Edward Andrew Robinson

It has been ages since I last posted, and for that I am sorry, but I have kept up with my twitter and identica accounts. Things have been moving really fast for me of late and as a result my blogging has slipped. So whats new in the world of earobinson?

1. I am now working for CAE, more precisely CAE PS out of Toronto, and I am loving every moment of it. They have a very open culture and encourage the use of open source tools when appropriate. I have been able to use Ubuntu to host some of the websites I have developed in Django. This has kept me very happy. I can honestly say that I think that my Ubuntu, and Open Source knowledge set me apart.
2. I have been getting more and more into photography with my new Canon EOS Rebel T1i, you can follow me on flickr.
3. I have been ramping up my fitness (and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu skills) at Toronto BJJ.

This brings me to my goals for the future, I am falling in love with Django and as a result I want to play with it more and more, now my current hosting provider 1and1 has served me very well up to now. But now that I want to start playing with Django more I need to get a hosting provider that can support Django (because I want to show off my work of course). I would hope that any new hosting provider I use could support both Django, and ruby on rails (as I may want to play with it in the future). So dear lazy web what do you recommend? And I know I could use Google app engein but I like the idea of pure Django, not some hack, I have also looked at djangohosting.org but would love some recommendations from actual users of hosting plans.

Any advise lazyweb?

I love lists, and I love open source software. Whats more I find that I am using more and more open source websites in my daily life. Without further ado here are 8 open source websites I use:

and two that I don’t:

Update: I just realized I also use tr.im as my url shortener and they will be going open source.

A lot of this post could also be applied to the Ubuntu Brainstorm but since I use reddit (an open source social news site)  a lot more I will make this post about reddit, yet it could apply to any voting site.

I use mainly reddit, and google reader to get my news online. Google reader is great letting me subscribe to sites I am interested in. Reddit is great letting me see what other people think is cool and find new sites that way. In order to decide what topics to show reddit lets users vote up or down a link and the displays the top links on the front page.

reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web — personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you’ll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is submitted and voted on by users like you.
– http://www.reddit.com/help/

I love the up or down vote system. It is much better than the star system for me (looking through my rhythmbox library most songs have either 4, 5, or zero (unrated) stars) and the up down system seems to work a lot better for me. However looking at just my liked, or disliked votes does not tell the whole story. I have 1000’s of liked votes but less than 50 disliked votes in the 2 years I have used reddit. Looking at a screenshot of my reddit homepage tells an even better story.

Looking at the above screenshot you can clear see that today I have clicked on 15 links but only liked 2 one of which I did not even click on. I feel that this is an important metric that reddit is missing from its stats, looking at the comments of a posted article tells you how many up and down votes an article has got. Maybe at least to start tracking and telling us how many clicks an article got is a good start. Why, well because if you have two sites one has 100 up votes and 100 clicks VS one with 100 up votes and 1000 clicks that info tells you something about the article. What this tells us yet I am not sure but maybe one is a niche article that a small community of people really care about as to read the article and up vote it (for example a colour blind patch for fluxbox, and yes I don’t even know what that would be), but maybe the latter is the release of the next version of ubuntu. I feel that this information could make reddit even better and as an added bonus for those of us who use reddit on more than one computer reddit could keep track of our clicked links for us.

Edit: This has been submitted to reddit. Please up vote it.

Using gmails spam filters I normally don’t have a problem with spam. However my one email that does receive a lot of spam is my Ubuntu email address. Interestingly enough a few open source members have droped there open source email addresses due to this exact problem. Jeff Bailey has disabled his @gnu.org email address, and talked about doing the same to his Ubuntu address. Daniel Robitaille has also posted on the problem. Now I like my Ubuntu email address so I’m not about going to delete it but I did receive three rather “great” bits of “email” to it today (Ill only include screen shots of two).

What I thought was “great” about these messages was that they where “sent” to Colin Watson and Corey Burger. Yes they got the emails wrong but I recognized the name instantly. I did find it funny that I had “antecedently” received personal emails to the both. It would be great if we where to use google apps, to run the Ubuntu emails that way we could take advantage of google great spam filters but I know that wont happen. I guess for now I’m stuck reading emails about the sexual prowess of Colin Watson and Corey Burger.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Free Software Open Source Symposium 2007 (FSOSS07) this year and had a great time. While I did take some pictures I am still using my cellphone to take pictures since my digital camera has not been replaced yet (read poor university student) so I only took a few, and I will post them soon. If your interested you can check out the flicker page, they also recorded all of the speakers if you missed any. A few of the speakers I really enjoyed are:

• Bob Young, Co-founder, RedHat, CEO and Founder, Lulu.com
• Dean Jansen, Outreach Director, Participatory Culture Foundation
• Ross Turk, Community Manager, Sourceforge.net

I hope to be able to attend next year. Thanks everyone who made this possible.

In light of the fact that I am now bald, today I uploaded a new hackergotchi to the planet ubuntu bzr tree. Uploading the picture was easy, making the picture was a bit harder. This is my first time using GIMP 2.4.0-rc3 and it seems that the selection tools don’t work the same way that they used to. In the old gimp I was able to make a selection the drag that selection around in order to remove it. It would seem that in the new gimp the only way to remove a selection (That I my girlfriend, could figure out) is to cut (<ctrl>+x) that selection. On the other hand the fuzzy select still works great.

TIP: when using fuzzy select you can use the ctrl key to un-select things that you have selected.

All in all I would say the update was a success. I just wish I had had a larger source image, (The large scale version of my new hackergotchi is a bit jagged around the edges, stupid digital camera being broken).

Large Version

From Me

Small Version

From Me

On a side note it would be fun to make a web page linking all the planet ubuntu faces to there websites / launchpad IDs, any thoughts on this? (Update: it could be just like the gnome one unless we all ready have one?)

Also I have three midterms this week, wish me luck.

The other day I stumbled upon Chris Harrison’s internet map, the only problem I found with his map is that I wanted to know exactly which country each network connection was in. So using the DIMES public data repository, and 1site1moment’s country boarders I have mapped the internet for myself.

From Public

Feel free to download the source code and come up with your own internet map, I would love to see what other people can come up with.

UPDATE 01: Image is back up, If the source code link wont work for you email me and I will send you a copy. Feel free to host this anywhere you like just post a link back to this site.

UPDATE 02: Source code can now also be found here.

UPDATE 03: Would love to see what other people can do with this.