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Archive for the ‘events’ Category

JavaScript sorting – the talk

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

Last week I had an emergency talk about JavaScript sorting since the original speaker had a last minute change of schedule. I decided to have a talk about sorting since I was just finishing my research into sorting algorithms.

The talk went quite ok – I wish I had more time to prepare though. There were just a few real JavaScript developers in the crowd so it was more challenging than I thought. I was hoping to get a bigger crowd because of the Ajax in the title, but I guess they saw right through me..

The slides to the talk are already online. I’ll be preparing a short article about what I found out soon.

There’s another talk today at Spletne urice, this time a case study about Debikartica.

Posted in events, javascript, spletne urice, technology | No Comments »

Online communities

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

Spletne urice #34 served its audience with a nice talk about what online communities are and a quick reality check that hardware or software are not key components to the success of a specific community. Some of the more advanced visitors were a bit disappointed since the talk did not serve any points one could really work upon or any numbers or more direct lessons to be learned from studying them.

I was fascinated at how Jure has shown us that even a geek crowd can engage in a more active conversation with the person giving the talk – not only with mumbling and nodding. His way of delivering information is really amazing – it shows he has a lot of practice at Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana (which recently got Equis accreditation) where he recently graduated and is also a demonstrator there.

At the same time Tim Berners-Lee seems to have discovered that internet has grown out of the computer science and needs some more formal research done.

After the talk we also had a short talk from mozdev admin and Mozilla developer Brian King about the new Firefox 2.0 features. Since he spoke about most of the important features Marko just quickly reviewed the ones that developers should know best. The Firefox launch party then moved to a nearby pub where we continued with pizza and beer.

Posted in events, services, spletne urice | No Comments »

Web mashups – LIFFe

Monday, October 30th, 2006

A few days ago the local film festival LIFFe launched its programme. Again it was not an exceptional work of IA or UX. You can access the whole list of movies that leads to individual movie pages that contain details and the showing times. You can also check the schedule by individual date that unfortunately contains almost no details about the movie – just the title. Sections of the festival do not have a page where you can see all the movies that compete in that section.

So I decided to create a quick mashup of all scripts that have been lying around my disk for some time now. This proved to be a quite difficult task because of a lot of reasons. The first one was that the code behind the page is incredibly ugly – table layouts in table layouts without ids, classes or almost anything you can use to find your way around it. The next problem was the encoding and my use of php that is not too friendly to windows-1250 encoding used on the source page. Eventually I did it in a bit less than a day – it’s not perfect, but I think it shows that it can be done better and it does not take more time.

I have some stuff to add but since the festival is getting closer and closer I present Program 17. LIFFe festivala.

The page uses some AJAX (XHR to be exact), DOM parsing of the source data and SortedTable to present the data.

Posted in ajax, events, javascript, liffe, services | 4 Comments »

Triptracker

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

Spletne urice served its visitors a great talk from one of the founders of a Slovenian company called Klika. It’s primarily a software company that specializes in tracking software with GPS and then mapping the data to support sporting and other events (like the Ljubljana marathon that’s on tomorrow).

But the talk wasn’t about their programming but rather about the first global Slovenian Web2.0 website/service – the TripTracker. In short it’s a website that allows you to upload positional data along with pictures, matches them all up by time, draws a map and more or less creates the whole trip into a nice little presentation that you can use to show at meets or just send to your friends. It’s also a good resource for travelers that want to travel to places they know almost nothing about – you can check other people’s trips and see where they went and what they saw and see any comments they might have made.

The most fascinating thing about all this is that they created all their mapping data themselves – all the JavaScript and html for the mapping was written for this site exclusively and all the images converted from NASA sources (I hear Google has exclusive rights on HQ satellite photos so no other mapping service can use them). As the talk progressed questions were popping to my mind but were soon answered – the API is in progress, the service can use Flickr as the image resource and they might even switch their own mapping tool with Google Maps. One thing that came as a surprise is that they’re not using Microformats even though it clearly supports stuff they present on their site. They do allow export to KML though. As all true Web2.0 sites TripTracker also has a developer blog so check it out to see when they release the API to the public.

The slides will probably online soon.

Posted in ajax, events, html, javascript, microformats, services, spletne urice, technology | No Comments »

xinf is not flash

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

“Spletne urice” started today with a talk from the lead developer and inventor of xinf Daniel P. Fischer. He talked about getting rid of flash by using it. The talk concentrated around xinf, an open development tool that shares a lot of goals with Flash but has a community driven open development.

The idea behind xinf is to create a new environment for creating rich media applications and then export them to different ‘platforms’. Currently available are javascript (in Firefox) and native (xinfinity). Export for Flash existed in a previous version and is also planned for this version. Xinf is LGPL and is based on many opensource solutions and libraries. The project is also looking for developers in various areas with the promise that Daniel will take you to his island when xinf is so huge that he’ll be able to afford it. You’ll probably get more insight when the presentation is online.

Related news:
Our local multimedia center Cyberpipe is hosting haip a multimedia festival of open technologies this week.

Posted in events, flash, javascript, spletne urice, technology, xinf | No Comments »

The little bumps of the first time user

Monday, July 3rd, 2006

As you can see, well read actually, I have about 0 time to do stuff. I haven’t the best idea why but I’m guessing it has something to do with work and heat. The immense heat in this part of the world.

I have a few stories to share and I’ll try to get around to posting them this week. In the meantime let me say this – Feed Demon is great. I’m currently testing it and I think it’s the first piece of software that I really liked from the start. And still like it. If it were documented better it’d be perfect.

On a side note, there seems to be a lot going on about Flickr. I haven’t really used it ever, but I’m doing it while writing this – I’ve been trying to get around to posting my pics from @media for some time now.

The first annoyance was the authorization of the Uploadr. Good thing I have the CTRL+S reflex (well ‘Save and Continue Editing’ anyways), since it opened over my WordPress tab. Then I figured there has to be a limitation to the free account even though I never heard about it. I have no idea if I really wanna go pro at this stage you know. So I find but I can only upload 20MB per month. C’mon you’re Yahoo! now. You could easily say 250MB per year (500MB would be even nicer you know?). Well, I thought the Uploadr would ease the tagging process but since it didn’t all my images have “needstags” tag now (picked up from Tantek).

All in all my experience wasn’t that great. I guess Flickr is a nice tool/app but it ain’t all that nice for a first-timer. And it’s really common to forget about these people since when you’re testing you’re not really one. So do test on your family & friends. Once only, then change friends or get more. Well, just for testing part.

Update: I updated the info on all pics – titles, tags, licensing. The only problem was that I kept adding the tags to the wrong picture – the field bellow the description just didn’t work for me. A bit more copy-pasting than needed. How about “zebrastriping” the entries?

Posted in atmedia, general | 2 Comments »

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