Richard Eriksson

"He was already telling me about the very important book -- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority." [link]

Boris gets an email from the development team. I'll send debugging reports about the altitude problem. [link]

A figure skater herself, Julie provides insight into a sport I can't not look at when I come across it on TV. [link]

Today we celebrate the 4th anniversary of Urban Vancouver's launch with an upgrade of the software that powers it to the latest and greatest, Drupal 5.7. With it we've improved the back-end a little bit, added a few little features. Technical details to follow for those who are interested.

• Spam filtering is now powered by the newly-released Mollom, so some people might see those annoying CAPTCHA's you've come to hate. This does not apply to people who have signed up for accounts with Urban Vancouver. I've gone back and outright deleted some posts and comments that are obvious spam, though I've surely missed some. If you notice something that is obviously an attempt to spam our service that escaped our radar, please point it out (gently) via our contact form with the URL.
• A WYSIWYG editor: we haven't tested it out fully, so it's not the default yet. If you go to your user profile page, and then click "edit". You'll see a link called "TinyMCE rich-text settings" and set that to "enabled". Then your blog posts will have a Microsoft-Word-like interface to do bold, italic, and create links. We're also testing out an easy image placement tool that cuts down on the steps to adorn your posts with photos or other images. Look for the camera icon when you have this enabled, which will give you a pop-up window with previously-uploaded images and the option to upload your own. At any time you can click "disable rich-text" and go back to regular HTML mode, but for many, the rich-text editor will be easier to use.
• OpenID support. This is still a little geeky, so for those with an OpenID provider, you can go to your user profile and click "OpenID Identities" and match up Urban Vancouver with your OpenID URL, meaning you have one fewer username and password to remember.
• We now have a better sense of the reader statistics on Urban Vancouver. For example, at this writing, over 450 people subscribe to the front page RSS feed. If you needed incentive to post, that extra little audience might give you a little boost in attention to what you have to say. As some of you know, I've been cross-posting from my personal blog Vancouver-related writing, with a link back to my original post, and I encourage others to do so too.

Anything out of the ordinary since on the site a couple of days ago? Please let us know and we'll try to fix it. The website's design could use a little tuning up, we know. We're looking to get a few more people writing featured articles on Urban Vancouver, and we can announce that Duane Storey will report for us at this year's Juno awards in Calgary. This will be a little preview our coverage for when next year's Canadian music awards are hosted in Vancouver.

An extra note for those who have read this far: I've been using the Urban Vancouver channel on Jaiku as a miniature change log for the site. (Jaiku is like Twitter where you post 140 characters, forcing creativity through brevity. While Jaiku has a few more features, it's also invite-only at the moment.) The idea is that I keep the site a little accountable by noting some of the tweaks we make to the site, as well as a notice each time that we've added a a feed to the Urban Vancouver blog aggregator.

That gives me a month to read last year's selection. Oops. [link]

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In other words, it doesn't tell me what to think about it. Looking at the works even gave me an idea for a piece. I know! [link]

I attended the conversation hosted by Gordon Price with Jacques Khouri and Margaret Mitchell, activists in Kitsilano and Little Mountain, respectively. [link]

[Cross-posted from my personal blog.]

Last night I attended my first meeting of the Vancouver Public Space Network (VPSN) Mapping & Wayfinding group. They are a group of mapping enthusiasts who want to organize collaboratively mapping Vancouver's public spaces and have some interesting ideas on how to do so, including a web service with a REST interface, but also hand-drawn maps. Let it ring throughout the world that I consider Joey deVilla the master of the hand-drawn directional map, after showing me how to get to his work from his former house back when I visited in 2005.

Having heard about it two hours before and deciding to go with one hour to spare, I pre-loaded two of my maps on Flickr. One was the map I made of my bike route home, and the other was the map of a SkyTrain Explorer walk in Burnaby. I got to talk about the latter a bit, and showed off my GlobalSat DG-100, and we talked about the different methods to track points when mapping out various items in the city, like surveillance cameras, bicycle locks and billboards. (Especially "non-conforming signs": the CBC has a short story on the Lee Building advertisement that Vancouver City Council ordered removed after the owners lost their court battle to keep it up. Read more at the VPSN's page on corporatization.) I suggested taking a photo, since the times will match up with the GPS logger, but there are other good, paper & pen methods too.

After the meeting, instead of doing the dishes, I looked deeper into geocoding on the Mac and added the 'geo' microformat to all of my Flickr photos hosted on justagwailo.com that are tagged with a longitude and latitude. A good example is the photo I took of Dave Olson: if you have Firefox and the Operator extension, you can use the actions associated with location to get KML (Google Earth) or view the location on Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps. (I already provide a small Google Map on each geotagged photo hosted on my site.) At last night's meeting, I also learned about geocoder.ca, which gives you latitude and logitude of locations if you give them a fuzzy description (like an address, or an intersection). They also have an API, for free or for fee. Wasn't there a web service floating around that would accept your text and send you back geotagged HTML if it found what it thought were locations inside that text?

I haven't decided whether to participate in the billboard documenting effort—it will depend on how much work surveying a quadrant will be—but I plan on attending their next organizing event. The next VPSN Billboard project meeting from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the MOSAIC Community Meeting Room, located at 1720 Grant St. in Vancouver BC [event listing]. Just for fun, that previous sentence is marked up in the hcalendar event listing microformat.

Last night I attended my first meeting of the Vancouver Public Space Network (VPSN) Mapping & Wayfinding group. They are a group of mapping enthusiasts who want to organize collaboratively mapping Vancouver's public spaces and have some interesting ideas on how to do so, including a web service with a REST interface, but also hand-drawn maps. Let it ring throughout the world that I consider Joey deVilla the master of the hand-drawn directional map, after showing me how to get to his work from his former house back when I visited in 2005.

Having heard about it two hours before and deciding to go with one hour to spare, I pre-loaded two of my maps on Flickr. One was the map I made of my bike route home, and the other was the map of a SkyTrain Explorer walk in Burnaby. I got to talk about the latter a bit, and showed off my GlobalSat DG-100, and we talked about the different methods to track points when mapping out various items in the city, like surveillance cameras, bicycle locks and billboards. (Especially "non-conforming signs": the CBC has a short story on the Lee Building advertisement that Vancouver City Council ordered removed after the owners lost their court battle to keep it up. Read more at the VPSN's page on corporatization.) I suggested taking a photo, since the times will match up with the GPS logger, but there are other good, paper & pen methods too.

After the meeting, instead of doing the dishes, I looked deeper into geocoding on the Mac and added the 'geo' microformat to all of my Flickr photos hosted on justagwailo.com that are tagged with a longitude and latitude. A good example is the photo I took of Dave Olson: if you have Firefox and the Operator extension, you can use the actions associated with location to get KML (Google Earth) or view the location on Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps. (I already provide a small Google Map on each geotagged photo hosted on my site.) At last night's meeting, I also learned about geocoder.ca, which gives you latitude and logitude of locations if you give them a fuzzy description (like an address, or an intersection). They also have an API, for free or for fee. Wasn't there a web service floating around that would accept your text and send you back geotagged HTML if it found what it thought were locations inside that text?

I haven't decided whether to participate in the billboard documenting effort—it will depend on how much work surveying a quadrant will be—but I plan on attending their next organizing event. The next VPSN Billboard project meeting from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the MOSAIC Community Meeting Room, located at 1720 Grant St. in Vancouver BC [event listing]. Just for fun, that previous sentence is marked up in the hcalendar event listing microformat.

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"While many commonly popular definitions of creativity amount to little more than references to self-expression or flamboyancy, we designers should not be so lax or obtuse in our concept of it." [link]

I've been using it, via Ma.gnolia, on my blog. I'll investigate the API in order to use it directly. Interestingly, accounts are OpenID-only. [link]

The trance/electro house producer knows Tommy Lee, and has a DJ name/online handle with a story behind it. [link]

In case there was any doubt that he is a real American war hero. [link]

For those of us who spend half (or more) of their time in a terminal window. [link]