B. Mann Consulting - Vancouver blogger, entrepreneur, and technologist

DaveO does a podcast with me on Bryght, Raincity Studios, and Bootup Labs

bmann — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:52:55 -0400

Dave Olson sat down with me at the beginning of this week and did a long (50 minutes) podcast over at Raincity Radio.

We covered a lot of ground. Here are some short notes with related links on what we talked about:

I first met DaveO down in Seattle at Gnomedex 2005
DaveO asks me about the start of Bryght -- me, Adrian, Roland, and James, supported by funding from Lance Tracey
The early days of my involvement with Drupal and how that moved into Bryght: hostmaster, install profiles (first created in D4.5, took all the way to D5 to get into core!)
we decided at Bryght to support the organic growth of the community and helping to stimulate a business ecosystem. A good post is organic vs. non organic open source
one of the big questions was "Why did you sell Bryght?". The answer is two fold. One, it became a combined product (Drupal hosting) and services (R&D and contract consulting work) company, trending ever more towards services. This was just not something I was personally interested in. Two, I felt an itch to scratch about continuing to support the growth of the local Vancouver tech community, and ultimately it became clear that Bootup Labs was the right vehicle to do that with.
Bryght re-launched. It looks beautiful and I had almost nothing to do with it. Oh, and you can now get Bryght Light in Chinese, or even pay nothing for it as an ad-supported version.
Yes, there are more new services coming from Bryght, including Canadian based servers as an option. Much of it will be due to Narayan Newton.
there is a big chunk in the middle about what my new startup, Bootup Labs
there are Drupal events coming up that you should go to. In a couple of weeks there is Drupalcon Szeged, and in early September there is Drupalcamp Victoria ... combined with the Great Canadian Beerfest!
The design firm for the Drupal.org redesign has been chosen. This is going to be a BIG job, but remember, Drupal.org is *our* home -- this is something that will benefit everyone, and everyone should be looking at how to help with this.
Call to action: help get Drupal.org upgraded to Drupal 6. One of the (minor but important) patches near and dear to my heart is the infamous XML patch to project*
Shout out to VeryMisunderstood aka Kenn, who does a ton of work helping out in the forums

New Ventures BC mentor panel makes my brain full

bmann — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:06:04 -0400

It seems that when I am working with a lot of different ideas and companies, that what I post here really dries up. And that's the case right now.

I went through 8 startup presentations yesterday at New Ventures BC, check out my post at Bootup Labs:
New Ventures BC 2008 Mentor Panel Two

So, between one day mind melting events like the NVBC mentor panel and all the new companies and founders I'm being exposed to at Bootup Labs, I'm processing lots of information and giving direct, "live" feedback. I've still got lots of ideas floating around, they're just not making their way into blog posts :P

And yes, I really am not posting local Vancouver tech event stuff here anymore. Check out the Bootup Labs event listings page.

Quoted in 24 hours - Buzz Bishop's "Head in the Clouds" article

bmann — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:06:08 -0400

Buzz Bishop put a request for cloud computing experts. I'm not exactly an expert, but it is something that I've been looking into more deeply lately (see my cloud links on del.icio.us). And, of course, I'm advising TrevorO's startup, Layerboom, through Bootup Labs.

Anyway, I ended up writing a fairly lengthy set of answers to questions that Buzz sent across, some of which made their way into his article in today's 24 Hours -- Head in the Clouds. Thanks for the opportunity, Buzz!

Site specific browsers for mobile?

bmann — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:49:44 -0400

I'm catching up on some mobile-related blog reading today, and was spurred to write something by Tim Bray's Mobile Blues and Dean Bubley's re-post of an article by David Wood. (And thanks to Roland's Google Reader Shared Items, where I am getting a wealth of mobile and food related links)

Canada (and the world in general) is caught up in a storm of mobile imaginings based on the launch of the 3G iPhone. Recent results of app sales potentially point to a future where carriers *don't* have a chokehold on the mobile handset experience: for the first time, your average non-technical end users can easily buy and install applications for your mobile fun. Except, of course, it's just another kind of walled garden, just one run by a computer company instead of a carrier.

Tim in particular has issues with that, as well as with having to learn yet another development environment to program native apps for the iPhone:

But there’s a little problem and a big problem. The little problem is that I don’t wanna learn Objective-C and I don’t wanna learn a whole new UI framework. I acknowledge that lots of smart people think Objective-C and Cocoa are both wonderful, and quite likely they’re right. I don’t care. I’m lazy; I know enough languages and enough frameworks. You’re free to disapprove, but there are a whole lot of people like me out there.

The big problem is this: I don’t wanna be a sharecropper on Massa Steve’s plantation. I don’t want to write code for a platform where there’s someone else who gets to decide whether I get to play and what I’m allowed to sell, and who can flip my you’re-out-of-business-switch any time it furthers their business goals. …

OK, points taken. You don't *have* to learn another programming environment, but every experience I've had with Java on every single phone I've ever owned has been .... terrible. Use Java if you want to quickly prototype an app for your enterprise ... but the usability and UI for the average end user, never mind the install process, is terrible. Most people go to native platform code for that final bit of polish (IF that polish is needed for your target market).

I don't have much to say on the locked platform aspects: you make your choices. In some ways, writing native apps for *any* platform is a level of lock in. That is, shouldn't we rail against OS X native only apps in the same way?

And here we finally come to the punchline hinted at by the title. For desktop operating systems, there are now a couple of site specific browsers (SSBs [wikipedia link]): you enter in the URL of a website / webapp and it is bundled into a separately clickable "application" that you can run like any other native program on your desktop. I use Fluid, based on a WebKit engine, and there is also Prism, based on a Mozilla engine.

So, somewhere between widgets and full blown native applications, can an SSB engine for mobile operating systems reign supreme? Bubley's summarized thoughts on this are:

…for many applications, Mobile Web will be the way to go, for ease of development, cross-platform support, rapid update and so on.

But for some the most important and demanding applications, there will still be a need for native development, even if it comes with a dose of pain.

The mobile web, with advanced, compliant browsers available on smartphones like the iPhone or various Nokia phones, is the Internet. Various UI niceties and formatting to fit the screen factor aside, this is regular ol' HTML and AJAX, no new platform to learn here.

So, I'm looking forward to "Fluid for iPhone" or "Prism for Series 60": I can think of a web app developer or three that would be VERY interested in exploring a potentially very quick way to have apps on these smartphone platforms, without the full pain of native app writing. Actually, paging Handimobility -- there might be a very nice business in there...

VinoCamp is open for registration: August 16th, 2008 at UBC Botanical Gardens

bmann — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:32:50 -0400

Yes, I'm getting involved in yet-another-event. I was overjoyed when I heard that Lori Pike had made the jump out of tech and into a great marketing position with Mission Hill. I mumbled something about a WineCamp, a similar-but-different* event that started down in San Francisco / Napa Valley.

Lori took the idea, went off and got approval, and then came back and called me on actually helping organize this thing. A bunch more volunteer organizers were called out, meetings were had, and now, we bring you ... VinoCamp! Here's the blurb:

This is definitely not the wine festival. In a more unstructured form than a standard conference, VinoCampVancouver brings wine, people and technology together in one place, making wine accessible, educational and fun. As a different type of conference, VinoCamp is designed for those interested in technology and wine, and people are expected to take photos of what's happening, and to blog or tweet or message about their experiences.

Join us! Whether you're speaker, sponsor, or a wine-drinker, our aim is to make this day memorable, fun, and interesting. You will learn more about wine and viticulture, meet interesting people, and enjoy yourself in one of Vancouver's loveliest gardens.

It's a full day (approx. 10-4) and is being held on August 16th at UBC Botanical Garden. We're expecting about 125 people. Registration is open now, and tickets are $50 for the full day event (t-shirt, lunch, wine, and food pairings included) please head on over to Eventbrite to register now. I fully expect this to sell out as we push out the word this week, so get your tickets soon.

We're also looking for sponsors and speakers.

Thanks to launch sponsors Redwerks for helping put together the website with their Kommonwealth tool, and to Artisan Wine Company for being the wine sponsor.

And, of course, a tip of the corkscrew in the general direction of my co-organizers: Degan, Tanya, Colleen, Megan, Cyprien and Lauren (yes there are some Northern Voice co-conspirators in that list).

* For the record, the WineCamp one liner description is "an ad-hoc gathering that brings together the best of the old world and the new... wine, non-profits and geeks!" -- connecting non-profits with technologists over wine. A great goal, but we really were interested in reaching out to wine and food enthusiasts and skip technology all together -- aside

Updated Mass Virtual Hosting How to for Mac OS X Leopard

bmann — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 03:42:42 -0400

I spent some time this weekend updating a long ago how to post on configuring mass virtual hosting for Apache on Mac OS X -- the original version was from April 2004!

I do lots of testing on my laptop, and while I'm now quite familiar with VirtualHost entries from the dedicated servers I work with, this is actually even easier: just create a directory with the name of the host and requests for that host will be served from the directory. It all comes down to good old mod_vhost_alias. I probably should do some more direct examples of mixing and matching this with other host directives. As mentioned at the end of the article, aside from symlinking one directory to another, I don't know of another way to point multiple hosts at the same web root. I'll get to it if I end up needing it myself, it works for now.

CTV Newsnet appearance: Bell and Telus incoming SMS charges debacle

bmann — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:46:38 -0400

I'm going to be on CTV Newsnet again, this afternoon at 3:15PM PST, live with Marcia MacMillan. Below are a few notes and links, I'll clean this up and post a link to the clip once it's wrapped. I talked about the iPhone last time, and somehow I think it's going to come up again.

in fact, Rogers is the only firm NOT charging for incoming texts, they now have a decent data plan, they have the high end Nokia phones, AND they have the iPhone.

Only North America charges for incoming text messages -- Europe and Asia have always been free.

via Ian Bell - http://www.physorg.com/news129793047.html - "SMS costs are, in the aggregate, 4x higher than getting data from the Hubble space telescope. Global SMS revenues are larger than the Hollywood movie, music and video game industries combined."

Lots more from Ian, like "I could personally store-and-forward all of Canada’s SMS traffic myself via my Novus broadband in Yaletown, and it would have limited impact on my BitTorrenting". Oh, right, and of course the fact that SMS effectively is NO extra load on carriers - "As such it costs the network exactly nothing and uses no bandwidth that isn’t already in use — traffic load is the same on the network even if no SMS messages are being transferred." - http://www.kenneyjacob.com/2007/06/19/how-sms-works/

via Yule Heibel - Productivity is boosted by mobile - "They say that by 2016 the value of the combined mobile wireless voice and broadband productivity gains to the US economy will equal $427 billion per year" - http://www.psfk.com/2008/07/how-mobile-boosts-productivity.html

Bell and Telus being called before Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry - http://www.smstextnews.com/2008/07/bell_telus_called_before_federal_indu... - of course, I'm going to mention C-61 and cellphone locking that Mr. Prentice has a hand in

Update: I was off at a photowalk this evening and am just getting back. My segment was quite short, but I'm glad I got a C-61 mention in. Thanks to Mr. iPhone John Biehler for digging up the direct link to my clip: http://watch.ctv.ca/news/latest/text-charges/#clip65669

Rogers to launch iPhone in Canada with $30 6GB data plan

bmann — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:16:37 -0400

I'm glad I waited in posting any sort of "the iPhone with Rogers will suck" commentary, as it seems they have somewhat come to their senses. As usual, John Biehler was my iPhone news source, and here's the link to the Roger's press release.

A new "promotional" data plan is going to be available until August 31st (and I actually believe they'll extend it...), where you can bring your own voice plan, and add a 6GB data plan for only $30 / month. Hmm, maybe over 50K signatures at ruinediphone.com changed their mind? No, it's not unlimited ... but in talking to Roland -- who is the heaviest mobile app user I know -- he's never gone over 500MB. I think I used a couple of GBs when I was at the Olympics in Torino, and large megapixel camera phones and the fast 3G speeds could certainly eat bandwidth, but 6GB seems fair.

So...am I getting an iPhone? Nope. I don't really like contracts, and I don't like locked phones. I imagine we'll be able to get an unlocked iPhone at some point, where I'll be able to swap out SIM cards when traveling as I do now.

Meanwhile, looks like I'll be on CTV Newsnet talking about the other Canadian wireless barons -- Bell and Telus. They are going to start charging for incoming text messages. Well, this should be a fun ride ... Rogers isn't charging for incoming, it has the iPhone and the latest Nokia phones, and now -- decent data plans. Really, what are Bell and Telus thinking?

Update: Looks like this is not just for iPhone -- you can add this plan to *any* phone, as long as you sign a 3 year contract, and it does apply to Fido as well. See the post on howard forums for reference.

Hypemachine + Nokia Podcasting client = constant new music

bmann — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:09:52 -0400

After being really happy with the Nokia Multimedia Transfer app for OS X to get music onto my phone, and photos off it onto iPhoto, I started looking to solve the "where to get new music" problem.

Around the same time, I was playing with the Nokia Podcasting app. Put simply, it is a podcast browser / downloader, which you can set to automatically connect to a network connection and download new podcast updates at a specified time. I set my phone to charge overnight, and set it up so that it would auto connect to my home wi-fi network.

Then I found Hypemachine. Yeah, yeah, I'm not really a cool trendy new music guy, and I *had* heard about it before, I just never really used it: it's a giant blog aggregator that tracks mentions of music and links to MP3s. It also exposes all this music blog aggregation as a podcast, with enclosures to the MP3 links. Not a traditional podcast at all -- it's whatever the Hypemachine has auto aggregated during that time period.

So, every morning, my phone is loaded with brand new music. It's eclectic to say the least -- last Friday featured lots of 4th of July-themed songs. The first time I set it up, I got some nice Catholic-rock-band tunes. Last night, I copied that music back to my computer after about 2 weeks of doing this. 63 songs survived my listening over that period, and I cut that down to about 40 that I would keep / give at least 3 stars to.

I'm listening to a lot more music on the go with this setup, and am being exposed to lots of "new stuff". So far, I bought the new Cold Play "Viva la Vida" album (definitely not a "long tail" band), as well as Ra Ra Riot both as iTunes Plus downloads. But the majority of the bands seem to be ones that I need to point you to their MySpace page to listen to their songs -- see Hooded Fang for one example.

It's been a fun experience so far, and I always look forward to what the next night of downloading will bring me. This whole listening to music on the go thing might really take off one of these days :P

Where do you find new music? Where do you listen to it? Where do you buy it?

Omnibus: BBQ, Jungle Disk, WordPress etc.

bmann — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:37:20 -0400

Well, contrary to the lack of posting here, I actually have a ton of stuff tumbling around my head right now. And so, an Omnibus post that covers a couple of different items.

I've been heads down busy and haven't been attending (or organizing!) any social media type events lately. I did get out Wednesday night to attend the Freshbooks / Redwerks BBQ. Look, there's me holding a puppy (photo by Ianiv)! It was a beautiful sunny evening and the Redwerks rooftop patio is awesome. I ended up manning the grill, my secret ploy to meet everyone (at least, everyone that was hungry). It was nice to meet some new people and catch up with a bunch of regulars.

I'm trying Jungle Disk for my personal backup. In short, it's a cross platform app that both serves as a kind of iDisk as well as some simple backup operations, except that your data is actually stored on Amazon's S3 service. You pay a one time license for the application (and you can install it on as many computers as you want), and you pay as you go for storage. And can get your files from any machine.

I'm currently backing up my Documents folder to a Backup area, and then I also have a second "bucket" (that's actually Amazon tech talk, but it makes sense) that is a true archive -- I copy old stuff there and delete if off my local disk. I'm still debating whether it's worth it for me to put my entire iTunes collection online -- it would solve being able to get my music from anywhere, and it would cost about $12 / month (for 60GB). Not sure what the calculation is for streaming that music some of the time? And yes, this is like MP3 Tunes music locker.

So that's my use, but Jungle Disk *also* launched the WorkGroup edition -- which is the same thing, but lets multiple users in a company use it from a single Amazon account, with things like their own storage space as well as granular user permissions. So you can have a Finance folder that only senior management can access. And if you don't have senior management, then just think about how great it would be to have a small business shared file system that you can access from any computer, anywhere. That's $2/month per employee, which I think is a good price.

WordPress! I've been mucking about in WordPress core and theme code. Once was with Rachael's site, which I upgraded using the FTP dance. I really hate not having command line access.... The second was for the Bootup Labs Blog, which I moved off of WordPress.com so we could add some more plugins and do stuff like have a feed for every category / tag. Except, when I went digging around, it seems that the main feed is the only one that is ever injected into the link rel header. So, here's my feature request if you're interested in the gory details: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7190 -- heck, I might even submit a patch :P

etc. There are so many things that could go in the etc. section. Should I talk about how Roger's iPhone pricing plans in Canada suck? Or about some thoughts on S3 and hosting shared files for the Drupal community? Or how my Raincity -- Bootup Labs transition is going? I've got lots going on, and I'll update here with extended posts on some of these topics. For now, it's summer, next week is Canada Day, and I'm going to spend time hanging out on Bowen with some of my favourite people.

P.S. Thanks to everyone that talked about their usernames -- that's one of the longest comment threads I've had in a while, it was fun!