I just released a new blog called What, Where, Why?, focused specifically on web development, the Internets, and other related geekery.

There are already a number of posts on the site, including one titled Octopress in the Cloud explaining the technologies I used on the blog (which include Octopress, Amazon S3, CloudFront, and Route 53) and my latest post on two tools two help you develop responsive designs.

Hope you enjoy it!

I will be releasing a few other subject-area blogs in the coming days and this blog will continue as a place for general news, and updates on what I'm doing.

Check out What, Where, Why? today.

The course will give you strong foundations in Objective-C and Cocoa Touch to give you a solid start to building your own iOS apps in just three days.

You will be using the latest iOS SDK (iOS 5) and the latest Xcode (4.2).

Tickets are £999+VAT for the three days. If you're a freelancer or a one-person company, use the code IAMAFREELANCER to get 20% off that price.

Find out more information and reserve your seat today as there are only 12 spots open on the course.

That is why this blog is blacked out in protest today.

You may also have heard that SOPA has been killed. It hasn't. It has merely been shelved, most likely until February.

It does, however, need to be killed and it–and similar bills in the future that are supported by the dinosaurs of our age, the old-school publishing companies, the BSA, RIAA, MPAA.

And, if you need any more reason to hate SOPA, just remember that Rupert Murdoch wholeheartedly supports it.

Find out more about why SOPA and PIPA here:

• SOPA Blackout–learn more
• Google: End Piracy, Not Liberty
• Guardian: Stop SOPA or the Web really will go dark
• Wikipedia: SOPA and PIPA, learn more.

Flickr Sets

• Geek Ninja Battle Night photos (2011)
• Head conference studio setup (2008)
• FITC 2007
• Pups in cars (yeah it's a bit random)
• Unpacking the Apple TV

And here are some miscellaneous photos that were not in any sets:

Replaced, are they, by the grey (OK, pastel) reality of commercial silos that grant users varying degrees of access to their own data while trying to gleam as much information about them as they can to sell to their advertisers and other interested third parties. And what freedoms remain are under grave threat from legislation like SOPA and PROTECT IP.

How's that for overly-dramatic?

Yes, that was overly-dramatic!

Of course, it's not all doom and gloom.

There is a thriving web standards community actively building, evolving, and furthering the open web, and bodies like the EFF who are campaigning to keep the web open. People–at least in the geekier circles–are becoming more aware of the importance of owning their own data. And, in all fairness, many web services now allow users to backup or export their data.

But what about the URLs used for public pieces of user data?

Who owns those?

Who owns your URLs?

The norm today is that URLs belong to the web service provider.

Case in point: I'm closing my Flickr account in response to Yahoo! hiring PayPal's president as CEO and that means that the URLs for all my photos and sets will now go dead. Anyone who has linked to a photo will now get a broken link. In short, this will break (a teeny, tiny, probably imperceptible) part of the Internet. Regardless of its impact, however, breaking links breaks the Internet.

So what can we do about it?

#myData #myURL

Just like we are beginning to understand the value of owning our own data, we need to understand the value of owning our own URLs.

And by this, I don't mean that we should all host all of our own data. We don't all want to run a mini Flickr, a mini YouTube, etc. We don't all have the technical expertise or the financial means to do so. It's just not practical.

It does mean, however, that I should be able to use my own URLs with third-party services. So, if I have a domain name (e.g., aralbalkan.com), I should be able to tell Flickr to use, say, photos.aralbalkan.com as the root of all URLs to my images and sets. In other words, I should be able to tell web services to use my own URLs as the canonical URLs to represent my own data.

If Flickr had allowed this, for example, I could have uploaded the photos I exported from it either to photos.aralbalkan.com under the same URL scheme or to somewhere else completely different (and used redirects, etc.) without breaking the Internet.

Owning your own data is great, owning your own URLs also is even better.

Let's start demanding that web application developers implement this feature.

The only things I had left on my 12-year-old Yahoo! account were a few contacts from the days I used Messenger and email and the photos on my Flickr account. I exported the former easily and I'm in the process of backing up the photos and their metadata from Flickr now.

Once the backups are complete, I'll be deleting my Yahoo! account.

Dead URLs break the web

Unfortunately, this does mean that those URLs are going to die (and it's made me realise how valuable URLs are–they're part of your data and you should own them, not the web apps you use. All web apps should give you the ability to provide your own URLs as canonical URLs for your own data.)

How to backup your Flickr photos

Anyway, in case you want to backup your photos from Flickr, here's the way I'm doing it. Follow these instructions to get going:

1. Download the latest flickrdownload
2. Unzip the downloaded file somewhere and then navigate to that folder in Terminal (Open up Terminal, type cd and then drag the unzipped folder into terminal to get its path, and press return to change to that folder).
3. Enter the following line, substituting your own Flickr username and the path to the folder you want the photos backed up to, in Terminal:

   java -Xmx2048m -jar FlickrDownload.jar --photosDir /PATH/TO/THE/FOLDER/YOU/WANT/THE/PHOTOS/BACKED/UP/TO/ --downloadExifData --authUsername YOUR_FLICKR_USERNAME

The first time you run this, it will give you a URL that you need to copy into your web browser to visit Flickr and authorise the script. Once you've done that, press return in the terminal and the script should Just Work™ (it didn't for me and I had to run the command again for it to work.)

That's it! Hope it helps.

Flickr to WP

I'm also using the Flickr to WP plugin to import all my photos into this blog so I can share them here.

Update #1

flickrdownload downloaded all my images properly but died when trying to write the archive.html file with the following error:

com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal. impl.io.MalformedByteSequenceException: Invalid byte 2 of 2-byte UTF-8 sequence.

It did write the XML metadata files correctly, though, and so I'm going ahead and shutting my account (I can always regenerate the HTML file by fixing the code).

Also, I saw that some of the images were Flickr's "image not available" placeholders but it doesn't seem to have affected the originals (just the derived medium and small versions, which are not crucial).

Update #2

I've now backed up the Flickr photos both offline and on this blog, cancelled my Flickr Pro subscription, and shut down both my Flickr account as well as my main 12-year-old Yahoo! account.

Goodbye, Yahoo!

No more eating animals

Oh, and in the last few weeks of 2011, I decided to give up eating meat (in a nutshell, I couldn’t reconcile my revulsion at being served whale at a sushi restaurant in Oslo with my willingness to eat–among others-cow, pig, and chicken.) I’m hugely enjoying being vegetarian. Even in these short few weeks, my diet has become infinitely more varied and I’ve discovered (and re-discovered) restaurants, ingredients, and dishes that I never would have otherwise because I would have picked the burger or steak on the menu.

Comfort zones

So I guess I have done quite a bit and things have changed in my life. And yet I feel that I haven’t achieved as much as I wanted to and that I need to venture outside my comfort zone.

It’s somewhat ironic, considering that my focus on User Experience in all things leads me to try and remove all friction from my life; design my life, if you will, for maximum comfort. And there isn’t anything wrong with that… as long as you are also pushing yourself, playing with stuff you love, growing, and creating. (And how lucky we are, those of us that have the luxury to do those things.)

All this to say, I feel I’ve gotten a bit too comfortable and I am going to make a concerted effort this year to venture outside my comfort zone.

Focus and experimentation

I want to start experimenting again, making mistakes, iterating, hopefully working and collaborating with other people, and generally getting my hands dirty.

I’m also aware that I need to focus (heck, I spend enough time telling everyone around me that focus is key). It’s too easy with all the conferences and workshops and travel to get pulled into a endless chain of social engagements. I’m definitely a social creature and I adore the company of others but sometimes you need to cuddle up with a warm blanket, a nice hot cup of tea, and your laptop and actually–y’know–make stuff!

Let’s play together

The ‘collaborating with other people’ bit is also something I want to really focus on. As an only child, it’s not something that comes naturally to me and I want to work on that. (I’m very used to being self-sufficient and handling all aspects of a project… but that–while it has its advantages–can also limit you in the scope of the projects you can work on.) I thought I’d get the chance to work with a lovely team on a new project this year when the kind folks at Lighthouse backed my interactive film idea and helped submit the proposal to the Arts Council and the BBC for their The Space project. Unfortunately, following an unbelievably short evaluation period in which they were inundated with entries, our proposal was not picked for funding. This was a bummer (yes, that’s the technical term) but I have a few other ideas up my sleeve–one of which is an app idea that I’m very excited about.

The write stuff (oh boy)

I also have a couple of writing/publishing projects I want to undertake. This started out as a mild desire but has progressed in the last year to become a full-on craving; one of those ideas that just sits there at the back of your mind and won’t go away until you actually do it. I’ll be starting on three different projects that I will be announcing shortly. I plan on developing each one publicly, and working on them concurrently.

Focus, focus, focus!

Of course, if I’m to focus on these projects, something has to give. As such I am going to cut down on my speaking engagements for 2012. There are several conferences I’ve already said yes to (and which I’m hugely looking forward to), but I am going to be very selective in which ones I say yes to going forward. (That said, if you have an awesome conference planned that you want an inspirational opening or closing keynote for, get in touch!) I am also going to keep teaching my workshops but will limit them to one a month at most.

Wanderlust

Finally, I feel like I could do with a change of scene. As much as I love Brighton, I’ve been here for about eight years now (and in the UK for a decade) and that’s the longest I’ve stayed in one country. I have to say I’m tempted by the quality of life in Oslo… or perhaps somewhere warmer? I don’t know. All I can say is don’t be too surprised if you hear that I’m going off to experience somewhere new. (And if you have any ideas–about working together, great places to live, or both, leave me a comment!)

‘nuff talk

I’m still planning out my year but this post marks the end of the thinking phase and the beginning of the doing phase. Time to get those hands dirty. Expect to see some half-baked ideas being developed publicly, experiments, mistakes, new beginnings, new friendships, and hopefully some really cool projects.

Don’t mind the dust, and I hope you enjoy the ride.

The problem is that there are apparently issues with installing the dependencies on a box running Lion with Xcode 4.2. The following solution worked for me. I hacked it together from that StackOverflow thread as well as the Octopress Setup Guide:

1. Install RVM:

   bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)

2. Add RVM to your shell as a function:

   echo '[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM function' >> ~/.bash_profile
   source ~/.bash_profile

3. Use RVM to install the latest Ruby:

   rvm install 1.9.3 --with-gcc=clang

4. …and use it:

   rvm use 1.9.3

   (This also resulted in the latest ruby gems (1.8.10 at the time of writing) being installed for me

5. Download Octopress:

   git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git octopress

6. Change your current working directory to the octopress folder:

   cd octopress

7. You should get an alert from RVM, asking you if you want to trust the .rvmrc file in the folder. Respond with (y)es, and you should get an error:

   WARN: ruby ruby-1.9.2-p290 is not installed.
   To install do: 'rvm install ruby-1.9.2-p290'

   Resolved this by editing the .rvmrc file and changing its contents to read rvm 1.9.3 instead of rvm 1.9.2 (RVM will ask you to re-confirm that you want to trust the file after you've updated it.)

8. Check the Ruby version

   ruby --version

   . You should see ruby 1.9.3p0 (2011-10-30 revision 33570) [x86_64-darwin11.2.0]

9. Install dependencies:

   gem install bundler
   bundle install

10. Install the default theme:

    rake install

11. To test your new blog:

    rake preview

    then hit it in the browser at http://localhost:4000

12. To learn how to deploy your site, etc., follow the links in the "Next steps" section of The Octopress Setup Guide (by the way, why have people stopped adding anchors or ids to their headings? One small id for you, one big deep link for everyone else.) :)

That's it, that should get you up and running with Octopress (and the latest Ruby–as of this writing, 1.9.3-p0), on a box running OS X Lion and Xcode 4.2.x.

One of the files in the tutorial is the package.json file for managing dependencies in the (absolutely lovely) package manager npm. When I wrote the data structure out in CoffeeScript, however, the compiled data structure wasn't valid JSON according to JSONLint (it was nested between parentheses, had unquoted keys, and a trailing semi-colon, as you can see in the code snippet.)

({
  name: "blog",
  …
});

(The CoffeeScript compiler generated the surrounding parentheses even when I used the --bare compiler flag.)

The resulting file also had a .js extension, instead of a .json extension and I couldn't find a way to change that (although there is a compiler flag to change the folder the file gets created in).

So, to cut a long story short, I just whipped up a little shell script to convert my original CoffeeScript data structure into valid JSON simply by removing the extra characters the compiler had thrown in and adding quotes around the keys. Here's the (pardon the pun) gist of it:

coffee --print --compile $1.coffee | sed '1s/^.//' | sed 's/  });/}/' | sed "s/\([^ '\"].*[^ '\"]\):/\"\1\":/" > $1.json

( Update: Thanks to Max's comment, I was able to boil down the script to a single line and get rid of the temporary files – thanks, Max!)

Not rocket science and I'm not a sed wizard so it may not be the most efficient way of doing things but it works.

So, if you want to write your static data structures in CoffeeScript and have them compile into valid JSON:

1. check out the gist
2. Save it in a file called coffeetojson
3. Don't forget to chmod +x coffeetojson to make it executable
4. Then, assuming that the coffeetojson script is in the same folder as your .coffee script containing your data structure (let's assume it's in a file called mydata.coffee), enter the following:

./coffeetojson mydata

That will create a file called mydata.json with the valid JSON version of your data structure. (I haven't tested this exhaustively at all so there's a big chance it might fail – if it does, I'll be very happy to receive your patches.) :)

Why go to all this trouble, instead of authoring JSON by hand initially? Well, because as easy as JSON is to author by hand, CoffeeScript – with its barer syntax – is simpler still. And I'm lazy! :-)

Here's hoping this helps someone out there who is as lazy as I am!

Here's your last chance to attend a native iOS workshop by me in the UK. Come to Brighton on November 23-25 to join me for three days of hands-on hacking as you learn the foundations of Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, and Xcode. We'll be covering iOS5 and Xcode 4.2 (the latest versions).

Tickets are commemoratively priced at £666.66 + VAT. Places are limited.

Do tell your friends :)

For more information, see the Native iOS Development Dojo web site.