Jeroens blog

Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6 are now available for download. Maps 0.6 requires Validator 0.3, which is included in the release distribution, and can also be found on SVN. Semantic Maps 0.6 requires Maps 0.6, Validator 0.3 and Semantic MediaWiki 1.5.1 or above. See the download page for full dependency and compatibility tables.

This is a big update, including a lot of new features, bug fixes, security patches, and most of all, internal improvements, making both extensions more modular and extendible (these changes are not covered here, see the relevant change logs for more info). It is also the first release of Semantic Maps that requires you to run the SMW update script, as it requires a new table layout to store coordinates (more info on this).

Let’s have a look at the various new features.

• Maps now supports real coordinate parsing and formatting, which allows you to input coordinates in any of the supported notations at any point in the extension, and can also request any output to be in the notation of your choice. This means you can now choose what format Semantic MediaWiki shows coordinates in, such as in ask queries. The supported notations are DMS, decimal degrees, decimal minutes and floats. All those can be either directional or non directional. A new parser function has been added that allows you to convert between any of these formats: #coordinates.

• New geographical functions: #geodistance and #finddestination. You can use the #geodistance parser function to calculate the geographical distance between two points, from and to any of the supported formats. The #finddestination parser function can be used to find a destination given a starting point, an initial bearing and a distance.

• Related to the new geographical functions is a rewritten distance query in Semantic Maps. It now takes into account performance and is scalable, which the old query was not, by using the new storage structure for coordinates. The notation for distance queries has also changed. Instead of using the like operator and a global distance parameter ( like #ask:[[Property: :~coordinates]]|distance=42 ) you now only have to specify your distance locally in the coordinate criteria itself like #ask:[[Property: :coordinates (42 km)]]. Like you can see you can now also specify a unit, which can be any of the supported ones.

• Support for various width and height notations. Previously Maps only accepted width and height values is px, forcing you to use maps of fixed sizes. Since most people want to have their complete page width visible even on small screens, this resulted in a lot of people using rather small maps, and so wasting screen space. 0.6 allows you to specify the size in px, ex, em, and most importantly, in %. The syntax is what you’d expect: width=”420px”, width=”420em”, width=”42%”. width=”420″ will default to using px, so is backward compatible. When using the % values, maps will even adapt their size when the screen width or the height of the container they are in is changed after the page has loaded

• Not a new feature, but rather one that’s removed: OSM support. The OSM service has been completely removed from Maps and Semantic Maps as it was rather broken and not easy to upgrade to the internal structure of Maps 0.6. I’m planning to add it back later on, rewritten from ground up, in 0.6.1 or 0.6.2 or so. Note that you can still view OSM maps on your wiki using the OpenLayers service, which has build in OSM layers, and also allows you to define your own layers since 0.5.5.

• And many more

The most notable bugfixes are:

• Fixed conflict with prototype library that caused compatibility problems with the Halo extension.
• Added automatic icon image sizing for Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps markers.
• Various security fixes, mostly preventing XSS attacks.

If no serious bugs are found in this release, a minor update can be expected in a month or so.

View announcement on the mapping wiki.

Downloads

• Maps 0.6 [ zip, 7z ]
• Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6 [ zip, 7z ]

As I did recently with several of my old software projects, I decided to wrap up a legacy release for my all time favourite Art of Defence map for C&C Generals, after I played the latest release once more yesterday. This video shows you the game, which surprisingly me and Darklight won on the most difficult level after both not playing the game for over half a year.

The legacy release is version 1.27, and includes some quick improvements over 1.26.

• Rewrote readme file and created documentation wiki article.
• Updated messages and fixed typo’s.
• Increased second boss HP by 50%.
• Slightly increased the amount of units for several brutal waves.
• Decreased the spawn time of jet waves on brutal from 15-30 to 10-20 seconds.
• Fixed bug in the final wave on brutal that caused part of the units to stay at their spawn points.
• Added air raid siren sound when a wave of jets is spawned on brutal.

As I’m not playing this game anymore, and think the map editor is way to limited, this is probably the last release of this map by me. Have fun playing it though!

Links:

• Documentation and downloads
• Download v1.27
• The replay on youtube
• More cool Generals maps

Two days back I did the effort of recording a replay (download) of a Supreme Commander Forged Alliance game I did a little over a month back. Like my 2 previous similar video’s, it’s filmed from an overview altitude, giving you a good strategic perspective on what’s going on. The entire match took a little over an hour, but the replay has been sped up to 20, with some insignificant parts omitted. Since Youtube has a 10 minute limit, I had to split the movie up into 2 parts. Enjoy

Team 1:

• 600613,42 (me, blue) UEF
• Darklight (friend, red) Cybrin

Team 2:

• Cheating Tech AI (yellow) Seraphim
• Cheating Tech AI (green) Aeon

Used mods:

• Experimental Wars 1.96
• Commanders Revenge 0.42
• Realistic Nukes 1.4
• Resource Rich (x2)
• BLUE’s Naval Unit Pack 4.0

These mods are balanced, and do not make the game easier in any way. You can download them here, or just google them to find the most up to date versions.

Music used:

• Unbreakable (Sabaton)
• Back in Control (Sabaton)
• Coat of Arms (Sabaton)
• Midway (Sabaton)
• Nuclear Attack (Sabaton)

Never guess how many credits I got on SETI@Home. Syrysly, it’s over 9000!

Meanwhile I passed the 20k line with Milkyway@home and am going to soon with Einstein@home.

Don’t know what this is all about? Check out the Wikipedia article about BOINC and my previous blog post.

I decided to finally become a paying member of two of Belgium’s three hackerspaces, which are Hackerspace Brussels, and Whitespace or 0×20, in Gent.

From Wikipedia [citation needed]: A hackerspace or hackspace (from Hacker and Space, also referred to as a makerspace or creative space) is a real (as opposed to virtual) place where people with common interests, usually in science, technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and collaborate. A hackerspace can be viewed as an open community lab, workbench, machine shop, workshop and/or studio where people of diverse backgrounds can come together to share resources and knowledge to build/make things.

Both spaces are totally awesome, earning over 9000 points on the awesomeness scale, even when holding only 2% of the overall awesomeness into account. Geeks, tech discussions, club mate and the airwolf theme playing every 5 minutes – what more could you want? Check out the wikis of the spaces if you are interested in joining one of the many upcoming awesome meetings/workshops/presentations.

Linkz

• Hackerspace Brussels
• Whitespace (0×20)
• Whitespace blog
• Hackerspace Antwerp
• List of hackerspaces

One of the big changes in the upcoming 0.6 release of Semantic Maps will be the from the ground up rewritten semantic datatype for Geographical coordinates. Although the changes themselves do not directly add any value for the user, they enable some pretty neat improvements to existing features, and the creation of many new ones. In this blog post I’ll first go over the changes that are made, in a technical manner, and then sum up the effects they have from an users point of view.

The SMWDataValue extending class for coordinates, which was previously part of Semantic MediaWiki, and only recently moved over to Semantic Maps, has had a big overhaul. This class, now called SMGeoCoordsValue, used to parser coordinates all by itself. Considering Maps also parses coordinates, this is pretty dumb, since the code is redundant, and even worse, does not behave the same way, resulting into incompatible output. I rewrote all the parsing and formatting code in an as modular fashion as possible, and put it in a new class in Maps, which is MapsCoordinateParser. SMGeoCoordsValue now does all formatting and parsing of values via this class

Markus recently added a hook to Semantic MediaWiki that allows for extensions to define their own database tables for storage of semantic values with a specific signature, which will be part of the upcoming SMW 1.5.1. Semantic Maps is using this hook for storing coordinates in a table with lat and lon fields, both floats. This is a huge improvement to simply storing the coordinates in non-directional float notation with the elements separated by a comma, in a string field. The new layout allows for much faster lookups since the values can be index, esp. for things like the soon to be re-implemented distance query, and opens up a lot of new possibilities.

As a user, you will not notice any of these changes, except maybe that things that where broken will be magically fixed when using this new code. Semantic Maps now has settings that allow you to specify the output format of coordinates in queries though, so you can now view them in a different format then non-directional floats, like you where obliged to in the previous releases. You can pick any format supported by Maps, for example directional DMS, as show on the screenshot. Another change is that you will see new functionality based on the new table layout, like, but not limited to, the distance query.

Edit: There actually is one thing you’ll definitely notice as a user when upgrading – you need to update your semantic data via Special:SMWAdmin in order for your wikis coordinates to be stored in the new table. If you don’t do this, queries for coordinates won’t return anything. It’s sort of annoying you need to do this, but there is no way around it.

Two months back I dug up the project files of BN+ Converter Pro, a .Net application I created when I was in secondary school, and did some high level refactoring to optimize it for .Net 4.0 and version 3 of my .Net class library. This was soon after I released a similar update for BN+ Brute Force Hash Attacker, another of my old .Net apps. On top of the changes I made, and a very few new features I’ve added, the code is now publicly available under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3 or later on SourceForge. I waited with releasing this since I wanted the app to be compiled with the stable release of .Net framework, which was released a while back now.

Changes in this release

* Use of BN+ Library 3.0.1
* Use of native components of .Net framework 4.0
* Implemented a new update platform
* Refactored namespaces and moved around a bunch of files
* Redesigned the about interface
* Redesigned the help menu
* Moved documentation to a wiki page
* Added ROT 5, ROT 13, ROT 18 and ROT 48 codecs
* Made the source code available under the GPL on SourceForge

Downloads

• Setup file (zip, windows installer, includes update platform)
• Executables tarball (latest version of the executables, straight from the SVN repo)
• SVN repostory

Links

• Project home
• Documentation

This is a screen shot of the previous version. This part of the interface is pretty much unchanged.

This screenshot shows the redesigned about interface.

the terms of the GNU General Public License