Jeroens blog

Earlier today, versions 0.5 of Maps and Semantic Maps where released. Some mayor new features where added, and a whole bunch of things have been refactored. I also did some effort to improve the documentation by adding some screencasts and revising the developer docs. Version 0.4.2 proved to be pretty stable, since only 2 bugs have been found and fixed.

Let’s have a look at the new, awesome, functionality:

• Strict parameter validation which allows you to get specific errors or warnings when entering invalid values or parameters. This functionality is obtained by relying on the Validator extension, which saw it’s first release today. This makes Maps dependent on Validator. Every distribution of Maps does include Validator, and Maps will automatically load Validator when it’s not loaded yet, so no extra installation work is required (unless you get the code from SVN).

• Static map support makes you able to display maps as plain images instead of via a JavaScript (or other non-html language, for example flash) mapping API. This is very important since it makes viewing the maps possible for people who are browsing the web with a browser that does not support JavaScript (or this other language), or simply have it disabled for some reason.

• Added a query printer that handles the osm result format.

• Added support for GUI parameter selection of Yaron’s new version of SMW’s Special:Ask page to the query printers.

• Added smart ‘autopanzoom’ like control for Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps.

• Added internationalization to the OSM service, and an extra parameter to define per-map languages.

The list of all things that have been refactored is rather long, so I’ll only cover the most interesting things here:

• Complete rewrite of the parameter handling. To make Maps work with Validator, this was required. The result is that Maps does not have a whole mess of specific validation and defaulting functions any more, since that’s now handled by Validator.

• Moved the geographical coordinate data type handling from Semantic MediaWiki to Semantic Maps. This will make the SMW codebase smaller by moving the geographical coordinate data type out, which is logical, since if you use coordinates, you very likely also want maps.

• Added code to unload any services from the service hook that are not present in the list of allowed services. This ensures they don’t get initialized, and makes any check to see if the service is one of the allowed ones further on unneeded.

As for documentation, I created 2 screencasts, both covering a different aspect of Maps. This way people can learn how to work with Maps in a more interactive way then just reading the documentation.

• Screencast: display_map

• Screencast: display_point

The developer documentation on how you can extend Maps using it’s hooks has been completely rewritten. This was needed since the previous version was created for Maps 0.3.3, since which a lot has been changed to the hook systems of Maps.

For a complete list of changes, see the Maps change log, and Semantic Maps change log.

Downloads:

• Maps 0.5 (includes Validator 0.1) [zip, 7z]
• Semantic Maps 0.5 [zip, 7z]
• Maps and Semantic Maps 0.5 (includes Validator 0.1) [zip, 7z]
• Maps 0.5 SVN tag
• Semantic Maps 0.5 SVN tag

I’d like to announce the launching of WikiWorks, a new MediaWiki consulting company that Yaron Koren founded. WikiWorks handles all aspects of wiki creation, from hosting to software installation to skin creation and other graphic design to data structure. As you might expect, the focus of the company is on Semantic MediaWiki and its related extensions; though they also handle regular, non-semantic installations.

You can read more (though, at this point, not much more) on the website @ http://wikiworks.com/

Yay! I finally got my Google Summer of Code T-shirt!

With my T-shirt, I also got my GSoC 2009 certificate, which marks the end of any involvement with GSoC for me (see original post). That is, until next year. When I reflect back to what I learned and achieved during GSoC, I’m more then happy with it. I’m planning to do another (awesome) Wikimedia Foundation project next year, if I manage to get accepted again. This (awesome) project will be more focused on changes to MW’s core, and so provide me with an (awesome) opportunity to learn more about the inner working of MW, which I’m currently still unfamiliar with. I’m not going to make my exact plans public yet, cause it’s possible the things I want to improve will already be taken care off, and I don’t want everyone to go rip-off my idea I’ve already put my name on the (awesome) participants list for MW, and was FIRST (awesome!) since I created the (awesome) page.

Two days ago my new laptop arrived (woot!). I got an Acer (Aspire) Timeline 3810T. The main characteristics of this laptop are that it has 8 hours (that’s right: 8h) of battery power, and that’s it very light weight and easy to carry. For it’s price, the other specs are also quite decent. It has 4GB DD3 RAM, which can be upgraded to 8GB (2x 4GB), 320GB HDD, HD LED monitor with glare (13.3 inch), HD webcam, blue-tooth and some other nice stuff. The only thing that’s less then with the other laptop models in the same price category is the procesor, which is an ULV (ultra low voltage) duo core of 1.4GHz with an FSB speed of 800MHz. Surprisingly it rates better on windows performance index (3.6 vs 3.3) then my one year old HP laptop, which has a 2GHz duo/dual (I don’t know) CPU.

Anyway, I’m quite happy with it until now. It seems to work faster then my old laptop, has more storage capacity, and other nice extras. Some negative points are the keyboard, which is slightly smaller then what I’m used to, causing me to frequently mistype things, and the position of the USB ports, which forces me to put my U3 and dev-usb on different sides of the laptop, which is un-practical in placing and carrying it. Another negative point is the size of the monitor, which makes it less suited for programming with a complex IDE. The reason I chose this model is that although it’s not ideal for heavy dev, it is really good at what laptops are supposed to do: providing an easy way to work or look up things anywhere, without worrying about if you have power or not all the time, and without being bloody heavy/verbose. It might not provide the brute power and larger display of the very expensive laptops, but IMHO you better get a decent desktop pc/workstation then such a model. You’ll be off with better gear for less money, and more flexibility in upgrading, and re-using components.

Today I was able to do some work on the .Net Download library project. I mainly focused on the cross thread event handling, on which I’ve been busy for quite a while now. Thanks to some helpful docs on MSDN, I now have a working implementation, that successfully fires events of the Download class onto the thread the instance was created. (yay!) The next step is to clean up the code a little, and implement it for all events. I’m still looking for the best way to store all the event delegates. I originally had a delegate for each event, but now moved them to a HashTable, from where I identify them via an Int32 Enum

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For me, today is the last day of the summer holiday period ( ). School will start at the 21st of September, but I decided to follow some extra courses meant to bridge the knowledge gap between people who had a lot of maths and sciences, and those who didn’t. These courses start tomorrow, and then continue for 3 weeks.

I just finished creating the developers manual to extend Semantic Maps. Like the manual for Maps, it targets developers who want to add support for a mapping service to one of the features Maps and Semantic Maps support. It goes over all the key aspects of the PHP code, like how to add your own service, how to create a query printer or form input class, and what the most notable differences with the parser function classes are. Examples and out-takes are also provided. The manual does not cover the JavaScript aspects of adding your own mapping service, since that code really depends on the API it uses, and although the overall structure might be similar, the code itself most likely is not.

Like every self respecting geek, I have a collection of science fiction books, mainly Star Wars. Today I found a bunch of Star Wars books in a second hand English book shop in Gent. Surprisingly, quite some of the books where pretty recent, including ‘The new Jedi order‘ and ‘Legacy of the force‘ books. Even Timothy Zahn‘s just released novel Allegiance was present.

I bought 14 books, and will probably go back after I’ve checked some stuff about some other books. The funny thing is that each book was €3. So the total was €3*14. WIN! (That’s 42, for those who don’t get it!) I managed to get a discount though, but it still stays a win

(Click to enlarge)

Today I reached 20k emails in my Yahoo! Inbox. The first email dates from Sunday, May 16, 2004 1:31:40 AM, and the 20000th arrived at Sunday, August 16, 2009 6:14:41 PM.

Yay – I just got my new business cards! I now have 500 cards with these front and back sides:

I ordered these cards via flyer.eu, where I had to enter some personal information like name, address and company. Assuming the company field was for the company you worked for, rather then the one you own, I entered Google. Wrong assumption! My receipt now states the order is for Google, located at my home address – LOL.