August 2007 Archives

One of the myriad things I do in my spare time (when I'm not working for my old company or my new company is being the webmaster for The Perl Foundation. Socialtext (see also, old company), for quite a while, generously hosted the wikis for TPF on their community box, but since I had done some custom work on the websites I needed to retain root access to the TPF box, so we decided to move the TPF stuff to another hosting service.

Enter Slicehost, a company who seems to have the right answer for unix geeks who want a little piece of the internet that they can mold to do whatever they want. You get root access, they give you the distro you need (Socialtext software likes Ubuntu best so I went with that). They are really awesome and I highly suggest them for anyone wanting just this sort of thing... but... they've got a waiting list. So if you decide you too want to be able to install whatever on your box and play with your favorite tools, you'll need to wait a bit before you can do it.

Other than that, though, they're awesome. I've had nothing but good experiences so far in dealing with them.

Also, it's been a while since I pointed to my corn bread but I fed it to some hapless co-workers today and they were all aswoon, so I thought I should point it out again. The world's best cornbread. Seriously.

I had the opportunity to spend a few hours talking with the Metaweb team yesterday, which was really fun. I'm excited to have the opportunity to contribute to this project - it's new technology with exciting possibilities, building a community of diverse people (developers, content experts, lookie-loos). We discussed ways to deal with the various administrative issues they're running into (having people administer the system without accidentally breaking it).

During the conversation, I contemplated the Game Browser application I'd created to learn about Metaweb and Freebase (now open for public read access! go take a look!). Don't be bowled over by the irony, that you're looking at the root of a site named "perlgoddess" and the application is written in Freebase. It's not the sexiest implementation of an mjt application but you could use it to springboard all kinds of data browsers.

The backend data for the board games is a little weak (because most of it was added manually by me), so I have some notions to fix that:

• Use the wonderful XML API offered by boardgamegeek to populate lots of useful information in freebase. I asked for permission and they haven't gotten back to me so I think I'll take the middle road of making the importer and importing into the sandbox and then point that out to them so they can ask me to remove it if necessary.


• Poke around in freebase to find places where there are board games that haven't been tagged correctly, there seem to be lots of them. I'll probably write a tool that accepts a ruleset and then optionally adds properties onto types.
  

I was also tempted greatly by the notion of creating a couple of tools to make it easier to administer freebase itself, having heard about some of the challenges there:

• User history, including things like 'number of entries created', 'number of entries updated', 'posts to discussion boards', 'replies to discussion boards' and other such things. The Metaweb team would love to be able to identify and encourage subject matter experts and this would help find them.


• Recent posts - they have a browser for recent discussion posts, but it would be cool to make one that remembers your preferences and filters by domain so you don't have to see all of them. It'd be a fun MJT tool to create, so maybe I'll get to that.

  skud created a Metaweb perl module, and WWW::Metaweb was created by Hayden Stansby. They take a slightly different approach to the interface, and I'm excited to have the opportunity to work with each of them. I'm hoping the friendly competition helps us as a community figure out the best API possible.

  All that having been said, I'm *this close* to having finished the new bloggy interface for the TPF website. I need to push through and get that done so we can finish up the infrastructure changes for that. Once I do that I can play with the shiny toys above.

Spurred by the blog posting on our corporate site advertising that we were going to update the MT 3.2 Socialtext Cross-posting plugin to 4.0, I took some time to do the work yesterday and make it true.

The MT developer documentation is a little light for 4.0 at this point, so updating the plugin to use the new callbacks was a little like stumbling around in a dark room looking for a particular color of ball. I tried looking at a few other 4.0 plugins but finally ended up just spelunking through the code to figure out which bits I had to flip to get my plugin to work. It was a little trickier because I needed to hijack a bit of the entry template so I could add the ability to turn on/off crossposting, and I wanted it to look spiffy in the context of the rest of the entry page.

I managed to get the plugin to work correctly, and am using it to cross-post this post to the Socialtext Open Workspace. The plugin is accessable from the Open Workspace as well.

One more thing off my list of things to do before I leave. I still need to get the commenting working on the TPF wiki-based bloggish website with OpenID so that we can have one backend running both TPF sites and simply posting the information there will cause the right thing to happen.

A while back, at the Movable Type Hackathon, I created a Movable Type plugin which allows a blog author to crosspost a blog entry to a Socialtext wiki (with or without tags, as desired). For example, this entry simultaneously posted to my blog and the Socialtext Open workspace.

I've submitted my talk proposals for the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, which I'll be attending as a volunteer to give Casey a hand. I submitted the Hydra talk I had so much luck with at OSCON, and also a talk on Metaweb.

I looked at the posts I'd already made on the blog this morning and experienced a familiar sinking feeling, the feeling that I can't really do blogs the way other people do.

One of the things I find hardest about blogging is deciding what belongs on the blog. When I had a knitting blog, I wanted to write about cooking and fitness and my family and I kept feeling like those weren't appropriate and I'd feel terribly guilty for diluting the "good" stuff with other information, which created just enough of a barrier to writing that I ended up writing much less. And then I tried having a blog for each topic and I ended up not having any idea how to let my ideas flow, and writer's block set in and I kinda gave up.

Tabitha, Melissa, some sangria, and the obligatory iced tea cup

My friend Susan recently had a birthday, so I signed us both up for a cooking class at Fresh Prep Kitchen - they have recently expanded to include cooking classes. Of course, since we're in Santa Cruz, their classes are somewhat different from the "mainstream" cooking classes offered elsewhere. Rather than teaching you how to make frou-frou dishes of various types, their classes are generally focussed on creating dishes from sustainable food of one form or another.

Last night we headed to Fresh Prep to attend our class, Summer Salsas and Sangrias. The women who taught this class (Tabitha Stroup and Melissa Schilling) are wine and cheese experts with extensive knowledge in food history, local cuisine, and food pairings in general. They teach classes in various topics throughout the bay area, and are known to many as the "Cheese Chicks."

As I mentioned in my last post, I am leaving my current employer (Socialtext) for a new, extremely exciting position at Applied Minds (here's a Wired article describing the nerdvana that is AMI). I'll be building prototype applications for them and working with the Metaweb folks. I'm totally jazzed about this opportunity - Metaweb and freebase are super exciting technology, and I've never had the opportunity to do true R&D, where you have the time to experiment and explore the possibilities of the technology. I ran into some of the Metaweb folks at OSCON, and they were super cool. I'm really looking forward to working with them.

I haven't been writing here because, really, my job at Socialtext transformed me into some other kind of creature. I've got a new blog on this site, though... Perl Goddess. Head over there if you want to see what I'm writing about these days.

Once upon a time, I had a knitting/mom/cooking blog, which is still hanging around here but, as you can see, it has been sadly neglected since I started working at Socialtext. One reason for that is that I spent a lot of my blogging energy blogging on our internal wiki (and eventually I blogged on our externally visible Open workspace... but the time has come for me to leave Socialtext and so I'm starting up my personal blog again.

This is going to be a "Kirsten" blog, filled with whatever I'm thinking about at the time. People who know me can tell you that's a fairly wide swath of everything there is in the world...