Advogato blog for zanee

My entire workflow is now OS X - I’ve made the switch - Blog Catchup

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:10:09 GMT

It is done, i know a lot of you may be shocked but i’ve switched my entire workflow over to OS X. Even my primary desktop workstation which has run Linux explicitly since 1994. The reasons for this are numerous including but not limited to:

Consistency in my desktop experience.
Stability in regards to underlying system components
An aesthetic visual experience across the board
Things like GDB seem to just work

These are just some of the reasons but all in all I haven’t been doing much Linux only programming anymore. My workflow has been revolving around photography, videos and web programming. That combined with the fact that I do own trinkets such as an Ipod and it was time. All that said, this doesn’t mean that i’ll no longer do Linux it just means that it’s no longer the choice for my desktop at home. I’m not doing any kernel work or contracts, etc etc. I am not going to rehash arguments heard round the various ml’s and web in general but suffice to say. It just doesn’t work for me in this space (home). However, at work my primary workstation is a Linux desktop and will most likely remain so but after this weekend of full on immersion, in a 30 inch experience apple may steal me away The old workstation will be turned into a retooled OpenSolaris workstation because thats where the new exciting shit is going on, for me anyway. (Thanks to all the people over at Sun who linked to my commentary as positive criticism; I just came across some of the commentary and i’ll do an update on that stuff soon I hope)

As far as opensource is concerned there are things that i’m still working on. So Gnomeweb-plone hack day is this Saturday and we’ll finish the portlet stuff from 2.x and move from there. Email out about this later on tonight, swear-it. I’ll be at the 3 day Plone conference this coming October and hope to see everyone and do some cool stuff. For World Plone day I was invited by the New York Plone Users Group to speak for the NYC scene (this is November I believe). Which was a shock to me because I had no clue one existed. Up until now I thought all of my Plone sister/brothers lived in Europe Definitely attending a meeting ahead of time and hope to have an outline for that first week in September. This will primarily be my work with Plone at New York Media (yes, I really do work here, and no it is fun, we need more people like me there so why not come over?) There are special use cases we have but largely i’ll be speaking on the process and politics surrounding content management and maybe a brief overview of where Plone is being applied.

Work has me strapped, but it’s all positive stuff; this week has been a little dramatic for me personally and it’s been a really trying time. I haven’t been responsive but I’m doing my best to get to all my email and all that. My personal life seems to generally be failing at the expense of my work but i’m ok with that, the latest incident though really was depressing to hear. Anyway.

Ahh yes, about the machine; I bought myself a 8 core Mac Pro with most of all the goodies with the only sad thing being that it has an ATI card. Which I swore off of ATI sometime in 1997 and haven’t purchased anything since. I really should of gotten the Nvidia card but it would of been special order and I don’t have time. It would of been another couple months before I got a free weekend to do something like this. I’ve decided to keep the default keyboard and mouse to see if I could get used to them. Only because of their aesthetic factor initially but the keyboard actually seems to be pretty nice after a day of hacking on it.

The speeding addiction has finally caught up with me and now lawyers are involved and all these shenanigans. According to people in the know the case is to be dismissed. I may have to actually either get track time or do any speeding I do; out-of-state. If anyone knows of any decent tracks in the greater TriBoro area or NYS or whatever hit me up; again, I actually need it now. Getting a case dismissed is expensive, but I found out the justice system is a total farce; all you have to do is spend more money and make “donations” to the right peoples campaigns. That’s all I’ll say on that.

Upgraded wordpress, someone or one of you l33t hackers tried to implement some form of change to my footer file stuff via Apache process to overwrite the file and boost your page ranking. This is the problem with PHP but suffice to say it worked because I changed the permissions to the Apache processes in that dir for some reason. Of course I was notified and I made the appropriate changes; lame. Luckily I have php stuffed with the Suhosin-Patch or it would of been A LOT worse

Anyway there’s much more I wanted to say but I can’t remember. I’ll do that the next Blog Catchup in a couple months.

SPARQL and Subquery; 3rd go

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:06:33 GMT

Well; I gave up and found an easier way using straight rdflib methods; another day wasted. The tutorials on rdflib are pretty bad. So you just can’t jump straight in. Wordpress formatting sucks, I know; prolly should upgrade.

from rdflib import ConjunctiveGraph as Graph, Namespace

DublinCore = Namespace(”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”)

g = Graph()
g.parse(”sample.metadata”, format=”xml”)

creator_list = list(g.subject_objects(DublinCore["creator"]))
for data, blank_node in creator_list:
# We get the dc:creator sequence
sequence = g.seq(blank_node)
for creator in sequence:
print creator

SPARQL and still sub-querying

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:06:32 GMT

for x in g.query(”SELECT ?xcreator WHERE { ?creator dc:creator ?xcreator }”,
initNs=ns):

print x

sub_query = “SELECT ?creator WHERE { ?xcreator ?creator }”

for sub_x in g.query(sub_query, initNs=dict(ns)):
print ‘Sub_x %s’ % sub_x

This can’t be the only way to do sub_queries with SPARQL and this doesn’t work well for me because the first result is on a blanknode. The stuff is really apart of rdf:seq which I haven’t figured out how to get yet even though my namespace is correct. ns#_1 contains all of the Literals for Dublin Core/Exif Metadata. I’m beginning to think maybe the binary tag from ExifTool is wrong or something.

SparQL and subquerying

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:06:32 GMT

So more into XMP data issues and handling this properly. Parsing the formatted data from ExifTool I realize isn’t going to be a reliable method for this system. So this meant having to export the full tag in binary from Exiftool utilizing something like: exiftool -xmp -b sample.jpg > sample.metadata sample image comes from Douglas Hackney (thanks!)

import string, os
from rdflib import ConjunctiveGraph as Graph, Namespace

DC = Namespace(”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”)
RDF = Namespace(”http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”)
EXIF = Namespace(”http://ns.adobe.com/exif/1.0/”)

ns = dict(dc=DC, rdf=RDF, exif=EXIF)
g = Graph()
g.parse(”sample.metadata”, format=”xml”)

for x in g.query(’SELECT ?bExifVersion WHERE {?x exif:ExifVersion ?bExifVersion }’,
initNs=ns):
print “Exif Version is: %s” % x

The problem line is the SparQL query which works for ExifVersion because it exists in the primary rdf:Description node and is listed properly in the metadata like exif:ExifVersion but because the Dublin Core Metadata has its own nodes I get blank nodes if I do something like SELECT ?acreator WHERE {?x dc:creator ?acreator }. After validating the metdata via W3.org and getting validation that the rdf is fine I am not sure how to handle this. Is it possible to do sub-queries with SparQL or how does one handle the extra node stuff. Can someone from the w3 comment?

Nevermind: I’m doing it wrong Will update this entry when i’m complete.

Zope2 on Python 2.5, XMP and ExifTool

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:14:05 GMT

Is looking promising; there is even a nice buildbot to check the progress. This is sorely needed by anyone using Plone right now, especially for me. Recently at nymag we’ve been implementing image management in Plone; the problem is that currently i’m using exiftool to get XMP data from a file. Sadly, this is not [...]

Neutron Protocol

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:09:09 GMT

I came across this article post called Neutron Protocol: Separating UI From The CMS which discusses a protocol that exists for essentially allowing client access to the CMS so that developers may create a completely separate UI from that of data submitted/entered into the CMS. There is no problem with this except that it pretty [...]

Gnome Plone Migration Update

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:10:29 GMT

Anyone working on the Gnome Plone Migration Update or that wants to work on the Gnome Plone Migration; PLEASE EMAIL ME. I’m inherently swamped and have a deadline and some other things on my plate. This really has to get done and we can finish it in a weekend. Please let’s not let this fall [...]

Content management, office politics and why there is no such thing as static content

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:10:29 GMT

After reading the book Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas it became clear that introducing new ideas and concepts, getting them across, and then doing them is a full-time job that should not be taking on by one person. It also should not be taking lightly. Needless to say, I wish I would of [...]

Plone - IUser* why don’t you exist?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:13:00 GMT

Jotting this down before I forget. Basically the problem is that when you create a new user you want to do stuff after the user is created. Whether it be, add a bunch of folders, send an email, etc. Regular stuff you’d be able to apply via rules in Plone. Or via the elegant event/subscriber [...]

Carl Sagan

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:09:14 GMT

Carl Sagan, simply put, was awesome. Far ahead of his time isn’t even the correct phrase. There are few people on Earth with the clairvoyance to be so forward thinking yet explain their ideas in such a reachable fashion. Some of these things did not even involve Astronomy. He spoke on how human beings interact [...]