Sometimes it’s easy to get despondent about bugs showing up in software you write. It’s possible to spend so long on a project that it almost feels like one of your children; any perceived imperfection hits you at your core. We’ve been doing some bugfixing lately, and it can occasionally feel a bit like you’re playing whack-a-mole.

But then you use other software.

I’ve been playing with a major open source PHP survey tool with the brief of making it work in Japanese and Chinese (on a Win2003 IIS box). Now, allegedly it can support these character sets, but in fact it has a little difficulty – so I spent a couple of hours adding the right headers and tweaking things to make it end-to-end UTF-8 compliant. It’ll now take pretty much any character set you throw at it; great.

Until you try and export the data to CSV, so you can import it into Excel. It turns out that Excel has a little buglet when you import CSV files – it ignores the character set and basically assumes everything’s in ASCII. In particular, Japanese looks a bit like a kitten has had a little dance across the keyboard; it’s total gibberish. It turns out you have to rename the CSV file so it has a .txt extension, in order to trigger Excel’s “tell me all about this file because I don’t understand” wizard, which asks you how it’s encoded and makes everything okay again.

After this little adventure, I feel much better about everything. Bugfixing is continuing apace (and will speed up as of next week), but on reflection I think we compare rather well.

This has been an unashamedly techie post, and I apologise – my next one will be about mountain vistas, blue sky thinking and synergy. Or something.

This is pretty neat – stick any URL at the end of gabbly.com/ and you get a personalised chatroom for that page. Click the link to chat on my weblog.

Not quite sure what the business model is, but it’s pretty neat. I think live chat scratches certain itches other forms of communication can’t match (although the ultimate goal, I think, would be videoconferencing / Skype-style VoIP within the page).

We’re looking at writing a chatroom plugin for Elgg communities, incidentally, so look for that functionality showing up on elgg.net sometime over the next few weeks.

http://lucafiligheddu.blogspot.com/2006/06/firefox-voip_114959011311941395.html

From the browser-as-platform department: voice functionality built directly into Firefox.

http://www.mosdeux.com/vitalsigns/

A short film told in American Sign Language. Amazing.

Link

The organizations announce availability of Microsoft Office add-in that enables easy access to Creative Commons copyright licenses. This is huge.

http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/40483#623656

A fantastic answer to a question on Ask Metafilter about how to talk to “troubled” children, from a 13 year old. Rings very true and highlights important problems; definitely worth a read.

http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/news/archives/Main/Is+it+all+over+for+bloggers.htm

Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian, defends the ongoing value of newspapers in the face of competition from bloggers. Includes the full lecture in streaming video.

Life is full of changes. Some of them are mundane (new haircut, new car); some of them are exciting (new job, new family). One of the most exciting things you can do is take something you love and transform it from the seed of an idea into something much bigger, that takes you to places you never imagined you could possibly go. Elgg has been one of those things for me.

Some of you might be aware that I’ve been working with the University of Oxford since March last year. I have very much enjoyed my time with them, but it’s meant that Elgg has been a part-time proposition for me. This seems incredible, given the work that’s gone into it, but is nonetheless true, and has meant sometimes working into the small hours of the morning getting things right.

I’m pleased to announce that from Monday, July 3rd, this will no longer be the case.

Dave has been close to full-time for a while, and I’m very happy to be joining him. I think it’s fair to say that we’ve accomplished a lot under this arrangement – but I think it’s also fair to say that we’re going to be able to accomplish a lot more. Indeed, there are some very exciting things lined up for the project over the coming year or so.

And for me? Well, excited doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Posted without comment, although it fits very well with the things Dave and I have been writing for the past month or so about how your data can be misused if you don’t have control of your system:

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites.

The heat is almost stifling here in Oxford; all the windows are open and sun is streaming in through my window. I hope you’re all having similar weather, although I also hope your offices have better ventilation than mine.

Cory Doctorow Visits a Radio Shack is very funny and pretty much sums up my feelings about overuse of the web 2.0 meme.

Now, I’ve got to admit, I’ve blown the Web 2.0 horn a number of times – and you’ll find the word plastered on the side of my Elgg space. I actively use Flickr, and often read my del.icio.us inbox, although I rarely actually bookmark anything there myself. I think tagging is great and that it’s hugely important for ordinary people to be able to post content onto the web as easily as possible.

But people, please, be serious. The meme has jumped the shark. When even TechCrunch – a prime candidate for “riding a hype wave” if ever there was one – vents about the hysteria you know there’s got to be something wrong. It comes down to this: the technology never, ever, ever comes first. People must come first, and that means everything must solve a problem; you need to know what your requirements are, and figure out what technology will solve it (or if it’s better solved in the real world), rather than saying, “isn’t this neat?”

Once again I need to point out how mortified I would be if Elgg was used to replace any real-world teaching, or real-world interaction. I’m not, to be honest, keen on the kinds of online community assignments where people ask, week upon week, students to discuss things online. Unless you’re into distance learning, why not do this in person? You’ll very likely have a much richer discussion. I can see it as a gateway method to get people used to online systems, but so much of the educational experience is about socialisation that I find continued use a bit scary.

One of the interesting things about all this is seeing people’s frustrations with using first-generation online participation software; basic forums and things like that. A number of times I’ve been asked by people ignorant about what I do if they can have an online space where people share resources with whoever they want, find each other by interest, and – best of all – keep their space for whatever they do. After spending some time diving into available software they’ve had time to think about what they actually want, and it’s always a pleasure to be able to say, “yes, that exists already”. The answers to the inevitable follow-up questions – “can we customise it?” “how much does it cost?” “will it work with our LDAP directory?” – tend to make people happy as well.

I’d be just as happy to recommend people other software if their requirements didn’t merit Elgg. You want to run a single blog on a page somewhere? Wordpress is great, and can be adapted. You want live chat? There are a number of interesting solutions, which can be adapted. You might also find that your exact requirements aren’t met by anything, and something has to be built. But it’s much better to do this than warp what your users will find useful around some software that isn’t quite right.

This is what scares me about the web 2.0 hysteria: a lot of this software won’t be quite right. As Dave has been saying (and as I did a while back), a lot of it is also dangerously commercial, with explicit intent to mine user activity for monetary gain. I don’t think that’s appropriate for an educational institution, which is supposed to be about both research and providing learners with the best possible learning environment, surely?