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Saturday, June 30th, 2007-
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Archive for June, 2007
tired
Thursday, June 28th, 2007I can’t believe this week is almost over already…the days have just flown by.
Last weekend was super busy. Marianne and I headed up to Bemidji for my cousin’s wedding on Friday. The wedding/reception was great and it’s always so much to spend time with the extended family. Oh, and all the lonely, boring nights staying at the Holiday Inn in Alexandria (for a previous job) finally paid off since I had plenty of rewards points for a free hotel room 
We spent saturday morning with the family then headed back to the cities.
Saturday was Corey’s wedding so I made it to his reception in downtown St. Paul in the evening. The reception was awesome (the band ruled!) and Pam and Corey and everyone else were so happy! MarkK was there as well so we had a great chance to catch up.
I don’t really remember what happened the rest of the week. Mare had some of her coworkers (and significant others) over for dinner last night. I was a grilling machine and cooked up like 20 chicken kabobs, corn on the cob, and potatoes. The food was awesome and I’m reaping the benefits of lots of leftovers Then I went home and started my “late shift” at work. We’ve been trying to get a beta release out the door and we ran into a few snags (note to self…don’t bother testing code…ever…it just leads to more work 
). RoyK helped me iron out a few last minute bugs and I was ready to release. Then I got greedy and tried to fix one more thing (which no one else will probably ever use…but was something I worked on) which ended up taking me until like 5am. I finally gave up and decided to release to sourceforge. Of course, my upload stalled and SF sucks so I had to figure out how to delete the stupid file! Ugh…SF is nice for free bandwidth but _really_ irks me most of the time. I finally got the release published and went to sleep (as the sky began to light up again). I got four hours of terrible sleep (in which I dreamed of repeatedly typing shell commands) and started another day.
We had kickball tonight but I checked in some broken code (and didn’t feel like going to kickball) so I skipped. It was probably a good idea since our horrible team got 10-runned in the 3rd inning Then I headed over to mare’s and watched a movie (Under the Tuscan Sun…laaaaaaaaammmmme).
We have another wedding to attend this weekend in Staples. Then it’s 2 more days of work and a nice long vacation!!!! We’re headed up to the cabin on lake of the woods on wednesday and I’m looking forward to disconnecting for a few days. No internet + No phone == good for the soul. I’m also looking forward to smuggling a bunch of fireworks across the WI/MN border so I can have fun blowing things up next weekend.
DekiWiki Hayes Beta2 upcoming release
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007I haven’t blogged about any work-related items in quite a while so I thought I’d make a quick mention of what I’ve been doing lately. A couple of weeks ago, we released DekiWiki Hayes Beta1 to give the community a sneak peek of what we’ve been working on. A few courageous souls gave the beta a shot with varying degrees of success. As far as I’m concerned, the feedback was pretty clear. The install procedure SUCKED! Seriously…I’m not kidding…it sucked.
When I was out in SD last week, we decided that it was time to finally get a web-based installer setup. I’ve spent the last couple of days hacking/cleaning things up and things are looking much better now.
The new installer will be very familiar to those of you who’ve installed MediaWiki in the past (not surprising due to the fact that DekiWiki is a MediaWiki fork, though the similarities are rapidly declining). I’m really happy with the outcome and can’t wait to see what it looks like once our UI guy applies a nice style to my heinous markup
The key features of the new installer are:
1) checks for prerequisites (apache2, php5, mysql5, curl, mono, imagemagick, mod_rewrite)
2) automatic setup of all the DB privileges
3) automatic configuration of deki-api (assuming you’re using mod_proxy to proxy request from DekiWiki to deki-api)
I think this will drastically improve the “clean install” process. I still need to write some logic to perform an upgrade from the Gooseberry version of the DB schema to the Hayes version, but the groundwork is all in place so it shouldn’t be too much more work.
On a side note, here are a few of the awesome features I’m excited about in the Hayes release. NOTE: I can’t guarantee all of these will work in beta2
1) new parser: The mediawiki parser we were using was _incredibly_ complicated and confusing. I’ve never seen so many confusing regex’s and logic in my life. BrigetteK did a _wonderful_ job porting the new parser to C# and it’s just so much cleaner now.
2) Live Data services: Live Data services are a way to include external data on your wiki page. For example, we’ve written LiveData services for video files (YouTube, Viddler, Google Video, etc), Flickr slideshows, RSS feeds (boingboing on my homepage is fun ), Google Maps, Yahoo stock quotes, widgetbox.com widgets, and for the geekier folks: LaTeX formulas, and graphviz graphs. LiveData services can be run locally or remotely over the internet. They are completely language/platform agnostic and are simply exposed via a URI. SteveB has written a few base classes in C# that make writing your own LiveData service really easy. Of course, we love linux so all of our services run on Mono (but also work just fine on the MS .NET runtime…I’m looking at you Mahlberg! ).
3) External Authentication services: Many companies want to leverage their internal ActiveDirectory/LDAP login infrastructure to log in to their wiki so we’ve added a way to plug in external authentication services. MaxM wrote an LDAP auth service and I threw together a simple service that authenticates with a Drupal database (which I guess I still need to document…)…but seriously, if I can do it, anyone can.
4) Extensible storage provider model: MaxM abstracted the storage provider model for saving file attachments. It’s now possible to store your attachments locally on disk or using Amazon’s S3 storage service! You can add your own storage provider by implementing the IStorageProvider interface. I don’t know…maybe you’re nuts and want to store all your attachments on alt.binaries or something…
5) New indexing service (Lucene): I haven’t gotten around to actually implementing this so it won’t be available in Beta2, but the goal is to decouple DekiWiki’s lucene index from the dekiwiki database. We’ll be exposing a generic REST-based web service which will allow you to store data about a document using a URI as the key. This will allow us to index external data sources (like shared network drives, external websites, etc) but have the results available within the DekiWiki search interface. I’m hoping to leverage some of the great filters/converters already written by the Beagle guys!
6) nicer UI: RoyK has made a TON of improvements to the DekiWiki UI. A few notable changes are: a single resource file for localizing text, a new photo viewer (using awesomebox), and most importantly, the ability to create your own skins for DekiWiki. To see an example of what you can do with skins, see: http://wiki.amplifysd.com and a demo space DamienH has been working on: http://www.mugglepedia.com
I’m sure there are lots of other great things worth mentioning but these features really stick out in my mind. It’s so exciting to see everything coming and it’s been a blast to be a part of if!
first time surfing
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007I’m out in SD for work this week. On Monday I asked my coworker Max who lives in Pacific Beach if there was lots of surfing this time of year. He said we should sneak out of work early one day and go out on the ocean. So today I woke up early and we ditched work around 3pm (I honestly thought it was like 5pm…but I guess not). We rented boards and wet suits for $20 and spent a couple hours out on the waves. Oh man, it was awesome One of Max’s friends came with and provided a few helpful tips.
I was actually surprised by how stable the boards were. It was difficult to get the timing right but overall it wasn’t too bad. I did swallow a large amount of salt water and got pummeled by many waves though! I think I’ll be hurting tomorrow After surfing we played a few rounds of guitar hero (which was also a blast). Then we went out for sushi and chilled out watching a movie.
It was a great time. I can’t wait until I can go out surfing again the next time I make it back to sunny california