I just completed the first of five, weekend long modules at Hancock Permaculture with Andrew Leslie Phillips. If you are also attending the course, I mentioned the Placement Randomizer Tool, which takes a little digging to find here. Here’s a link to Peak Moment TV- lots of great interviews with Peak Oil as well as Permaculture and other cultural creatives. Also I’ve got a link here to Greeening the Desert.

I’d like to offer this as a place for us to work together virtually, in between and after the training sessions. If anyone is interested in contributing, send me an e-mail and I’ll create an account for you, and give you a little run through on how to write a post.

Finally I want to say a big Thank You to all of you for coming and inspiring me and eachother to move forward with Permaculture. I was looking at an old list of things I would do if I had unlimited time and resources and this training is on the list. Special thanks for the great food, coffee, pie, smoked fish, cheese, and Little Debbie cakes! See you next month.

I’ve been thinking about plant guilds and developing a web database of plant groupings that combine synergistically. I thought this could possibly done as a “mashup”, pointing to some existing open database and adding metadata to map the combinations or guild groupings.

In looking for a database I came across the USDA’s PLANTS Database and found I can link to specific plants using a query mechanism. I didn’t see anything on there about an API or web service that would allow for a real mashup application, but it’s a start.

I’ve been busily digging into Joomla to create a new business site over at www.davefeasey.com. I was complaining that the code was a mess and that I wish it were more object oriented. Then of course I became aware of the Joomla 1.5 effort, which looks very OOP and sophisticated. 1.5 is currently in Beta, and the code freeze started today.

Part of the reason for this is that I’m looking for work again, although I’m still on contract at Kodak. Unfortunately, they just announced further layoffs this year, so I’m not too optimistic about getting hired or extended. The prospect of doing a full redesign, plus content was too much for me, so I took the plunge with Joomla. Having revised the templates there to match (more or less) the style I was looking for, I’m now thinking I ought to try the same experiment here at Greener Minds. I was noticing that the Joomla developers actually used WordPress for one of their documentation sites- Not Good! I personally wholly subscribe to the ‘Eat your own dogfood’ Dogbowl Philosophy I first heard about over at Zope.

Maybe today we can start to erase the six-year long nightmare disaster of a federal government. The polls seem to show a new Democratic House, and gains of 3 or 4 seats in the Senate. But it brings to mind the exit polls in 2004, and the Supreme Court in 2000. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if by some “miracle” the Republicans held on to the House and called it a mandate. Yet I remain hopeful. Here in the midwest (upstate New York) the big race for me is Eric Massa to take a House seat in NY-29.

On other matters, I want to start writing about the relationship between quality, globalization, lean business principles and sustainability. I also want to comment on a recent Mother Jones article on global warming and social networking (hat tip dailyKos). These themes all play together for me. Unfortunately, I’m trying to get a SQL Server database up and running today, so I’ll have to post tonight or tomorrow.

Picking up on Monday’s post, I built a little design tool that generates random ideas about how to place two elements in relationship to one another.

I mainly used JavaScript to build this and I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. The tool already suggests a bunch of next features to add: ability for visitors to add their own components, ability to relate more than two things, ability to save placements that seem to make sense and annotate them, adding pictures, flash etc.

One thing I started thinking about is creating each element as an object with inputs and outputs and relationships to its consumers and producers. For example a chicken produces feathers, eggs and fertilizer and consumes seed, grass etc. The lawn produces grass. The garden and lawn needs fertilizer. The house needs pillows which need feathers. By setting rates on all these things, we can start to build very sophisticated models and simulations. But that’s obviously a larger project.

I’m starting to mess around with PHP, and got the left hand navigation bar in davefeasey.net built as a single list that is contextual, meaning it knows what page you’re on and so turns off the link and bolds the text for the current page. I’m learning the ropes on include files and I think I finally have that pegged; the paths are different since I’m in a shared / virtual environment and can’t see all the way up my directory tree. Also had to figure out how to hide the INI file.

I started re-reading the Permaculture Designers Manual this weekend. The starting point for the book as a code of ethics, which I’ll talk about in future posts. I want to point out the centrality of design even in the first few pages. This might seem counter to the idea of self-organizing systems, but systems don’t organize by themselves too frequently. More often, they devolve into chaos. I see this a lot in my current tech job: if we lay off 35% of our IT staff, the rest will figure it out- it’s a “free market”, after all.

Also, right off the bat, Bill Mollison starts talking about computers, and using them as design aids. I’ve said for at least ten years my ideal job is building these types of tools. For example, Mollison mentions H.T. Odum’s Emergy concept. There’s an open source Emergy modeller now available.

One of the way’s systems self-organize is through a random process, and one of the things computers do well is random number generation. One strongly emphasized aspect of Permaculture design is selection and placement. I saw an example yesterday that I hadn’t thought about. I was at the studio and only had about an hour and thought I should walk up St. Paul and see what I saw. I found an urban garden next to a church and they had a compost bin pretty much in the center of the garden, just behind the corn, a little north of center. This is counter intuitive to me, from a “look and feel” perspective, but makes perfect sense from a work and zones perspective. I usually put the ugly compost in a corner somewhere. They prettified it by making the bin itself pretty, painted it pink and put big wooden painted bugs on the side.

Later in the walk I found wild turkeys, pioneer species (sumac, some type of artemisia I think- looked like mugwort, poplar) starting to work on an abandoned parking lot, and a path down to the river’s edge. Pretty productive for an hour downtown. This is all in the heart of a very urban landscape.

Since we’re going through CMS selection vendor demo RFP scoring hell at work, I thought I’d finally install a CMS. After a little research, Joomla looked like the best choice based on the admin functionality, ease of use and support community.

My first test was to see if I could easily change the banner image. I tried to do this with the WordPress template and I only got halfway there. With Joomla, it was just replacing an image.

I was easily able to add a user and set permissions. He got an e-mail notification on cue. So far it looks pretty good, although I’m noticing that when I login as an admin, I don’t necessarily get the Administrator menu in the left nav.

No, not the Safari browser.

A safari to figure out how to edit the theme. Already you can see that I’ve changed the color of the Annoying Million Pixel Deep Gradient Header Thingy and that my copy is black, not gray.

Did that on my lunch break so it seems pretty straightforward. However, if I try to make the AMPDGHT only 72px, it slides up, and the text of my name (also annoying) stays where it is. The style.css file in the theme has about 2000 lines and a lot of duplication, commenting, etc. Guess I’ll have to become a CSS guru on top of all my other jobs.

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Got Emergence by Steven Johnson out of the library, along with an O’Reily book on PHP. So’s I can edit the theme. It’s all circular, see?

I’m pretty fed up with work so I’m looking for new. My dream job is still creating knowledge systems using rich media, especially around sustainability, systems and permaculture. Y suggested that I stay here and work toward that, start moving to something more heart-centered for me. If you want to know about my current job, see some of the movies on the list below.

So, I installed WordPress and I quickly discovered the first annoyance. I’m used to the Manila model, where you type double quotes around your link in the body of the post, it does a lookup in your list of links, posts, named images, etc. and creates the anchor tag and points it to the right URL. Still trying to find how this is done in WordPress. I’m also wondering if it uses Wiki conventions- I’ll try that next.