Fri, 27 Jul 2007

pwyky wiki

Like many hackerly-inclined individuals I tend to develop or research a lot more stuff than I release or comment on. The reasons for non-release vary but generally relate to the non-trivial amount of work it takes to put even a half-baked idea on a webpage or blog entry. (A workload increased by the accompanying handy case of perfection-itis.)

The amount of work required to document something depends significantly on the tools at hand so in light of that I've installed a version of the pwyky python wiki on code.rancidbacon.com. The version I'm running is actually a cosmetically modified version of a modified pwyky version hacked by a guy I ran into during my Google Maps hacking escapades. There's some notes on the modified pwyky version and they include some Apache configuration suggestions also.

I'm treating the site as a "one-way wiki"--it's intended to make it easy for me to update it, not in order foster community additions. Various obvious reasons apply.

The updated site will include project documentation and general link-storage--I guess a local del.icio.us replacement--in an attempt to reduce my browser-tabbage when I'm exploring half a dozen paths at once. While much of the wiki is intended purely for my use I made it public on the off-chance it ends up being useful for anyone else.

With some use of mod_rewrite I think I even managed to preserve the existing URLs on the site.

"Oh, I'll chuck it in the wiki" will hopefully help with my information processing activities... :-)

Posted at: 02:05 | category: / | Tags: , , , | Comments ()

Mon, 26 Mar 2007

Browser tab grab bag #4

A few more random tab closings...

Planet NZTech feed links

While I think of it, I also just added the Planet NZTech RSS 2.0 and Planet NZTech Atom feeds to the page header so it should be more discoverable.

Christchurch needs "co-working facilities"

One of the biggest negatives about being self-employed and working from home is the social isolation that often goes along with it—a complaint I have had re-enforced by my contact with other home-based self-employed people. A possible solution is to have a shared office with other self-employed people. The downside to this is there is a big jump from working from home to working somewhere where you need to pay a weekly office rental with a medium- to long-term commitment. An alternative approach is to make use of "co-working facilities".

A co-working facility provides office space (or desk space) on a more casual basis than a traditional office rental arrangement. The "tenants" may be a mixture of "foundation" and "casual" where the former receive a better daily rate in exchange for an agreed term commitment.

Here are a few related links describing various implementations of this idea:

I would really like to see a coworking facility develop in Christchurch. In fact, I would like to see multiple facilities develop in Christchurch. Ideally I think a city like this should support multiple suburb-based coworking facilities: I don't want to trade a no-commute lifestyle for a long commute to an office!

At present I wouldn't be in a position to bankroll such a project but I do wonder if existing organisations or individuals would be in a position to support a development like this through financial support or provision of currently under-utilised space. Perhaps one or more of these:

Speaking for myself simply having a space with internet access and power would be great. Any offers? :-)

Tracking code with Google Code Search

When Google Code Search was released I decided to track down a little watermark I put in something I did a while back.

In the early days of Google Maps when I had developed an approach for displaying a map in a non-Google page I put up some example JavaScript. Because JavaScript tends to be a very "cut and paste" language I thought I'd put in a unique identifier to see where the code snippet ended up. So, in a couple of places I attached the suffix _frb to variable names. When I searched for container_frb it delivered two results—one which seems to acknowledge the source and one which doesn't.

I think the next item will get its own post...

Posted at: 04:40 | category: / | Tags: , , , , , | Comments ()