JudoGeek Blog

A new project... MartialConversations.com

Lance Wicks — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:19:34 GMT

This week has been rather busy and exciting for me.
Mike (from http://www.thejudopodcast.com ) and I have launched a new website http://martialconversations.com a social networking site for Martial Artists.

The catalyst for this was the launch of the European Judo Unions "community" social network. I had been aware the EJU site was coming since Bath when I had seen some info on it. I also know the British Judo is looking at social networking too, though via FaceBook.

We were really impressed with the vision of the EJU to create a social networking site, though the site itself annoyed me a bit. It was rather... well rough around the edges. And closed to people outside Europe (though I gather this has changed). It was also (obviously) Judo only and also limited to the EJU and it's member organisations, be that implicit or explicit.

So Mike and I said "well hell, lets create our own site and see what happens", so, here we are on Friday and the site has been live a couple of days and all is good. We have a few members on the site and the buzz is starting to grow.

For me personally it's the sort of project I love, working with someone else, working fast and hard. Making it work. It was enjoyable also as it forces me to learn something new. Prior to this week, I had never installed WordPressMU before or BuddyPress. We have pushed out our first Judo specific modification to the software, so I have had to learn how the BuddyPress code works and how to modify it. I love that!

Lance

Developing for the iPhone.

Lance Wicks — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:02:53 GMT

This week I am doing some interesting things for www.PlanetJudo.com starting with the server move and launching the Spanish language site to the public.

The second part has been making a iPhone friendly version of the site available. Which I have now done... at least a first stab at it.

I have basically done a very lazy hack to make it work, which is this. I created in Dashcode a Web Application that uses the RSS feed to create a iPhone web app. It is pretty easy, there are a few little gotchas, but overall it's nice and easy.

Then I created a little PHP redirect that detects the iPhone browser and when it does it redirects Safari on the iPhone to the iPhone specific site, it is a one liner so that was pretty cool.

Whilst I was getting used to Dashcode I realised I could create a Dashboard widget for PlanetJudo also... so I have done that too. I want to make it a bit shinier, but soon it will be put up on the site.

Overall, I have to say I really like the Apple developer tools, I have played in XCode in the past and liked it, this is the first time I have played with Dashcode and it was really nice to work in, so I shall be doing more with it in the future I am sure! :-)

It is nice to work with these development tools, it is only Wednesday and I get to say I have worked in Perl, PHP, Dashcode this week... what will that list look like by the end of the week, a bit of Scratch no doubt, what else, Ruby, Smalltalk? Who Knows! :-)

What I must do is look at NoseRub again this week and try and add some more services if nothing else.

I have also finally managed to get the TV next to my desk hooked up as a second display for the laptop, the resolution is rubbish, but fine for video, or the iTunes visualizer! ;-)

Productive week so far... nice!

Time for the real world again.

Lance Wicks — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:13:00 GMT

Well after two weeks in Bath and a week on Holiday in Devon, it's time to return to the real world. I need to get some client work done and more client work in the door.

I have quite a bit of work on, partly stuff I have already been paid for and some that is being done "pro bono" and some that is business development stuff.

Anyway, lots of blogging to catch up on over the next few weeks, not to mention 17,000 words of University of Bath assignments to write.

So, if you don't hear much from me, now you know why.

Lance

Please leave a message after the tone....

Lance Wicks — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:31:30 GMT

Hi everyone,
I am now in Bath for two weeks attending the last of my residential blocks for my BSc. in sports Performance (EJU Level 5 Judo coaching course).

As such, I most probably will not be blogging here for the duration of the stay. I will be blogging daily over at www.judocoach.com/blog making the 5th year that I have blogged everyday of my experiences at University of Bath.

I shall also be twittering (of course), so follow me there. Here is a twitter widget:

Quantity, Quality and Openess in online reputation and Karma of course.

Lance Wicks — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:18:05 GMT

So... recently I have been spending time in the world of forums (Judo forums) and have managed to engage in a couple of flamewars. :-(

There is a thread in one forum about respecting Judo "high grades" on the forum (or the lack of respect given to them on the forum). The other one I have in mind is one I was/am engaged in where someone else mentioned my insane amount of Judo websites as a reason to give more weight to what I post.

It has had me considering how reputation works in this networked society we live in and within smaller niche communities.

Here's the thing, I respect some people based purely on the content they make available online. For example Cory Doctorow, Bruce Schneier in the geek world. In Judo world Mike Darter, AnnMaria De Mars have the same sort of status for me.

None of these people I have met in person, yet I hold them in a higher regard than many people I do know personally. Why? Because these poeple share a large amount on a regular basis online. They share in terms of Quantity, Quality and Openess.

You have probably guessed by now, but I try to live in a similar fashion. I try to be open and share regularly via my blogs and my podcast. At present I aim to post something online 6 days a week. I try to share in an open way, I use my real name and try and share openly and honestly.

This is not all entirely philanthropic, I've watched "My name is Earl", I am hoping that this is a Karma thing and that if I give away as much as I can, good things will happen.

In the age we live in, and my children will grow up in, I think our position in the world will be more and more driven by our online reputation. Wuffie may be something beyond my generation, but from now on you had better believe that your blog and other online content is how you'll land the next job in your career, James Urquhart is perhaps the example I would cite. I met him several years ago in Minneapolis when he worked for Cassatt, whilst there he started blogging and that lead to him, I think, ending up where he is as market manager for the Data Center 3.0 strategy at Cisco Systems and blogger on CNet.

So... as we go forward, we need to look at creating our online reputation, we should be open online, be honest and transparent. Produce lots of "content" and keep the quality up of course.

This goes for individuals of course, but even more so for organisations. Which brings me back to the flamewars. Most of the criticism I give is aimed at the BJA (British Judo Association), who IMHO fail to produce much in the way of content, they produce very little and not very often and they are far from open and transparent.

They will change eventually, it will hopefully be sooner rather than later; for their sake. Corporations and charities are starting to get a clue, especially in the USA. We see more company blogs, we see companies on Twitter. They are getting the idea, that they need to be open and share content.

For me, I see it now and try to push the vision to people and also organisations I am trying to help, including the BJA.

I am fine, but trying to bring others along for the ride is harder than I expected.

Ahh well... I feel better for sharing anyway. :-)

ZOMG!! Too Cool!

Lance Wicks — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:15:31 GMT

That is so awesome, long live the Empire!

W00T!! Got this email in this morning... s92a is dead!

Lance Wicks — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:54:52 GMT

I received this email in today from my native New Zealand, it seems that New Zealand will now no longer be the first "civilised" nation to drop the "Innocent until proven guilty" approach to law! Thank goodness!

Hi Lance Wicks, we thought you'd like to know that the S92A has been scrapped.

The Creative Freedom Foundation are celebrating tonight after National's announcement this afternoon that Section 92A will be scrapped, and that they will work towards finding an alternative.

Chris Keall at the NBR reports: "Prime Minister John Key has announced that the government will throw out the controversial Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment Act and start again. Section 92A has been scrapped.". This is fantastic news, and it's great that Prime Minister John Key has taken a stand on this important issue. This draconian and naive law was originally championed by former-MP Labour's Judith Tizard. Now we need to help make some sensible copyright law that will protects artists and well as New Zealanders. The CFF are preparing to take part in this process.

Today is a victory for New Zealanders - artists and non-artists alike. The CFF thanks everyone of you who supported this movement: we couldn't have done it without you!
Further details at
http://creativefreedom.org.nz/story.html?id=231

Of course, politicians have a knack of scrapping unpopular things to reintroduce them later when they think nobody is looking so the CFF shall need to keep an eagle eye on the Beehive.

Of course we don't know how much of this turn around is due to the #blackout campaign that got so much great publicity, but lets chalk one up to it anyway. :-)

Thanks NZ for staying just a little bit sane for a little bit longer!

Lance

NoseRub 0.8.2

Lance Wicks — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:44:22 GMT

The NoseRub team have been hard at work and tonight the 0.8.2 release has been made available via SVN. Much has been done which prepares for the 0.9.x release, but this release brings with it a new admin interface and added services include NoseRub fotolog, seesmic, twitpic, skitch, github, google code and scratch.

Dirk will no doubt blog soon on the official Noserub Blog, but I was too excited not to post something quickly. :-)

Things I wish I had thought through yesterday I suffer for today.

Lance Wicks — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:02:18 GMT

So, everytime I have been plugging my iPhone in it has bleated about a software update, which I have been ignoring as I have Jailbroken the phone.

Last night I lost patience with it and decided to upgrade my phone to the latest code. I am not planning on leaving O2 (sadly) so I could just do the upgrade via iTunes, so I did.

Okay, you know what's happening don't you? Yep, complete wipe of my iPhone, everything gone. No problem restore... that worked for AppStore stuff. The next step was to Jailbreak it again with quickpwn, and this is when I got upset...

Yep, all the apps I had from Cydia were gone! I wish I had thought about this first. Ah well, manual re-install in probably not the end of the world as it'll end up with a cleaner device right?

To save my butt in future I decided to try APTBackup, which backs up a list of the Cydia apps and automates re-installation of apps, no data though ok.

Gave it a test try and you know what it didn't work. :-( Infinite reboot loop, which I notice a few other people have struck. I am going to try again, well the next time I need to.

Anyway... a reliable backup app for iPhone is needed I think, something that takes your data and apps would be cool.

Anyway... having done all that I learn that v3.0 of the Apple iPhone firmware is apparently due next week; typical eh?!

Still Loving SCRATCH and the upcoming Scratch day.

Lance Wicks — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:05:18 GMT

A little while back I wrote about Scratch ( Blog Entry here ) which is a fantastic visual programming environment designed for young people.

Since that post I have worked with my children and created a few more games, which you can find at http://scratch.mit.edu/users/lancew

You will notice that I have created a bunch of spelling games. These were built with and for my son, who although being one bright little guy has not been hitting 100% his spelling tests at school. He loves computer games, so I have been creating games for/with him using the words he is given to learn from School.

The result? He has got every word correct since we started creating games!

To me, this is perfect example of how finding the right way to teach the student is essential. My boy loves games, he knows we are being sneaky and making his spelling the game. He does not mind, he knows he has to learn them, so he does not mind, because the way we are doing it suits him. As a sports coach, this make sense to me, sometimes that is what you need to do, find a way to help someone do something they are finding difficult/dull.

The other positive is that my kids are being exposed to programming at a early age. They are becoming literate about software. They are gaining an understanding of what happens to create the Wii games they love and also the cartoons they love.
They are also picking up programming fundamental concepts. Scratch is teaching them about loops, conditionals, objects, etc.

I am a fan, a big fan of Scratch. And I'd like to help promote it's use with other kids/parents/teachers. Luckily, just such an opportunity is coming up... SCRATCH DAY!

Scratch Day is May 16th 2009, and I hope to organise an event here in the UK, I'd love to have some help, so if yu are interested, drop me an email!