Four Kitchens is proud to help organize this year’s BarCamp Austin alongside our good friend Whurley and our new friend Richard Goodwin. If you’re going to be in Austin this weekend (either because you live here or you’ll be in town for SXSW) be sure to stop by GSD&M Idea City anytime on Saturday, March 8th.

This year is going to be bigger and better with a lot more room for demos, presentations, and killer robots. This event is free, open to the public, and everyone is invited to participate!

More info at barcampaustin.org.

Here’s a few of the new features:

• Drag-and-drop administration
• OpenID support
• Update status for core, modules, and themes
• Theme developer module

Be sure to check out the full list of features and when you’re finished drooling, go download it!

whurley at BMC has posed an interesting question: Do the candidates have an opinion on open source software? Are they even aware of it? And if not, shouldn’t they be?

So whurley created a poll to find out who we, the open source community, feel best represents our common interests. (Yes, “None of them” is an option!)

Assume for a moment that a knowledge of open source is prerequisite (or integral) in solving issues like patent reform. Who would you vote for? In other words, who would be the best candidate for the open source community?

Please vote! The more buzz we can build, the better chance we have to educate our elected representatives on the important, complicated, and philosophical questions surround open source, free culture, intellectual property.

OpenID is blowing up!

This morning, the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined as its first corporate board members. But don’t worry: OpenID.net was quick to note that the members are not decision-makers:

While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building. (Emphasis theirs.)

Well, we have an announcement of our own: We’re completely overhauling our OpenID registrar GetOpenID.com and expect to re-launch the site sometime in April 2008 — and we’ll do it on Drupal!

OpenID support for Drupal 5.x and 6.x is currently limited to clients. We plan to build a module to enable server-side support, allowing any Drupal site to become an OpenID registrar. The module will be released to the Drupal community under the GPL.

Viva free software and open standards!

Four Kitchen Studios and That Other Paper have relocated to a new facility in North Austin at 183 and MoPac. Here are some pictures of the work in progress courtesy of Kristin (or can view the entire Flickr set):

An empty, soulless office pre-painting

Albert, Tim, and I discuss the finer points of laying drop cloths

Christine, Stephen, and Chad paint a wall green — the color of MONEY

Christine and Stephen pretend to like each other long enough to make a meaningful contribution to the greater good

An action shot of the paint drying

Excelsior!

David and I contemplate the sublime nature of Swedish office furnishings

That’s me. I’m working.

What do you do when you’re one of the world’s top-ten websites, and you support 50 languages, 30 currencies, and four payment systems? And you have, at any given time, about 700 users hitting “reload” to find out up-to-the-minute results of worldwide contributions. You also need a meter to show progress on a site that serves 20,000 requests per second.

You’re Wikimedia, the charity behind Wikipedia.

In collaboration with Wikimedia’s technical staff and its community, Four Kitchens has built an integrated system to meet these demands. It’s called Fundraising C.O.R.E. (Central Online Reporting Engine).

Fundraising C.O.R.E. is built with Drupal. It uses the Drupal modules CiviCRM, i18n, and a custom module built just for this project. The custom Fundraising C.O.R.E. module integrates with CiviContribute’s fundraising management system to display privacy-conscious real-time data to community members.

With hundreds of contributions coming in every few hours, the small staff at Wikimedia doesn’t have the time to enter them all. For that Fundraising C.O.R.E. integrates with the instant notification features of PayPal and Moneybookers. In case anything gets lost between the payment processer and the fundraising system, Fundraising C.O.R.E. provides the ability to synchronize downloads of records.

If you use an old USB scanner with a Mac, you’re probably unhappy with the out-of-date drivers offered by the manufacturer. (Chances are it runs in the “Classic” interface, famously replete with Chicago typeface.) Luckily, the opensource community is developing a solution: the TWAIN SANE interface for MacOS X.

“SANE” stands for “Scanner Access Now Easy.” (Looks like someone put the acronym before the horse, if you catch my meaning.) I’ve installed it myself, and it works well enough. I have two major gripes, however: (1) the preview image does not automatically update as I adjust contrast and gamma, requiring me to sit through a “Preview” each time I nudge the settings; and (2) the gamma table interface is so geeked out that it displays the mathematical formulas of the curves instead of a human-readable legend.

Here’s a quick installation guide:

1. download and install libusb
2. after installation, libusb will unpack sane-backends.pkg; install it
3. install TWAIN SANE Interface

SANE should now appear in whatever program you normally use to scan your junk. In Photoshop, you can find it under File » Import » SANE….

Read more about SANE project SANE-project.org.

Four Kitchen Studios is proud to announce the launch of That Other Paper — Austin’s FIRST and ONLY publication!

From our Declaration of Principles:

We will do our best never to bore our readers

Years of publishing experience have taught us a simple lesson that seems to evade most writers and editors: Readers have extremely short attention spans. What’s the value of a 10,000-word exposé on the backroom dealings of Senator McJerk if the reader is stifling yawns by the fifth paragr—

Oh, too late. She already turned the page.

We will infuse everything we do with a sense of humor. Every article, review, and blurb will tell a story. And we’ll always keep it short.

We will cover all forms of entertainment — not just music

Austin may be called the “Live Music Capital of the World,” but that doesn’t mean music is the only entertainment in town. Most notably, Austin has a vibrant live comedy scene on the cusp of national recognition.

Our restaurant reviews will be written with the average Austinite in mind

You aren’t rich, and neither are we. Most of us don’t have the cash to blow on so-called “fine dining.” So why waste your time reading pretentious reviews of stuff you can’t afford?

We’re gonna do things differently. If we can’t afford it, we won’t review it. Value — the quality of food and service we get for our money — will be paramount. And though we have a broad palette, we’ll deliver our reviews with a plain tongue. If the BBQ kicks ass, we’ll say so.

We’ll dig deeper, too. We’ll publish restaurants’ health inspection scores and interview the staff regarding the management’s treatment of its employees. (Prepare to be shocked at the state of Austin’s kitchens.)

Above all, we will serve you, the citizens of Austin

This is for you, Austin. You’ve educated, employed, and entertained us. Now it’s time we gave something back, and we know nothing better than entertainment.

Recently, one of our clients wanted to install a stock ticker on her company’s website. It was a simple request; the only difficulty lay in finding a data feed of stock prices. After several hours of research, we found StockApplets.com, an online purveyor of Java-based stock ticker functions. We plunked down $50 and purchased an applet. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Why? Because StockApplets.com doesn’t provide a data feed.

We requested a refund. This was their reply:

Dear Sir

Can you please let me know where we state that we are selling content?

Sarcasm. That’s a good sign, right? I asked about the status of the refund. They replied:

Dear Sir

Your refund request is not accepted because the reason you are mentioning is not real. We are not stating anywhere on our site that we are selling content.

For more details, please read our order page: [link removed]

I visited their order page. Since we had purchased the applet, StockApplets.com had revamped their website and added this disclaimer: [… P]lease note price does not include any data source, we only sell software, not data. In other words, if you’re hungry, they’ll sell you an empty box. But it’s your job to fill it with Lucky Charms.

What inexplicable timing! I thought. I certainly didn’t remember seeing anything like that beforehand. I replied:

Why would you sell a product whose purpose is to deliver content, then refuse to deliver the content?

Refund my purchase, or I will contact my credit card company and dispute the charge.

What’s the first rule of doing business? Tell the customer he made a mistake by purchasing your product! Their reply:

When you buy a car, do you expect the car company to offer you free gas? It is the same logic here. We state everywhere on our site that we are not data providers and we only sell tools.

Please pay atention next time you make a purchase, we are not stupid nor full of money to pay for your mistakes. We are working very hard to develop tools and to sell them to make a living, and your complains are very ofending to our efforts.

The second rule of doing business is, of course, to tell the customer that his legitimate problems with your service are “offensive” to your efforts. After all, a company’s products should be met with unconditional support, right? HOW DARE YOU SAY OUR PRODUCT DOESN’T MEET YOUR NEEDS! WE WORKED HARD ON IT, AND YOU WILL LIKE IT!

I decided they needed some good advice:

What’s offensive is your complete lack of concern for your customers’ satisfaction. The product you offered doesn’t meet our needs. We’re not using it, and we don’t intend to pay for it. You’ll have to deal with the credit card companies now.

Is this really how you intend to operate your business? By making your customers angry and refusing to issue a refund for something that doesn’t meet their needs? This will be a very expensive fifty dollars.

That pretty much sealed the deal—or so I thought. I contacted our bank and requested a chargeback. A few minutes later, I received one of the most melodramatic, logically flawed emails in human history:

I asked Shareit to send you refund. I also think this might be a refund it will be very hard to bear for you. It bears all our work and hopes for a peaceful and better world for everyone that you distroyed.

Because of you we decided to stop selling this product and we will probably stop selling all our stock based products.

I’m not making that up. According to StockApplets.com, I “distroyed” (sic) “all [their] work and hopes for a peaceful and better world for everyone”. And if I’m to blame for StockApplets.com shutting down—the obvious implication of that last line—then I’ve done the world a favor, and I should be greeted as a hero. Statues should be commissioned in my honor.

Beware StockApplets.com. If you do purchase a stock ticker from them, you’ll need to supply your own stock data feed as well as your own programmer to write the code that can pull quotes from the web, scrape the data, and hand it to the applet for display. And by that point, you’re better off simply writing your own ticker.

If that sounds like too much work, consider this: it’s better the burden of “destroying their work and hopes for a peaceful and better world for everyone”!

UPDATE: I’ve found proof that StockApplets.com did indeed market their product as offering a data feed. From their freshmeat.net page:

The financial market data is transferred to the applet using an HTTP client-pull connection. PHP and ASP scripts are provided that feed the applet with data from the Yahoo! Financial section. The data connection works without the need to modify proxy servers or firewalls.

Sounds like they used to support a data feed, doesn’t it?

“Original Thought”
by Alcalde assistant editor Tim Taliaferro

Update: With Alcalde’s permission, I’ve posted the entire text of the article.

The Alcalde, UT-Austin’s alumni magazine, interviewed me about the formation of our company and our approach to working creatively. Wonderfully assembled by assistant editor Tim Taliaferro, the article explains Four Kitchens’ conception and philosophy (and why we’ll never again work a desk job!). Here’s a scan of the full article in PDF format: download “Original Thought” by Tim Taliaferro.

Tim did a great job assembling my meandering, self-indulgent ramblings into something approaching coherence. Here’s the full text, added August 30, 2006:

Original Thought:
Four Kitchen Studios Offers Creativity Consulting

Todd Nienkerk lasted exactly one year and one day in the world of cubicles, staff meetings, and pressed khaki pants. Stifled by the doldrums of an 8-to-5er, he co-founded Four Kitchen Studios, a “creative collective” that does “anything and everything involving creativity and publishing.” He and his comrades are creativity consultants, hired guns sought for their technical skill and restless imaginations. They’ll spruce up your Web page, brighten your documents, and come up with that type of clever radio or TV ad that always makes people wonder, “Who thinks of this stuff?” Read the rest of this entry »