Cross posted from FindingAda.

As announced on the front page of the Ada Lovelace Day site a few weeks ago, the date of this year’s Ada Lovelace Day has moved to Friday 7 October 2011. Please put it in your diary!

I didn’t take the decision to change the date lightly. We’ve had two years of ALD being in March, and it was starting to become a bit of a tradition, so the idea of moving it to later in the year has worried me a bit, as I don’t want to lose momentum. But by early January it had become clear that things just weren’t going to be ready in time.

Although I have had some fabulous help from some wonderful people, the responsibility for getting things moving still lies with me, and the last six months has seen me incredibly busy with work. We’re in the middle of a recession, so I feel grateful for having such a full diary, but the knock-on effect has been that I’ve not been able to give this year’s Ada Lovelace Day the love it deserves.

It turns out that March is a supremely bad time of year to have a recurring event. Despite trying to get things moving towards the end of last summer, I didn’t make much progress and before you know it, it’s Christmas and everyone’s really busy, and then New Year has come round and suddenly things aren’t ready and it’s all getting a bit tight. Add a trip to India in February to the mix and deadlines throughout March and it became clear to me that something had to change.

The March date was always arbitrary, picked because I was too impatient to wait any longer! The October date has been picked because it’s far enough away that it gives us a chance to get our ducks in a row, but also because (hopefully!) it doesn’t clash with school and university calendars. I’d very much like to do a bit more outreach this year, and would like to have more resources for teachers, pupils, university lecturers and students. A date that’s in term-time, but not too near Easter or in exam season is a more important consideration now than it was two years ago.

There are other changes afoot too: I’ve also shifted the mailing mailing list from Yahoo to Mailchimp, so provide us with more flexibility. Please do join up – there’s a form in the sidebar of FindingAda.com. I’ll be sending out monthly updates once we have a few people subscribed, with more updates closer to the big day. You’ll be able to manage your subscription and unsub at any time you like, so take the plunge and subscribe today!

Finally, I do need your help to spread the word about the new date, so please do blog, tell your friends, Twitter, and Facebook followers! Ada Lovelace Day: 7 October 2011.

I’m going up to Sheffield in November to speak at Interesting North, a day-long conference where people talk about their passions (rather than their work). I, for one, will be going way off piste:

Suw is a writer, collaboration strategist and lapsed geologist.

Earlier this year she followed, in considerable detail, the exploits of Eyjafjallajökull, The Little Volcano Who Could (Close Airports Around Europe On A Whim). Part of a community of vulcanologists and lay enthusiasts, she watched for earthquake swarms, monitored live webcams, and attempted to interpret interesting yellow blobs on the volcano’s infrared cam.

For your delight and delectation, Suw will be attempting to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull live on stage, as well as pointing out some of the more interesting aspects of the eruption.

Sound like fun? Then get your tickets before they sell out!

From the Ada Lovelace Day blog…

There are just two weeks to go until Ada Lovelace Day 2010, and we still have a fair few bloggers, Twitterers, podcasters, web comic artists, and videocasters to recruit. We have 1114 pledgers and need 1958 more people to sign up. That’s a challenge with only 14 days to go, but if everyone recruits just two more people, we’ll still make it!

There’s loads of stuff going on around Ada Lovelace Day this year. We have events in London and worldwide (Copenhagen, Dresden and Montreal, with the promise of others to come). The London Potluck Unconference, to be held at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in Kings Cross, 6.00pm onwards, still has some places left, so please nab yours now, whilst you can.

We have T-shirts on their way – we’re just polishing off the design and hope to get them up and ready for you to buy very soon. We also now have an Offers page which currently carries a 10% discount from the lovely people at AdaFruit Industries. Again, we hope to have more there for you soon!

If you’d like to get involved, then our main need at the moment is promotion. We need to get more people signed up, and here’s how you can help:

• Send a Tweet, update your Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn status
• Write a blog post about Ada Lovelace Day
• Email your friends and/or relevant mailing lists
• Post an item on LinkedIn or Facebook Groups
• Encourage other people to do something to promote Ada Lovelace Day!

There’s more info on how to help, including a Tweet you can just cut and paste, on the blog!

We do have more goodies in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more news!

Although I really enjoyed many of the talks at yesterday’s The Story event, it wasn’t really possible to take notes. One highlight was Sam Conniff from Livity talking about Jody McIntyre, a young man with cerebral palsy, a wicked sense of humuor and a desire to do stuff that is truly inspirational.

I also loved Cory Doctorow’s The Story So Far … and Beyond aka The Right Book, which you can read on The Bookseller. Neil Gaiman did a reading at last year’s WorldCon, which I include here because hell, who doesn’t love listening to Neil read Cory?

But the talk I got the most out of was Sydney Padua’s Graphic Storytelling. I know I’m biased, because Syd’s a good friend and because I love her webcomic, The Thrilling ADventures of Lovelace & Babbage, but I found her talk both interesting and useful. I will certainly be doing little diagrams of my own short stories in future to help me understand them more deeply. Hopefully Syd will put her slides online, as it really does help to see the digrams and comic frames she’s talking about, but I meantime I hope this video will do. Enjoy!

Yesterday I went to Matt Lock‘s event, The Story, at The Conway Hall. The day was billed thusly:

The Story is a one-day conference about stories and story-telling, to be held at The Conway Hall, London, on Friday, February 19th, 2010

The Story will be a celebration of everything that is wonderful, inspiring and awesome about stories, in whatever medium possible. We’re hoping to have stories that are written, spoken, played, described, enacted, whispered, projected, orchestrated, performed, printed – whatever form stories come in, we hope to have them here.

The Story is not about theories of stories, or making money from stories, but about the sheer visceral pleasure of telling a story. Whether it is in a game, a movie, a book, or a pub, we’ve all heard or told or been part of stories that have made us gasp, cry or just laugh.

There have never been so many stories, never so many ways to tell them. The Story will be a celebration of just a small sample of them.

Looking back at that, I should have been a lot less surprised that the day was not a day about stories, but a day of stories. The first few speakers all gave readings, which were entertaining in the main, but I was still sitting there waiting to learn something. I know I wasn’t alone in that. I’m really busy at the moment and so I wanted to have not just an entertaining day but an educational one too. I wanted to be able to very clearly justify to myself a day away from work at a time when I have deadlines screaming towards me like juggernaut with an afterburner cranked up to 11.

That isn’t what I got. (Only two talks that I saw, and I did miss two after lunch, weren’t a story of some sort.) Talking to James Bridle afterwards, he nailed it perfectly when he said that there were quite a few people there who were expecting a conference and found themselves at a spoken word event. I was certainly one of those people.

If this had been a Saturday event, I think I would have been a lot more laid back about it, but it was a Friday, a workday. I spoke to a few people who had had to persuade their bosses to give them the day to attend and were wondering what they were going to report back, how they were going to justify that day out of the office. Holding an event on a weekday does change the tenor of it, especially for people who have less sovereignty over their time than the self-employed.

I want to make clear that I still enjoyed the event. Many of the speakers were fab and there was a lot of laughter throughout the day: It really was a lot of fun. The fact that I came to the day with expectations that weren’t met is my problem, not Matt Lock’s. So none of this is a criticism of Matt or the speakers, it’s just that at about 11am I had to readjust my expectations to fit reality. That’s not an easy thing to do, but I managed it and once I’d done it I really relaxed into the rest of the day.

Because so much of the event was readings, I didn’t come away with very many notes. I did pick up two titbits though, which I shall now share with you:

• Don’t become a one-trick pony. If the only way you have to make people laugh is the non sequitur, use it sparingly lest you wear it out.

• When a character makes a choice, it reveals something about that character. Depth of character correlates with the number of choices they make: the more choices, the deeper the character. The way that people make choices is interesting, even if there’s no risk and no reward. When we make people make choices we make a story. When we don’t tell people the answer, we create mystery. (Not telling people the answer is also rude: It’s rude to ask people to make even a simple choice and then not pay attention to their decision.) — Stuart Nolan

James and I also talked about an underlying theme of lying-as-storytelling to the day. Tim Wright’s entire story was based on a period of his life when he was lying to a friend and perhaps also to himself as his marriage broke down. Stuart Nolan also lied when he sat on the stage with a straight razor set against his wrist, implying that if a member of the audience got the answer to a question wrong that he would top himself. Jon Spooner started off talking about storytelling and science in a way that sounded as if he was a genuine science storyteller and that we were going to be treated to the tale of the neutrino, but then took it off down a rather bonkers path that bore no resemblance to reality and which for a while there looked much more like a lie than a story.

There is of course the question about where lying ends and stories begin, but for my money, the difference is complicity. When you tell me a story I know it’s not true but I’m complicit in that untruth – I accept it for what it is because I know what it is. When you tell me a story as if it’s true and want me to believe it, that’s lying. Obviously the line is blurry and as stories can blur into lies, so lies can blur into stories, but I wonder why that theme came out in yesterday’s events.

That complicity can be a double-edged sword, when a story turns sour and yet you’re still laughing. I noticed that a couple of times, when the performers ran a story down a dark and uncomfortable hole that took the audience to places where not everyone was happy, but they laughed nonetheless. Maybe it was my imagination but the tone of the laughter changed at that point, from belly laugh to nervous laugh and I wonder how many people sat there asking themselves why they were laughing.

Fiction can take us where we don’t want to go, a point noted by Annette Mees & Tassos Stevens when they were talking about their play-without-actors, A Small Town Anywhere. They told of how one audience member (who also becomes a player in this 100% participation play) really took his role as a town bureaucrat (I think) on with gusto and wound up as a Town Mayor who collaborated with the invading army. Although he felt that he had been in charge of his own choices at every step of the way, his character had ended up somewhere that was not where he would have chosen at all.

Me, I’m not really into the edgy stuff. Never have been all that interested in using fiction to manipulate my audience so that they find themselves in places they wouldn’t otherwise willingly have gone. So whilst it was interesting to observe this once, it was not something i feel I want to emulate or explore. I’ll leave that to other people.

So no, I didn’t learn very much that will help me improve my storytelling, which is what I had hoped for, but I did get a lot of food for thought and I did enjoy myself.

(Coming shortly: Video of the best presentation of the day by Sydney Padua. I may be biased, but she was fab!)

Last year, over 3500 people pledged to support Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Over 1200 people added their link to our map mash-up and we got lots of coverage in the national press and even appeared on the BBC News Channel. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We wanted you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, and you did. Thank you!

But our work is not yet done. This year we want 3072 people to sign up to our pledge and to write their tribute to women in tech on Wednesday 24 March. We have 197 signatories so far, we just need another 2875, which is where you come in. Please sign the pledge and let all your friends know about it.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, if you do text, audio or video, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

To keep up to date with what is happening:

The Pledge: http://findingada.com/
The Blog: http://blog.findingada.com
on Twitter http://twitter.com/FindingAda
on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=253179284089

Please, join us on Ada Lovelace Day. Together we can raise the profile of women in technology around the world!

I’m going to be in San Francisco between 15th and 23rd April, although up in Sebastopol for the weekend. I have two projects running at the moment that I’d like to explore with anyone who’s interested.

The future of the social web
What might the future of the social web look like? What trends and developments in technology, demographics, etc. might influence how things could change? If you had to ask “What if…?”, which “if” would you ask?

Books and publishing
How do you write? What are the challenges to finishing a long-form piece? If you’re an agent or a publisher, what are the missing pieces in your publishing puzzle? What tasks or processes are clunky and awkward?

If you want to meet up with me to talk about either the social web or books, let me know.

And if you just want to meet up for a chinwag, then I’m holding a bit of a do on the evening of Tuesday 21st. I’ve tried to do an event thingy on Facebook, but again, ping me by email or @suw me on Twitter if you fancy coming. The location is to be decided – please leave a comment if you have any suggestions for somewhere nice and relatively quiet (big noisy venues aren’t my style; I like to be able to hold a conversation without shouting).

The Open Rights Group has organised an evening with Neil Gaiman, its Founding Patron, on Friday, 24 October (7.00 – 9.00 pm), where Neil will talk about Piracy and Obscurity:

In this, the first public appearance of his Graveyard Book UK tour, he invites fans and ORG supporters to discuss piracy from the perspective of a creator, what it means to be one of the tribe of readers, and why most people discover their favourite authors for free.

The venue – The Crypt on the Green, St James Church, Clerkenwell – is tiny compared to many events Neil does, with only 150 places, so it’s going to feel very intimate and personal.

The schedule for the evening is:

19.00 – Doors open. We’ll welcome you into the crypt with wine and nibbles.
19.30 – Neil’s talk starts and will be followed by an extended Q&A
21.00 – The talk finishes and all attendees are invited for a drink to the private upstair rooms of an adjacent pub, The Three Kings

If you’re a Neil fan, then you really need to sign up fast. I meant to blog about this when the announcement was made last Thursday, but have been insanely busy what with one thing and another. In the meantime, the ‘£10 on the door’ tickets have all sold out, leaving only the New ORG Supporter tickets (join between now and the event, and entry is free, 20 left), and the Existing ORG Supporter (£5 on the door, 28 left) tickets.

(UPDATE: ORG have released some more ‘£10 on the door’ tickets, and there are currently 24 left. Grab them now whilst you can!)

I would highly recommend that you sign up asap, because these tickets aren’t going to be around for long! And, as you can see from the counter to the left (if you’re reading this on the site rather than RSS), ORG is up to 921 supporters now. Hopefully this fundraiser will push it over the 1000 mark. That would finally get ORG the same number of supporters that originally pledged, and that we were supposed to launch with (although, of course, we were working on campaigns before we even had a name or a bank account!).

The aim is to get ORG up to 1500, and it’s important that they reach that goal. The list of issues that they need to campaign on isn’t getting any shorter, and there aren’t any more hours in the week, so the best way to continue being as effective as they have been is to expand. And they can’t do that without money!!

So, don’t just sign up to support ORG, don’t just come along to see Neil, convince a friend to sign up too!

Here are the dates for my next two Fruitful Seminars in September:

The Email Problem and How To Solve It
Wednesday 3rd September 2008

As we move towards a knowledge-based economy, email is becoming an unavoidable part of business life. But not only do some people have to deal with hundreds of emails a day, many of them unnecessary, the ‘always on’ culture of the Blackberry means they can never escape their inbox.

Reducing people’s dependence on email is easier said than done, however. Arbitrary rules like ‘No Email Days’ or tight inbox limits just add to people’s stress and don’t reduce the amount of email people send. This is because the problem with email is psychological, not technical, so such solutions treat only the symptoms and not the cause.

Social media expert Suw Charman-Anderson will take a look what’s at the root of the email problem, and how it can be solved using social tools. During the day you will hear an alternative view of email and will be able to discuss the issues you face in your own company. By the end of the seminar you will have a thorough understanding of the behavioural problems related to email and a clear set of next steps to take.

Who should come?

• CXO executives
• IT executives
• Managers
• Team leaders
• Decision makers
• Social media practitioners
• Social media vendors

Or anyone in situations similar to these:

• You are responsible for managing email infrastructure and have problems such as over-full inboxes or unnecessary file duplication across accounts.
• You have observed poor ‘email health’ amongst team members, perhaps including obsessive email checking coupled with delays in processing email.
• You are concerned about unhealthy patterns of email use across your business and related inefficient use of IT resources.
• You are an executive or manager who just can’t cope with all your email, much of which is a waste of your time, and you want a better way to work.

Making Social Tools Ubiquitous
Wednesday 10th September 2008

You may have heard that social tools – such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and social networking – can help you improve business communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation. And with open source tools, you can pilot projects easily and cheaply. But what do you do if people won’t use them? And how do you grow from a pilot to company-wide use?

Social media expert Suw Charman-Anderson will take a practical look at the adoption of social tools within your business. During the day you will create a scalable and practical social media adoption strategy and discuss your own specific issues with the group. By the end of the seminar you will have a clear set of next steps to apply to your own collaborative tools project.

Who should come?

• CXO executives
• managers
• team leaders
• decision makers
• social media practitioners
• social media vendors

Or anyone in situations similar to these:

• You have already installed some social tools for internal communications and collaboration, but aren’t getting the take-up you had hoped for.
• You have successfully completed a pilot and want to roll-out to the rest of the company.
• You want to start using social tools and need a strategy for fostering adoption.
• You sell social software or services and want to understand how your clients can foster adoption of your tool.

If you want to be kept up to date with Fruitful Seminar news and discussion, then please do join our Google Group. And don’t forget to sign up to Lloyd Davis’ social media masterclass on 16 July!

I shall be reprising my talk on how to draw a healthy line between work and play at Steph Booth‘s Going Solo conference in Leeds on 12 September. Registration is now open, but don’t delay – the first 25 tickets will be going at the early bird rate of £150, and some have already gone. Once they run out, the normal price is £220.

If you’re a freelance, or are thinking of starting out on your own, then Going Solo will be invaluable – it has a great atmosphere and some stonking speakers! So go straight to registration, do not pass go, and pick up an early bird ticket whilst they are still around.

I blogged this on Strange Attractor before Kev and I went off on hols, but thought it was worth cross posting.

Lloyd Davis, Leisa Reichelt and I have been spending a lot of time plotting just lately, and the result of our machinations was the creation, at midnight in a semi-derelict Gothic mansion and with the help of a bolt of lightening, of Fruitful Seminars. The three of us will be putting on a number of day-long seminars on various Web 2.0 subjects over the next few months, starting on 27 June with my session, Making Social Tools Ubiquitous:

Many companies have heard that social tools, such as wikis and blogs, can help them improve communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation. As the best of breed tools are often open source, it is easy and cheap to experiment with pilot projects. But what do you do if you don’t get the level of engagement you’d like? And how do you progress from a small-scale pilot to widespread adoption?

This seminar, run by social media expert Suw Charman-Anderson, will take a practical look at the adoption of social tools within enterprise. During the day you will be lead through each stage of Suw’s renowned social media adoption strategy and will have the opportunity to discuss your own specific issues with the group. You will have access to one of the UK’s best known social media consultants in an intimate setting – with no more than 9 people attending – that will allow you to get the very most out of the day. By the end of the seminar you will have a clear set of next steps to take apply to your own blogs or wikis.

Perfect for CXO executives, managers, and social media practitioners who want to know how to foster widespread adoption of social tools in the enterprise. Perhaps you have already installed some blogs or wikis for internal communications and collaboration, but aren’t getting the take-up you had hoped for; or have successfully completed a pilot and want to roll-out to the rest of the company.

We’re keeping the sessions very small, with a maximum of nine people attending each one, so that everyone has the opportunity to fully take part in discussions. Sessions will be quite practical and participants will be able to really get into the nitty gritty. I think that’s something that’s really missing from conferences and the bigger workshops – you don’t get the chance to really get down and dirty with what’s relevant to you. I want people to come away from my seminar with a really clear idea of what they are going to do next, and how they are going to do it.

Registration is already open – it’s very easy to sign up and payment can be made by PayPal or cheque/bank transfer. The fee includes lunch, tea and coffee.

We also now have a Fruitful Seminars mailing list on Google that is open to anyone to join, where we’ll keep you abreast of progress and you can let us know what you’re thinking.

Josh Sierres is giving a workshop on Ruby on Rails so I'm going to take notes more for my own benefit than for yours.
So, what's the big deal about Rails?
Most important point is that it gets out of your way. Lots of people refer to it as a boring framework because the people who start using it in real business apps find it gives them more time to focus on business logic and less time on implementation details.
Productivity. Gains are massive. Not necessary to put a number on it because it's not measurable.
Happiness. Productivity makes people happy, and happy people are productive. Very important point. Rails programmers have a little smirk on their face because things start working better.
Creativity. Lots of people from design and usability are now using rails as their gateway into implementing tings, getting things prototyped without depending on a programmers. Designers can do this, without knowing Ruby at all, and can build an entire app in a few weeks, and do the design themselves.
Lots of plug-ins, lots of people contributing, nice atmosphere in the community, and a lack of tension.
'Bad things', that stop people using it. Rails is not a silver bullet. Anyone who says one tools solves all problems is a salesman.
Ruby is a slow language. So people say 'does it scale?'. Yes. Share-nothing always scales, i.e. the type of architecture where you have no shared resources between instances of the application (see Cal's book about scaling Flickr). These always scale. But you have to have the right people to build them. So pointless to talk about scaling really.
Some e.g.s: 37 Signals, MOG, Robot Co-Op.
Few experts, but you only need one.
Rails is not ready for The Enterprise. It's missing internationalisation, composite foreign keys in the database natively, etc. But Ruby's a very powerful language and people can write plug-ins and add behaviour without getting in the way of the user, so there are plugins for both these and other issues.
But is The Enterprise ready for Rails? It comes with its own philosophy…
But…. all this doesn't matter. Rails is good for most web apps – most people most of the time will get what they need to get done quicker with Rails.
Risk. Use risk inherent in switching to a new technology, Rails, to make yourself more valuable. Can easily demonstrate new projects in Rails.
Opposite of risk is not safety, it's stagnation.
Rails is:
- a tool for getting stuff done faster
- maturing very quickly, more and more programmers using it
- sneaking its way into all types of businesses
- supportive of AJAX, Agile development, and other buzzwords
Rails has an edge because
- AJAX functionality is in Rails in a way that puts it into Ruby itself
- uses one language for everything
- gives you the ability to create natural language mini-framework on Ruby
And it creates happy programmers.
Rails does not stop you needing to understand HTML or SQL, but it reduces your dependance on repetition. So gives you tools to make your HTML cleaner, or writing SQL for basic queries.
It's not a high level set of components like user authentication or shopping carts. Push back against this type of components, because there are so many ways of implementing business logic, like log-in or shopping carts, that it is bad to force one way on people by creating these sorts of components.
It's not magic, but it feels like it for a while.
Power of Rails comes from the Ruby language.
More about rails…
It's an Models, Views and Controllers framework. The Model is how is should work, the View creates the thing you look at and the Controller joins those two together.
Can override conventions, but best not to otherwise you'll not get the productivity gains. Can automatically create views and controllers.
It lets you test everything inside your Rails app, with very few exceptions. Building these tests gives you a sense of security and a way to mitigate the risk in your app to prove that it works without troublesome too and fro with browser.
A few ways to get started. Can build out your database first, then build the app around it, or you can generate database files and create a 'migration' which controls the changes you make to the database.
(Had to break off here and go to a session I'd promised to be in.)

Last weekend I went to Brussels to take part in EuroFOO, a two day event held by O'Reilly to get together a diverse set of people so that cool and constructive conversations can happen. I have been publishing most of my notes over on Strange Attractor, but somehow it would seem wrong to publish these session notes there instead of here.
Because this session, run by Tor N??rretranders, was about chocolate. Here are my very rough notes taken during the session.
Chocolate is one of the few examples of a food whose full potential was first revealed in industrial manufacturing. Industrial age has resulted in a decline in food quality for most foodstuffs, except chocolate which was improved by better technology.
agriculture + industry = high glycemic index
Means converts to blood sugar very quickly. Problem is that it provokes hormone reactions, insulin, which removes blood sugar, so we eat and get hungry from eating. We now, on the whole, eat a lot of high GI food.
hi GI = metabolic syndrome
People becomes overweight, diabetes, high blood pressure, lots of problems particularly in the US are related to high GI food.
But chocolate is good for your health… even though chocolate is 'candy'.
Two studies published. Italians fed chocolate to people in labs and measured their insulin leavels. Dark chocolate makes your blood pressure go down and stabilises insulin levels. White chocolate does not.
Second study in Holland, free-living people (i.e. not in lab), one group didn't eat chocolate, one was normal, and the other had a high chocolate intake. High choc intake had half the mortality of the non-chocolate group.
The reason is that the chocolate bean is high in anti-oxidants, which are a self-defence mechanism for plants. 8% of cocoa powder is anti-oxidant. Good for blood vessels.
But bad for dogs and horses.
Choclate history (note: dates may be incorrect as I was hurriedly writing them down and I'm not good with numbers)
1000 – Mayans, use chocolate beans, to eat and as currency (cf gold chocolate coins!)
1528 – Introduced to Europe by Colombus, as a drink.
1815 – Changed it from a drink into a solid when the press was invented to create the coco mass, so that you can separate the butter and the powder.
1847 – Fry and Sons, discover that if you put more butter into the chocolate liquid it will becomes solid at room temperature.
1875 – Found you could add milk powder.
1878 – Lindt develops conching, which is a process of taking chocolate powder and mix it in the butter and the acids evaporate to increase quality.
1894 – Chocolate bar becomes commercial object.
Unusual edible substance: solid but will melt in the mouth. Never chew chocolate: Only amateurs chew. Storable yet edible, needs no preparation from the buyer, and can be stored at room temperature.
Has to do with anti-oxidants. Has shelf-life of a year.
Chocolate is a matrix of the butter and you can add othe rthings, i.e. small particles of cocoa and sugar or dried milk. So the butter will hold two or three other substances.
Cocoa powder expensive, sugar cheap, cocoa bitter, so… make it with lots of butter, or other vegetable fats, lots of sugar, not much chocolate powder, and it makes it cheap.
Can even make chocolate without cocoa powder – this is white chocolate. it has no powder at all, just butter. Low quality, no anti-oxidants because they are in the cocoa powder. don't want the sugar, don't have to worry about the fat because it's not bad for you.
1985 – a French company said there must be a market for quality chocolate.
1989 – Lindt introduced the percentage bar, 70% intro in 1989. Then the 85% and now even 99% (very bitter). So all companies are trying to put % signs, but others are trying to erode the meaning of the %.
Tor never eats lower than 85%, but found some of the 90% and 99% 'childishly easy to eat', but the % tells you how much is not sugar. So that doesn't tell you what the 85% is, so some companies are using cocoa butter, not cocoa powder, to fill in the 85%, and this results in lower quality chocolate.
So that corrupts the meaning of %.
You want a lot of powder, meaningful amount of fat, and something else than sugar. Can we put in something that's not sugar that we can put in chocolate? Stevia, perhaps, a mad sugary plant, can get it in powder. [Kevin says that Stevia behaves differently to sugar when it's cooked, so it's good for sweetening things like coffee, but it can't replace sugar in all circumstances.]
Bean types, and percentages of the bean crop:
1% Criollo – traditional cocoa bean, high quality
14% Trinitario – reasonable quality
85% Forastero – high yielding, stable, efficient crop that's not tasty, low quality.
Now you have chocolate snobbery.
But need to have better quality chocolate, and get more of the value chain happening in the producing countries, so that the producers make more money (currently the manufacturers in the West get most of the profit).
I have to say, I loved this session. Tor brought some different types of chocolate to taste, and it was amazing to tell the differences between the different brands and the different % chocolates. I don't think there was anyone who didn't enjoy the 85% Lindt, nor were there very many who liked the 99% because it was so bitter and, strangely, non-chocolatey. Fascinating stuff. I wish I had more time to investigate chocolate.
EuroFoo06

Like an idiot, I left my MacBook charger at the Corn Exchange in Brighton yesterday at d.Construct. If anyone picked it up, can you please email me?
UPDATE: I've been told that my charger was indeed found, and handed in. I shall ring the Corn Exchange tomorrow to see what I need to do next. Thanks for your help, everyone!
d.construct 2006, dconstruct06, idiot

I'm in San Francisco next week, and on Friday I am planning to go the Nova Bar at 555 2nd Street, to drink ludicrously large amounts of vodka. If you want to come, it's on Upcoming. See you there!
If anyone else wants to meet up pop me an email to the usual address.

I'm off to San Francisco at the end of August to attend the O'Reilly FooCamp – a weekend camp for geeks. I'm really looking forward to hanging out with some cool people, and getting to see San Francisco again. Due to peculiarities of flights, I'm going to be in town for a week and a half, so if you want to meet up, let me know.

Was the headline that I chose not to run with in today's Open Rights Group press release, despite the fact that's pretty much how I felt about it.
If you're a regular reader of either my or Neil's blog, you will of course already know that Neil's our Patron, but it's nice to finally fess up publicly about it. I'm pleased about it for a few reasons. Neil's very clued in when it comes to copyright, digital rights and authors' freedoms. He even won the Defender of Liberty Award* from the CBLDF in 97. It's wonderful to see someone whose creative processes are so very analogue – Neil writes his first drafts longhand with a nice pen and a Moleskine notebook – becoming so deeply immersed in the digital world.
It's also great because Neil and Cory Doctorow, who is on our Advisory Council, are the very people that the rights-grabbing publishing oligarchies claim that they are trying to 'protect' using that annoying DRM crap, plus they're the people that you are I are supposedly 'stealing' from every time we read their books more than once. I've always found Cory to be quite pleased to have his work downloaded, repurposed and redistributed (within the terms of his Creative Commons licence, of course). And I know for a fact, because he's said so on his blog, that Neil's very keen on people reading his works more than once, turning them into tattoos, and using them as inspiration for interpretative dance.
Plus, of course, and you know how much I love stating the blindingly obvious, I'm chuffed because I've been a huge fan of Neil's for a long time, and finally I have a good excuse to email him and ask for quotes. To wit:
“We're in a world in which digital rights, the world of the internet, and the exchange of information is getting more and more important and relevant to all our lives, wherever we are,” said my new friend Neil. “I'm delighted that there's now a group of people committed to preserving and extending civil liberties in a digital world and to being sane and sensible as we careen into a digital future. I was honoured to be asked to be Patron of the Open Rights Group, and I look forward to working with them for years to come.”
So, don't forget to sign up to support ORG, and especially don't forget that we have an evening of free drinks, nibbles and Cory Doctorow on Feb 7th.
* Hm… wonder if ORG should start a Defender of The Digital Realm awards…

The second Open Rights Group, featuring ubergeek Cory Doctorow, is set for the evening of Tuesday 7 Feb 2006.
Don't let Hollywood hijack your rights
Cory Doctorow
American entertainment companies say they're fighting piracy, but they're going at it by punishing the innocent to get at the guilty. A pan-European digital television restrictions proposal will turn the studios from companies that can control copying of movies into companies that can control the design of all digital TV devices, that get to define how big your family is allowed to be, that get to take away all the rights you get under copyright law and sell them back to you, one painful, expensive dribble at a time. It's not really a business plan: more like a urinary tract infection. Europe's coming Broadcast Flag will ban open source for digital TV, break the devices in your living room, and turn you into a truly captive audience. Get your torch and pitchfork, for this genuinely sucks — and you shouldn't take it lying down!
This free event is open to digital rights campaigners, grassroots activists, the press and the general public, so please do send this information to anyone you think may be interested.
Refreshments and nibbles will be provided free of charge.
When: Tuesday 7 February 2006, 6pm–9pm
Where: 01Zero-One Hopkins Street (corner of Peter Street), Soho, London, W1F 0HS
Map: http://www.01zero-one.co.uk/map.htm
Note: 01Zero-One is sometimes a difficult venue to find if you've never been there before. On the corner of Hopkins and Peter Street, you'll see a featureless brick wall, with nothing but a black door in it. That anonymous black door is the one you want — just ring the buzzer and it'll be opened for you, if it's not propped open with a brick, that is.
Only 100 people can attend, so please book your place by signing up on the Open Rights Group wiki.

And no, I don't mean the pretty-boy chick-stealing Trojan but the great and beautiful capital of France, where I shall be for Les Blogs 2, where I am going to be telling Marc Canter and Hugh McLeod to shut the fuck up so that Anina can get a word in edgeways to talk about socialising in the year 2055. Some call it moderating, but I prefer to think of it as an opportunity to practice my golf swing.
If you're in France and you want to come to lunch on Sunday 4 December, let me know. No idea yet where, but it'll be somewhere near wherever it is that Les Blogs is at.

The emergence of new communications technologies has radically changed the civil rights landscape in our society. Privacy, intellectual property, and access to knowledge are just some of the areas where digital rights are being eroded by government and big business.
The Open Rights Group (ORG) would like to invite you to an evening of digital rights discussion, networking and wine at 01Zero-One Hopkins Street on Tuesday 29 November at 6pm to debate these issues.
This inaugural ORG event will begin with a short presentation by special guest speaker Jonathan Zittrain, Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University. Lloyd Davis from Perfect Path will then moderate an open discussion, asking: Which issues are a priority for you? And where would coalitions strengthen your hand? There'll also be plenty of time to meet and talk with fellow organisers and activists.
To reserve your place, please email events@openrightsgroup.org now. There are only 100 places available, so be quick!
This free event is open to digital rights campaigners, grassroots activists, the press and the general public, so please do forward this information to anyone you think may be interested.
Where: 01Zero-One Hopkins Street (corner of Peter Street), Soho, London, W1F 0HS
When: Tuesday 29 November, 6pm – 9pm
Guest Speaker: Jonathan Zittrain, Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation, Oxford University; Co-Founder, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
RSVP: events@openrightsgroup.org
Map: http://www.01zero-one.co.uk/map.htm
What is the Open Rights Group?
ORG is a new not-for-profit digital rights activist group, working to raise the profile of digital rights issues in the media and help other groups get their voices heard. For more information visit www.openrightsgroup.org or email Suw Charman, Executive Director, at suw@openrightsgroup.org.
This event is presented with the support of 01Zero-One's InSync Programme.