The Obama’s Katrina talking point doesn’t do much for us down here. Katrina is a word that has become so hopelessly overloaded with meaning, that our first response when someone utters the work “Katrina” is, “here, let me unpack that for you.” We try to explain the intricacies of the wholesale destruction of a major American city, but the intricacies never take. Calling the BP oil drilling disaster “Obama’s Katrina” merely heaps another layer of misunderstanding onto our plight, which is already so grossly over-simplified and so profoundly misunderstood.

It sounds like politics that does not concern us, that does not consider us, it merely packages us for use on the Sunday talk shows.

Problem with this talking point is that Obama has accepted the responsibility. After the sheer incompetence, the assignment of blame was the hallmark of the Bush response to Katrina.

Unlike Katrina, which was often waved away as an act of God, the BP oil drilling disaster is a undeniably a disaster of policy. A disaster of an energy policy driven by the childish rallying cry “Drill, Baby Drill!” A disaster of regulatory policy that choose to look at private corporations as our societal benefactors, who could be trusted to do the right thing. This faith in corporations is something that has been growing in the American psyche for a some time. The mistaken belief that corporations align their interests with their customers, not their shareholders. It is untenable. The oil disaster is another harsh dose of the reality of private profit, socialized risk.

The key difference between this oil drilling disaster and Katrina? Katrina didn’t have a CEO.

Rather than asking if this is Obama’s Katrina, we should be asking if this is Big Oil’s Chernobyl.

The shot heard round the mommy blog ring.

There was this advertisement for a pain reliever that tried to invent a new pain to treat, the pain of holding your children close, and it would be a laugh out loud failure, if it didn’t hit the brown note.

Do You Suffer from Babies?

When you watch the Motrin Moms ad, at first it is annoying, but there is this magic that happens as you replay it. For some reason, it is easy to watch again and again. It bounces along at nice clip, it is well animated, well narrated, and each time, it reaches out and insults your intelligence with a gentle plucking of a cord.

With the all the digital fervor of the online mob that mistakes their pursuit of customer service complaints for political action, a subset of the Twitter community has minted a bold new hashtag, and is pressing their message through Twitter search trends. On Monday, when whoever has the Motrin account arrives at their desk, there is a good chance that the advertisement will be pulled, a mea cupla issued, and the outraged Twitter users will squee triumphant. We’ll have to hear about the power of social media to effect social change for the remainder of the week.

The advertisement is indeed tone deaf. It is a reminder that you can’t always manufacture a problem for your product to solve, a la Don Draper and Mad Men. People won’t always cover their mouths, scrunch up their arms, put on extra baggy clothes and scurry off the pharmacy for the suggested chemical perfumes.

Sometimes they’ll just say, “who the hell are you to call me ugly?”

Motrin Asks: Can We Forgo the Pretense of Loving Our Children?

Thus, wearing a baby isn’t the bothersome chore done grudgingly to show that one is with it. One doesn’t suffer with pain because of a trending social norm. It is something that people truly love; holding their children close.

The woman narrator says that carrying your baby “seems to be in fashion”, and says “who knows what else they’ve come up with.” They are they, but she is us. Our confidant, speaking confidentially. Between you, arbitrary web-site visitor, and me disembodied feminine voice surrounded in the colors of pain reliever packaging, isn’t the baby wearing thing a bit much?

At first, I had to imagine that it was an impossibly annoying commercial for a parent, but it didn’t take long for it to become impossibly annoying for me. Like many commercials that attempt to be conspiratorial with the viewer, the Motrin ad whispers in your ear, tells you that you can drop your pretense, made makes a bald appeal to baser instincts, baser instincts that you don’t possess.

It is an ad that plays like any would be confidant, who leans into you at a bus stop to make a cruel remark about a passerby. It has all the warmth of a fellow conference attendee asking you, “where do you think she got her money?”

For the most part these messages can be ignored. When the television leans forward, puts the back of its hand to its lips and confides, you and I both know that you’re lazy, greedy, incurious and horny, that you are empty and awkward, that you are desperately striving to fulfill your lad fantasies, I’m not one to argue, since I am the one vegging out in front of America’s Next Top Model. But be that as it may, I’ll forgo the shower gel on offer.

I for one, care very little about how I smell, which in a way, means that I get to watch a lot of television for free.

Marketing Means Lying to Me on My Terms

And yet, there is so much that is absurd about the Motrin Mom outrage, probably summarized best in this montage of tweets and baby bearing mothers, panning and wiping to a song that makes the whole presentation perfectly overwrought.

Haven’t these people seen television before?

What really throws me is this new expectation that corporate citizens are just regular people like you and me. When, through some miracle of perception, people realize that marketing sews discontentment for consumption to solve, they flip into this righteous indignation. The most perverse sort. Not indignation that they are being manipulated, but indignation that they are being manipulated in way that that even they cannot ignore.

The message is clear; Do not advertise to us in this way. It offends us. We will not purchase your product. Advertise to us instead, in some other way, that does not offend us.

When the advertiser responds, these consumers imagine that they have effected a change. They begin to beat the drum of social media. They talk about the power they possess. The power to tell the producers of good and services adjust their marketing message.

How flabbergasting.

These were generally referred to as the commercials about nothing.

Now the advertising has made a preposterous leap to an incredibly defensive ad campaign.

The ad is passive-aggressive with a chilly tone of righteous indignation. I recalls the haughty politically correct types that I’d encounter in Ann Arbor. You might be talking about the Atlanta Braves when someone at the table says, “Well, my great grandfather was half Chippewa Native-American,” and glowers at you. Everyone stops talking about baseball and starts talking about nothing.

They start with a John Hodgeman look alike saying, “I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype.” Then they run through a litany of people who say that they are a PC, but they are not hip, they wear glasses, they study genes, they are not human doings but human beings, and they are all PCs.

Immediately, I recalled Principal Blackman’s You’re A Racist educational film from Strangers With Candy, the comedy that parodied the after school specials that are so familiar to me as a television weened child of the 80′s. (The video is available. Please click play.)

The ad campaign fails for me because of this overlay. More after the jump.

The advertisement puts forward a straw man accusation, that Apple has made a stereotype of a group of people. It then beats the straw man to dust with a hackneyed device, this litany of people proudly laying claim to their cultural identity, showing that they can shatter your stereotype with the diversity of their accomplishment.

Except that in the Mac ads John Hodgeman represents an actual PC computer, not a person who uses the computer. He is not a stereotype. He is an archetype.

He is beige, stuffy, fickle and temperamental. The “Hello, I’m a Mac” ads compare products, with two actors who personify the two products. The products are complicated, they come in many shapes and sizes, they go through short life cycles. This simple abstraction, these two actors portraying the archetypal Mac and PC, is an exceedingly clever way to communicate the nature of a product that does not stand still.

An honest complaint about political correctness is that it is used to stifle the conversation. When a person who is not really offended, but could be offended, takes offense, by a person who means no offense and will gladly find a better way to phrase something so that it is not offensive, they are burdening the other person with a tiptoe through a minefield of unintended injuries. The overhead of a conversation with someone who constantly interrupts you with “or she” when you use “he” as a collective, makes a conversation not worth having.

As such, politically correct has become a shorthand for saying that offense taken is insincere and overwrought. Bill Maher chose Politically Incorrect for the name of his talk show to convey the message that the show will be frank and sincere.

This is not to say that all offense is imagined. This is not to say that all you have to do is feign ignorance that you’re words are insulting and you’ll not be held to account. If you are ignorant of the insults you inflict, you are likely a bigot, but most certainly an oaf.

It is to say that it is amazing that Microsoft would make defense of the Personal Computer by arguing that the Mac has not been Politically Correct. That they would make this ham fisted argument that the “Hello, I’m a Mac” ads demean anyone, let alone the very people with whom those ads have been so successful, people who own PCs. Those ads are meant to convince PC owners to switch to Mac.

Those ads speak truth to PC owners. PC owners hear the truth and switch.

Imagine if you will, an advertisment, with Ronald Mc Donald, in a darkened studio with the light on his face, becauswhe he wants to have a very serious conversation. “The Burger King has been saying that the Whopper is better than the Big Mac.” Ronald now makes a turn to camera three. “This is not only an insult to McDonalds. This is an insult to billions and billions served.”

Except that Microsoft is not saying, you’re insulting our customers. It’s saying our customers are PCs. You’ve insulted PCs. PCs, for the purposes of this advertisement, are an ethnic group that is the victim of stereotyping.

I’m wondering if the advertisers knew that this advertisement would draw on the imprints of the after school specials when putting forward this message? That this righteous indignation over stereotyping PCs would tap into the sincere revulsion we have at stereotypes, which are “a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment?” Or did someone in the cultural anthropology department say it out loud, “PC and Mac are like two different ethnic groups,” and the ideas flowed from there?

In this, our election season, a season of meaningless fabricated demographics, with all it’s feigned indignations, and responses to statements once they’ve been taken completely out of context, you’d think that Microsoft would find something other than an appeal to tribalism, a populist denunciation of the elites. It might be a strategy to open up a cultural rift between PC and Mac users and exploit that rift with the political tactics we’ve come to loathe.

The advertisers might be outsiders who might really believe that people are that passionate about their computer vendors. They aren’t. From what those to guys in the Mac ads say, people switch all the time.

Which is why I’m so happy to see Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. When I watched the clip above, I was able to laugh out loud at Sarah Palin for the first time. Much needed.

It was a fun and clever satire of the accusations of sexism that have been bandied about in the two weeks since Sarah Palin’s debut.

What I like most of all about the SNL skit is that it completely deflated Sarah Palin. For two weeks, Sarah Palin, marched forward with a message of wide-eyed denial about every aspect of her record, defended by a phalanx of operatives who labeled all inquiries into her abilities as sexist. As it seemed that she would get away with, there were the early stages of Bush Derangement Syndrome setting in among the Democratic faithful, a condition that is often fatal for Democratic political campaigns.

The skit deflates Sarah Palin, with nuance. Amy Poler as Hillary Clinton says, “you just glided in on a dog sled, wearing your pageant sash and your Tina Fey glasses”, and there it is. Sarah Palin seems suddenly unoriginal. Indeed, so much has been made of her celebrity resemblances. Her own supporters fawning over her beauty. The celebrity that she resembles is now going to use the likeness in satire.

Which oddly gives Tina Fey authority. Tina Fey has been in the room since Sarah Palin arrived. We knew this moment was coming. We all looked forward to it.

Tina Fey is a funny woman, a successful comedian who is also quite lovely. Much has been made of her success as a woman in comedy, a genre in entertainment which is known to be a boy’s club.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are professional women in the public eye in a tough business. They are using those credentials to say that inquiry into the candidate’s qualifications is part of process.

It is improper to focus on a woman’s appearance over her talent. This is dismissive.

That dismissive sexism is not the same as the malicious sexism that was directed at Hillary Clinton. It attacks successful women as inhumanely unfeminine. The logic seems to be that because the stereotypical woman is averse to confrontation, the woman who accepts the challenges to pursue high office must be some sort of sociopath. She must be stopped.

Yet, somewhere in Hillary’s campaign was a sense of entitlement that legitimately rubbed some people the wrong way. They were shouted down as sexist. Blurry stuff.

With this skit, two professional comedians make a point about their own profession. They mocked Hillary. They made fun of her sense of entitlement. They showed her flummoxed by Obama’s coddling by the press.

Now they’re going to make fun of Sarah Palin’s unwillingness to expose herself to questioning. They’re going to characterize her unwillingness to speak directly and characterize it as oblivious.

When Sarah Palin can’t answer foreign policy questions, that’s comedy gold, and they’re going to use it. Trust them. They are the professionals. This is funny.

Blogging ought to be easy. It hasn’t been. Blogging had become professional communication. It was a perpetual press release. It had become and odious chore.

I was afraid of turning into one of those pro-bloggers. My experiences with social media ran counter to the breathless self-referential raving of the Web 2.0 crowd.

What strikes me about a lot of these pro-blogs is the profound absence of critical thinking. People find a niche and then build a web of people who are only seeking confirmation for what they already believe.

That is the nature of pro-blogging. Coming up with a pet of an idea, then flogging it with anecdotal evidence in the form of anecdotes.

I once ran across this horrible blog post about Henry Ford and The Secret. Remember The Secret from last year? It’s the bible of the Just World Hypothesis.

The blog post was entitled Why Henry Ford Knew More Than “The Secret”. Every time I see Henry Ford, that image pops to mind, the one of him getting the Grand Cross of the German Eagle pinned to his label by the Honorary vice-consul of the Third Reich in Detroit, Fritz Hailer pops to mind. Henry Ford the virulent anti-Semite held up as model of positive thinking.

I felt like I was all lined up to slide down the chute of the idiot pro-blogger, so I didn’t blog much at all.

Celebrating John Frum Day on Vanuatu.

Some folks have written to show concern. I appreciate the concern.

I’m still getting email about policy matters. I’m inclined to respond with, oh, wow, very interesting. Hey, seen what I’ve been up to lately?

I’m going to enjoy being rid of these people who engage me as a resource, people who have no resources to offer. That has been particularly tiring.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Many New Orleanians are engaged in a cargo cult dance to bring down some form of funding for the grassroots efforts that drive the recovery. They dress up, wave the sticks, march and dance, and but the DC-3s do not land. The cargo is not for us.

It’s uncommon that local efforts are overlooked, that nonprofit organizations parachute in and disappear as quickly.

More than half the structures on this block are abandoned, there are vacant lots on either side, the upriver sidewalk is overgrown and crumbling, tires are basking in the sun in puddles of mud, while the worker rolls onward in search of a particular type of refuse. Packaging, I assume.

The sidewalks reconstitute themselves as I approach Claiborne. They are solid. I imagine them to have just been throughly swept, although there are tell tale scraps of wrappers. At Claiborne I see a troop of men with brooms, bins and pans rolling along underneath I-10. I wonder why one man decided to make a detour down St. Philip.

Barren Vending, Powerfully Clean by Adam.

I’m familiar with two separate feed readers. You’ll have to adapt these instructions for your feed reader.

Permanent Reader Zero for NetNewsWire on OS X

To perminently achieve reader zero for NetNewsWire on OS X

• Open the applications folder.
• Drag NetNewsWire to the trash.
• Empty the trash.

That was an afterthought, though. My main feed reader was Google Reader. Getting Google Reade to perminant Reader Zero was a more complicated procedure.

Permanent Reader Zero for Google Reader

First, delete all your subscriptions.

• Go to Settings link in the top left corner.
• Click on the Subscriptions tab.
• Select All N Subscriptions where N is the depressing number messages devoid of context that are ready to either consume your precious time and attention or else suck away at your sense of accomplishment.
• Click the Unsubscribe button.

This is not enough. If you are like me you have been creating a mound of items that you swear you’ll read some day using tags and stars.

Burn it.

• Go to Settings link in the top left corner.
• Click on the Tags tab.
• Select All N Tags where N is the number of meaningless entries in your meaningless taxonomy that you’ve created in a deperate attempt to reattach contextual information to data that has been stripped of the context of location, graphic design, information design and referring links.
• Uncheck Your starred items and Your shared items because you are not able to delete those.
• Click delete selected.

There is no way to remove all your starred items at once. In order to achieve Permenant Reader Zero, you will have to unstar them manually.

I unstarred mine by pressing j and then s over and over again. First, I selected Starred items in the side bar. The j key moves the focus down one. The s key toggles the star. It did not take too long and it felt good to have them all gone forever.

You can unshare items selecting “Your shared items” by pressing j and then shift-s over and over again.

Now, if you reload, the intro to Google Reader introduction video with Chris Wetherell will appear. It as if you’ve never been here before. If only that were the case.

Burn Your Reader and Salt the Earth

Now, salt the earth. There are items shared by your friends. These are compelling, they are your friends after all. Unfortunately, these soulless items are still entirely devoid of context. Nothing will prompt you to contact your friend. It as if you are looking at your friend through Argus glass. It as if you were a lost soul walking among us wanting to speak with living, but only able listen.

For each friend under Friend’s shared items.

• Click on the friends name.
• Click “Hide Alan” or whatever you’re friends name maybe.

If you feel bad about this, you can make yourself feel better by visiting your friends blog and leaving a meaningful comment after reading one of their posts.

How to Maintain Permanent Reader Zero

Now you can breathe. You will no longer feel that pang of defeat as you mark all as read. You’ll no longer have to deal with an endless torrent of decontextualized prose that exhausts you with rapid context switching.

Instead, you will follow the whimsy of your thoughts by searching for information as ideas occur to you.

From there you will explore information using hyperlinks. This information will be context rich. It will be packaged in websites. If you’ve been struggling to maintain context with tags, you’ll be pleased to know that websites employ graphic design and information architecture communicate information. From each website, you can further explore topics by following hyperlinks to other relevant websites.

This process of exploring websites by following hyperlinks is called surfing.

You will search for answers. You will surf for new information and ideas.

Information will not arrive, it will be discovered. This is a very natural way to learn about new topics and to take ownership of new ideas.

One Link Closer to Humanity

You’ll learn to get answers by asking other people. You’ll learn to obtain new information by exchanging information with other people. This, of course, puts in active communication with people, instead of being a passive consumer of feeds.

Feeds are eroding your social skills.

Instead of consuming a person’s feed, you will now visit their blogs. When you do, you are in for the whole experience. You get the context of their blog, the photos and links in their sidebar. You can browse into their articles and see who has left comments.

Leave a comment. Take the time you’ve saved and contribute to the blog of a friend or someone you respect.

You will obtain more information in this way, than if you were scanning feeds.

Information is not consumed, it is socialized.

Update: Bill Tozier has followed suit as noted in his post I love you but we can’t go on like this, never talking.

I Love Caddyshack by Ian.

There is a ruckus in the roof sometimes. I thought they were mice, gnawing away at the insulation or the timbers in the room.

One day I saw that they were squirrels. There was a heavy scurrying in the attic, and I traced the source of the sound with my eyes. They made circles overhead ran to a corner of my room and then appeared in a perfect transition on the branches of the live oak outside my window. Two squirrels in a mad dash to the trunk and out of view, as if they were tuner sports cars, squealing out of a parking structure and onto the freeways of California to settle some score with their scurrying.

They are noisy and annoying creatures when they are in the attic. They are gnawing away at something up there, but I no longer think of them as pests. All things considered, they have just as much right to be in the house as I do.

This morning I awoke to a tapping at my window, which is in a gable on the roof. It could have been someone repairing the roof, which was the first thought forming in my scattered waking mind, but I looked up and saw immediately, at an arms length away, a little fuzzy face peering at me in at me. It was a squirrel.

I was lifting my head to better put it into view and it ducked. I wasn’t about ask it what it wanted, so I put my head down to fall asleep. As I did, I heard the tapping again and popped upright with start. The squirrel was looking straight at me, with a pinched and furrowed expression. Whatever the squirrel wanted, it wasn’t me. I was more than it bargained for. It ducked.

At this point I turned to put my back to the window, having had enough of this squirrel tapping on my window with it’s plaintiff looks and no requests. The tapping resumed, but I didn’t startle out of sleep. Eventually, the squirrel went away.

I woke up late this Sunday. Recalled my miscommunications with my furry little voyeur. I thought of Carl Spackler in Caddyshack.

The rest of the morning has been spent with the Kenny Loggin’s song, “I’m All Right” running through my head.

Test Pattern by Jen.

About two months ago, my funding for a dedicated Think New Orleans server came to an end. Think New Orleans had been running well for a while, so I thought it wouldn’t matter much to consolidate it with the server that hosts this blog, ljubljana.blogometer.com.

Neither website gets large amounts of traffic. Think New Orleans receives 500 unique visitors a day on a good day. I can’t imagine that all the neighborhood blogs, the New Orleans Wiki, and my personal/professional blog together attract more than 2000 unique visitors a day. Even a modest dedicated server should be able to handle that much traffic, unless something is terribly wrong.

The server also runs postfix and dovecot (IMAP). It serves up the bloggers listserv using GNU Mailmain. It acts as a Subversion repository through Apache. None of these applications concern me. They are all very well written applications. The mail and Subversion services serve only a single user, me.

The Think New Orleans web menagerie includes WordPress, MediaWiki and Instiki. WordPress and Mediawiki are PHP applications running from Apache. Instiki is in a Ruby Webrick web server which is accessed via Apache mod_proxy.

Neighborhood blogs such as Northwest Carrollton and Think New Orleans itself are run in WordPress. There are two flavors of New Orleans Wiki. The Mediawiki version and the Instiki version. The latter is getting more use these days. It contains the definitive List of New Orleans Bloggers and the resources created by CHAT.

There is an instance of Jetty that is rarely visited that runs a few simple servlets that is also accessed via Apache mod_proxy. This is very low traffic and the Servlets are my own. The unconference signup servlet is an example. It writes a web form to file.

I run a script from cron that requests http://blogometer.com/. If it takes more than three seconds to serve, I kill all httpd processes and restart Apache.

Please have a look at the crash reports and tell me what you think.

Morphing Grid by Dan Allison.

Ever find yourself with a data collection, and you can see the steps in your head, create a form, create a table? It’s a dry task that gets dryer by the minute once you find yourself once again creating that paged results table for the contact us or event registration form you’ve created a thousand times before.

I can’t tell you how much slicker it is to send that data directly to an EditGrid workbook. It is a quick and easy database that is intuitive for your users. Instead of a paged html table, their information is available as rich full-featured spreadsheet.

New Orleans Permits

Recently, I set out to create a database of every building permit issued in the City of New Orleans since January of 2005. This is to support the work of Karen Gadbois, Matt McBride and Sarah Elise Lewis. Ultimately, I created a resource that does not exist anywhere else in the world. A collection of building permits with contact information, the type of structure and permit, the geocoded address of the permit, and the date the permit was issued. The who, what, where and when of the recovery of the City of New Orleans.

The process is as follows; I’d fetch a permit from the city website. Parse the HTML permit page and covert it a structured XML document of permit data. I’d then geocode the address to get the latitude and longitude and a normalized address. Then I’d put the permit into an EditGrid workbook.

I implemented the program as a Java command line application. It now runs from my server five times a day so that the spreadsheet is always up to date.

EditGrid API

Getting started with EditGrid API was quick. The documentation is straghtforward. The methods in the API map directly to the functionality you’ll find in the menus.

I had a false start when I tired to use Apache CXF instead of Apache Axis. The size and volume of the data collected triggers some limits, but the limits of EditGrid were easily accommodated.

I wrote about the EditGrid API in A Programmer’s Notebook on the EditGrid API. Read it if you’re interested in details. Read on if you’re interested in an overview.

Sizzle and Steak

The spreadsheet itself made quite a splash when I showed it around. It took some explaining, because it turns out that not many people in know me as a computer programmer. I was asked how long it took me to enter all this data often enough, that I learned to launch into the program description.

I was able to share the database by sending out a link to the EditGrid spreadsheet. For real pizzaz, I’d IM the link to someone while the program was updating an ask them to scroll down to see the rows snapping into place with a red to white AJAX flash.

This little flourish is one of many. For zero programmer hours, I’ve got a full-featured UI that is far more fabulous than anything I could do with and HTML table.

Spreadsheets As You Like It

The data goes straight into EditGrid. It’s public. People are able to immediately export the EditGrid to Excel and work with it on their desktops.

For New Orleans, which is still very much a desktop and email user base, publishing in EditGrid means that people always have the latest data in Excel using the export menu. But, I won’t feel lonley and left behind, because they’ll always come back to visit my EditGrid spreadsheet to get the latest in Excel.

Simple Password Protection

For the people I work with, “First, go and create a new account at…” elicits sighs and glazed looks.

Thus, one of the great features of EditGrid is the many different sharing options. Not only can I pick and choose other EditGrid users who can view a spreadsheet, I can assign a password to a spreadsheet to protect it.

This means I can create a spreadsheet and share it with a link and a password, rather than having to ask people to join a new Web 2.0 website in order to share the data.

The protection is every flavor, protected read-only, protected read and write, read and protected write. If I’d only wanted to share the permits database with a select few during testing, those select few do not have jump through registration hoops to see the data.

If they did, I know that the response would be, can you just email it to me? Please? And then I’m no longer a computer programmer, I’m a data secretary.

Funny, but up until yesterday, I’d fogotten all about embedding. I knew that EditGrid was embedalbe, I’d embedded it before, but it’d forgot.

A Humble EditGrid

Finally, EditGrid is embedable. This means that I can put the data I’ve published in EditGrid in Think New Orleans. The EditGrid will have the export menu, so the core functionality that I need for my application will be available under a thinknola.com URL. I’ll be able to track who’s visiting the spreadsheets. When people visit they can see the Think New Orleans identity and know that this is a project of Think New Orleans.

The EditGrid logo and a link to EditGrid is present and yet it is so unassuming.

It’s almost too kind.

It’s almost as if I’d written a lovely full-featured spreadsheet for my website myself, but I didn’t.

EditGrid Prototype and Productoin

I now have a working application that I can completely forget. It is a working application that is of great benefit to the nonprofit and neighborhood organizations of the New Orleans recovery.

Yes, I’ll create a relational database, so I can begin to collect other data sources and relate them. I’m a programmer like you. I want something bigger and better and more complex.

Starting with EditGrid, I’ve captured the data, published the data, and it is now a structured data source for that fancy relational database I’ll create, and for anyone in New Orleans with ArcGIS, Google Earth, SPSS, SAS or Excel.

The EditGrid spreadsheets will be the data source for the permits tables of my relational database. It will keep me honest in the maintenance of this resource. Own dogfood eaten here.

Use EditGrid for Your Next Database

EditGrid is a full featured spreadsheet in it’s own right. I use it for budgets and time sheets.

Yet, it’s these features that make it a great tool for creating ad hoc databases.

• The EditGrid SOAP API.
• Public spreadsheets with simple password protection.
• The export menu.
• An unobtrusive embed.

If you need to throw together a database, like a registration form, use EditGrid as your database, and password protect the workbook.

You’ll save a lot of time on HTML tables, and you can focus on converting the visitors to your website into registrants.

If you want to publish some summary data for the public, publish to EdiGrid, so they can see the data, copy it to their own EditGrid workbook, or download it to their desktop spreadsheet.

You’ll be able to forget all your automated service as I have, and provide people with the latest data wrapped in a slick UI with an ever growing feature set, while you’re working on the next thing.

My Tchotchke Boxes by 1213 1982.

I created a series of online spreadsheets of every building, construction and demolition permit issuesd in Orleans Parish since January 2005. These spreadsheets are available at Think New Orleans.

The EditGrid API can automate the creation of reports and act as an easy use and share database for light data collection applications. I’ll write about my experience with EditGrid and why you should consider EditGrid at the back end for your next data collection task.

This is my programmer notebook on my getting to know you time with EditGrid.

I wrote my program in Java. Here are the three gotchas that I encountered.

For Java, You Must Use Apache Axis

Apache CXF (nee XFire) wouldn’t generate classes carping about some version of something. It said, “WSDLToJava Error : Rpc/encoded wsdls are not supported in JAXWS 2.0″ It’s something that it is said.

So, I used Apache Axis. I created the EditGrid classes with the following incantation.

java -cp lib/wsdl4j-1.5.1.jar:\
  lib/saaj.jar:lib/jaxrpc.jar:lib/commons-discovery-0.2.jar:\
  lib/axis.jar:lib/commons-logging-1.0.4.jar \
  org.apache.axis.wsdl.WSDL2Java \
  --package com.thinknola.wsdl.generated.editgrid \
  --output ~/Desktop/Inbox/WSDL \

http://www.editgrid.com/static/EditGrid.wsdl

The output was identical to the classes used in the EditGrid API documentation except that the class EditGridPort was generated as EditGridPort_PortType. I rolled with it.

There Is a API Call Limit

When I showed Matt McBride the 2008 permits, he turned right around and asked for every permit since 2005. That’s 50,000+ rows. At some point EditGrid told me to give it a rest.

I didn’t much mind, because the import was slow anyway. The city website took 7-10 seconds to respond to a permit request. I was importing 500 permits an hour per process, I was running six processes to fetch all that data.

I gave it rest. 24 hours later I resumed and finished the import.

There is a Size Limit

Initially I created one workbook with a sheet per month. This triggered an internal limit when I went to export to Excel. The solution was to create a workbook for each year.

RTFM: Read the Flipping Menu

You can learn all about the EditGrid API using the straightforward documentation. The objects and methods are well-documented.

The EditGrid API does pretty much everything you can do from the EditGrid menu. You can muck around with your spreadsheet in EditGrid to get the way you want it look. You can then map the menu and cell clicks to get your desired output to EditGrid API calls.

Which is an interesting aspect of the programmable web. It is much easier to learn an API when you have an interactive menu to the API calls. Not much questions as to what the API calls will produce.

Adding a new GNU Mailman listserv.

[alan@~]$ cd /usr/lib/mailman
[alan@ljubljana mailman]$ sudo ./bin/newlist barcampnola@thinknola.com
Enter the email of the person running the list: alan@thinknola.com
Initial barcampnola password:
To finish creating your mailing list, you must edit your /etc/aliases (or
equivalent) file by adding the following lines, and possibly running the
`newaliases' program:
## barcampnola mailing listbarcampnola:              "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post barcampnola"
barcampnola-admin:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman admin barcampnola"
barcampnola-bounces:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces barcampnola"
barcampnola-confirm:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman confirm barcampnola"
barcampnola-join:         "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join barcampnola"
barcampnola-leave:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman leave barcampnola"
barcampnola-owner:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman owner barcampnola"
barcampnola-request:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman request barcampnola"
barcampnola-subscribe:    "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe barcampnola"
barcampnola-unsubscribe:  "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe barcampnola"

Hit enter to notify barcampnola owner...

[alan@ljubljana mailman]$

Then you cut and paste the aliases into /etc/mailman/aliases

[alan@ljubljana mailman]$ sudo /usr/bin/newaliases
[alan@ljubljana mailman]$ sudo ./bin/withlist -l -r fix_url barcampnola

Photogamer: In your pockets by Kenn Christ.

He is at Fair Grinds. He wants a Times-Picayune. There is fifty cents in his jacket pocket for a Times-Picayune. He knows this. He recalls putting the two quarters into his jacket pocket for the purpose of purchasing a Times-Picayune from the paper box in front of Fair Grinds. His jacket is draped over the chair that sits across from him at the table where he has set himself up with his laptop to write. He gets up to fetch the two quarters. He looks in one pocket and does not find them. He looks in the second pocket and doesn’t find them. He looks in his pants pockets, but he knows the quarters are not there. He looks in the inner pocket in the jacket, but there is none. He looks in one jacket pocket a second time and does not find them. He looks in the second jacket pocket a second time and does not find them.

He then picks the jacket up off the back of the chair, swings it over his shoulders. As his hands exit the tunnel of the sleeves and just as the jacket comes to rest on his shoulders, he reaches into his right jacket pocket and grabs both quarters between his thumb and two foremost fingers. He folds his shoulders and doffs his jacket and returns it to the back of the chair, cradling the quarters in his palm.

He looks at the quarters and it occurs to him that logically, he could have just scavenged his jacket pockets a third time as the jacket hung from the back of the chair.

At that point he understood something about doing without thinking, but he soon forgot it.