I’ve just finished up a week in Beautiful Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Wikimedia held its annual conference, Wikimania. I think the best way to describe it is “Crazy fun”.

Highlights (the sessions)

• Richard Stallman (enough said).
• Finding out some of the stuff Kate and Ævar have been doing on OSM.
• Chatting to Christian about DBpedia, an awesome semantic database produced from the Wikipedia data.
• Finding people unaware of my work on LiquidThreads who have been doing prototyping of their own on discussion improvements.
• Some of the fancy new stuff in the works, as summarised by Brion.
• The awesome work Michael Dale’s been doing on open video at Wikimedia.
• Finding out about the plans the usability folks have for MediaWiki.

Highlights (outside the conference itself)

• The taxi ride from the airport, which was conducted by a driver who (like most drivers here) did not understand the concept of a lane, and found 140 km/h to be a perfectly appropriate speed.
• The Mauseleum at Recoleta, and its colony of feral cats.
• Dancing the Tango with Florence (who described my dancing as “not super elegant”).
• Finishing the closing evening with pizza at 6 am, accompanied by Phoebe, Kat, Mako and others.
• The feeling of inadequacy that comes from being surrounded by people who speak at least 4 languages.
• Deciding with half an hour’s notice to visit Colonia (in Uruguay) with Betsy, Kate and Ævar.
• When out with Ævar, making liberal use of body language to explain the concept of a nightclub to a bemused taxi driver.

Comments about the conference (directed mostly at the organisers)

• The communal areas were great. It was especially good to hang out in our techie basement, although we were a bit separated from everybody else.
• It sucked that the staff hotel was so far from everybody else and was much nicer. It felt hierarchical, which is not how Wikimedia is supposed to work.
• The organisers did a good job of trying to stem the flow of stolen stuff.
• The party was a lot of fun, and very well-organised.
• The hotel was a pretty good choice, the lack of wifi in the rooms was a mixed blessing, drawing everybody out into the lobby to hang out.
• The internet in various parts was a bit flaky, which is a bit weird for a tech conference

See you all in Gdansk next year! And in Sydney the year after!

Unfortunately, even when following Apple’s instructions for getting push notifications going, I ran into this error:
Error in registration. Error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3000 UserInfo=0x1402f0 "no valid 'aps-environment' entitlement string found for application

As it turns out, I needed to give myself an entitlement called ‘aps-environment’, whereas I’d assumed (and I’d found nothing on the internet to contradict it) that this was an internal part of the provisioning profile, since Apple recommended I created a new provisioning profile once I’d activated APN on my application in the development portal.

This document from Apple explains how to do this.

I’m sort of hoping this helps somebody in the same flummoxed position as I

In the last 24 hours, I’ve bought (prices include shipping):

• An external 2.5″ HDD enclosure, £4.98
• A new dock-USB cable, £1.75.
• A dock-Component Video cable, £6.23.
• A brand-new wireless Apple Mighty Mouse £34 ex. shipping (estimated at £3.95, but I may be able to combine).

I’m also the top bidder on a £5 brand new wireless Apple keyboard, from the same seller as the mouse, so I may be able to combine the shipping and save there.

So basically I’ve bought about 5 things I’ve been meaning to buy for a while, but which eBay has brought back into my price range.