The English Cemetery

Kelpi is a new web service and project created by a coleague of mine, Nando Quintana. It's an application to share code snippets, recipes and tips, all free software, with an API and else. Here are some things Nando himself has posted regarding a very promising web project, Freebase.

I'm not a programmer, so I could hardly make any use of it, but nevertheless I sent Nando my wishlist:

• RSS versions for all pages (already in the workings, as I've learned afterwards)
• Let the posting interface also show a field for description. Something's coming in this sense.
• .po based i18n, and then l10n based in Launchpad.net so people may contribute with translations.
• A non-code version. For users like me, of course, but also with some practical uses: Kelpi for haiku exchange, famous quotes repositories... clickable URLs (just another free delicious clone? yes, why not?)
• Follow list: user and/or tag aggregation: add usernames or tags to a list, and that becomes your "follow list": subscribe to that single RSS to view your personal Kelpi setting. Possible uses: free Twitter clone: in a non-code version where people post "status messages", "presence notes" or any short notices, the follow list becomes a river of tweets that you follow.
  

The Basque Country is located in the axis of the area where Franco-Cantabrian paleolithic art was developed in Cro-Magnon times... Lascaux, Altamira are eastwards and westwards from our country, and although the findings around are not as spectacular as the ones from those sites, there's a bunch of caves with interesting things.

One of those is Praileaitz, where Magdalenian marvels have appeared. See documentation in English here.

A delicate Venus also was unearthed recently, and paintings have been discovered. New galleries haven't been explored yet, and more caves are presumed to exist in the same hill. Yet Praileaitz is endangered. Look at the map and at the picture: the red arch, that's Praileaitz. A sister-cave called Praileaitz 2 is no longer there...



Scientists and locals have been asking for protection, to stop the mining, and finally a decree with protection measures has been issued by the autonomous Basque Government. I'm just shocked by the decree. The mining will go on, dinamyte explosions are permitted just 100 meters from the paintings. A official map now depicts protection areas (!) shows radiuses with dinamyte cantities allowed. Whatever is left of the mountain, the area where unexplored galleries and caves may exist, can be exploited until disparition. I didn't expect such a joke from a Department of Culture, which is the one that produced this.

Thousands of years of past legacy, a legacy that could be saved for the generations to come, is endangered. What for? 10 years of mining explotation (an economic activity with zero positive side-effects in society, culture, technology or overall local wealth except for a handful of people) and all will be gone.

Please raise awareness if you can. The other side is trying to do so as well: the Real Sociedad, regional football team, has a new sponsor for 2007-2008, Construcciones Amenabar, the mining company responsible for this.  If you happen to know institutions related to prehistoric art, make them know what's happening here. Visitors to the Basque Country: there's beauty and culture at the Guggenheim Museum, yes, but if  you are offered the option to write down a feedback note at any site that you see, mention Praileaitz and ask for effective protection. Thanks.

It's been nice to meet with Jaiku's founder Jyri Engeström twice this week in our little city Donostia. First in this course, and then a meetup with the local geek & blogging scene yesterday. In the university thing, Jyri basically followed this slide show, adding some notes about creativity.



Yesterday, at the meetup, Cadius Donostia Lab (Cadius Donostia being the local mailing list), he spoke more freely about Jaiku.

• Its origins in mobile, partly because of the background of Jyri at Nokia's R & D section.
• Its particularly brilliant phone app, suitable for some Nokias, which was quite unknown to us, web users largely, living in a place where flat access rates for mobile Internet are not an easy option.
• He explained how the mobile Jaiku app does celltagging when posting photos to Flickr. Look at the machinetags in Jyri's pics. Interesting talk about opening databases of geolocated cell antennas.
• Business model: ad based, and we'll see, let's focus on the product. Don't want to be distracted by carriers asking for particularly tailored apps.
• Compact team, 7 people. Technically, Jaiku begun on Ruby on Rails, then the web side has been built in PHP, but many components, particularly in the mobile side, are in Python, so they're going to rearrange it pythonically in Django.
• Localisation. We'll see multilingual Jaiku. They've got advice on this from the i18n team at Mozilla foundation at it will be an open process, if users volunteer to translate into Basque, there will be Basque Jaiku.

The locals also gave some talks. I made a presentation about how I see the interaction between geo-things and these microblogging platforms (Jaiku, Twitter and also Facebook, not microblogging properly but with some resemblance to it): I think Tagzania may have things to do interacting with microblogging sites from that geo perspective. Gorka Julio Teketen spoke about his nanoformats in Twitter and showed some clever Yahoo Pipes examples. He announced that the nanoformat wiki-based process and discussion goes now to Microformats.org, it's been kind of accepted into that group after some contacts between Teketen and Chris Messina, who has been pushing the idea of picoformats. Now, around Microformats.org, pico and nano may converge hopefully.

David Gonzalez Ketari, a local hacker who acts like a one-man-orchestra, announced Nirudia.com, a fotolog platform for geolocated pictures. A mixture of Panoramio and fotologs... Ketari's multilingual bloggin app Nireblog has seen great success over the last months, and maybe he'll repeat that with this.
    
And those were not the only speakers. We all interacted a little bit. 20 people talking freely around web ideas and projects... A good afternoon. We lost the Aubisque finnish of the Tour, won by Rasmussen.... Well thought, I think that we lost nothing.

Next week, Jyri Engestrom, the finnish creator of Jaiku, a microblogging/presence web service, comes to Donostia to take part in a summer seminar about creativity and entrepreneurship, have some holidays, and also share a meetup (or lab meeting) with geeks and web fans of the local group Cadius Donostia. Fortunately, 'll be at both events.

Jaiku is fun. I find it more interesting than Pownce, though I see that Twitter has more traction. Then, Facebook came in storm to capture us grown-ups, and that's also some kind of microblogging / networking app. So, can you open accounts in all those and hope to be consistent? Difficult. Right now, my Jaiku account has my Twitter feed among its inputs, and in Facebook I have both apps, the one for Twitter and the one for Jaiku (also Powncer!). So, what I do is, I send msgs to Twitter from Facebook, and as those are fetched by my Jaiku, they're also there. Straight and clear (well, almost).

I'm preparing a lightning talk for the Cadius Lab meetup with Jyri. I'll try to make some points around Geography in microblogging and presence services.

Quite a long time since I didn't attend an "international artist concert". But Björk's visit to the Guggenheim in Bilbao was worth the little journey from home. It was a good concert. It sounded best when electronic machines pumped up the volume surrounding Björk's voice with trip-hop noise, in songs like Joga, Pluto... The famous Reactable was fake, or it seemed like that: whenever they used it, nothing happened to sound; rythm, notes, and the whole soundscape was independent of that gadget.



On the other hand, the local Basques in the audiences were just getting anxious as the concert evolved and Björk, how Scandinavian of her, kept repeating Gracias, gracias, gracias in Spanish... Just before the final song, Declare Independence (was it specially chosen?) she finally said Eskerrik asko in Basque, after consulting someone behind the curtains. Finally! we screamed (many people commented this to me afterwards). But just as the song ended, she forgot what she heard previously, and just repeated: gracias.

Don't worry, we still love Iceland.

Like many others, I'm new to Facebook. For a newcomer, searching for your city (Donostia) it's like a logical step and I found this group, not too crowded but interesting: San Sebastian Donostia Gastronomy.

I received the following welcome message: We have only just created this group but will post, Ryan, Martin and I have visited Donostia a number of times and eaten at Mugaritz, Arzak, Martin B, Zuberoa, and our favourite Akelarre.

Our favourite football team in Spain is of course Real Sociedad.

I replied that that list of restaurants is excellent, but, you know, most of the time one doesn't choose those local multi-star Michelin places to dine ;-) I don't know Mugaritz yet, for instance. Rather eat on the cheap, and there's plenty to do that in Donostia as well. My latest find, a Japanese-Basque little cave near home, Txubillo. Interesting food there, I commend it.

On the other hand, regarding Real Sociedad, I cannot agree with my new coleagues at Facebook. I'm just so happy they fell to Division 2 of the Spanish football league... Meanwhile my hometown team Eibar went up from Division 3 (called 2b, really) to 2, so I'll attend an interesting derby against Real next season ;-)

The Rolling Stones were in town (Donostia) last weekend. Tickets ranged from 60 to 105 euros. It's supposed that these megastars fill stadiums, but that was not the case apparently... Just 24 hours before the concert, some public institutions began giving away tickets to everyone. The public radio gave around 2000, and in the very City Hall of Donostia, public officials handed tickets by the dozens in a somehow hidden way.

The concert was heavily subsidized, yet it seems that expectations were not met, and there was something in the contract saying that at least several thousand people should be at the stadium. No voids in sights for the Stones. Therefore, the public institutions decided to trhow more taxpayer money on the hands of these boring old millionaires, with that free ticket fiasco.

An insult to all those that payed the tickets. Fraud and insult for taxpayers in Donostia. How much did this cost to us? No, they won't tell us.

More info in Spanish at this blog.

I had never been to a Barcamp event, so I was gladly surprised with the self-organising principles, networking opportunities and good atmosphere that I found at last week's Wherecamp, which I attended with my Tagzania coleague, Gari Araolaza.

I even dared to give a lightning talk of my own. Unlike the Ignite Talk at Where 2.0, which went quite well, I just couldn't adjust to the available 5 minutes, and it went 1 minute long. Sorry!!!

My talk was Historic Maps. Best viewed at this Flickr set, as the presentation was just a succession of screenshots, showing historic maps of the first ever Wherecamp event of history! Map applications that participants showed and discussed, centered on the spot where the unfoncerence was held, the Yahoo Campus in Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley. You can browse over those historic screenshots in Flickr; I've added descriptions and links in the descriptions.

Just to illustrate this post with a couple of mashup maps of the event.



This one at Mapufacture created by Andrew Turner, that aggregates several Wherecamp created geoRss feeds (including one from Tagzania and plotted using Mapstraction's options, in this case, to show in in the 3d visualization of FreeEarth created by Poly9. Wow! FreeEarth can't now show very close details of their 3d model of the Worlds, due to lack of free detailed close imagery, but somehow the Poly9 has ways to overcome that shortage:

1. getting Mike Liebhold actually build 3D structures,
   
2. join the forces of the free market act, and let real estate developers construct things, as they have done with the moon's 3D equivalent of FreeEarth, the Moonplex.

And my own mashup:



I went to the Yahoo Campus at Tagzania, clicked on the Here tab to say I was there at that moment, and a message was sent to Twitter, including the code snippet with L: that would that tweet to appear in the exact spot of Twittervision.

Finnally, another joke, the extension that I made over Kyle Mulka's interesting new application, Cartiki, where plans and images can be uplodaded to make for detailed maps, as the exact spots where Wherecamp sessions were held.



Instead of Geotude's micromapping solution based in square units, Cartiki's approach is using a long long long breadcrumb that may come down to the tinyest detail!

A nice web application that we developed for the regional administration is now available in English. The Street Gazetteer of Gipuzkoa, is a directory-like organization of all postal addresses of Gipuzkoa (a Basque province inhabited by half a million people) plus other geographic features as mountains, rivers, roads... all geocoded to their exact locations.

As a matter of fact, each postal address of Gipuzkoa, each home in Donostia or any other town, has its own Permalink. I live in Heriz 47, Donostia for instance. Even every kilometer point of a given road.

We decided we needed a new laptop for the family, and we decided it should run free software. Last year we tried to do that buying a macbook, but it didn't work. Before installing Linux, its Mac OS X system didn't detect the wifi system we had at home. It was clearly a malfunction of those Macs shipped last year (case explained in Spanish here). We left the Macbook at the shop, and they refunded us. This year, we bought a new machine, a Sony Vaio laptop with Windows XP, and now we've installed Ubuntu Feisty (thanks to my coleague Txus Sanchez, specially).