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Move to the new server nearly complete…

Just a quick update for the Barbelites among you. As I mentioned very late last night, I’m moving all my various sites over to a new home – a home just for them, which they don’t have to share with the rabble. The move has been mostly painless (thank you Pair.com, with one small exception – the Barbelith database still appears to be in the wrong place and turned off. So – for the moment at least – regular Barbelites are going to have to wait a little longer to get their fix of huggles, comics and revolutionary politics. I’m on the case, though – just waiting for some final words from support… Hopefully by the end of the day? Fingers crossed!

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A little down-time while I move servers…

In case you’re wondering why the comments functionality has been turned off and why I’ve got a little quiet, I’m currently orchestrating a switch to a new dedicated server for Barbelith and plasticbag.org and I want to make sure that none of the databases will lose any information during the switch. As you can probably tell from the degraded code at the bottom of each entry page, I clearly never tested with comments turned off and there are a few bugs there which I apologise for. There are likely to be a few things more or less savagely broken after the transition as I try and turn everything back on, so please bear with me. It should mean a fully functioning Barbelith in less than twelve hours, although I’m not going to promise anything right now. (Oh and an enormous vote of thanks to all the people who sent in donations towards getting this server transition happening – it’s been an enormous help.)

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Belaugh from the sky…

This may seem many months too late for other people to be interested, but I was roaming around Google Maps the other day and decided to try out their satellite imagery for the UK. Until a few days ago there had only been risable quality, super-long-distance photos of Britain – and if you zoomed in you got the standard grey squares that are more traditionally associated with sensitive parts of the US. Anyway, I typed in my parent’s postal code and came back with this startling image:

I’ve had to shrink it down a bit to get the full image to fit. You can see the original picture here though: Belaugh on Google Maps. Frankly, it’s stunning. I always knew that my parents’ village was situated in a little bend in the river. I’ve written about the village a couple of times in the past: Factfile: Belaugh, Norfolk is the best summary I’ve got. But I’ve never really been able to visualise it, and maps of the area are incredibly spotty and ill-focused. But suddenly I get to see the whole village from an entirely unexpected angle – I can see the farm nestled in the bend itself. I can see the ‘Unsuitable for Motors’ road and how secluded the village is – no one ever needs to drive through it on the way anywhere… And when I zoom in still further, I can see my parents house, and the river where I used to go canoeing and the church with the hidden passage. Yay, Google. Nostalgia, information, context and perspective – showing me things I never could have seen alone. Wow.

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Links for 2005-06-29

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Links for 2005-06-28

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Totally exhausted in San Francisco…

So I fly back from San Francisco today at the end of the weirdest holiday I’ve ever had in my life. I keep forgetting how many people I know out here. So enormous thanks to Leslie, Ben and Mena for housing me for a few days. Thanks to Nat Torkington, Cal Henderson, Ryan Carson, Kevin Werbach and Trevor F Smith for hooking me up with the nerds. Thanks to Heather, Lance for wandering around with me. And general waves to Jesse James Garrett, Jeff Veen, Dave Sifry, Ev Williams, Derek Powazek, Stewart Butterfield, John Poisson, Molly Wright Steenson, Ross Mayfield, Suw Charman, Kevin Marks, Leonard Lin, Anil Dash, Brad Fitzpatrick and all the other bloody millions of neat people I got to hang out with while I was out there. Mostly, I feel like I didn’t get anywhere near enough time to chat to you all – I’m particularly regretting the end of conversations with Jesse, Derek and Dave.

Anyway, on the flight back I’m hoping to catch up with the note-taking and the synthesis of all the stuff I’ve been up to, but probably the defining memory of the trip for me was getting to go to PARC. It’s a place I’ve read about so much and so many times and it was extraordinary to see it – however briefly – in person. So here’s my representative picture of the whole experience (you can see more on my Flickr photostream).

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Links for 2005-06-26

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Links for 2005-06-25

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In which Tom visits PARC…

In what is definitely a highlight of my weirdest holiday ever, today I got to travel to California Ave on the Caltrain and visit PARC to talk to them about my stuff around Social Software for Set-Top Boxes and the work that Matt Webb and I did over the last couple of years at the BBC. It was possibly a more exciting trip for me than it strictly should have been, I fear – I think even I was surprised by how nerdy I turned out to be. Trevor F. Smith was looking after me – he took a few embarrassing fanboy shots of me lurking by the PARC sign and then gave me a bit of a tour around the floating earthquake-secure buildings, past the self-assembly robot room and around the back of the laser experiments suite. As you do.

Having a native nerd show me around was beyond cool. At a certain point we ducked into a room with an enormous photocopier in it, Trevor pulled back a little door and pointed inside. “That’s the world’s first ethernet cable“, he said. I’m embarrassed to say that this got a little sincere ‘oooh’ noise out of me. But that was nothing compared to when we passed the door with the ‘Smart Matter’ sign on it. The door was very firmly shut, and all the windows had blinds so you couldn’t see inside, but secretly I knew they were developing Flubber. Trevor refused to confirm or deny this speculation.

The session itself went relatively well – I got some interesting questions about some of the work we did on Phonetags and some useful directions to investigate in terms of more formal directions in tagging and hypertext research. I also got to hear a bit about the research that they’ve been doing, and was delighted to see that we were coming to some very similar conclusions from very different directions.

After our chat, Trevor was decent enough to drive me back into San Francisco. The views along the way were completely stunning and he took me up to pose by this really grotesque statue of Father Junipero Serra that points out over Crystal Springs lake. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the pictures, but only in as much as I like to have a record of what I’ve done, not because they’re good pictures of me. Trevor seems to have a particular knack for making men look like shabby balding transexuals in his photographs. I’m not entirely sure I’ll be sharing them with the world.

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A quick apology to Barbelith users…

This is a bit of a heads-up and an apology to regular Barbelith users who are going to the site today and finding that it is completely unfunctioning. Barbelith has grown in scale enormously over the last six years to the extent that it can no longer properly function on a pair.com shared server. Mainly this is a problem with the sheer number and size of the database requests that it generates. Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that I need to move it and the rest of my online empire to a dedicated server, which means more monthly costs and a fairly substantial amount of organisational work in the meantime. Unfortunately, I’m also on holiday in San Francisco at the moment (my first holiday for nine months or so), I don’t have regular sustainable access to the internet and this is is not the kind of large-scale enterprise that I want to undertake in net cafés over wifi or sitting in the back of Starbucks. So unfortunately, as of this afternoon, Barbelith will be closed for at least three or four days, and potentially for a full week.

I’d just like to apologise to all of the regulars for this annoyance – I promise I’ll sort it all out on my return to London (if not before). In the meantime, if you want to donate to the server fund to keep Barbelith running then you can do so by clicking on the button below. Sorry again.