relationships between people and things online. There was also a related concept called DOAP, Description of a Project, that I was interested in and implemented in a couple of things I worked on back then. I did some digging, but the only references I can find on this blog are some passing mentions in the early 2000s, and I’ve lost my original foaf.rdf file but I might have to go hunting for that for posterity, at some stage.
I’m mentioning all of this because it reminds me that I’ve always been interested in the Semantic Web space, and also in the people aspects of the web, beyond just the words and the technology – Who is making What, and How it is all connected.
Humans today
Back to the ~present!
About 10 years ago – actually 12 years ago, according the last updated date in the original humans.txt file – there was the quiet proposal of an idea, for a humans.txt file, that could live in parallel to the robots.txt file on a web server.
The robots.txt file is intended for site owners to provide instructions to web crawlers – “robots”, or automated programs – as to how to behave in relation to the content of the site: this is the agreed-upon standard way in which the web works, and signals to search engines how to index websites, going all the way back to the early days of 1994-7, and later fully documented by Google and others. The idea for the humans.txt file was that we should have a simple way to credit the people who made a website, in a super easy to create and publish format, regardless of the technology stack used to build the site or the URL formats and layout of the site. It was briefly documented and lightly promoted on humanstxt.org. I remember noticing it at the time, loving the idea, but then not really doing anything with it, and I admit that I didn’t end up using it myself.
However, Stefan is using this on his site (and wrote about it 11 years ago, because of course he’s ahead of me again 😀) and it made me think:
This is still A Great Idea, and Right Now Could Be Its Time:
We’ve seen deliberate misinterpretations / mis-statements (from big AI players) about the value of robots.txt in relation to AI crawlers/scrapers in the past 6-12 months. Let’s re-emphasise the human aspect here.
I have a “made by a human” button in my sidebar, made by the excellent human Andy Carolan. You can get one here.
humanstxt.org could do with a bit of a refresh / re-upping and updating, maybe, but it’s on all of us to promote and adopt this idea.
the IndieWeb is thriving, and I’ve been seeing folks returning from XOXO over the past week enthusing about the greatness of the web.
Hold on, is there a browser extension for this? Oh, there is (although with the rollout of the new Chrome updates / Manifest V3 and lack of maintenance, they may not work in the future)
OK what about a WordPress plugin, for this here WordPress blog of mine? Oh, there is (although it has not been updated lately, and continues to refer to legacy stuff like some site called Twitter; it works, though)
We really, really need to give credit where credit is due, in a world where things are increasingly being sucked up, mashed together by algorithms, and regurgitated in ways that diminish their creators for the enrichment of others.
What I’m saying, is this – Thank You, Stefan, and Sara, and Dan Hon2 and everyone else from XOXO and everywhere all over the internet, for reminding me that the web is great, humans are incredible, and hey, why don’t we all give this humans.txt thing one more try? I’m on board with that.
Today, I noticed an exchange between the brilliant Sara Joy and Stefan Bohacek on Mastodon, in which Stefan accidentally reminded me of something interesting that I hadn’t properly explored the first time around.
Rewind
About 20 years ago – actually 24 years ago, according to this Wikipedia article – there was a thing called FOAF, or Friend-of-a-Friend, an early online vocabularly / ontology for describing relationships between people and things online. There was also a related concept called DOAP, Description of a Project, that I was interested in and implemented in a couple of things I worked on back then. I did some digging, but the only references I can find on this blog are some passing mentions in the early 2000s, and I’ve lost my original foaf.rdf file but I might have to go hunting for that for posterity, at some stage.
I’m mentioning all of this because it reminds me that I’ve always been interested in the Semantic Web space, and also in the people aspects of the web, beyond just the words and the technology – Who is making What, and How it is all connected.
Humans today
Back to the ~present!
About 10 years ago – actually 12 years ago, according the last updated date in the original humans.txt file – there was the quiet proposal of an idea, for a humans.txt file, that could live in parallel to the robots.txt file on a web server.
The robots.txt file is intended for site owners to provide instructions to web crawlers – “robots”, or automated programs – as to how to behave in relation to the content of the site: this is the agreed-upon standard way in which the web works, and signals to search engines how to index websites, going all the way back to the early days of 1994-7, and later fully documented by Google and others. The idea for the humans.txt file was that we should have a simple way to credit the people who made a website, in a super easy to create and publish format, regardless of the technology stack used to build the site or the URL formats and layout of the site. It was briefly documented and lightly promoted on humanstxt.org. I remember noticing it at the time, loving the idea, but then not really doing anything with it, and I admit that I didn’t end up using it myself.
However, Stefan is using this on his site (and wrote about it 11 years ago, because of course he’s ahead of me again 😀) and it made me think:
This is still A Great Idea, and Right Now Could Be Its Time:
We’ve seen deliberate misinterpretations / mis-statements (from big AI players) about the value of robots.txt in relation to AI crawlers/scrapers in the past 6-12 months. Let’s re-emphasise the human aspect here.
I have a “made by a human” button in my sidebar, made by the excellent human Andy Carolan. You can get one here.
humanstxt.org could do with a bit of a refresh / re-upping and updating, maybe, but it’s on all of us to promote and adopt this idea.
the IndieWeb is thriving, and I’ve been seeing folks returning from XOXO over the past week enthusing about the greatness of the web.
Hold on, is there a browser extension for this? Oh, there is (although with the rollout of the new Chrome updates / Manifest V3 and lack of maintenance, they may not work in the future)
OK what about a WordPress plugin, for this here WordPress blog of mine? Oh, there is (although it has not been updated lately, and continues to refer to legacy stuff like some site called Twitter; it works, though)
We really, really need to give credit where credit is due, in a world where things are increasingly being sucked up, mashed together by algorithms, and regurgitated in ways that diminish their creators for the enrichment of others.
What I’m saying, is this – Thank You, Stefan, and Sara, and Dan Hon2 and everyone else from XOXO and everywhere all over the internet, for reminding me that the web is great, humans are incredible, and hey, why don’t we all give this humans.txt thing one more try? I’m on board with that.
The writing trigger today was largely prompted by reading the latest edition of Tedium, specifically, commenting on the Patreon situation with the App Store.
[…] it is also reflective of a mistake the company made many years ago: To allow people to support patrons directly through its app. Patreon did not need to do this. It was just a website at first, and for all the good things that can be said about the company, fact is they built on shaky land. To go to my earlier metaphor: They built their foundation on quicksand, perhaps without realizing it, though the broken glass wasn’t thrown in just yet. […] That shaky land isn’t the web, and if Patreon had stayed there, this would not be an issue. It’s the mobile app ecosystem, which honestly treats everyone poorly whether they want to admit it or not.
Look at that – hyperlinks between content published freely on open platforms, that can be read, studied, accessed around the world, and discussed, all within minutes and hours of publication. Mind blowing! Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!
I spend a bunch on apps, and in apps, and with Apple, directly and indirectly. They have a good ecosystem, it is all convenient (but spendy) to me as a consumer… but, I don’t think this whole situation with them milking creators and creatives is OK at all. The trouble is, that the lines are all kinds of blurry here – if they carved out a new category and set of rules around apps that sell subscriptions for creators that had, say, a zero or just a lower fee than other categories, then you’ll get into situations where others try to find ways into that category to avoid the higher fees.
The closed ones make me increasingly sad and frustrated.
The open ones can take more tinkering and effort, but I get a lot back from them. They need sustaining. They don’t come for free. They need us to contribute, and to find ways to pay to support the creators and makers and builders and engineers.
I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.
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I was pretty actively commenting from the event and taking part in the live uStream channel… others have written up some of their experiences and thoughts, so I don’t propose to say much here. My main contribution was to make a (shaky!) video of Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk towards the start of the morning – a half hour overview of his home automation projects. I’ve posted it on Viddler, and if you are interested you are very welcome to comment on it, embed it in your own sites, or add annotations on the video timeline.
[viddler id=e4676600&w=400&h=267]
The nice part about Viddler over, say, YouTube is that it let me post the whole thing as a single video rather than having to chop it up into 10 minute chunks. I’ll try to post some notes on how I went about producing the video at some stage soon.
Some very general comments on the day:
Well-organised, well-run, great venue, nice to have wireless access – thanks to everyone involved in the logistics!
A brilliant, exciting array of skills, talents and interests. It was kind of funny to realise just how many of the folks I knew of as we were doing introductions at the start, and great to find that it wasn’t only a bunch of IBM hackers – this movement is really building momentum.
I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.
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IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, has been speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York today. He’s been discussing how the planet is getting smarter:
These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected – economically, technically and socially. But we’re also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get “flatter.” And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.
In the speech, Sam talks about how the world has become instrumented, more interconnected, and devices more intelligent. And he talks about how the current world crises – ecological, financial, and others – represent an opportunity for change. The next step for the globally integrated economy is a globally integrated and intelligent econo
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IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, has been speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York today. He’s been discussing how the planet is getting smarter:
These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected – economically, technically and socially. But we’re also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get “flatter.” And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.
In the speech, Sam talks about how the world has become instrumented, more interconnected, and devices more intelligent. And he talks about how the current world crises – ecological, financial, and others – represent an opportunity for change. The next step for the globally integrated economy is a globally integrated and intelligent economy and society.
Some of the problems and solutions that are being mentioned are interesting.
67 per cent of all electrical energy is lost due to inefficient power generation and grid management… utilities in the U.S., Denmark, Australia and Italy are now building digital grids to monitor the energy system in real time.
Congested roadways in the U.S. cost $78 billion annually in wasted hours and gas… Stockholm’s new smart toll system has resulted in 22 percent less traffic, a 12 to 40 percent drop in emissions and 40,000 additional daily users of the public transport system
This is exciting for me on many levels. Let me step up through them.
As regular readers will know, I’ve become increasingly interested in pervasive computing and home automation. The little “Current Cost craze” that has swept through my group of friends at work could be seen as a mark of the individual interest in applying technology in a smarter way. I’m excited that this has widened out to a group of folks who are supportingChris Dalby’s Home Camp idea in London later this month.
First on stage were hosts Brady Forrest [http://radar.oreilly.com/brady/] of
O’Reilly Media [http://oreilly.com/] and Jennifer Pahlka
[http://blog.pahlka.com/] of TechWeb [http://www.techweb.com/home].
The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.
Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.
This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs.
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[viddler id=e83b64e1&w=437&h=288]
For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.
Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.
This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.
I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.
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The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here and on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).
This year was no exception, and referring back to my old blog entries it turns out that this is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I chose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).
So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from
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One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here and on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).
This year was no exception, and referring back to my old blog entries it turns out that this is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I chose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).
So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from Malvern St James School and their teachers – they had travelled a fair distance to come to the event, but despite the early start I think they did really well.
I won’t go into too much detail and spoil the fun for people who might read this but have not yet taken part in this week’s event, but I think we had some great activities on offer. I twittered our way through a few of them. My own personal favourite was a remote surgery activity. You can’t see much in this image (it was a dark room) but the students basically had a “body” inside a box with some remote cameras to guide their hands around and had to identify organs and foreign objects.
There was also some interesting application of visual technology / tangible interfaces – a genetics exercise using LEGO bricks and a camera which identified gene strands, and an energy planning exercise which used Reactivision-style markers to identify where power stations had been placed on a map (sort of similar to what we built in SLorpedo at Hackday a couple of years ago). We also had some logic puzzles to solve, built a, err… “typhoon-proof” (ahem) tower, simulated a computer processor, and commanded a colony of ants in a battle for survival against the other school teams.
Things I learned
Facebook (not Bebo) is now where it’s at.
If a tornado is coming, get out of the way or into a safe room.
Girls are much better than boys at listening to multiple streams of conversation (actually I think I worked this out a long time ago!).
A now, some notes just for my team…
Here are links to a few of the other things we talked about during the day:
Home Camp, the home automation and green energy event (next one is at the end of April).
And most importantly, here’s the evidence that we started off in first place 🙂 and I think you were an awesome team throughout. Well done, it was brilliant spending the day with you.
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We just presented our team’s hack for HackDay in London… An awesome team effort inspired and led by Paul Johnston and Nigel Crawley. A mixed reality naval game from the Supernova team. …
For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.
Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.
This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.
I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.
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I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.
What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.
Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.
We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.
Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.
Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.
I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.
A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:
Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service
I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.
In late 2011, I was contacted by a very charming, smart and persuasive French gentleman who spoke of clouds, platform-as-a-service, and polyglot programming. It took him and his team a couple of months to get me thinking seriously about a career change, after 10 great years at IBM. I’d spent that period with “Big Blue” coding in Java and C, and primarily focused on enterprise application servers, message queueing, and integration – and yet the lure of how easy vmc push[1] made it for me to deploy and scale an app was astounding! Should I make the transition to a crazy new world? Over Christmas that year, I decided it would be a good thing to get in on this hot new technology and join VMware as Developer Advocate on the Cloud Foundry team. I joined the team early in 2012.
The Cloud Foundry adventure
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In late 2011, I was contacted by a very charming, smart and persuasive French gentleman who spoke of clouds, platform-as-a-service, and polyglot programming. It took him and his team a couple of months to get me thinking seriously about a career change, after 10 great years at IBM. I’d spent that period with “Big Blue” coding in Java and C, and primarily focused on enterprise application servers, message queueing, and integration – and yet the lure of how easy vmc push[1] made it for me to deploy and scale an app was astounding! Should I make the transition to a crazy new world? Over Christmas that year, I decided it would be a good thing to get in on this hot new technology and join VMware as Developer Advocate on the Cloud Foundry team. I joined the team early in 2012.
The Cloud Foundry adventure has been amazing. The day after I joined the team, the project celebrated its first anniversary, and we announced the BOSH continuous deployment tool; I spent much of that first year with the team on a whirlwind of events and speaking engagements, growing the community. The Developer Relations team that Patrick Chanezon and Adam Fitzgerald put together was super talented, and it was brilliant to be part of that group. Peter, Chris, Josh, Monica, Raja, Rajdeep, Alvaro, Eric, Frank, Tamao, Danny, Chloe, D, Giorgio, friends in that extended team… it was an honour.
A year after I joined, VMware spun out Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and other technologies into a new company, Pivotal – headed up by Paul Maritz. I’ve been privileged to work under him, Rob Mee at Pivotal Labs, and most closely, my good friend James Watters on the Cloud Foundry team. I’ve seen the opening of our new London offices on Old Street, welcomed our partners and customers into that unique collaborative and pairing environment, and observed an explosion of activity and innovation in this space. We launched an amazing product. James Bayer heads up a remarkable group of technologists working full-time on Cloud Foundry, and it has been a pleasure to get to know him and his team. Most recently, I’ve loved every minute working with Cornelia, Ferdy, Matt, Sabha and Scott (aka the Platform Engineering team), another talented group of individuals from whom I’ve learned much.
Over the course of the last two years I’ve seen the Platform-as-a-Service space grow, establish itself, and develop – most recently resulting in my recent talk at bcs Oxfordshire:
Last week, we announced the forthcoming Cloud Foundry Foundation – and one could argue that as a community and Open Source kinda guy, this was the direction I’ve helped to move things in the past two years, although I can claim no credit at all for the Foundation announcement itself. I’ve certainly enjoyed hosting occasional London Cloud Foundry Community meetups and drinks events (note, next London PaaS User Group event has 2 CF talks!), and I’ve made some great friends locally and internationally through the ongoing growth of the project. I’m proud of the Platform event we put on last year, I think the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit will be just as exciting, and I’m happy to have been a part of establishing and growing the CF community here in Europe.
Cloud Foundry is THE de facto Open Source PaaS standard, the ecosystem is strong and innovative, and that has been achieved in a transparent and collaborative way, respectful to the community, in a good-natured way in the face of competition. Rest assured that I’ll continue to watch the project and use PaaSes which implement it (I upgraded to a paid Pivotal Web Services account just this past week, I tried BlueMix, and I’m an ongoing fan of the Anynines team).
There are many missing shout-outs here… you folks know who you are, and should also know that I’ve deeply enjoyed learning from you and working with you. Thank you, Pivotal team! I do not intend to be a stranger to the Bay Area! In my opinion, Pivotal is positioned brilliantly in offering an end-to-end mobile, agile development, cloud platform and big data story for the enterprise. I look forward to continuing the conversations around that in the next couple of weeks.
[…]
What happens after “the next couple of weeks”? Well, this is as good time as any (!) to close that chapter, difficult though it is to leave behind a team I’ve loved working with, on a product and project that is undoubtedly going to continue to be fantastically successful this year and beyond. So, it is time to announce my next steps, which may or may not be clear from the title of this post… 🙂 Joining Twitter! I joined Twitter as a user on Feb 21 2007. On the same day, seven years later, I accepted a job offer to go and work with the Twitter team as a Developer Advocate, based in London.
If you’ve been a long-term follower of mine either here on this blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere, you’ll know that Twitter is one of my favourite tools online. It has been transformational in my life and career, and it changed many of my interactions. True story: between leaving IBM and joining VMware I presented at Digital Bristol about social technologies, and I was asked, which one I would miss the most if it went away tomorrow; the answer was simple: Twitter. As an Open Source guy, too, I’ve always been impressed with Twitter’s contributions to the broader community.
I couldn’t be more #excited to get started with the Twitter Developer Relations team in April!
Follow me on Twitter – @andypiper – to learn more about my next adventure…
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.
What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.
Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.
We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.
Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.
Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.
I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.
A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:
Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service
I’m very excited to announce that, from April 10th, I will be joining the Developer Relations team for Cloud Foundry at VMware.
This is a thrilling opportunity for me for a number of reasons.
from a technology perspective: Cloud Foundry is very, very, very cool. In my opinion, it really comes from a different set of thought processes than the other Platform-as-a-Service offerings out there, which make it unique and compelling.
the operating system stuff gets out of the way (why should it matter?), but multiple language runtimes and backend resources are available for easy scaling. Seriously, the first time I walked through the command-line tutorial and scaled a Ruby app to 6 load balanced instances with a single command, I was instantly impressed.
it is Open
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I’m very excited to announce that, from April 10th, I will be joining the Developer Relations team for Cloud Foundry at VMware.
This is a thrilling opportunity for me for a number of reasons.
from a technology perspective: Cloud Foundry is very, very, very cool. In my opinion, it really comes from a different set of thought processes than the other Platform-as-a-Service offerings out there, which make it unique and compelling.
the operating system stuff gets out of the way (why should it matter?), but multiple language runtimes and backend resources are available for easy scaling. Seriously, the first time I walked through the command-line tutorial and scaled a Ruby app to 6 load balanced instances with a single command, I was instantly impressed.
it is Open Source. The code is on Github. You can run your own cloud if you like. You can add support for your own languages and frameworks, much as AppFog have done for PHP, Tier 3 and Uhuru have done with .NET in Iron Foundry, and so on. This provides a huge amount of flexibility. Oh, and of course mobile and cloud go hand-in-hand, so last week’s announcement of FeedHenry providing tools to develop HTML5 apps to deploy on Cloud Foundry was really significant, too.
you can take your cloud with you using Micro Cloud Foundry – so the development and deployment model remains the same whether you are online or offline. I love this idea.
for me, personally: it’s a natural evolution of much of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years – focusing on developer communities and promoting technology adoption, as much as top-down solution selling. As my good friend James Governor is fond of saying and as his colleague Steve O’Gradywrote, developers are the new kingmakers – and with trends like mobile, cloud, and devops, nurturing those communities is more important than ever. You don’t impose technology on a community – you explain it and earn your place and reputation.
I’m looking forward to more speaking, more writing, more mentoring, and more online community building. These are things I’ve grown to enjoy (and in the case of the latter, appear to do naturally).
I’ve followed Patrick Chanezon, the Senior Director of the team, since he was setting up the developer advocacy programme back at Google – I have a lot of respect for what he’s achieved and the way he operates, so I’m delighted to have the chance to work closely with him. I’m excited to join everyone in the team, of course – I have spoken with most of the group already and I’m really looking forward to learning from their diverse range of experiences and backgrounds.
Between now and April 10th, I have a few things planned including a vacation (!), heading to EclipseCon to talk about MQTT and M2M topics, and some other speaking engagements. After I start the new role, I expect I’ll join in on the Cloud Foundry Open Tour and start to meet folks. I’ll also be on the team for the GOTO conference in Aarhus in October – exciting times ahead!
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In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.
Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.
There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.
Why so many?
Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.c
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In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.
Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.
There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.
Why so many?
Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.
Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.
Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X. In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.
… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!
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I’m very excited to announce that, from April 10th, I will be joining the Developer Relations team for Cloud Foundry at VMware.
This is a thrilling opportunity for me for a number of reasons.
from a technology perspective: Cloud Foundry is very, very, very cool. In my opinion, it really comes from a different set of thought processes than the other Platform-as-a-Service offerings out there, which make it unique and compelling.
the operating system stuff gets out of the way (why should it matter?), but multiple language runtimes and backend resources are available for easy scaling. Seriously, the first time I walked through the command-line tutorial and scaled a Ruby app to 6 load balanced instances with a single command, I was instantly impressed.
it is Open Source. The code is on Github. You can run your own cloud if you like. You can add support for your own languages and frameworks, much as AppFog have done for PHP, Tier 3 and Uhuru have done with .NET in Iron Foundry, and so on. This provides a huge amount of flexibility. Oh, and of course mobile and cloud go hand-in-hand, so last week’s announcement of FeedHenry providing tools to develop HTML5 apps to deploy on Cloud Foundry was really significant, too.
you can take your cloud with you using Micro Cloud Foundry – so the development and deployment model remains the same whether you are online or offline. I love this idea.
for me, personally: it’s a natural evolution of much of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years – focusing on developer communities and promoting technology adoption, as much as top-down solution selling. As my good friend James Governor is fond of saying and as his colleague Steve O’Gradywrote, developers are the new kingmakers – and with trends like mobile, cloud, and devops, nurturing those communities is more important than ever. You don’t impose technology on a community – you explain it and earn your place and reputation.
I’m looking forward to more speaking, more writing, more mentoring, and more online community building. These are things I’ve grown to enjoy (and in the case of the latter, appear to do naturally).
I’ve followed Patrick Chanezon, the Senior Director of the team, since he was setting up the developer advocacy programme back at Google – I have a lot of respect for what he’s achieved and the way he operates, so I’m delighted to have the chance to work closely with him. I’m excited to join everyone in the team, of course – I have spoken with most of the group already and I’m really looking forward to learning from their diverse range of experiences and backgrounds.
Between now and April 10th, I have a few things planned including a vacation (!), heading to EclipseCon to talk about MQTT and M2M topics, and some other speaking engagements. After I start the new role, I expect I’ll join in on the Cloud Foundry Open Tour and start to meet folks. I’ll also be on the team for the GOTO conference in Aarhus in October – exciting times ahead!
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Today’s mail delivery included more stickers – in addition to the collection from earlier in the week – and, these are particularly special. Three NFC stickers, each with the text “Tap For Art” overlaid on a colourful pattern The first thing I noticed when I opened the envelope was the care and attention that was put into the manner in which they’ve been presented, slid into a similarly-cut sheet of textured paper.
As you can see in the photo, each of these is a “Tap For Art” design, and sure enough, tap an NFC-capable device like a recent iOS or Android phone to one of these, and you get redirected to a generative artwork created by our friend, the artist
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Today’s mail delivery included more stickers – in addition to the collection from earlier in the week – and, these are particularly special. Three NFC stickers, each with the text “Tap For Art” overlaid on a colourful pattern The first thing I noticed when I opened the envelope was the care and attention that was put into the manner in which they’ve been presented, slid into a similarly-cut sheet of textured paper.
As you can see in the photo, each of these is a “Tap For Art” design, and sure enough, tap an NFC-capable device like a recent iOS or Android phone to one of these, and you get redirected to a generative artwork created by our friend, the artist bleeptrack. There’s an extra cool feature here, as each of these tags also has the ability to carry a tap count, so that goes into the generated URL to create a new variation each time.
Really cool, and I’m over the moon to have a few of these to play with and stick in places that I hope will enable more people to discover the work – thank you @bleeptrack 🙏🏻
[folks, go check out her other work – plotter artist, generative creative, maker extraordinaire]
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Today’s mail delivery included more stickers – in addition to the collection from earlier in the week – and, these are particularly special. Three NFC stickers, each with the text “Tap …
Today, I received some fun post from some lovely people in New York City. Those in the know, may recognise these stickers as the logos of Glitch and Fastly.
I’ve been using Glitch to write and host web apps for quite a few years now – it is super helpful when working in a role like developer relations, needing to rapidly spin up demos, examples, or to demonstrate new features. A couple of years ago, Glitch came together with Fastly, and in the past couple of months their new developer platform vision really started to come together.
If you haven’t been keeping up with what they have been up to, and were not able to be at their recent special developer event in NYC (don’t worry, I couldn’t get there either), there’s a helpful ~6 minute video that summarises the announcements. I’m particularly interested and excited about this because I know and respect the folks involved – Anil Dash, Jenn Schiffer, Hannah Aubry, many others across their teams – and I know that they get and they care about developer experience, Open Source, and the free and open web. I’m talking about the big stuff, the infrastructure, the stuff that needs to invisibly just work in order for the web to run; and also the smaller things, the quirky indie little pieces, the fun and new experiences, helping people to learn to code and to be creative. It’s no exaggeration to say that Fastly’s Fast Forward program is a massive supporter of Open Source, open standards and the Fediverse. All of these things are reasons why I love Glitch & Fastly.
[ if you’re curious about the sorts of things I’ve been building or working on from a code and web perspective, I’ve also spruced up my GitHub bio, and I have a more general gallery page on GitHub that has links to the source and deployments of different projects – some of which are links to those Glitch apps above ]
Thank you for the stickerage, Glitch friends! And, congratulations on the new Fastly Developer Platform! I’m looking forward to continuing to use your cool technologies 👍🏻
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Resources page for Andy Piper's talk on the history of Computer Art, pen plotters, and more. Explore further with links to exhibitions, contemporary artists, tools, and reading materials.
I’ve given some talks in the past 6 months about the history of computer art, and in particular art created with pen plotters and drawing machines. As I got into building plotters last year, I didn’t initially think too much about the background to what I was doing; but, being an historian, I then started to dig into it, looking back to the emergence of computer art of the 1950s and 1960s.
At a high level, it’s a simple and very effective rule – draw a square; repeat, adding a small but increasing amount of rotation (noise) with each column and row. Such a basic piece of code produces a wonderful and pleasing – to my eyes – “disintegration” effect. My description is a very simplistic way of understanding the code – more recently,
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I’ve given some talks in the past 6 months about the history of computer art, and in particular art created with pen plotters and drawing machines. As I got into building plotters last year, I didn’t initially think too much about the background to what I was doing; but, being an historian, I then started to dig into it, looking back to the emergence of computer art of the 1950s and 1960s.
At a high level, it’s a simple and very effective rule – draw a square; repeat, adding a small but increasing amount of rotation (noise) with each column and row. Such a basic piece of code produces a wonderful and pleasing – to my eyes – “disintegration” effect. My description is a very simplistic way of understanding the code – more recently, Zellyn Hunter has done a fabulous twopart deep dive on the program, going as far as recovering the random seed used to create the specific piece of work that is part of the collection at the V&A Museum in London1. Until about a month ago I had an alternate / approximated version2 hanging just inside the door of the studio, and thanks to Zellyn I now have a precise recreation generated from Python, plotted using my own machine, on fine black paper using gold ink. Schotter, in the V&A Museum, LondonRecreation of Schotter, Forge & Craft studio, London In my talks, I’ve joked that we can think of these in-their-time “magical” programs as being like AI, but in old school terms, they are just algorithms.
To say that today’s AI is “just algorithms” would be ridiculously reductive – that form of AI involves not just algorithms, but vast Large Language Models that inform the outcomes of the generated art or text or code; but ultimately it is just super-powered autocorrect and applied statistics3, which derives superpowers from the corpus of data that it has been trained on. I completely understand the concerns around how that data is being acquired and (mis)used, and the skepticism and trepidation and other reasons folks have to disdain “AI”.4
One of the common things we get asked when showing our plotter art is, literally: "where is the art in this?" (thus the title and inspiration for my talk); or "so, the computer did it / it's all done with AI then?" (the implication being that we didn’t really make any creative effort of our own).
In our (Forge & Craft case), the work tends to divide between two types and styles (not exclusively, but mostly):
things I generated using code, mostly experimenting in different languages and frameworks as I learn – this is usually referred to as “generative art”;
images taken as photographs by one of us, transformed into plottable line art using algorithms (we use DrawingBotV3 for this, it has an amazing range of path finding modules, excellent support, and solid knowledge of a range of different plotters including output to Inkscape SVG for AxiDraw, or to HPGL for my vintage plotter).
Is that “AI”? No – we’re not using what is known as generative AI in those cases. I have, of course, experimented with tools like Midjourney and so forth for some limited image generation, and for some coding assistance – I’m a curious technologist, and I like to explore new tools – but, in terms of putting down the lines in the plots, we’re using algorithms to derive the pen paths.
We also work with analogue materials i.e. the pens and inks and papers are themselves an artistic set of choices. Take a couple of my other pieces, 1984, and Cellular. The piece on the left is a Cistercian numeral or cipher. I used Python code to generate the glyph here; I used DrawingBotV3 to process the SVG into a plottable format (a close look would reveal it is a dense squiggly line fill); this was plotted using sepia fineliner onto cotton rag paper. The piece on the right was made using an online generation tool, and plotted using bronze Uniball onto the same cotton rag paper.
In both cases I’m showing the dichotomy of ostensibly old formats (handmade paper, Cistercian numerals) and modernity (the notion of “1984” be it the Orwellian, or the Apple ad; the bronze metallic ink); and doing that via the physicality of analogue output. Oh, as a side note, this cotton rag paper is pretty challenging to plot onto – it undulates so the pen can easily drag unexpectedly, and I found that some “babysitting” of the machine was required. No AI there.
In relation to the analog element, I love these words from Freya Marshall in the recent book Tracing the Line:
… to see an image take shape, line by line, is […] hypnotic. In the age of social media, where hour-long plots can be condensed into 20-second videos that are instantly attention-grabbing, it is not difficult to see how the pen plotter has risen in popularity […]
Freya Marshall, Tracing the Line
Another author, Carl Lostritto, writes beautifully about this in Computational Drawing:
… when drawing with ink, time and material are consequential.
Even though the volume of ink is almost never enough to provide measurable depth, the behavior of the material ink as it interacts with the material paper participates in cuing and undermining depth. Ink affects paper and paper affects ink. […]
Ironically, pen-plotters, machines that move a physical pen in two axes across paper, were marketed as output devices for architectural and engineering technical drawings. Now, almost all have been re-appropriated by artists, designers, and architects who cherish them for the very qualities that made them obsolete.
Carl Lostritto, Computational Drawing
My blog post today was prompted by being asked whether the generative art stickers I wrote about, created by my friend bleeptrack, use AI. Well, first of all, it’s not my art so I’m not going to go deep into explaining or defending the work itself (there is an explainer and video on the website, and both mention the generative and algorithmic nature of the pieces). Secondly I coincidentally also saw today, an excellent piece by Monokai that seeks to separate algorithmic art from generative art and from AI, for many of the same reasons I’ve done above – it also mentions a number of the original algorithmic artists from the 1960s. I also prefer to specify that I’m talking about computer art in my historical coverage, rather than digital art or net art or demo party art (or or or…), which are distinct genres. By the way, folks like Rev Dan Catt are doing some incredible work with AI: creating a personalised assistant, Kitty; and applying the technology tools and his amazing brain to creating ever more impressive artwork – see his Artist Statement.
I’m not here to bash on “AI”, but I do want to draw some distinctions around how and when and where tools are used, and assumptions are made. I’m no apologist for OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and others; I’m an informed skeptic. A kneejerk reaction of “AI = bad” does not take account of how the term “AI” is being misused everywhere to justify investments and valuations – a lot of stuff we previously labelled “algorithmic” is suddenly a flashy new “AI feature”, when it remains simply a complex set of advanced computing techniques and mathematics; equally, separating out an assumption that all “AI” is the result of misappropriated data in a large language model, is important.
Finally, I don’t have videos from the talks I’ve given (at QCon, and at EMF) available to link to at the moment, but I made a small webpage with more information and links to my sources, if you would like to do more reading around the topics of the history of computer art, pen plotters, and how to get involved. I hope you find that interesting and useful!
I visited the V&A earlier this year and asked to spend time examining this piece, and several other early computer art pieces, in the reading room – part of my research for the “Where Is The Art?” talk. ↩︎
I generated a version using the Whiskers library in Rust, which comes with a handy interactive demo GUI for playing with the same style of piece. ↩︎
It is also not Intelligent, just backed by a lot of data that makes it sound clever. ↩︎
Today’s mail delivery included more stickers – in addition to the collection from earlier in the week – and, these are particularly special. Three NFC stickers, each with the text “Tap For Art” overlaid on a colourful pattern The first thing I noticed when I opened the envelope was the care and attention that was put into the manner in which they’ve been presented, slid into a similarly-cut sheet of textured paper.
As you can see in the photo, each of these is a “Tap For Art” design, and sure enough, tap an NFC-capable device like a recent iOS or Android phone to one of these, and you get redirected to a generative artwork created by our friend, the artist bleeptrack. There’s an extra cool feature here, as each of these tags also has the ability to carry a tap count, so that goes into the generated URL to create a new variation each time.
Really cool, and I’m over the moon to have a few of these to play with and stick in places that I hope will enable more people to discover the work – thank you @bleeptrack 🙏🏻
[folks, go check out her other work – plotter artist, generative creative, maker extraordinaire]
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Yesterday I came across two fun and interesting uses of large language models, in quick succession.
First, I saw a post on Mastodon commenting about how “brutal” a web app called GitHub Roaster is, in analysing a user’s profile and repository history. That’s a very accurate assessment. The app uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o to create “a short and harsh roasting” for a given profile. The result for my profile was sufficiently uncomfortable to read, that I swiftly moved on!
Yesterday I came across two fun and interesting uses of large language models, in quick succession.
First, I saw a post on Mastodon commenting about how “brutal” a web app called GitHub Roaster is, in analysing a user’s profile and repository history. That’s a very accurate assessment. The app uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o to create “a short and harsh roasting” for a given profile. The result for my profile was sufficiently uncomfortable to read, that I swiftly moved on!
Instead of trying to tear each other down with AI, why not use it to help lift others up?
I love this approach! (from a technical perspective, I noted that this app uses the prompt “give uplifting words of encouragement” with LLaMa 3.1 70b, to create more positive output)
If we’re going to use these sorts of tools and make these kinds of apps – let’s do so in a positive manner. Notwithstanding the very real issues with the overuse of resources, and the moral and legal debates around how the models have been trained – both of which I have huge concerns about – I strongly believe that technology has the capacity to have a positive impact on society when used well, ethically, and thoughtfully. Like everything else though, it is up to us to make the best, and most positive use of what we have access to, what we create, and what we leave behind in the world. It is our individual, and our collective, responsibility.
Thank you, Xe, for being thoughtful about this. You’re inspiring!
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Jetzt mal ehrlich: Dieser Film war ein Monster. Auch wenn es „nur“ drei Oscars dafür gab, hat dieses kleine Kammerspiel für mich 22/23 die Saison als größte Überraschung dominiert. Es war schlicht unglaublich, was Arronofsky und Fraser aus einem Theaterstück extrahiert und auf die Leinwand gebracht haben. (ARD)
Jetzt mal ehrlich: Dieser Film war ein Monster. Auch wenn es „nur“ drei Oscars dafür gab, hat dieses kleine Kammerspiel für mich 22/23 die Saison als größte…
Ja, sicher. Meine Kritik geht in Richtung Programmdirektor, weil zur Primetime kommt dann Sportschau oder der x-te Krimi in seiner drölften Wiederholung.
Ich würde mich freuen wenn Rentner auch mal nen guten Film sehen nicht nur die Schwarzwaldklinik.
Ich habe den Film erst vor zwei oder drei Stunden mit der kostenfreien Software "MediathekView" heruntergeladen. In die Suchezeile "The Whale" und zack gefunden.
Wir haben den gestern Abend geschaut. Unglaublich was für ein Facettenreichtum an Themen und Fragen da drin steckt. Diese Ambivalenz in den Charakteren, die einen total gebannt hält, wo man ständig schwankt zwischen Zuneigung und Abgestoßen sein. Sehr beeindruckende Arbeit, und sehr berührend auf eine ganz eigene Art.
Oh, vielen, vielen Dank für deinen Kommentar! Eigentlich hast du den Film, in viel weniger Worten, viel besser beschrieben, als ich. Und du hast „den Punkt“ wirklich getroffen. ❤️ 👍
Revolut is specifically banning GrapheneOS by checking for the build machine hostname and username being set to grapheneos. We've changed these to build-host and build-user. Combined with another change, this allow our users to log in to it again until they roll out Play Integrity API enforcement.
There's no legitimate excuse for banning using a much more private and secure operating system while permitting devices with no security patches for a decade. Meanwhile, Revolut's shoddily made app tells users they're banning GrapheneOS because they're "serious about keeping your data secure".
Revolut's app will stop working against once they start enforcing having a Play Integrity API result showing it's a Google certified device. This is not a security feature but rather anti-competitive behavior from Google deployed by apps like Revolut wanting to pretend they care about security.
Revolut uses a bunch of shady closed source third party libraries in their app and it's one of these libraries banning GrapheneOS. These libraries are a major security risk and put user dat
... mehr anzeigen
Revolut is specifically banning GrapheneOS by checking for the build machine hostname and username being set to grapheneos. We've changed these to build-host and build-user. Combined with another change, this allow our users to log in to it again until they roll out Play Integrity API enforcement.
There's no legitimate excuse for banning using a much more private and secure operating system while permitting devices with no security patches for a decade. Meanwhile, Revolut's shoddily made app tells users they're banning GrapheneOS because they're "serious about keeping your data secure".
Revolut's app will stop working against once they start enforcing having a Play Integrity API result showing it's a Google certified device. This is not a security feature but rather anti-competitive behavior from Google deployed by apps like Revolut wanting to pretend they care about security.
Revolut uses a bunch of shady closed source third party libraries in their app and it's one of these libraries banning GrapheneOS. These libraries are a major security risk and put user data at risk of being compromised. Revolut is not taking user security seriously at all and is cutting corners.
There's no legitimate reason for any app to ban GrapheneOS users. It has the full standard security model and massive security improvements. There's no logic in banning GrapheneOS. It makes no sense for them to ban anything when they permit a device with no patches for 10 years. It's performative.
GrapheneOS fully supports standard Android hardware attestation for verifying the hardware, firmware and operating system along with the app that's using it. See grapheneos.org/articles/attest…. If apps insist on checking device integrity, that's the only way they should do it.
Play Integrity API checks that Google's monopolies are supported through devices licensing Google Mobile Services and integrating their browser, search engine, advertising, etc. It's anti-competitive and clearly illegal. Multiple governments are taking regulatory action and are in contact with us.
Play Integrity API checks that Google's monopolies are supported through devices licensing Google Mobile Services and integrating their browser, search engine, advertising, etc. It's anti-competitive and clearly illegal. Multiple governments are taking regulatory action and are in contact with us.
I have the right to have Android GrapheneOS, I want privacy and I want my phone to be mine and not from Google or Apple or any other corporation in the world. Since Revolut does not provide me with secure banking, I changed my bank to "N26 - love your bank" the app works great and offers everything I had before. #grapheneos #n26bank Because Revolut doesn't understand our needs, the easiest and most painful thing for them is to change banks. #degoogle
Über Jahre hinweg hat die FPÖ den ORF zu ihrem Feindbild aufgebaut. In der Regierung will sie umsetzen, was sie seit langem ankündigt: den ORF auf einen „Grundfunk“ zusammenstutzen, die Finanzierung massiv kürzen und den Rundfunk damit dem Gutdünken der Regierenden unterwerfen.
Aus parteipolitischer Taktik will die FPÖ den öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunk ruinieren. Mit dem Ziel: Partei-Propaganda statt unabhängiger Berichterstattung.
Not sure if the following has been part of information and discussion around here. Apparently there are several Nostr relays that bridge, with or without asking for permission, profiles to somewhere else.
Actually at least over here I also could create a positive list, restricting access to only predefined instances.
That said, the "asking for permission" is if some instance simply mirrors profiles "without asking for permission" each profile or instance it pretends to mirror or duplicate. This in any case is basically about good manners, not technical possibilities.
I didn't dig into some apparent nostr discussion itself but saw the possibility to register a profile for mirroring it. Well, actually the only way this could happen in a correct respectful manner is that a profile follows an account that than interpretates that following as a request or permission to be mirrored.
Not interested in supporting bluesky or disrespectful folks in any way so I guess this list comes kinda preemptive handy. 👍
Die Welt braucht mehr gute Laune. Wir gönnten uns ein Frühstück in Mainz und feierten meinen abgeschlossenen ersten Chemo-Zyklus. Und doch verspüre ich Demut.
Die Welt braucht mehr gute Laune. Wir gönnten uns ein Frühstück in Mainz und feierten meinen abgeschlossenen ersten Chemo-Zyklus. Und doch verspüre ich Demut.
Naja, Größe ist vielleicht nicht ganz angemessen. Manchmal überkommt mich das Bedürfnis, größere Papierformate zu beschreiben als das meiner Kladde (16,5 cm x 12 cm, Zeilenhöhe 6 mm). Und dann […] …
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D. It is used by video playback software, emulators, and popular games including Valve's award winning catalog and many Humble Bundle games. \ SDL officially supports Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Support for other platforms may be found in the source code. \ SDL is written in C, works natively with C++, and there are bindings available for several other languages, including C# and Python. \ SDL is distributed under the zlib license. This license allows you to use SDL freely in any software.
Hui, schon wieder zog ein ganzes Jahr ohne Nachricht auf diesem Blog ins Land. Dabei war 2024 durchaus kein ereignisloses Jahr mit zwei Urlauben und einem neuen Hobby(!).
Schon Ende 2023 entdeckte ich in „unserem“ Rewe eine Postkarte mit der Aufschrift „Die Lust am Seemannslied: 6 Proben – 1 Auftritt“ des Seemanns-Chores Nürnberg – und meine Neugier war sofort geweckt. Ich war sowieso auf […]
Aktionskünstler:innen projizieren „Heil Tesla“ an die Fassade der Musk-Fabrik. Wie beim Hitlergruß zweifeln Medien, ob das wirklich wahr sein kann 👉 taz.de/!6059694/
Aktionskünstler:innen projizieren „Heil Tesla“ an die Fassade der Musk-Fabrik. Wie beim Hitlergruß zweifeln Medien, ob das wirklich wahr sein kann.
Faxverbot lässt Kommunikation zwischen ÖGK und Spitälern zusammenbrechen. Patienten warten länger, betroffen sind Bewilligungsverfahren, Operationen, Therapien. Kuriose Lösung: Boten ersetzen Fax.
Österreich ist viel weiter. Für teure Medikamente gibt's eBewilligungsservice, Genehmigung in 30 Minuten, elektronische Gesundheitsakte, eMediPlan, eRezept ,etc seit Jahren. Auch QES für jedermann ist erhältlich Nur das mit der Kommunikation haben sie verkackt
Symbolbild: schon wieder ein kaputtes Kabel in der Ostsee
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Three NFC stickers, each with the text “Tap For Art” overlaid on a colourful pattern
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Schotter, in the V&A Museum, London
Recreation of Schotter, Forge & Craft studio, London
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Hypolite Petovan
Als Antwort auf utopiArte • • •utopiArte
Als Antwort auf Hypolite Petovan • • •To begin with @Hypolite Petovan, the original idea is to offer for example to projects like @YunoHost :neopossum_box: or @Castopod :podcasting2: a profile on forum.friendi.ca, the same way our very @Friendica Support works.
... mehr anzeigenMost #fediVerse platforms have profiles on their own platform and/or a #mastodon profile, because that's the kinda standard thought and behavior. But actually to me it looks like the #friendica #
To begin with @Hypolite Petovan, the original idea is to offer for example to projects like @YunoHost :neopossum_box: or @Castopod :podcasting2: a profile on forum.friendi.ca, the same way our very @Friendica Support works.
Most #fediVerse platforms have profiles on their own platform and/or a #mastodon profile, because that's the kinda standard thought and behavior. But actually to me it looks like the #friendica #communityForum page capabilities exceed by far what mastodon or others have to offer. Well, I haven't digged into the fedi clone of reddit to see if that would be an even better option. What is true tho is that forum.friendi.ca is already long standing and our community has gone a long way, so there is in general terms "no single point of failure" like in other projects that depend on one main figure and that's it.
I consider our helpers community experience here, with all the followers of our helpers page getting resend the help requests posted to the forum, chiming in to help out and solve issues, very positive. So this is a proven setup and could help lot's of other projects out here too. Actually I do think that if implemented and adopted, it even could have a positive feed back loop for friendica itself, but that's like something on another page.
So having forum.friendi.ca already up and running, why not support the fediVerse community opening our doors to those who fulfill certain basic community standards?
This server here (tupambae.org) as well is only mend to be a forum server, and of course it's doors are open for any #fediPlatform that likes to have an own forum page over here, yet somehow to me it look's like forum.friendi.ca is the first natural and ideal candidate for something like that.
Of course same goes for a #fediAdmin, #activityPub or #APIdeveloppers community support forum, if that is desired or useful.
Right now in general terms the fedi lives on using some tags or maybe some a.gup.pe addresses, but it's actually us who hold and develop that option for more than a decade now inside the federation itself.
Was that more clarifying
@hypolite?Hypolite Petovan mag das.
Hypolite Petovan
Als Antwort auf utopiArte • • •@utopiArte Unfortunately some features of Friendica groups are only available from Friendica, like the !-mention that transfers post ownership to the forum account, which means it isn't distributed to your followers that don't also follow the group.
So I don't think it's a good all-purpose solution for the larger Fediverse.
utopiArte
Als Antwort auf Hypolite Petovan • • •Looks to me that I have to disagree @Hypolite Petovan in the sense that their may be certain specific extras only friendicans have, but that does still mean that the rest is available for others, and that that is already a lot.
Actually my main experience and focus is with mastodon federation, and for what I can see, addressing forum pages I follow makes those toots show up on the forum page and is reflected back to federated instances of followers.
(or am I wrong 🤔 )
Also, if the the !-mention that transfers post ownership to the forum account is something implemented by activityPub specifics and useful, it's more likely that other platforms start to consider to code that implementation too, if they see that it's used and useful. So in any case that would be one of the positive feed back loops I was referring to.
Hypolite Petovan
Als Antwort auf utopiArte • • •Michael 🇺🇦
Als Antwort auf Hypolite Petovan • • •!simply is meant to transmit that post only to the group account that then reshares it.Hypolite Petovan mag das.
Friendica Support hat dies geteilt.
Hypolite Petovan
Als Antwort auf Michael 🇺🇦 • • •Friendica Support hat dies geteilt.
Michael 🇺🇦
Als Antwort auf Hypolite Petovan • • •Hypolite Petovan mag das.
Friendica Support hat dies geteilt.
mʕ•ﻌ•ʔm bitPickup
Als Antwort auf Michael 🇺🇦 • • •> The ! simply is meant to transmit that post only to the group account that then reshares it.
In other words, it acts on the server side that sends the post, addressing only the forum page at the other instance as recipient with a public post, right?
Doesn't sound like any negative or restrictive effect for the rest of the fedi platforms.
btw
Traviling thru helpers profile here on troet.cafe (mastodon).
Looks normal, besides the disruptive display of single answer toots.
@hypolite
Friendica Support hat dies geteilt.
jeSuisatire …ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ
Als Antwort auf utopiArte • • •> tema en edicion v05
That's spanisch my friend, don't tell me the batteries a fully drained ..
@edit @utopiarte my dear @helpers as it looks like those guys are lost in translation, time, space, the #fediVerse and everything ..
:)
teilten dies erneut
Friendica Support und jeSuisatire …ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ haben dies geteilt.
utopiArte
Als Antwort auf jeSuisatire …ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ • • •jesuiSatire …ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ hat geschrieben:
¡Why do you tell people to not
follow us @jesuiSatire …ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ ?
jeSuisatire …ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ
Als Antwort auf utopiArte • • •> ¡Why do you tell people to not
follow us @jesuisatire ?
What are you talking about @utopiarte, are you out of your mind?
I only told them to edit you.
Friendica Support hat dies geteilt.
EDITion | EN
Als Antwort auf utopiArte • • •utopiArte
Als Antwort auf utopiArte • • •@Steffen K9 🍮, here are some questions and consideration that I guess concern you in the first place, can you have a look at them?
Inicial post hat geschrieben:
Steffen K9 🍮 26/01/2024 hat geschrieben:
... mehr anzeigen@Steffen K9 🍮, here are some questions and consideration that I guess concern you in the first place, can you have a look at them?
Inicial post hat geschrieben:
Steffen K9 🍮 26/01/2024 hat geschrieben:
utopiArte
Als Antwort auf utopiArte • • •Can you try to mention @Steffen K9 🐰 for me please, somehow it feels like he doesn't get my mentions and respective questions on this topic here.
Steffen K9 🍮
Als Antwort auf utopiArte • • •utopiArte
Als Antwort auf Steffen K9 🍮 • • •ok's
Is there a way to help you or chime in on moderation or administration of forum.friendi.ca to make things like the proposed happen @Steffen K9 🐰 ?