Coffee & Diffie

I've been hanging out in Palo Alto for the last week, meeting new coworkers at Socialtext, and visiting old friends. This last Saturday morning I made a new friend. I was waiting for my coffee and I spied a man sitting at a table using a laptop. Not a rarity around these parts by any means. But this was a man I was pretty sure I'd seen before at a Foo Camp some years ago... "Excuse me, are you Whit Diffie?" "Yes, I am." "Hi, my name's Ingy döt Net"... Whit and I talked a bit and then I ran off to have breakfast with Lyssa.

This morning I ran into Whit again and we ended up talking for about an hour or so. I think I am cursed with this condition that when I meet someone with interesting ideas, I feel compelled to turn those ideas into projects. Whit left me with two interesting ideas...

1) While discussing the concept of "ingy.net", he impressed on my that a query url is a long lasting resource of good information on a subject. For instance http://ingy.net (this blog) may become dead some day, but http://www.google.com/search?q=ingy+dot+net is much more robust. This led me to the idea of creating a blogware wrapper, that basically contained the latest google info about me, without me needing to lift a finger.

So far I have create http://i.ingy.net. For now, it is a simple redirect to google, but may be more interesting at some point. It might be an interesting meme to make domains like 'i.' or 'iii.' to mean, "general information". At this point "www" has very little meaning, but lots of people type it in regardless.

2) Whit is interested in NSA factoids and during some talk about this and Wikis, we came to the conclusion that a wiki would be a decent tool for a group of people with that common interest to share what they know. The main difference is that this data is more structured in nature and wikis are pretty much about free form content.

This discussion rekindled my interest in two older ideas of mine: Kwiki and CogBase. I think that there is a lot of potential in what I would called a "typed wiki", a wiki who's pages have a type and that type implies a certain schema (aka required data). That way you could set up a wiki that contained both free form prose, and also pages that made you fill in a form for certain data. Imagine a baseball wiki. You could have pages on players that required all the typical "baseball card" info and also free formed pages that talked about things like a certain famous game.

Whit was quite an interesting man, but given my current project schedule, perhaps dangerous to meet with too often. ;-)

A Twelve Pack of YAPC

I just got back from Chicago. I really love that place. I usually tell people, "Chicago is a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there", but I had a great visit.

I went salmon fishing on Lake Michigan with my dad and my brother. We caught 6 fish and drank a few beers, then we met up with mom for a nice family dinner.

I also got to see my old friends Dave, Brooke, Margy and Emily. They really took good care of me. Thanks!

The main reason I went to Chicago was to speak at my 12th YAPC conference. That's me in that picture at the end of my first ever naked impromptu lightning talk!

I've been to 6 North America YAPCs (2001,2002,2003,2005,2006,2008); 5 in Asia (2004-2008) and YAPC Europe in Amsterdam (2001). I've given talks at every one of them.

This year's YAPC was really inspiring to me. Larry Wall's talk was the best one I've ever seen him give. I think it rekindled my spirit to work on the following major (for various definitions of major) open source projects:

• YAML
• C'Dent
• Perl 6
• Jemplate
  
• Kwiki
• Moose
  

as well as my many Perl modules like Inline, IO::All, pQuery, Module::Install, Module::Compile, JS, WikiText and Vroom.

The best part of YAPC is always seeing your old Perl friends and making new ones. Too many people to list here. I love y'all, and y'all know who you are.

Good Morning Ingy

Last week I got back from a couple months in Taiwan, with a side trip to Tokyo. Nice to be back to some proper Seattle June weather... cold, wet, miserable. Ah well, we still got the most best coffee houses and I live right in the middle of the that sweet spot.

In the past I've always gone to the nearest cafe, Online Cafe, for my morning americano. While the coffee and people there are awesome... that's just criminal. Within 8 blocks of me there is Victrola, Caffe Vita, Bauhaus, Vivace, Fuel, Republik, Stumptown, Presse, and oh so many more. I love these cafes but never go to them on any regular basis. But this week two things changed...

I became (at least temporarily) a Morning Person. I thought I could avoid the jetlag coming back from Taiwan this year for sure. I did it last year, but alas, this year I got it bad. I woke up every morning at 2:30 or 3am for a whole week. Luckily Victrola opens at 5:30am so by then I was stoked to do something... like get my coffee. On the second day I figured out how to carry a coffee on my motorcycle!















My first Ducati mod. A MotorCycleCoffeeCozy!

Now I can easily go check out a new cafe every morning for like the next 10 years!

Taiwan was a great trip. I got to hang out with old friends Gugod and TvCafe. The Kogai family treated me to 10 days of bliss in Tokyo. Larry and Gloria Wall were there as well (Perl geek nirvana). I actually sat next to the same person on both of my flights to and from Taiwan and get this... he lives 2 blocks from me in Seattle and his name is Jimi Hendrix! We're going to hang out this weekend. Lyssa from LA came out to spend the last two weeks of Taiwan and Tokyo with me. She really knows Tokyo and I know my way around Taiwan, so it was a perfect match.

Good to be back in Seattle and America for a while. Obama FTW!