Here’s more riding by Charles for your enjoyment.

For once that there was a show that was “preaching” for simply being a good human being, with no pedantic or overly religious aspect… Yes, the belief in karma is indeed anchored in religion (arguably philosophy), but it was so far removed from the environment featured in the show (White Trash America) that it had no theological bearings in this context.

All in all, it’s big shame and I’m going to miss the Hickey crew.

Well, I guess it’s back to professional skateboarding for Jason Lee then. ;)

Click here to view the embedded video.

]]> http://tekartist.org/blog/2009/05/23/death-of-the-stache/feed/ 0 http://tekartist.org/blog/2009/05/21/spots-spots-spots/ http://tekartist.org/blog/2009/05/21/spots-spots-spots/#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 21:08:34 +0000 Stephane Daury http://tekartist.org/?p=577 Well, I enjoyed posting Montreal BMX/skate spots pictures the other day, so here’s a fresh batch. These are some if the most obvious “drive-by” spots right on the path of my daily bike commute to/from work. :)

Here are a few of the ones we remembered to take pictures of.

Construction happened during the Winter, so the even larger outdoors park (94,000 sq/ft) is not built yet. With 83,000 sq/ft indoors, I think we can wait another couple of month. ;)

Sorry for the abysmal quality, but I had more important things on the mind: riding, riding aaaaand, riding! :) Don’t worry, tons of pictures will surface online this week for sure.

But what a board! And especially dear to me is what it represents, since the fact that I am fanatic about extreme sports, and have been since I was a child, is far from a state secret.

In 2009, Mumble will be presenting three people who have had an outstanding influence on the skateboarding industry over the last decades with pro skateboarder diplomas and honorary pro model decks.

The first person to be induced in this hall of fame of sort, in association with Powell Peralta and The Skateboard Mag, is none other than legendary photographer J. Grant Brittain, the founding photo editor of The Skateboard Mag.

And today, I received my own copy of this limited edition deck, number 17 of the 99 that have been produced. And to top it all off, I also got myself a classic Ripper shirt to go with it. Can you feel the joy? It’s positively palpable, isn’t it? :)

Now, I can’t wait to see who the next two legends will be. I’ll definitely try to get these boards too, as well as a[nother] personal treat: a re-issue of Steve Caballero’s original Cab Street, my first real skateboard, in Martinique back in the 80s.

Hey, it could be worse, I could have been tempted by one of the Rip the Ripper tribute art pieces! Not that I’m not, but there’s no way I can afford one of those… :p

Update 1: I so feel like mounting trucks and era-specific wheels on this bad boy and ride the [...] out of it! But I’ll be strong…

Update 2: I forgot to mention that the proceeds of the sale of these limited edition boards will be going to the Grind for Life foundation, helping people with cancer.

If you are not familiar with snowskating, just check out the following embedded video to get the gist of things.

YouTube – Chairlift Skeptics… A Snowskate Flick

An appropriate short description would likely be: the newest surefire way to injure yourself while laughing your head off. :p

Looking at the various kinds of snowskates out there, there seems to be three general types:

• simple boards with an oversized tail and nose, referred to as single deck
• what looks like a standard skateboard made out of marine plywood, with a mini snowboard underneath, aka bideck
• and the same, but with multiple mini-skis (2 to 4), with or without suspension

The easy way out for me would have of course been to just grab an old skateboard and gone for it as is, but my kids and I have done that many times in the past and although it’s fun, there is just not enough kick to it. What became obvious was that the elevation from the ground that trucks and wheels provide was what I was looking for in the rig.

After finding a photo of the now out-of-production Danny Kass Snowskate model, it became apparent that simply joining 2 old skateboards might just do the trick nicely, at least to mess around with and see if there’s any sense in spending more time or money on getting setup.

So that’s what I just did. You can see the basic steps I took by browsing to the photo set of the build process I uploaded on Flickr, or you can use the following embedded slideshow (full screen mode will let you see the attached instructions).

Voilà! Nothing too fancy, but it promises to be a blast to at least try out. :)

The kids and I will go do just that shortly.

Updated 2009-01-18: I’ve added some picts of our test run to the slideshow. Fun stuff! As expected, it works best with heavily packed snow. Not a problem in Montreal. ;)

Meh, why not? So, I now have to detail seven things about me – some random, some weird – then find seven soul to harass with my new found mischievous streak.

Here we go:

1. First thing first, I’m the proud dad of three beautiful boys between the ages of almost-3 to 9-and-a-half.
2. I didn’t actually write my first PHP app. I wrote a script to convert it from Perl to PHP for me, around 1998-99.
3. My favourite place to be is on a half pipe, with my son(s) and bmx/skateboard/snowboard, no matter the location.
4. Although I live in Montreal, Canada, I’ll never EVER get used to its weather, yet still like it here.
5. I dug part of our previously 4-feet-high clay basement by hand so I could have a wood workshop in our downtown duplex.
6. I spent my childhood in France (0-12), teenage in Martinique (12-17) and adulthood in Canada (17-…).
7. And finally, I hate how English spellcheckers highlight properly spelled words, such as favour, colour, and behaviour. :p

Now, for my preys, aiming for fresh ones:

1. Pierre-Hugues Pellerin (@pierhugues), who will probably mention Ruby, despite his initials.
2. François Lafortune (@quickredfox), who could write and illustrate a comic book published only in pure Javascript.
3. Xopher Murtagh, who can play the trombone and probably find a way to get GNU/Linux running on it, somehow.
4. Janina Szkut (@nanananini), who could probably mention something about knitting and PAX in the same sentence.
5. Konstantin Ryabitsev (@mricon), who is probably already teaching four or five languages to his newborn son, who’ll probably read them fluently by age three.
6. Sylvain Carle (@afrognthevalley), Praized Media’s CTO extraordinaire.
7. Evan Prodromou (@evan), who will (and should!) probably mention Laconica.

And to conclude, the complete rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

After installing the 32bit version of Ubuntu Server 8.10 in VirtualBox 2.0.4 on my MacBook Pro (OSX), I was faced with the following error message when starting the VM, which I found also happens on other platforms:

From Wikipedia:

Physical Address Extension (PAE) refers to a feature of x86 and x86-64 processors that allows more than 4 gigabytes (GB) of physical memory to be used in 32-bit systems, given appropriate operating system support.

Fortunately, the fix was as easy as pie:

• Once VirtualBox is up and running, select your Ubuntu Server VM.
• Go to the “General” configuration screen and select the “Advanced” tab.
• Check the “Enable PAE/NX” option.

Here’s a screenshot:

Try starting your VM again, and all should go as planned. It did for me.

Looking forward to it!

Now Web publishers can easily write about local places while growing traffic and ad revenue. Praized is the first free local search platform designed specifically for social media sites like blogs, social networks and other online communities.

I said, back in January, how happy I was about joining the Praized team, and how much potential I was seeing in the company. Suffice to say, I’m just as ecstatic as I was back then, kicked up a notch or two.

Hey, maybe now I can reach inbox zero and start blogging again. ;-)

Edit: we’re getting some pretty good reviews so far. Crossing our fingers. Still work to do.

Now, if you also happen to be on Mac OS X, one annoying thing is that EC2 UI is configured by default to be used on Linux (and GNOME). Looking online, all I could find were questions on how to set EC2 UI on OS X to use the proper terminal and ssh, but no answer.

Fear not! Yours truly spent a few minutes on the case, and ended up finding a solution that is at least viable for myself, and will hopefully be for you as well. The trick is that I have X11 installed on my OS X box anyway, so I just use the binaries intended for this package.

There you have it. Now, I can right click on any instance listed in EC2 UI and select “SSH to Public DNS Name”. X11 and xterm are both seamlessly launched and proceed to log me into the desired instance.

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

Not taking the time to post much these days (too busy), but I couldn’t miss this one, being in the middle of developing stuff for the platform (among other things). :)

The new site at UN Data allows anyone to access the United Nations Data Access System. This online, easy-to-use database was created by the UN in order to provide current, relevant, and reliable statistics to the whole world, for free. Using UN Data, you can access statistical information on populations, demographics, trade, commodities, agriculture, employment, the environment, industry, education, tourism, and much more.

That’s awesome. CIA World Factbook 2.0 anyone?

1. Introduction
2. Noogl: WINNERS: Panel’s Choice
3. A2B
4. SneakSend
5. BlitzDirectory: WINNERS: People’s Choice
6. Reverse Payment system
7. Heron
8. Mandelbrot: 2nd most popular choice; my vote.
9. GoalR
10. Microfinancing for Macrolenders

And a few extra presentations, outside of the competition.

1. TikiWiki 1.10b
2. Digest (in French)
3. Business and Open Source Software

Congratulations to all the teams!

Blitzweekend is an unique experience where designers, developers, and entrepreneurs are challenged to create a working product in 48 hours [...] Find a solution to a current problem, meet and innovate with bright creatives, work in an environment built for rapid development, and get feedback from experienced entrepreneurs.

1. Introduction (EN/FR)
   Introduction and last minute match ups.
2. Team Introduction (EN/FR)
   Organizers and Sponsors.
3. Rules and Principles (EN/FR)
   Question and Answers.
4. Presentation – Ben Yoskovitz (EN)
   Starting and raising money for a startup.
5. Presentation – David Fugère (FR)
   Utiliser Ruby on Rails pour programmer des applications Facebook.
6. Presentation – Matthew Harrison (EN)
   Financial and administrative pointers for startups.
7. Presentation – Arach Tchoupani (EN)
   The benefits of Python for rapid web applications development.
8. Presentation – Yann Rousselot-Pailley (FR)
   Aides et subventions gouvernementales pour entrepreneurs Québécois et Canadiens.
9. Presentation – Vincent Guyaux (EN)
   Panelist tips for the contestants.
10. Presentation – Alistair Croll (EN/FR)
    “Making it Viral” (English starts 3 min. in)

Mainly being on the techy side of things, I particularly enjoyed the more business oriented presentations given by Ben, Matthew, Yann and Alistair.

Good luck to all the participants! See you on Sunday, when I come to film the demos and the event’s conclusion.

The company on Thursday announced the first 10 teams of competitors in its $30 million contest to send a spacecraft back to the moon to gain greater insights into the solar system and to find new sources of clean energy.

More info is available on the Google Lunar X Prize web site.

Google. Space. Clean Energy. $30M. What’s not to like?

Via Digg.

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the biggest and most popular in the United States. For the fourth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-less collection of songs that – thanks to Greg Hewgill – can now be downloaded for free via BitTorrent.

A little consolation for not being able to attend this year. :)

In this article I will take a good look at XFN – the microformat for describing relationships between people. I will look briefly at what it is and the basic markup needed to add the information to your sites, before then going into depth, looking at the benefits you can get from that data by extracting it and using it in different ways. Extracting the data is easier than you think – there is probably a library for your favorite language already! If not, there are also some web services that could do the job that I’ll show you below.

Via a Microformat tweet.

There are always seemingly good reasons to continue doing things the way they were done in the past, and transition always presents challenges. As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based infrastructure themselves. They are two basic reasons for this situation: Change of existing operational services is hard. So is changing people behavior.

One of the advantages of working for a startup is that there is no baggage to deal with, leaving you with great freedom of innovation.

On the other hand, vendor and infrastructure lock-in is something that we, as technologists, have all had to deal with in one form or another. The challenge is to develop an ability to spot nascent trends and innovations early on, so as to gage and potentially leverage them as they emerge, rather than miss the boat and be left behind.

I think I’m not too bad at what I do, but then again, there are people like Sylvain, Joe and Chris (to only name a few) who always help keeping me modest on this front.

I am in fact very happy to announce that I have now officially joined the ranks of the Praized Media team.

Praized Media is a startup company working on a web-based application that will enable you to find and discover local places and merchants with help from people you can trust. It’s also a tool that will structure local conversations within blogs and a new platform for local search providers to generate leads from the untapped social media market.

I’ve been following Praized since mid-2007, when they really started to show up on my radar as a serious[ly fun] and innovative venture, oozing with potential, and backed by a winning trio of entrepreneurs: Sebastien Provencher, Sylvain Carle and Harry Wakefield. A fact which was only reinforced when Garage Technology Ventures decided to fund the company last September.

I’ve been given the opportunity to increasingly involve myself in the company as a consultant since last December. The way things were evolving, I could not longer deny the clear fact that this is a project I want to be an integral part of. Something I can unequivocally see myself focusing on, even providing segues into some of involvements in the web and open source communities.

Luckily for me, the feeling seemed to be mutual and today marked my first day on staff. Suffice to say, I’m sporting a mile long smile about it all.

Praized is currently in stealth-mode, so although I can’t say much more, I can definitely hint that great things are coming! And with the people already on board, I’m in for a fun ride, striving to keep up with and help them in their efforts.

Thanks for the opportunity, team! But shame on you though. Now I’ll have to can that site I worked on for my consulting biz’… ;-p

Compressed-graphite field plotter:
This example of inscriptive technology is a dactylically manipulated lignin/cellulose-encased crystalline carbon allotrope allowing shear force deposition for semiotic and representational modification of planar compressed-cellulose substrates.

I dare you to think of what the device might be before checking the answer out.

Note: The whole video is great, but the amazing stuff starts about half-way into it (~2 min.).

I’ve been stopping myself from buying another BMX for years, thinking “bald dude + trick bike = not so cool”, but seeing stuff like this just makes me think “Hey, I’ve got kids, don’t I?”.

Gotta show them how to not get hurt, right? Right? Riiiight!

Worked for skateboarding and snowboarding, after all. :p