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Tag: open source

  • PHP Québec CodeFest 2.0

    I will be attending the CodeFest2008 hosted in Montreal on January 5th and 6th. This year’s theme will be all about microformats. Here is a link to the Facebook event, if you’re having trouble reaching the official wiki.

    I will be vying to address an hreview project I am getting involved with, unless I’m already done with it by then, in which case I’ll find something Diso related to tackle (if not both).

    Note: the event is not limited to PHP by any stretch, and anyone is welcomed. Join us, it’ll be fun. And as always, it will also be a great opportunity to network with your tech-peers.

  • DiSo Is Born. OpenSocial Delayed Until Next Year.

    Ha! I knew I could almost taste the mythical open, decentralized social network of tomorrow. In context, turns out it was the network of the day-after-tomorrow, with Chris Messina posting today that:

    Steve Ivy and I have embarked on a prototype project to build a social network with its skin inside out. We’re calling it DiSo, or “Distributed Social Networking applications”. The emphasis here is on “distributed”.

    The initial implementation of the project is built on WordPress, though making clear that this project is intended to be an example whose concepts should be able to be implemented on any platform. Since Steve offers a path to contribute to their effort (see “What’s Next”), I think the floater in my break list might just have found a permanent slot. With a twist and all for the better, so long as I find an area I can effectively contribute to.

    I’ve tried to address related subjects on wp-hackers before, but the thread never picked up. The plugin paradigm is always a good approach, and if the implementation solidifies, code could ultimately make it into the WP core. +1 for that on my side! Just visit this very site with the excellent Operator FireFox add-on, and you’ll see what I mean. 🙂

    On the other hand, Open Social is now being reported as being delayed until next year:

    OpenSocial received a ton of hype when it was announced. Rumors of an early November launch surfaced following Arrington’s announcement of Maki Maki. The announcement turned out to be only that, an announcement. Soon after, I spoke with developers that suggested would open their platform by December 5th. That hasn’t happened either. Techcrunch has pointed to a Google group about OpenSocial in which a Google employee states “This puts us into January before the API is ready to be implemented by containers, so expect some early adopters to have a public launch early 2008.”

    With so much activity at the standards/architecture level in the identity and social spheres right now, I’m one to say waiting a few months might actually be a very good thing for all involved parties here. A project of Dilo’s scale will thrive on the experimental angle and be malleable enough to rapidly adapt to changes, but OpenSocial is expected by many to be a stable platform to invest in, and has been presented (or represented) as so.

  • Filling Up the Break

    I’ll be focusing on Plank until the holidays, but I’m already finding myself filling up my wish list for what I want to tackle during the break. Family first, but there’s always a few hours of the day (err, night) to geek it out.

    So far, here’s what I have down. Posting it here will give me a push to get it done. 🙂

    • New features for WPhone: Viper007Bond, Doug and I are in planning stage for a few nice features we’re trying to deck the upcoming 1.5 version with.
    • Setting myself up with an OpenLDAP sandbox for wpDirAuth: when I left McGill, I also left behind the AD install that was providing me with a testbed for my WordPress/LDAP authentication plugin. I don’t mind flying blind with the code, but it’ll help with support.
    • Write an app with Symfony: I have a small toy project I want to get to, and I’m planning on using this PHP5 framework as a RAD environment.
    • And a few floaters that I haven’t quite officially added to the list yet, like upgrading my site’s theme visually and with data portability in mind, etc.

    Bah, with three kids, it’s not like it was going to be a relaxing vacation anyway.
    Might as well just add to the fun. 😉

  • Fresh Screenshots of WPhone on iPhone

    From iPhone Screenshot Goodness at WPhone Admin Plugin:

    Thanks to Matt, I can now take iPhone screenshots to my heart’s content. So I’ve updated the set showcased on this site and made a zip archive of 18 screenshots available on the same page.

    The only sad thing about this is the “No Service” at the top-left corner of each screenshot… *sigh*
    Soon, soon enough.

  • Release: WPhone 1.4.0: “Tada!” Edition

    We were planning on releasing a WPhone 1.3.2 tonight. Then we figured the new Plugin Management feature and some of the backend improvements called for a 1.4.0 release instead.

    Moving forward is fun!

    On a related note, I though the following was just brilliant: We got our first confirmed post from a BlackBerry. What’s so interesting about this? Well, Sergio, the author, embarked on a 4×4 expedition to Morocco (and its desert) last Friday, and will be using WPhone to blog for his family and friends back home.

    Thanks a lot of for your quick support. I want to post for my family and friends in my recent blog http://www.sergiorico.com with my blackberry traveling into Morocco (from this friday)… probably nothing is going to work… least wphone!! Great extension!!

    Lucky him.

  • Release: WPhone 1.3.1: the Moment of Truth Edition

    My team and I released version 1.3.1 of WPhone. This will be the version which will be judged in the little challenge we got involved in/with. Matt, at Automattic, will judge the entries with what is released by October 22nd, so we’re all eager to know how we did.

    And now, let the wait and nail biting begin (00:16 in Montreal)… 😉

  • Release: wpDirAuth 1.1

    Thanks to a lot of help from the support and development groups (special thanks to Richard and Adrian), and despite having focused on my upcoming job switch and WPhone in the last month, I finally found some time to release version 1.1 of wpDirAuth, an LDAP authentication plugin for WordPress I also maintain.

    The new version adds support for more directory server configurations and vendors by supporting privileged pre-binding. It also adds a few interface and documentation tweaks, and has been tested under WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.

  • Release: WPhone 1.2.0

    Thanks to Warren Wilansky, owner of the excellent Plank Design, who was kind enough to lend me his iPod Touch for the weekend, we were able to finally view and use WPhone on an actual Apple device and hammer out most of the display glitches our original releases had. Well, that and a whole lot of tweaks and new features, such as some fixes in the bundled iUI Javascript library for which I started submitting patches upstream, etc.

    Sure feels good to not be flying blind anymore! Though I did have to give the iPod back today, which was about as painful as cutting off one of my own fingers… :p

    So, if you had downloaded an earlier version, be sure to try the new 1.2.0 release. Or if you’re into the whole living on the edge thing, checkout the development branch of our Subversion repository, where we’ve already started to add some neat new features after 1.2.0 came out (otherwise known as rapid fire development).

    Now, since our core focus is actually full support for the widest possible array of mobile, lightweight and accessibility devices (smart and non-smart mobile phones, PDAs, micro tablets, screen and braille readers, etc) what I really would like for the next step is to somehow gain access to some of the other targeted devices.

    So if you happen to be in Montreal, have any of the following devices/environments and are interested in helping us out, please drop me a note (comments or wordpress-AT-tekartist-DOT-org) and maybe we can get together for a bit of geeky fun. 🙂

    • Nokia devices running the S60WebKit browser or earlier versions (w/ or w/o JS),
    • Blackberry (any xhtml capable generation),
    • Windows Mobile smart phones or PDAs (EDGE and/or WIFI),
    • Symbian-based devices,
    • Opera Mobile and/or Opera Mini capable devices,
    • Jaws or other accessibility device/software,

    … or anything else that you would like to use WPhone on really.

    Who knows, maybe I’ll luck out at one of the countless tech events organized in Montreal, such as the BarCamps, etc.

  • Release: WPhone 1.0.0

    See, I told you I wasn’t all there today…

    I guess it takes a nasty fever for me to have forgotten to mention that Doug Stewart, Viper007Bond and I have jointly released the first version of WPhone last night, a plugin to bring the WordPress Administration to the world of mobile and accessibility devices.

    The project was, originally, in response to a challenge sent to the wp-hackers mailing list, but our take on it actually goes beyond the original parameters by trying to support full universal access instead.

    We’re now in the debug phase, since we’ve never actually had the chance to preview the souped up iPhone/iPod mode of our interface, but we’re hoping to be in a much better place on this front by the end of the weekend. The lightweight version of the interface, used for all non-WebKit browsers, is a lot more stable and seems to work like a charm on even my feature-deficient Motorola v551 (pre-RAZR, less RAM, about the same browser).

  • Release: Moostick 1.0

    Moostick is my take on a Mootools-powered, unobtrusive, Javascript news ticker library.

    Moostick will take in any type of <li> container (<ul>, <ol>…) and turn it into an animated news ticker, fading between each entry at a set interval.

    This project is an experiment in mootoology. Quite arguably over-engineered for its core purpose, I use it to hone my MooTools skills while trying to still provide a fun and stable tool for others to use.

    The unobtrusiveness aspect of the project is key in keeping the content accessible when pages are loaded without Javascript and/or CSS, whether by users or machines, and is one of Moostick’s top goals.

    See the project page for more information.