Recent blog entries for mindcrime

Screenshot of the new polymorphic event stream

Syndicated 2012-02-13 02:38:00 from ScrewPile Dev

Quoddy is getting a polymorphic event stream!

The big news from Quoddy land currently is that support for polymorphism in the event stream is largely in place. "What," you might be asking, "does that mean, exactly?" Well, simply put it means that different "kinds" of events can show up in the event stream now, and each event will render (display) differently (and appropriately) based on it's attributes.

For example, one event might be a simple text based status update from a friend. That will display the words the friend wrote, their profile avatar and the time they posted and that's about it. But the next event in the stream might be a link to a scheduled event from your Meetup.com iCal feed. Since it's a calendar event, it will render with a an iCal icon, the start date/time of the event, the end date/time of the event, the location, and a hyperlink to the Meetup.com event.

Similarly an event might be a document shared from Google Docs or something, and it would, again, render seamlessly into the event stream, but with the exact details, links and controls that are appropriate for the event. This is really slick stuff, and coupled with AJAX callbacks to the server, allows us to embed any manner of interactivity right into the event stream.

Somewhere down the road we might look at incorporating GoogleApache Wave functionality here, so you can do collaborative editing "in place" from the stream.

We'll have some screenshots of this stuff up soon.

Syndicated 2012-02-13 02:16:00 from ScrewPile Dev

Just In Time For Christmas: Neddick TPR3 is Released!

Neddick Technology Preview Release 3 (tpr3) is available, just in time for Christmas! See https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick/tree/tpr3 and enjoy!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all, from the Fogcutter team and Fogbeam Labs.

Syndicated 2011-12-25 12:57:00 from ScrewPile Dev

New Batch of Quoddy Screenshots

Believe it or not folks, progress is being made on the Quoddy project, and the progress over the last 2-3 weeks has been substantial. I've just posted a big batch of screenshots over at G+. Check 'em out here:

https://plus.google.com/u/1/114301088526097505896/posts/3NVEkHxRVUY

Syndicated 2011-07-24 01:39:00 from ScrewPile Dev

ScrewPile Update 02-24-2011

Activity around Fogcutter has been frantic since our last update. Neddick release TPR2 was finally released and that code has been pushed to the demo server. TPR2 features UI improvements, bugfixes related to the tagging feature, the introduction of scheduled jobs, and the addition of scheduled jobs for rebuilding the entry cache and populating channels from RSS feeds


On the Quoddy front, the user-profile support has been radically improved and the UI for editing profiles has been cleaned up considerably. A preliminary preview release should be out soon. The main feature that we want to get in for a TPR1 release of Quoddy is basic "activity stream" support (think the "Wall" feature on Facebook.)

We've also started digging into the Mahout clustering code, and are starting to look into implementing some of the neat stuff that you can do with Machine Learning and Text Mining. An "auto tagging" feature and a better "related links" feature for Neddick are on the drawing board.

See the roadmap page for more on what's coming in the short-term.

Syndicated 2011-02-25 03:33:00 from ScrewPile Dev

What's New With ScrewPile?

Since the last post, we've made a ton of commits to Quoddy - our Open Source Enterprise Social Networking platform (which is receiving most of the attention right now.) The most recent batch of changes have been focused on LDAP integration and User Profile editing.

Specifically, we've made all use of LDAP optional (the first pass at adding LDAP support actually assumed LDAP would always be present) by finishing up the "Local Accounts" support. We also added LDAP User Import, and we now fully support a mixed authentication mode where both "Local Account" users and (optionally) external LDAP users may log in. We've also started adding some (very) primitive support for editing User Profiles, and we added the very first UNIT TEST! Yes, the intent is to have a comprehensive test suite, but we'd been neglecting that stuff while doing a lot of exploratory programming earlier.

Yeah, it's considered back form to write the code first and retrofit the tests, but in this case we think it's going to be OK. There isn't *that* much code to test.

On that note, after cloning the repo, if you want to see the current test coverage metrics, just

[user@somehost quoddy]$ grails install-plugin code-coverage

and then

[user@somehost quoddy]$ grails test-app unit: -coverage

to generate the coverage report.

Other changes: rev'd the Grails version to 1.3.6, and switched to using Groovy 1.7.6 for development.

And that about covers it. Check the TODO or the roadmap for more on what's coming down the pike.

Syndicated 2011-01-14 03:04:00 from ScrewPile Dev

OpenSocial working (sort of)!

The first primitive bit of OpenSocial support is now wired into Quoddy. Don't believe me? Fine, here's the first screenshot:

Syndicated 2010-12-23 08:48:00 from ScrewPile Dev

ScrewPile Update 12-22-2010

Since our last update, a lot of work has gone into Quoddy. The latest code includes support for using LDAP for user account information, has support for creating and listing "friends" and "followers" and has some primitive activity stream stuff in place... and to top it all off, work has begun on adding OpenSocial support using Apache Shindig. The OpenSocial stuff isn't finished by any stretch of the imagination, but I hope to be able to deploy and render at least a "hello, world" Gadget sometime tonight / tomorrow morning.

To take a look at the latest changes, check the Quoddy repo on GitHub.

Syndicated 2010-12-23 01:32:00 from ScrewPile Dev

ScrewPile Update 12-01-2010

Not a lot to report since last time... I (Phil) have been in more of a "research" mode than a "coding" mode lately, trying to get more up to speed on some of the theoretical stuff vis-a-vis Information Retrieval, Network Science and Evolutionary Computation. But expect some progress on Neddick - at least - in the near future.

In the mean-time, take a gander at some of the cool stuff that's going on over at the ASF. A lot of new projects are showing up there, that may be useful for the ScrewPile projects. In particular, there's a lot fo Semantic Web related activity going on, as well as some Content Management stuff. Check out Stanbol, Chemistry, Clerezza, and note that Jena is becoming an Apache project.

Syndicated 2010-12-01 05:01:00 from ScrewPile Dev

ScrewPile update for 07-25-2010

So, what's new since last time? Well, not everything one might have hoped for, but a few Neddick bugs have been fixed at least, and progress continues on. We still hope to have Neddick TPR2 out by the end of August, and maybe a solid start on Heceta.

Specifically regarding Neddick, since last time, the bugs that have been resolved are:

Bug #12 - Make "tag" box work when pressing ENTER] - FIXED

Bug #8 - Get arrows for up/down vote links - FIXED

Bug #25 - Create scheduler mechanism for asynchronous updates - FIXED

Bug #35 - Need scheduled job to rebuild entrycache on some periodic basis - FIXED

The scheduled task stuff turned out to be pretty simple, thanks for the excellent Quartz Plugin for Grails. Now the EntryCache gets refreshed once a minute. Additionally, even though it wasn't in the bug list as a discrete bug, a problem with recalculating the score of an entry - after an upvote was removed - has been fixed.

As to what's coming next... mainly work on the next Neddick TPR, so see the Roadmap for details. The bugs on the roadmap page are now sorted (more or less) by the order in which we intend to attack them, so it should be pretty easy to tell where things are going.

And that's a wrap, for this week.

Syndicated 2010-07-26 03:36:00 from ScrewPile Dev