After printing photos and names in various configurations suitable for learning, it dawned on me that I might not be the only one who would be better off by learning these basic things about my colleagues. Actually, it would be a pretty neat intranet-application, at least I thought so.

We have a Django-driven white-pages app so it didn’t take that long to get something usable, here’s what it looks like at the moment (albeit a bit anonymized):

Guessing the name of a colleague from a photo

I went back and forth on the number of options to choose from but finally settled on six. It feels about right but might be too easy given that I pick out people randomly without any regard to gender, thus limiting the plausible options to around three.

Guessing the face of a colleague given his or her name

As you can see, there are only two types of questions so far but I plan to expand that in the future. What would you want to learn about your colleagues?

I’m far from an expert when it comes to the subject so hopefully it can trigger a good discussion around deployment ideas and strategies. Because it’s not really about the tools one’s using. For the most part, it’s much more about coming up with clever ways of automating tricky processes. Fabric just gives you some nice building blocks to help you on the way.

Django Deployment with Fabric (on SlideShare)

David Hall är en av de mest ödmjuka och snällaste människor jag känner (@andcar som pekar på hans tröja är också snäll!)

As we got hooked on fjällen last year, Karin and I early on decided to go backpacking in the north of Sweden again. This time, we met up with my dad and brother at Arlanda airport and flew together up to Kiruna where we took a taxi to Abisko Fjällstation and ate an excellent as well as extensive vegetarian buffet there (Karin felt very lucky!)

Next morning, after a steady breakfast, we started hiking and for two days followed Kungsleden until reaching the Alesjaure cabins. At that point, we headed off along one of the unmarked trails along the Unna Visttasvággi valley in order to reach the Visttas cabin. From there, we headed up another valley to the Nallo cabin. After which we split up for a while. Jens and Olle headed to down to the Sälka cabins to rest a day while Karin and I took a detour to the remote and alpine Unna Räita cabin.

After Unna Räita, we went down to Sälka where the cabin host argued strongly against going up Koupervaggi and ending up at the Tarfala cabins. In retrospect, we should’ve trusted our guide book but at that point we didn’t know and decided to go by what he said. So we followed Kungsleden and the trail to the Kebnekaise cabins where we split up once again. Jens and Olle were going up to the top of Kebnekaise and Karin and I headed towards Tarfala.

Going to Tarfala turned out to be a really good choice. From there we headed “straight” towards Nikkaluokta by starting with going up a steep mountain side consisting of only loose rocks but we were lucky and met up with a crew from the research station who led us up an easier path than the regular one. The top of that pass is absolutely beautiful. One one side, you have views of steep, snow-covered mountain tops and glaciers. One the other side, you’ll have all the gentle sloping hills you can wish for.

The last couple of days we spent on these beautiful hills sloping towards Nikkaluokta. No path, just immense open spaces in front of us.

All in all, camping around the 1000m mark has become our definitive preference — alpine but not too alpine.

Our packing list for this year improved a bit (but far from the amount the checkbook says ;). Our most appreciated new piece of gear were our NeoAir 120cm sleeping pads. Crazy light and really, really comfortable when you fill them with just enough air.

Backpacking light? Not really.

Our tentative plan (which did change)

Wearing:

Carrying:

Living and sleeping:

Clothes:

For the feet:

Eat and cook:

Dry-bags, etc.:

Miscellaneous:

Books, maps, etc.:

Camera equipment:

Food:

Hygiene:

All in all, 15981 grams carried including backpack. When we started from Abisko we noticed Karin was carrying as much as me so we gradually moved stuff over to my backpack during the hike.

Karin’s packlist

Click the above to see the Flickr notes on what Karin is bringing.

makeSearchCommand({
  name: "Bloggy",
  url: "http://bloggy.se/search/{QUERY}",
  icon: "http://bloggy.se/favicon.ico",
  description: "Searches Bloggy for...",
  preview: function(pblock, directObject) {
    var searchTerm = directObject.text;
    var pTemplate = "Searches Bloggy.se for ${query}";
    var pData = {query: searchTerm};
    pblock.innerHTML = CmdUtils.renderTemplate(pTemplate, pData);
  }
});

I’ve added Ubiquity meta information to this page so that you should see a Firefox bar across the top of the page asking you whether or not to install/subscribe to this script.

For people who have installed Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs, here’s a user script that enables you to quickly search for words in Wordnik:

makeSearchCommand({
  name: "Wordnik",
  url: "http://wordnik.com/{QUERY}",
  icon: "http://wordnik.com/media/img/wordnik.ico",
  description: "Searches Wordnik for your words.",
  preview: function(pblock, directObject) {
    var searchTerm = directObject.text;
    var pTemplate = "Searches Wordnik for <b>${query}</b>";
    var pData = {query: searchTerm};
    pblock.innerHTML = CmdUtils.renderTemplate(pTemplate, pData);
  }
});

I’ve added Ubiquity meta information to this page so that you should see a Firefox bar across the top of the page asking you whether or not to install/subscribe to this script.

makeSearchCommand({
  name: "jaikungfu",
  url: "http://jaiku.lemonad.org/search?q={QUERY}",
  icon: "http://jaiku.lemonad.org/favicon.ico",
  description: "Jaikungfu search Jaiku.",
  preview: function(pBlock, directObj) {
    if (directObj.text)
      pBlock.innerHtml = "Searches " +
      "<a href=\"http://jaiku.com/\">Jaiku</a> for " +
      directObj.text +
      " (<a href=\"http://jaiku.lemonad.org/\">jaikungfu</a>)";
    else
      pBlock.innerHTML = "Searches " +
      "<a href=\"http://jaiku.com/\">Jaiku</a> "+
      "for the given words " +
      "(<a href=\"http://jaiku.lemonad.org/\">jaikungfu</a>)";
  }
});

Thanks to Håkan Kjellerstrand for teaching me the basics!

Update 2008-08-31: I’ve added Ubiquity meta information to this page so that you should see a Firefox bar across the top of the page asking you whether or not to install/subscribe to this script.

Karin and I are going backpacking in the north of Sweden. The tentative itinerary is to meet Jonathan and Jessie in Kiruna on the 23rd. They’ll arrive at the airport coming from the US via Stockholm. On the morning of the 24th we’ll start hiking from Abisko and follow Kungsleden for a couple of days.

When we reach Sälkasstugorna we’ll head off on the “unmarked” trails up towards Nallostugan. Then follow the “unmarked” trails down to Vistasstugan and up again over the pass at Mårmastugan and back up towards Abisko. We’ll see how it goes ;)

Now, we’ve spent tons of nights in tents while biking but we’re relatively unexperienced hikers so the last couple of weeks we’ve been planning and purchasing stuff to bring. We thought we had most of it but, alas, the checkbook says no, you really didn’t.

Here’s what it boiled down to:

Backpack fodder

Wearing:

Carrying:

Karin’s packlist

Good for one week of backpacking? Missing: Clothes for wearing, towel, peanut butter, soft bread, money and possibly a book.

Click the above to see the Flickr notes on what Karin is bringing.

Say hello if you meet us! Feel free to help us carry our too heavy backpacks ;)

Greasemonkey scripts are great. However, for users and developers alike, they do pose one problem; that of managing updates and bug fixes. There’s no automatic infrastructure set up for it and users might not notice that there are newer versions out—especially if they’re happy with the functionality of the current version. Developers can’t notify these users either since they don’t know who they are.

So to get around that limitation, over the last week or so, I’ve slowly (and painstakingly) made my own Firefox extension combining the two Jaiku Greasemonkey scripts I had previously made (AutoLink and More Context for Comments) with some additional features.

without Jaikungfu

with Jaikungfu

with Jaikungfu (blue marks extended icon set, version 0.1.3)

Integrated search form in sidebar (version 0.1.5)

Integrated channel search form in Jaiku channel and explore sidebar (version 0.1.6)

Inline reading of comments. Click the read inline link and and comments for the presence update are downloaded via ajax and displayed underneath (version 0.1.7)

List of commenters displayed underneath comment edit box. Click to insert @usernames (version 0.1.9)

In order to be able to submit it for Mozilla approval, I need people to beta test it first so I would really appreciate if you would register and download Jaikungfu from my sandbox at addons.mozilla.org. The sandbox is an area for advanced users to test add-ons before they are reviewed for general use. In order to access the sandbox, after registering, you must enable it in your account settings: click the link in the upper right corner that says My Account and check the box that says Show sandbox?. Then click save.. If you’d like, you can read more about it here.

Good news, the extension is out of the mozilla extension sandbox and can now be downloaded without registering—thanks everyone! :)
Kung-Pow! Download Jaikungfu 0.1.5 from addons.mozilla.org (or if you prefer the absolute latest version, development build 0.2 is available directly from my site. Download and open with FireFox/Flock).
Oh, and please remember to remove my previous Greasemonkey scripts before installing Jaikungfu as they probably don’t play well together :)

If you find a bug or have suggestions, don’t hesitate to email me!

• 0.1.3 extends the icon set shown on the Jaiku site.
• 0.1.4 removed some files that was no longer needed.
• 0.1.5 is the latest public version (approved on August 2) and adds a search form to most pages (the search functionality can be accessed without jaikungfu at jaiku.lemonad.org/search/).
• 0.1.6 is the latest beta-version and adds channel search through Rick Measham’s JaikuFans channel search.
• 0.1.7 adds inline reading of comments.
• 0.1.8 adds a list of commenters under the comment box for quick insertion of @username’s.
• 0.1.9 improves upon the list of commenters under the comment box by adding user images. It also fixes a rear display formatting problem with inline comments.
• 0.1.10 just includes some small tweaks to the above functionality.
• 0.1.11 adds a “top” link below comments to quickly return to the top (per request on Jaiku).
• 0.1.12 integrates search and channel search into one form with two submit buttons.
• 0.1.13 includes a number of changes and additions with the main ones being that it now works in Firefox 3, clickable inline comment avatars, and links for increasing size of profile avatars.
• 0.1.14 primarily fixes a very annoying problem for users not using adblock (Thanks again Rick Measham for all the help with finding and solving this! :).
• 0.2 is the latest alpha-version and fixes a minor problem for users not using adblock. I really hope this will become the public version so I rev’ed it to 0.2 :)