Laughing Meme » protest.net

10 Years

Kellan — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:28:39 +0000

And what a long, strange 10 years it’s been.

“Going to the good video store”

Kellan — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 19:52:26 +0000

Hey! There Josh goes slandering my luvly Riot::Core

http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/03/30/going-to-the-good-video-store/

Craig on ChangeThis

Kellan — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 17:01:32 +0000

My buddies at ChangeThis got Slashdotted last Friday, and apparently held up well under the load. (damn, I wish we had actually finished the re-write of protest.net we started that code base for) And today they have, “Why Craigslist Works”, by Craig. I haven’t quite gotten over the conceptual leap of having to dowload a PDF, but I’m noting this for when life is a little less crazy.

Money, Power, Sex, and Elephants

Kellan — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 08:10:23 +0000

Picked up my copy of Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant this evening, and I noticed that it is published by Chelsea Green. Chelsea Green is a progressive publishing house in Vermont who use Eggplant’s MI CMS. A CMS based on the Riot::Core framework we built for our since stalled protest.net re-write. Small world.

While I was there I also noticed that they’re totally sold out of “Don’t Think”, so now would probably be a good time to buy your copy before your local bookstore also runs out.

“Not in Our Name” is using protest.net

Kellan — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 22:34:12 +0000

http://www.anarchogeek.com/archives/000339.html

Cascadia Anarchist Tech Skill-Share

Kellan — Sat, 25 Oct 2003 05:14:02 +0000

If you’re a radical techie in or around Seattle (crews from Vancouver and Portland are coming) then you should to CATS this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, at the IMC.

CATS is an informal skill swap and socialize aimed at activists who are using technology in their work. Bring your own presentations, discussions, projects and hardware. Except conversations on collaboration, geek culture (and its negative impact on diversity), building secure webservers, VoIP (we’re all hoping someone will show up, and tell us all how its done), Debian NP, and whatever else people are moved to discuss.

See the wiki for some projects which people have said they would be willing to talk about (or have been volunteered to speak about)

Now and forever.

Events and Bayes

Kellan — Mon, 21 Apr 2003 01:07:55 +0000

Inspired by a post to the python-list about using spambayes to classify defunct or out of date event listings,(via Uche Ogbuji), and a recent chat with Kendall I started playing with using it to identify spammed or inappropriate listings on Protest.net (and by extension other open publishing web applications). Initial progress was not promising. I think it’s going to be need more time then a distracted afternoon at Coffee Exchange when I was really supposed to be working on a cover letter or revising the resume.

The net simply wasn’t converging (learning) fast enough to get useful results. I think that I need to spend some time thinking about my token choices, which will be substantially different then those used for email, to really get this to work.

Deep down I really feel like these learning, emergent technologies are going to be an important enabler for the new wave of web experimentation going on under the moniker “social software”.

Expect Outages

Kellan — Wed, 12 Feb 2003 04:19:00 +0000

So Yada, the server that hosts both LaughingMeme and Protest.net is being pounded in anticipation of events this weekend, in New York and elsewhere. This partially a problem of poorly written code (the site software behind Protest.net is about 3 years over due for an overhaul) partially too little memory in the box (it could use another 500M) and partially too much damn traffic. I hate wars, everytime it looks like we’re going to have a war, our load jumps to like 400. Its so annoying, just cut it out with the war mongering, I’m not sysadmin enough to handle it.

Coverage has already started rolling in over at NYC IMC in anticipation.

Speaking of NYC IMC, I just got my Threat to Peace poster tonight, and its amazing. (hmmm, the Indypendent server is also having load trouble)

Programming Retreat, an Update

Kellan — Sat, 28 Sep 2002 19:20:00 +0000

I don’t think I’m constitutionally equipped for a retreat. I’m sitting in a quiet living room, watching morning fogs billow across the Arcata marsh. We’re here to do a re-write of Protest.net, close down the outside distractions, pull together the same group who built the first version so many years ago. But the outside world keeps intruding. I watch with pulse pumping events unfolding in DC (how the hell is Ramsey still police chief?), and follow the inane twitter of foreign affairs pundits, and even following along with the ridiculous RSS 2.0 wars. Plus there is has been the running side show of the computers to Ecuador being trapped in bureaucratic hell.

Work proceeds slowly. But there is a nice framework starting to shape up.

Also, thinking the software should be able to participate in building something like the DC Mobilization calendar, perhaps via allowing arbitrary grouping of events, and allowing embedding.

A few hours later

Sitting on the Arcata Plaza, the fog has burned off, and the sun is warm, as what must be the entire town swirls around us. The Saturday farmers’ markets is setup, booth-to-booth, shoulder-to-shoulder all around the central square. And there is music, and dancing, and juggling everywhere. And lots and lots of children. So many young children everywhere, I don’t understand why Acatans aren’t spreading out to take over the world. Perhaps they are a very successful species in their niche, but too specialized to spread out over a wider geographic range? The market was a studied contrast to the Santa Cruz farmers’ market. In Santa Cruz the market is done and over by 9am, and most of the people who attend are serioius foodies. Sun bathing, juggling, and small children are not part of the mix. Nor is hydroponics growing supply as prominent. (They do have in common an extraordinarily high quality of produce, the absence of which leaves me bitterly depressed when I’m back East).

UPDATE, ARCATA: That evening, as we walk back across the Arcata plaza, having just finished large bowls of gourmet vegetarian ramen, the crowds are largely gone though small clumps of young people, sit, or mill around the edges, laughter echoes across the plaza. As we exit from the Southeast corner a man age 18-28 walks up us, “Anyone want a shoebox full of nuggets?”, “Ummm, no thank you”. This is a long way from the covert whisper of “Weed? Weed?” you expect in city parks. We stood there wondering how much are you selling if you your basic unit is a shoebox? Arcata is a very different world

UPDATE COMPUTERS: Computers are no longer trapped in bureaucracy, they are now trapped by the lockout along the West coast.

Tech Todos – RSS Event feeds from Protest.net calendars

Kellan — Sat, 25 May 2002 23:27:00 +0000

Protest.net’s software (aka calendrome) certainly has its problems. It was the first major piece of software development we ever did, and due to some historical issues we’re not allowed to release the code under a free license, but it does also have some neat features, and I try to encourage people to look past the warts, and see what it can do for them.

Here in Seattle, the IMC is interested in taking the SCN Calendar and making it into something more useful. However once they’ve done all the work: of getting Jean using a new tool; getting allies setup with their own calendars; setting up the merge rules to pull these ally events into one calendar; and configuring look and feel so that it isn’t jarring to visit, then they’ll want some way to syndicate it to Seattle-IMC.

So, soon Protest.net calendars will have RSS1.0 feeds using the events modules

UPDATE: The feeds are working! Urls are of the form:

UPDATE: Parsing RSS event feeds that use mod_event? Checkout MagpieRSS, a RSS parser in PHP.