Posts by oemebamo.

BarCamp Brussels 2006 – 4PM – 5:30PM

And here’s what happened during the last presentations of BarCamp Brussels …

Some thoughts about TypO3 by Pieter Jelle De Brue

Pieter Jelle, of Statik, shared with us the experiences he had with using TypO3 to develop sites. (Gotta have guts with all the Drupal fans in the audience ;).) TypO3′s features include the basic CMS-features you’d expect, plus extensive user rights management and the possibility to create different data models and work with those to create custom database views … A great tool for creating presentational websites for business purposes. It’s not a blogging platform, and you’re bound to a tree-structure, nor has it got any community features; there’s other tools out there for this. I’m more curious about Drupal though … Someone selling extra time?

Firefox Extensions, ViewMyCurrency Case Study by Will Moffat

Firefox-fans united in the Passionate Users room for a talk about Firefox Extensions lead by Will Moffat, who started working on a impressive Firefox Extension 3 months ago. The extension will convert all prices it can find on any website into your own currency. For this it uses WebServices (to get the exchange rate), some heuristics (to determine where on the page prices are to be converted), some impressive XUL-skills … Will started of with a Greasemonkey script as the first draft and then looked and asked around. He suggested the Dive Into Greasemonkey book of Mark Pilgrim. I’ve been bookmarking lots of Firefox Extensions tutorials recently, time to read them … Or just dive into Will’s code, as an xpi-file in fact is a renamed zip-file.
A good extension starts with a great idea, and this sure is. A step closer to viewing the web you want it, your way … ?
Question for mr. Moffat though; does this extension have any impact on the speed you’re surfing over the web? I guess all the heuristics at every page load could slow things down.

jQuery, making Javascript fun again by Steven Wittens

The last – and, to me, most interesting – speech was about jQuery. Steven started off with a brief but good introduction of what JavaScript is and why you shouldn’t be scared to start scripting. That introduction did me well, as to have a quick reminder and overview of JavaScript’s special features.
The interesting part was about the JavaScript library itself though. I had seen some jQuery magic in several freely available javascripts here and there, but never used it myself. For personal projects and at work I’ve always been using the Prototype javascript library which has been a god-gift, taking the pain out of js coding.
The jQuery library enables you te chain methods like crazy, which definitely makes for compact coding, but with the examples given I feel like it’s difficult to keep an overview. Getting used to I guess. On the other hand the jQuery selector function $(), that enables you to browse through your DOM as you would with CSS, definitely is amazing and a great feature. Now, if they could make this available into Prototype …
At the moment jQuery isn’t compatible with Prototype, as is. Because they both use a different implementation of a selector-function with the dollar-sign. With some patching it should be no problem to make them compatible, and Steven assured me the vibrant jQuery community would help me with that.

The topic I had been preparing yesterday for BarCamp was mentioned here too … A brief overview of the possible types of communication between your Javascript and server side scripts. I wish I had been able to finish my presentation about this topic, but it’s just been a very busy week and I must add I was a little unsure about the level/tone/type of presentation it should have been. Anyways, I asked Steven what he’d prefer his AJAX-requests to return: XML or JSON. He’d pick JSON because it’s such a native format for JavaScript. He also said he wouldn’t mind the eventual drop in speed (eval() is said to be slower then responseXML), since it’s on client-side it would only make a really big difference when processing thousands of records.

Up next: the roundup …

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Posted by at 9:46 pm on September 27th, 2006. 2 comments... »
Categories: tech.

BarCamp Brussels 2006 – 2PM – 3:30PM

14-16 AM
picture by pietel

Screen scraping with Ruby and IE, or the improper use of the WATIR Framework by Pascal Van Hecke

After a small coffee break I listened to an introduction to the WATIR Framework by Pascal and was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t have any notion of WATIR, and screen-scraping isn’t exactly the hottest topic around, but what I found was a great and simple tool to do some quick tests on a website. WATIR, short for Web Application Testing in Ruby, is a framework written in Ruby that can interact with your Internet Explorer and tell it to do things. The good thing here is that the tool will see exactly what the user will see, and with todays AJAX-y applications it’s not always easy to write a good test script for every feature of your site, so mimicking users and evaluating what the browser sends back seems ideal, at least for quick tests.
With few lines of Ruby you tell WATIR to go to a site, enter a value in a form field, click a button, test and evaluate the response … Here’s are some lines from the sample on the WATIR-homepage;

ie.goto(test_site)
ie.text_field(:name, "q").set("pickaxe")
ie.button(:name, "btnG").click
if ie.contains_text("Programming Ruby")
   puts "Test Passed. Found the test string: Programming Ruby. Actual Results match Expected Results."
else
   puts "Test Failed! Could not find: Programming Ruby"
end

For the moment it’s only working with IE (so you’re bound to Windows), although the FAQ mentions it becomes available for Firefox too in the next release. (But according to Pascal, the author’s been promising for a long time now …)
Anyways, this WATIR seems like a good way to quickly write some simple tests and while it’s probably not the most advanced nor complete testing suite around, I’ll definitely have a look at this. I believe it would come in handy for us, eg. to automatically test some basic features of our various sites as soon as we launch a new version, instead of getting the whole tech crew gathered to test that upload functionality again. A few lines of Ruby could do that for us. And it would be a good way to finally start delving into Ruby a bit, ’cause although I like what I’ve seen from Ruby (and in one of the next sessions I’ve seen some more), I haven’t yet found a project where some Ruby could be used.
Pascal mentioned you could also use WATIR to reclaim the data you’ve got stored on various sites by using it as a screen-scraper. Someone else also mentioned the Selenium-tool. The platform and browser compatibility of this tool sure looks more promising then the IE-only of WATIR, so I’ll be checking that one out too. Anyone who has got experience with the two tools?

Google’s dirty little secret by Bart De Waele

Another presentation that was good for a packed room (‘pr0n‘ / ‘dirty’, you get the link, right?), this talk from Bart of Netlash was a case study of why the visitor statistics of a specific site suddenly dropped terribly. I’ll quickly sketch the situation: the website has 90% traffic via google.nl, 10% via google.be and has a server based in Amsterdam. They move the server to Brussels where it gets a new ip, all other things stay the same, but the visitor stats drop 3 days later with the 90% of traffic from google.nl vanishing completely. This led Bart to conclude Google decides which language/country you’re website is in, and therefore where it should include the site in the search results (localisation), based on the ip of your server. While it seems impossible for me that this would be the only criteria (Top-level-domain name, language, links from other sites, … ?! I’m sure all of this plays it’s role.), the ip-change sure had a drastical impact on that site. Imagine your commercial site had a 90% drop in traffic … Horror.
Since we also have different sites targeted at different countries I’d like to see some more discussion about this, I’ll start here at digg.com and continue with these: Why isn’t my site returning when I search for results from a particular country?, Inside Google Sitemaps: Tips for Non-U.S. Sites, How search results may differ based on accented characters and interface languages.

Ruby Live Demo by Dennis Lamotte

During these 20 minutes Dennis, made a simple blog application in the Ruby On Rails framework, showing how easy he thinks it is to quickly create web applications with Ruby. While this presentation was much like the vidcasts available elsewhere on the net, I did learn a few new things, for instance about the automatic generation of unit tests and how Ruby tries to keep your database in sync when you down or upgrade to different versions of your application. Nice features, me thinks, which makes me more anxious to really kickstart a Ruby project somewhere soon.

Still I have the feeling that with Rails so much stuff is happening behind your back; a few commands and several files are created and or modified at once … Lots of magic involved. Which is a good as well as a bad thing. I raised the obvious question: “Is Ruby On Rails ready for really big and complex sites with huge traffic?” 37signals.com was indeed the answer :).
A video of this presentation is available at blogologie.be.
This presentation also made me install TextMate and CocoaMySQL, two tools Dennis uses to develop. Since I recently made the switch from Windows, the quest for good macosx apps is on again …

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Posted by at 1:50 pm on September 26th, 2006. One comment... »
Categories: tech.

BarCamp Brussels 2006 – 10AM – 12AM

Here’s some scriblings about the presentations at BarCamp Brussels 2006 from 10AM till 12AM I attended.

10 - 12 AM
picture by pietel

“When old web meets web(x.x)”, an informal discussion on resistance and buzz (based on real (but disguised) cases) led by Gunnar Langemark

We arrived a little too late for the introduction but right in time for the first presentation to start. The ‘Passionate Users’ room started off with a presentation about the buzz & hype around Web 2.0 and how to react to eg. clients asking to sprinkle some web 2.0 over their site – “you’ve got 150 to 200 pixels”. It’s obvious to me the whole social aspect of the web associated with the term 2.0 is something that ideally has to grow bottom-up or eventually involves lots of education top-down. These points were also raised in the discussion (well, maybe discussion is a big word, it was still early for most of us).
It was interesting to hear someone speak about a project in Germany where the project manager obliged the different projects to start a blog and write about what they were doing. While at first lots of people involved got scared (“Won’t they blog about secret things?”), it quickly went the good way and the project manager for the first time had a good overview of everything going on, right there in his rss-reader. Another interesting topic this guy raised was his experience with a social media project in Africa and how they launched this blog platform. The problems and difficulties they had to tackle were of another kind; electricity being one, analphabetics being another one … but he did say something that could be extrapolated to all social media applications; you often don’t end up with a community/product you intended when setting out your concrete plans and intentions.

Source control with Subversion by Bert Heymans

Next up was Bert, the author of this clear howto guide for Subversion, sharing his experiences with this version control system. I’ve been using Subversion when working on my thesis too (a joy!), and now at work we use the other system; CVS. The last few days some of my colleagues had a deeper look at these two systems, because we really need a good way of dealing with different versions of our application and an easy way to work on different features and checkout these features seperately. ‘Say hello to branches and tags!’ But in Subversion there’s apparently no really easy way to rollback to previous versions (eg. take one feature -branch- offline while keeping newer updates to other ones still online). So for that reason we’re stuck with CVS and some of its odd sides.
TortoiseSVN was mentioned as a great client for Subversion and I can only second that. It nestles itself in the Windows Explorer and makes using Subversion very easy. Someone else asked if it would be possible to combine a OS Save-operation with an automatic commit to the Subversion repository and apparantly there is a way to do that. For simple home use, two other source control tools of which I unfortunately can’t recall the names, were mentioned … Help me out, please!
The mindmap Bert used to structure his presentation seemed like a good way to quickly make a sketch of a talk you need to do, but don’t really have the time to turn into a nice ppt. Good tool for brainstorming sessions, I think.
Oh, and isn’t Apple going to put a versioning system in their next Leopard OS? Forgot to ask …

Eco-awareness in Data-Centers by Frank Louwers

Third and last presentation in the morning was done by Frank of openminds.be. He had the difficult task to be in the same slot as the ’10 things we could learn from the prOn industry’ – presentation. But what’s there to learn about porn we don’t know already?
This topic was interesting for us since we deal with exactly these problems; our fast ‘n’ shiny servers with lots of processing power need lots of amps, too much in fact. A regular rack in a data center normally has 16A (220-230V) available, but we had to move to specials racks who can serve up to 32A. Needless to say this involves money. So, apart from the eco-awareness, lowering the amount of consumed electricity would obviously also be a good thing for cost effectiveness.
This presentation adressed the new trend for lowering the wattage high end servers need these days. He talked of set-ups using up to 40% less power, and said the new Dell 1U servers are less promising: 1.9A to 2.0A, so a 5% increase instead of decrease. I’d like to see some people confirm this, cause if so … ?!

back to the Barcamp Brussels 2006 overview

Posted by at 9:05 am on September 25th, 2006. 4 comments... »
Categories: tech.

BarCamp Brussels 2006 – Overview

Call BarCamp Brussels 2006 a success. Second time this event was organised, first time I attended. This edition had a very international and interesting crowd (No doubt because the planning was excellent; back to back with govcamp and the Drupal Con). Let’s start of with saying it was refreshing to see so many passionate people who love their job together.

BarCamp Group Picture
picture by pietel

My Parcours

Here’s a little overview of my parcours in the SAP Lounge, 24th of September 2006.

What other say

Other presentations

I’ll be posting up some thoughts, comments and maybe even some conclusion shortly. This post will be updated whenever I add something new.

Posted by at 9:04 am on September 25th, 2006. 3 comments... »
Categories: tech.

Ajax/PHP-powered Sudoku Helper

Goal

This Ajax/PHP-powered Sudoku Helper is a little project written for the ‘Internet Technologies’ course at KaHo Sint-Lieven. It’s an attempt to explore the world of object-oriented programming and the use of WebServices in PHP5, as well as a way to get to know the Prototype / Script.aculo.us Javascript frameworks.
And then some … Ajax (buzz buzz!), valid xHTML, CSS Design and a mySQL database.

This article is written for my fellow students wanting to know more about this experiment.

More… »

Posted by at 10:04 am on May 16th, 2006. 4 comments... »
Categories: tech.

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