Archive for the ‘spletne urice’ Category

Authentication panel

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

Tomorrow I’m hosting a panel about authentication at our local web-related talks. To make thing a bit more interesting I invited more than just coders and security experts – we have a designer and a usability expert on the podium. I think the whole talk will be enlightening to everyone, since hardly anyone knows all the areas covered by our panelists.

I’ll introduce the panelists here in more detail:
Ozren Škondrič is a friend who dedicated a big part of his life to designing web interfaces. He uses a bunch of web based services and applications and is probably the person who filled the most registration forms amongst all the people I know.
Duška Mervar is probably the most famous around here for a great booklet about writing for the web which a lot of people don’t respect enough. As an expert for the user perspective I’m sure she’ll show us a new meaning to serving customers based on their personal preferences.
Tomaž Cerar works at the same company I do – Parsek. He is a coauthor of the infamous CP2 platform – a Java based CMS system we use and also the lead developer of many e-commerce sites we created.
Marko Perme works on e-banking and e-insurance and other e-solutions for one of the biggest Slovenian IT companies – Hermes Softlab. They created and support a few of the biggest and the most used e-service platforms in the country.

The moment is right for us to reflect on what the internet knows about us and to think about what we want from it. The panelists will help us understand what the trends in this area are and shed some light on the matter that is becoming one of the most important problems of the current wave of web services and applications.

Debikartica

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

The first case-study talk went quite well. Even though I work for the company that presented the project I learned quite a few new things which was great. Unfortunately the number of visitors was quite low – you really did miss on a few thing that could’ve triggered a few sleepy synapses.

Jernej and Igor were a good match, talking about the client and the methodology aspect and the technology respectively. I guess each of the themes actually deserve a talk of its own – unfortunately the number of Wednesdays in a season is finite and good willing speakers are hard to find around here. If you happen to know one (doesn’t need to be from Slovenia) drop a comment.

I’m quite busy in December as you can see from the lack of posts this month – I do have a few longer pieces in writing but don’t have time to finish them.

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.

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.

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.

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.