“POPOS” stands for privately-owned public open spaces – publicly accessible spaces owned and maintained by the owner of an office building. POPOS come in many forms: plazas, roof gardens, greenhouses, atriums and others. Some POPOS are easily accessible, while others are tucked away and more difficult to find.

If you can get past the public policy debates, POPOS are an unsung treasure of many big downtown areas. They feature unconventional architecture, great sculptures, and gardens ranging from delicate flower arrangements to small forests. Some we pass by every day and never really notice, others are out of sight just beyond a door or up a flight of stairs. Office workers may have a favorite for lunch or coffee breaks, but may not explore others or visit outside of work, and the rest of us might never discover them at all.

Luckily, organizations like SPUR and New York’s DCP have put together surprisingly good guides and maps like this one:

Starting on Mission between 1st and 2nd St., we managed to find a wide variety in just a single city block. The urban garden at 555/575 Market was lush and opulent, if a bit inaccessible. 25 Jessie’s garden was a hidden gem, cozy and out of the way and clearly very loved. 525 Market had a fountain and sun terrace protected by a thick cluster of trees. The plazas at 555 and 560 Mission were roomy and substantial, especially 560′s deep bamboo grove. Finally, the tea garden at 100 1st was the coup de grace, a massive sunny pavilion with plenty of seating, water, and greenery. It’s popular during working hours, for good reason.

Next time you’re in downtown SF, take a few extra minutes and check out a nearby POPOS or two. They’re worth it!

A couple days ago, halfway through a busy night, I lost my phone. Happily, I got it back just half a day later, along with some lessons learned and a great story. I tried all sorts of high tech tricks, but in the end it was pen and paper and a bit of foresight that saved the day.

It’s worth mentioning a silver lining first. Thanks to the cloud, full device encryption, and remote administration and wipe, losing a phone is no longer the disaster it once was. However, it still costs money and time to replace, so naturally I wanted to recover it if I could.

I realized it was gone as soon as we left Pause. When it didn’t turn up there, I immediately thought to try Pintail, a tracking app I’d installed. Text your phone a keyword and PIN and Pintail responds with its location.

Pintail reported it was on Clement St., nowhere near anything we’d done that night. We retraced our steps, compared notes, and figured I’d left it in a cab halfway through the night. Sure enough, over the next hour, Pintail took us on a tour all over the city and even out to Oakland and Berkeley.

Luckily, I remembered the name on the side of the cab: Vina. Google quickly found their web site, which proudly sports a search box, RSS feed, and even a Google Apps login, but no actual content or contact information. Ah, small business web sites.

I was not to be deterred. Google also found an address in Potrero and a plethora of phone numbers. Two of them rang until I gave up, one gave me an AT&T pitch for a service to “find similar businesses” – leaving me to connect the dots that the number was disconnected – and amazingly, the last was a working answering machine. I left a message, knowing full well what a long shot it was.

The next morning, Pintail greeted me from outside an apartment building in Daly City. It was still there an hour later, so I checked Street View. If the cab was parked there when Google’s camera crew drove by, I’d have a good lead. It wasn’t, of course, but Pintail was insistent, so I hopped in my car and drove over, hoping to find it and leave a note.

I canvassed the street and all of the nearby apartment buildings, but I didn’t see a single car with Vina’s livery. Pintail had gone dark too, most likely due to a dead battery. (I could only hope.) That left the building itself. I paused for a minute, recalling ham-fisted stories of police tracking lost iPhone prototypes, then thought “why not?” and headed inside to knock on doors.

The tenants weren’t eager to talk. I heard TVs blaring and kids playing inside many of the apartments, but only five answered my knock, and four of those spoke to me from behind closed doors. I asked if they drove a cab, or knew anyone in the apartment who did, or found a phone recently. One pointed me to #9, which didn’t answer. The rest claimed ignorance.

I taped my note to the wall of the lobby and left, not expecting much. I could search public records to find the owner and call them, but that sounded like the biggest wild goose chase yet. If I didn’t hear from Vina, I figured I’d call it a wash and get a new one. So when I came home to a voicemail from my secret weapon, asking me to come pick up my phone, I was pretty damn excited.

Sorry, I should explain. A while back, I taped contact information to the back of my phone in case something like this happened. More importantly, I promised a cash reward. I’d never needed it before, but on its first test, it came through with flying colors. I called the driver back, set up a meeting, and half an hour later I had my phone.

Moral of the story? Plan ahead, and don’t be afraid to go low tech. Technology like apps and GPS and Street View are great, but keep some contingency planning and elbow grease in your bag of tricks too. When that note finally rubs off of my phone, you can bet I’ll print out another one and tape it on.

I’ve just published webfinger-unofficial, a stand-in WebFinger server for major sites that don’t implement it themselves. It currently has implementations for Facebook and Twitter, deployed at these endpoints:

• facebook-webfinger.appspot.com
• twitter-webfinger.appspot.com

It’s just a little side project, and it’s not hugely useful on its own, but it is a step toward implementing OStatus bridge apps for more of the major social networking sites.

Feedback and pull requests are welcome!

See also:

1. Facebook comments vs. Twitter replies
2. Facebook app for OStatus?
3. Bridgy up and running

I hate forced idle time. I used to carry reading material with me everywhere, in case I had a few extra minutes. I still do that sometimes, but now I listen to podcasts more often. I break out the headphones at any excuse, even as little as walking between buildings at work, or while I’m falling asleep. It’s great. I can easily keep my brain engaged, no matter where I am or what else I’m doing.

I wonder if there’s a catch, though. At the end of a busy day, if I’ve had headphones on throughout my workout and commute and squeezed some quick reading into all the leftover moments, my brain feels a bit…cramped. Uncomfortably full. Like it’s had three square meals, and a bunch of snacks, and a big dessert, but hasn’t had a chance to digest anything. Which, arguably, is exactly what’s happened.

I’m no neurobiologist, but I’m familiar with the popular science, and it rings true for me personally. Sleep, for example – the ultimate idle time – probably plays a key role in building long term memory. The language center of the brain can’t multitask very well, if at all, especially in men. The subconscious is our best tool for problem solving and decision making.

As far as I can tell, my brain does most of its important thinking in the background. Prioritizing, synthesizing, introspecting, predicting, thinking holistically: it’s all critical, but I rarely do any of it explicitly. I add something to my todo list, or file it away in the back of my head, and when I come back to it an hour or day or week later, chances are it’s neatly broken down and incorporated into the big picture.

When I haven’t had enough idle time, when I’ve been especially aggressive with the headphones and books, I suspect this process gets backed up. I feel backlogged, mentally constipated, like I’m playing catch-up with all the connections and mental leaps that I should have been making. It’s not a good feeling.

I don’t have an addictive personality, in general. It’s a blessing. I work, eat, drink, watch TV, play games, and do all sorts of things in natural, easy moderation. Filling idle time, though…that might be an exception. I know I should relax sometimes, put the phone away and just let my mind drift, but it’s so hard.

What do you think? Do you ever feel the same? Have you found a way to protect that precious downtime and keep your brain rested and recharged? How do you do it?

My new Mindcandy DVD came in the mail the other day, and it reminded me all over again why I love the demo scene.

Demos aren’t easy to describe. If you’re not familiar with them, think of them as graffiti art for computer geeks. They’re like music videos, with abstract, real time computer graphics…but more. At their best, demos are a striking, uncomfortable, hauntingly beautiful art form unlike any other.

The best way to experience demos is at a demo party, a huge, multi-day competition where authors exhibit their work and sometimes create whole new demos from scratch in just a day or two. Unfortunately, demos are mostly a European thing; there are almost no parties here in the US.

When I discovered demos in the mid ’90s, YouTube and internet video were still years away, so I downloaded them from sites like pouet.net and scene.org and ran them on my own computer. My video card creaked and sputtered them out at frame rates that made me cringe, but they were still magic. Classics like Second Reality and Stash made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I’m still amazed at what they squeezed out of computers that barely ran WordPerfect, and that inspiration is a big reason I ended up in my current career.

Now, of course, I can watch any demo I want on YouTube. Still, I don’t follow the scene closely, so I appreciate the archiving, curating, and love Dan Wright puts into his DVD compilations. Dozens of landmark demos from the biggest demo parties over seven years, well organized and polished. It’s especially fun to watch techniques and styles evolve over time: non-photorealistic rendering gives way to programmable shaders, material and liquid rendering gets more sophisticated and abstract, and post-processing effects like film grain and distortion explode in popularity.

I haven’t finished the latest DVD yet, but I already have some favorites. Passing was lonely, unsettling, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Only One Wish, a collaboration between scene legends Fairlight and The Black Lotus, is a riot of kindergarden finger painting and inside jokes in garish colors, painted with a palette of unusual 2D techniques. Bombman‘s oily vision of organic surfaces and industrial settings through a gritty filter made me think of the recent Fukushima meltdown. And of course, no demo compilation would be complete without mind-blowing visuals from Farbrausch.

I can’t wait to go to a demo party in person someday. In the meantime, I’ll have to be satisfied with the Mindcandy DVDs, YouTube, and my sense of childlike wonder. OK, at least the first two!

I’ve added a new App Engine shell app for the Python 2.7 runtime:

shell-27.appspot.com

It complements the existing Python 2.5, HRD, and JVM language shell apps as well as other, even better third party projects like App Engine Console.

Enjoy!

See also:

1. Shell app for App Engine’s High Replication Datastore
2. Google App Engine Launched!
3. teaching beginning programming with Python

I’ve just released Bridgy, a little side project I’ve been working on. Got a blog? Share your blog posts on social networks? Wish comments on those shared posts also showed up on your blog? Bridgy copies them back for you.

Bridgy is a throwaway prototype on the road toward a larger project: OStatus for Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. I don’t plan to update it much, provide end user support, or properly integrate it with WebFinger or Salmon or the other OStatus component protocols. Still, it was a useful way to explore the APIs, and it does actually work. Feel free to try it!

I’m starting a cleanse today! It’s not a New Years resolution – I don’t tend to do those – but for the next three weeks, I’m cutting out alcohol, caffeine, sugar, wheat (gluten), dairy, and meat. Seafood is ok, and I’ll probably have the occasional piece of dark chocolate or lightly caffeinated tea, but that’s it.

This is a “blacklist” kind of cleanse, as opposed to a “whitelist” that lets you have only orange juice, or only rutebaga and sardines, or only raw plants you pull out of the ground yourself. Those just seem silly.

I generally eat healthy, but I’m not hardcore. I’ll happily gobble down the occasional pork belly, croissant, half a chocolate cake, or five drinks or cups of coffee in a day. Even without the excess, days without wheat or dairy or sugar are the exception, not the rule, and days without coffee or alcohol are rare indeed.

Even so, I’m happy with my diet overall, so I’m doing this mostly just for the experience. It’s not an obvious one to seek out, but I’m sure it will be interesting!

Props for the inspiration and motivation go to Gina, who’s always trying different cleanses, and Schemer, a great new webapp for discovering fun things to do. Wish me luck!

Unhosted aims to decouple webapps from their backend storage on a per user level. The status quo is that each webapp stores and manages all of its users’ data. Unhosted wants to turn that on its head and let each user store their own data, across all of their webapps, in a single provider and account of their choosing.

The key piece of the puzzle is remoteStorage, a new Javascript library that mirrors HTML5′s localStorage API and uses cloud providers like S3, Google Docs, and Dropbox. When a user starts using an unhosted app, it determines where to store their data (ideally behind the scenes via WebFinger), gets permission via OAuth, and then uses remoteStorage to perform standard CRUD operations.

Not surprisingly, the people behind Unhosted are hardcore free software advocates, so the project comes with a healthy dose of anti-corporate advocacy and preaching. However, it also comes with a convincing technical foundation and working code. In particular, reusing localStorage seems like a stroke of genius, especially since many developers now use it exclusively when starting a new app, adding server side sync only after they’ve finished their MVP.

Naturally, there are problems. Want querying or aggregate operations? You’re encouraged to build your own, which is a tough sell for even simple queries, much less large scale data processing. Also, there’s no story for onboarding new users. They could punt and start by letting apps store their data for them, but that raises an awkward migration question.

Most of all, though, I think they’re missing a sales pitch. End user data portability may have gained some mainstream mindshare, but it’ll probably never reach a tipping point, and free software idealism will always be niche. More to the point, until users want it, I don’t see a motivation for app developers.

Even so, I’m intrigued. We originally considered structuring App Engine‘s datastore the same way, clustered by user instead of by app. Integrating Unhosted with App Engine would be fun, but the app side is Javascript on the client, and the storage side already supports Google Docs, so I’m not sure it would add any value. Anyone out there currently working with remoteStorage? Thoughts?

Oh, and happy New Year!

We saw everything from full-on stage plays to impromptu street scenes like beggars and police, chimney sweeping, and more. It felt like a huge set, complete with real life characters, that you could walk around inside and touch and interact with. Not to mention the authentic food, drinks, and old world craftsmanship like quill pens and pewter goblets and soap made from tallow, all for sale.

I’m definitely going back next year!