Jeroens blog

Last 3 days I’ve been at the 2010 edittion of Wikimania, one of the biggest yearly wiki events. This year it was in Gdansk, Poland. I went by Plane from Eindhoven, together with Maarten, a moderator on the Dutch Wikipedia with >5 year history, who drove me to the airport.

I’ll start with the things that where not nice, basically the heat and the dormitories. It was 30+ °C practically the whole time, and the dormitory I stayed in, which was reserved by the event organizers for the attendees, was more like a sauna then a dormitory. It was located right next to a viaduct, so when opening the window at night, you’d get a lot of noise. On the last night the people from the event could not stay at that dormitory, and had to go somewhere else. Me and another attendee from Belgium got assigned some dormitory a few km away from the event. Saying this was a crappy one is an understatement. Furthermore, the payment was not arranged, so we had to pay for staying, while it should have been done by the event organizers as we paid for it?!! In any case, this amounted to me having less then 10 hours of sleep over 4 nights And they don’t have Club Mate in Gdansk o_O!!!

I think the event itself was great, with lots of interesting talks, awesome people and good food.

On the first day I missed the keynote since my flight arrived to late to see it, and only followed some non-technical talks, of which the most notable one was about Liquid Threads, the totally awesome extension by Andrew Garrett and now also some other people. I left early, skipping the deinner and following events, and went straight to the dormitory, to get some sleep (which failed >_>)

I gave 2 talks, one about my Google Summer of Code project, now titled Deployment, and one about Maps and Semantic Maps, both on the second day. The Deployment talk went pretty bad, as I was extremely tired. Hopefully I got the core message across of the importance of having a solid and user friendly way of deployment. Apologies to all the people I forgot to give credits to! Daniel Kinzler had some interesting security concerns which we discussed later on the day, together with Markus.

On the second day of the event there was a series of Semantic MediaWiki talks and workshops, kicked off by a presentation about the concept and what SMW has become over the past 5 years by Markus. This was followed by a workshop by Hans-Jörg Happel and Frank Dengler about Semantic Result Formats. Daniel Herzig gave a talk about AskTheWiki, and promising extension he is developing. There where two more SMW related talks focusing on the advantages of SMW and how it can be deployed. Later on the second day I gave my talk about Maps and Semantic Maps, preceded by one of Tim Alder, who presented the capabilities of the geo-related work on the toolserver. Luckily I was awake to some extend during this talk, and it went reasonably well IMO, although I had to rush through it, cause of to little time.

The second day was closed by the word premier of the movie “Truth in Numbers“, which aims at giving people an idea about the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation, and how it works. It shows arguments from both people involved or enthusiastic about the foundation, and those who think the world is going to explode if you go to Wikipedia for whatever reason. It will be interesting to see how this movie gets distributed and what effect it will have. I’m a little sad about how the creators choose to distribute it though, as it will require you to pay for it. It would be a lot more awesome if it was free with a big donate button. All the footage, which is a lot more then what’s seen in the movie itself includes, but not edited, will be released for free under a creative commons (or similar?) licence though.

The third day I found the most enjoyable as I did get some amount of sleep the night before. (In other words, I was awake enough again to program during the talks : ) The most interesting talk for me I followed here was definitely the one by Roan Kattouw about writing MediaWiki extensions, which mentioned some things I did not know about yet (such as build in MediaWiki support for Memcached o_O), as well as provided a nice overview of the things you need to keep in mind. I wish I had seen it a year earlier though, as I would have learned a lot more from it then, and not made a lot of the noted beginner mistakes. In the next session I attended several strategy sessions, which gave me a nice idea of what all the strategy fuss is about. The last session I attended was about Wikimedia credibility, including a talk by Maarten about how information (esp the incorrect) spreads to other media. The other talks in this session where similar, and although obviously none of the issues addresses are technical in nature, I found several of them rather amusing.

It was great to meet all the people involved with SEMANTIC MediaWiki in person, as well as a bunch of people I only knew from IRC and other online communication tools. Sadly enough Yaron Koren and Brion Vibber and several other people I’d like to have seen there could not be at the event.

On the way back to Belgium I tackled a lot of small design issues that have been present in Maps and Semantic Maps for months, resulting in one big refactoring commit for each extension, which I made as soon as I was back home. After that I went to sleep, and woke up 19 hours later O_o

Next years Wikimania will be in Haifa, Israel. I’m probably going, but seriously hope it won’t be so insanely warm there

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

Whitespace would like to invite you to its opening weekend 19-21 March.

When: From Friday 19th of March to Sunday the 21st.
Where: Blekerijstraat 75, Gent, Belgium

Whitespace (0×20) is the first hackerspace in Ghent and will be opening its doors for the first time on the weekend of 19-21 March. The space is ready for launch, but far from finished: we’ve got a roof, multiple walls, and some cat5 and now we need more people to have fun with. Don’t know what a “hackerspace” is? Check http://hackerspaces.org We hope to see you drop by.

The agenda
The sechedule might undergo minor changes, so keep an eye on the wiki page.
Friday:

• 20:00: Opening drink, see the space, meet the locals, fun hacker partygames.

Saturday:

• 14:00 : OpenWRT presentation: a big os for small devices.
• 15:00 : Flashing for fun & profit (Bring your compatible wireless router (http://wiki.openwrt.org/oldwiki/tableofhardware), Flash it! (don’t worry we’ll walk you trough).)
• 17:00 : Everything you always wanted to know about IPv6 but were afraid to ask.
• 18:00 : Open recipe burgers (with secret sauce).
• 21:00 : Evening entertainment: Powerpoint karaoke hosted by fs111.

After that : something involving liquids.

Sunday:

• 12:00 Hungry-Hacker is hungry. Breakfast.
• 15:00 lightning talks:Such diverse subjects as: Google Summer of Code, The talk too trollish to mention, How to get yourself a lot of work that you didn’t plan by being creative, Something about something, Awesome talk will be awesome, … (open stage, schedule will be on the wiki, add your lightning talk there).

Registration
Is not necessary but it would be nice to give us an idea on how many of you to expect so we have enough chairs and secret sauce. Please add your name: http://www.doodle.com/bg5x7xrbcg5z9h8q. Feel free to invite your friends.

More info
Check out our wiki at 0×20.be, follow us on twitter and join the #0×20 irc channel on freenode.

I’ve been so fortunate enough to be able to attend FOSDEM 2010, which stands for Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting, and is the biggest yearly open source event in the world, again this year. It took place last weekend in Brussels, as usual. I mainly attended talks of the Mozilla Foundation, covering topics such as HTML 5, the nature of the Mozilla foundation, hackability and new services. Anyway, I had a great time there, and learned a lot. Not going to go into detail, cause I’m pretty busy getting into a few new projects about which I’ll post later on

Last week I went to a VISUG and MSDN event in Brussels where Scott Guthrie held 3 talks about VS2010, Silverlight 4, asp.Net and MVC. The event was very interesting, but I’m not going to dwell on the contents.

Everyone got a red tshirt to wear, as can be seen on the underneath photo. Somewhere near the end of the second session, I got to warm wearing the tshirt, and put it in my bag. I had no idea that my blue Google Maps tshirt would be so visible though. Setting in the middle of the room, this wasn’t really subtle if I look at it now, esp since it says “I am here”

This is the model of tshirt I was wearing:

Last weekend I attended Semantic MediaWiki Camp (SMWC) 2009 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Both days of the event contained very interesting presentations about SMW and various related extensions. The most exciting aspect of the event for me was perhaps getting to know other SMW developers, including Markus Kr̦tzsch and Denny Vrandecic, the two lead SMW developers. And of course, I finally met Yaron Koren, my GSoC 2009 mentor, which was really nice. He also brought my long awaited Google T-shirts Рyay!

On Saturday, I gave a presentation about Maps and Semantic Maps, after which I did get quite some nice feedback about the extensions. I also got some interesting proposals for new functionality.

During the two nights I was in Karlsruhe, I stayed at Robert U, a student working at Ontoprise, the company hosting the event, his place, sparing me the rather expensive hotel costs.

This picture is from during one of the first talks. Yaron is explaining Semantic Forms. I’m the guy with red training right in front of the camera.

I’m just back from Arrrrcamp Gent 2009. Arrrr stands for “About Ruby, Rails, Radiant and Rum”, and is obviously about the programming language Ruby and 2 of it’s most popular web frameworks. This years edition took place right in front of my door, in the Zebrastraat, Gent. I followed 2 of the main presentations, and 4 visitor presentations, in essence similar to lightning talks.

The most interesting talk for me was about JRuby, an implementation of Ruby I’m considering to learn and use. I also gained a lot more insights in how Rails works, and into the more general Ruby community. Some other very interesting things I wasn’t really aware of, like GIT, the real-time web and push technology where also mentioned in the talks.

Today I held a presentation about my 2 MediaWiki extension, Maps and Semantic Maps, titled Semantic Mapping with MediaWiki at the Zebrastraat in Gent. Although quite a few of the people that registered to attend didn’t show up, the presentation went well, and I’m confident I won’t have any problems with the one I’ll be giving at SMW Camp 2009. The presentation lasted for about an hour. You can get the used powerpoint presentation (.pptx) here.

Some photo’s from the presentation:

Yesterday I went to my first VISUG event. VISUG stands for Visual Studio User Group and is the independent professional user group for Microsoft Visual Studio users in Belgium. The presentation, titled “C# 4.0 and testability”, and given by Dino Esposito, addressed the importance of testability in applications, and how this is made easier with code contracts.

Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs. The contracts take the form of preconditions, postconditions, and object invariants. They act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification (yay!), and documentation generation. In short, they bring the advantages of design-by-contract programming to all .NET programming languages.

Remix is a Microsoft event I attended yesterday that focuses on what’s coming next on the web. I arrived half an hour late due to some problems with the public transportation, but still was able to see the biggest part of the keynote.

I’m really happy I attended it, cause I learned about quite some things I didn’t know about yet. There where 2 tracks you could follow: designer (UX) and developer. I of-course followed the dev track. The main focus was on Silverlight 3, the latest version of microsoft’s answer to technologies such as Flash and Google Web Toolkit. From what I’ve seen, which included some impressive demo’s, I concluded that Silverlight 3, together with the development tools that are needed for it, probably form the most advanced set of RIA development sets out there. I’ve been considering getting into it for quite a while now, and still can’t decide due to the pretty important drawbacks that come with choosing Silverlight. These include the fact that Silverlight is as much Microsoft as it can be, making it a very improbably candidate for most open source projects, the costs of all the dev tools, and the Silverlight client required for you to be able to view a Silverlight site. There also where presentations about the involved development tools, which are Expression Studio 3, and Visual Studio 2008. A few very nice demo’s of Expression Blend 3, part of Expression Studio, where given, introducing the public to the basics of control, template and style creation, as well as things like animation and import options.

At some point in a demo, Google was used to demonstrate an SEO aspect of a Silverlight app. A few moments later the following entry appeared on the remix2009 twitter channel: Attention Steve Ballmer; A Microsoft employee is using Google. This drew a laugh from most of the public.

Although FOSDEM is way cooler, I’m already looking forward to MS Remix 2010.