weeknotes – Page 11

Week 204

Drive by-ing these notes ~~two~~ ~~three~~ four days late. Yeah, these are those kind of weeks.

Gave my first lecture on data visualization at the Willem de Kooning. That was fun.

Then after I went straight to This Happened Utrecht #9.

Met with the people behind IAmsterdam and updated on Statlas with Kilian Valkhof.

Finalized the rules for maguro and codified them.

Spent a day at Buro Pony working on a very aesthetic affair.

After that it’s mostly a blur of hustling at maguro. Staying in at the studio ’till midnight day after day. Hard hours but good work and company. So no biggie.

Quoting Jack Schulze: “It’s brilliant to have these people around.”

And finally the version was finished and we went off boozing.

In the weekend it was mostly doing catchup on other projects. Did the briefing and wireframes for hermosillo. Updated the event page for March 12th’s Hack de Overheid.

Then closed off the day with an architectural dinner.

Touched up some stuff on Sunday and prepared my WdKA lecture of the following day.

Week 203

Work

Made a lot of progress on Statlas during the course of the week. The domain should be live this week and we should see tangible results this month.

Maguro got updated and deployed again.

Planned the ineraction and design for acapulco and briefed designer Martijn Broekman. Finally finished those wireframes in a café in Brussels and sent them in.

Made a tentative start on hermosillo.

Mony dropped by for a crash course in Django and he promptly ported his entire Layar project TUdarover.

We setup a Github organization for Hack de Overheid to get the code conversation flowing before the event and give our code a place to live after. Also got a ton of communication things done for the event on March 12th.

Teaching

I also had a meeting to draft the road map for the small minor in data visualization I will be giving at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam. Also I prepared the first lesson during the weekend (lesson day: Monday).

Writing

Got my review of “Zero History” by William Gibson published on de Republiek der Letteren (the Republic of Literature). I had spent quite some time writing and polishing it and I was quite pleased with having it published.

That also went into print that same Thursday, so yeah pretty cool:

I also published my review of the iPad episode “Money & Speed” of the Tegenlicht documentary I got a preview of.

The site for the Apps for Amsterdam application contest went live. Thanks to the Waag Society for putting that online so quick. We of Hack de Overheid are going to work with them to make it one hell of an open data wave this year.

Events

I attended Mobile Monday mainly to see Ville Vesterinen present about their pervasive magic game Shadow Cities.

On Saturday I made a quick trip to Brussels to attend FOSDEM which I had never attended before. It was a fun chance to sit in the DataDevroom and watch presentations about open source data processing and graph visualizations. It was good to meet fabricator Rejon again too (who I had last said goodbye to in Damascus).
What I noticed though at FOSDEM was the nearly complete absence of web development and assorted technologies. Also that while you cannot go to a technology conference these days without being hit by ethics and politics, that engagement was strangely absent at FOSDEM (except probably in the keynote by Eben Moglen).

I also registered for the Infographics congress on March 4th though I find the focus on print media and infographics archaic and distasteful. Let’s see if we can change that.

Hardware

Got myself an iPhone4 because the old 3G wasn’t pulling it anymore after the countless iOS upgrades it had seen.

Also got an iPad keyboard dock from the bargain bin. Thanks Maarten den Braber for picking that up for me. Seems I have turned into that Apple completionist:

Week 202

A different format for these weeknotes:

In meetings

Met with the guys from Amstel Media and had a chat over at Sanoma Media. Met up with Ton Zijlstra after way too long and Henk Jan Bouwmeester.

In work

Project Statlas made solid progress on both the renderer and the interaction framework. The map is looking pretty spanking on Polymaps, but no screenshots yet.

For Maguro I modelled the entire game in the database and made a beat scheduler using celery. Using that I created a fully playable prototype.

In writing

Wrote about how the process of government contracting ICT projects could be made more transparent in Dutch: “Transparantie in ICT-aanbestedingen”

In events

We announced the next Hack de Overheid for March 12th. Then we started scouting locations and drafting the program for that event. It’s looking good!

I was at the VPRO launch of their iPad documentary and I got an advance copy to play with. Together with Iskander we coined the term Sensor Parkour: “in an ubicomp surveillance world, ‘sensor parkour’ could become a novel situationist exercise.”

Then I went to another event about the end of the publishing industry. Funnily enough most book publishers in the Netherlands have no clue about the consequences the internet is going to have for their business.

Friday we had impromptu drinks at @ouroffice along with an attempt to hack the OV-chipkaart which was a lot of fun and got a bunch of people to come out. Expect more of that and probably also a dataviz ignite somewhere in April.

Week 201

Solid progress on Maguro in Utrecht. Spent a large amount of time over there also to evaluate the PLAY Pilots project’s succes. Started building a prototype that runs more in real-time and on timed events (and all that in a traditional web framework).

Progress on the design framework of Statlas. This week we should see that coming together and look at the progress on the renderer, but I’m getting ahead of ourselves here. I rounded up the research I did on personal mapping platforms that are online now.

Dinner with Johnny Wonder Jaap was nice, collaboration on the public affairs side of things looks promising:

Apps for Amsterdam should come along nicely and we should announce a bunch of stuff this week (or else!). You can pencil in March 12th as the next Hack de Overheid event but don’t tell anybody I told you.

I also went to the Open Streetmap drinks in Amsterdam. Wherecamp EU may take place in Amsterdam, so that would be very good geo news.

Week 200

For project Statlas, we kicked off the design framework with Alexander and made some good strides with that. Also met with Kilian for progress on the renderer.
I acquired a small Python script from Henkjan that we were allowed to release as open source, a Rijksdriehoekscoordinatien to WGS84 converter. I had been meaning to write this myself, but felt we shouldn’t duplicate the effort.

I did a call on Monster Swell to collaborate more with designers at any and all levels and got some response to that. More are welcome.

For project Maguro I started prototyping the game’s data model and the message queue using Celery. Thursday I went on to make a playable barebones version of the game in django. The team was pretty psyched about that turned out.

Administration wise started the new year with a new sheet of books.

Socially, I went to the Django meetup. The Djangocon in Amsterdam is going to be awesome. Also the ISOC had their New Year’s Drink on Thursday.

Lastly on Friday I had a meeting with the city of Amsterdam and the Waag for Hack de Overheid to talk about the series of open data events this spring and an app contest for the city.

Week 199

Last week was the week things got into gear again for 2011.

Monday I built a quick javascript mashup with the new API by NOS called ‘Ons Nieuws’ (Our News): http://monsterswell.com/projects/onsnieuws/ inspired by the trend in glanceable display websites. The write-up is here: “Glanceable news using the new NOS API”

Blogged about the catch-22 in Dutch open data: “Bloggers, transparency and our Catch-22”

Hack de Overheid is also busy bringing a whole lot of awesome to open data in 2011. Stay tuned and look over there for announcements.

Started setup for the next iteration of Dutchstats. Kicked off the technical part of Dutchstats (the renderer) with Kilian Valkhof, drafted a set of functional and non-functional requirements and setup a project repository.

Did a bunch of deployment stuff to create a rather complex django site for mérida which is a relief to get up and running.

Switched prototyping maguro from twisted to Django because that is still the technology I’m most familiar with (prototyping should not be about technology acquaintance). We had a meeting with the team and after some discussion we played a game concept that was pretty fun.

Friday we had a geek breakfast with Peter and Taco having a full English at Greenwoods. The food was good as was the conversation. We should really do this regularly.

Then I spent the rest of the day with James Burke working on the new version of the Hack de Overheid site.

In the weekend I picked up a second hand Grote Bosatlas 51e editie for a real bargain. It still is a fantastic cornucopia of maps and infographics. Leafing through it made me all nostalgic like I used to do back in school exploring far away places on the map.

Week 198

The ephemeral week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Wrote a bunch of stuff that was due among which a report on the demise of TipiT.

Was busy doing planning for Dutchstats with a week0 briefing.

Also did some stuff for Hack de Overheid a new website for which should be ready soonish.

Week 197

Got some reinforcements at the office:

My business cards for Monster Swell have also arrived, more about those in a separate post: Information Compression on Paper

Started writing a document describing the end of life of TipiT for our investors. Nothing new there but still interesting to reflect.

Took in Dutchstats and starting planning that in earnest. Subsequently spent most of the day in Numbers. The phrase: “Project management is hard, let’s go shopping.” did come to mind…

I had been increasingly frustrated with Dutch media’s treatment of the Wikileaks affaire but also was somewhat too busy to write anything better. Inbetween business Jaap and I posted a ‘drive-by essay’ on a week old nrc.next blog post.

Wednesday was a kickoff on prototyping for Maguro which needs to leave the ephemeral stage sometime quick. That night there also was a very well curated Ignite at Mediamatic about games. Fifteen presentations is a bit on the long side, but none were really boring or bad due to the Utrecht gaming scene having come out in force.

The rest of the week was filled with more of the same and tying up loose ends for the end of the year.

Our office also said farewell to one of its members, typographic hero Gustavo:

A new addition is already eager to get started in the new year.

Week 196

Last week was mired by the flu which made it a bad week for production (and only slightly less bad for meetings).

Some notable stuff did happen, however.

We kicked off project Maguro which is going to cause our all star team a lot of work —and a lot of fun— in the new year (see Kars’s Week 182).

Tuesday night we had the fourth UX Book Club Amsterdam discussing the book Game Design Workshop. eBuddy hosted us and it was a lot of fun both talking about game design, how it pertains to interaction design and reminiscing about old games.

Wednesday Urbanode was launched officially, my write-up: Urbanode: first steps in environmental control

Friday I met as part of a delegation by Hack de Overheid with people from the city of Amsterdam and the Waag. Lots of stuff going to happen with regards to open data and apps in Amsterdam in 2011.

Week 195

A somewhat more downpaced week with a bit of a cold in the middle, but:

One big ticket was finishing and launching the Bandjesland addition to PLAY Pilots.

Hung this poster on the studio:

Unfortunately lost the other half on the subway (don’t ask…).

Some more nice additions to the office:

I got an iPad thanks to Peerz a new professional rating and recommendation startup.

Had a bunch of meetings with people: Utrechts UIT Bureau, Vrij Nederland and de Groene Amsterdammer.

Friday Bandjesland was launched and I worked a bit on the new Hack de Overheid site and went into a wonderful work-free weekend.