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

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:

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.

Yesterday the Dutch GSoC student meeting took place at Hackerspace Brussels (which appears to be the first, and currently only hackerspace in Belgium). Unfortunately 1/3rd of the attendees forgot to come, resulting in only 2 people being present. Some interesting people where present at HSB though, which who I had some nice conversations about ICT related subjects. I also installed Maps and Semantic Maps on their wiki, as a demonstration of the extension’s usage.

Sunday, 11th of October, I’ll be giving a presentation about Semantic Mapping with MediaWiki. This comes down to presenting the two mapping extensions for the MediaWiki platform I developed, Maps and Semantic Maps. The presentation language will be English, but Dutch questions are acceptable.

Presentation contents

• Introduction to the wiki concept and MediaWiki
• Introduction to the semantic web and Semantic MediaWiki
• Why mapping is useful
• Introduction to Maps
• Usage of Maps
• Introduction to Semantic Maps
• Usage of Semantic Maps
• Future development
• Questions

As you can see, the presentation will focus on the usage of the extensions, and not the technical aspects involved. Therefore no extensive knowledge about any of the involved technologies is required.

Where and when

The presentation will take place October 11th, in the afternoon. The exact moment is not yet determined, although the presentation will probably start around 14:00 and last for about an hour. It will be held at a presentation room at Zebrastraat, 9000 Gent, Belgium. The accommodations are provided and paid for by Alain Liedts.

View Larger Map

Targeted public

This presentation is most interesting for everyone active in the areas of mapping, semantics and wiki’s, but also for those involved with any form of software development, site administration or web publishing.

Attending

If you are interested in attending, you must contact me in advance to ensure there is enough room. There is no entrance fee. See this article for more info.

Future presentations

In November, I’m likely to give another presentation about Maps and Semantic Maps at Semantic MediaWiki Camp 2009. SMWC is a 2 day user meeting by and for the SMW that will take place in Karlsruhe, Germany on November, 7th – 8th 2009. This talk will probably be shorter, since the introductions to MW and SMW will not be required, and the attendees will be better informed about the relevant systems.

I’m also likely to give another presentation in early 2010, again at the Zebrastraat. This presentation will be part of a regular event held every Thursday, and will be publicly announced by the organization running the event. This is still far ahead, and no precise date has been chosen yet, so I’ll post more about this later on.

While working on .Net download library, I realized I still didn’t know how to fire events from the background threads onto the main thread (meaning the thread that started the download by calling Start). I posted query on how to do this in vb.net on several forums, and got some helpful responses at MSDN. Apparently, the thing I’ve been searching for is called the Event-based Asynchronous Pattern, which is a general pattern for asynchronous operation’s with events. I have done some familiarization with it by doing the entire walk-through, and I also started implementing it into the Download class. I’ll probably commit my current code this weekend, hopefully with working cross thread events