My Balaur.ro real life test

Today I went on the Balaur.ro to see some options for a friend who's about to get jobless (independent of their competency, it's a business matter). What I first liked was the way the balaur greeted me with nice personal words, as if indeed it was the lil' dragon addressing to me. Pretty fancy and quite relaxing (not ugly formal), along the good guidelines set by the funky dragon, like, I'm about to change job, I'm stressed enough, it's cool to have a friend talking to me.



It's nice to see that kind of interface for a serious app in Romania, usually the friendly addressing is reserved to party/fun/social websites ("vino sa te distrezi cu noi!"), while the stuff that help you get the job done treat you like some sort of a grandpa ("Aici puteti sa va rezolvati toate problemele existentiale. Inscrieti-va acum!")

Since I had no CV and no interest in a long term experience (I just looked around to checkout the options), I went to the plain search:



I looked around, found a few nice things (as in nice jobs) and I liked the way the balaur showed duplicates so that I don't get emotioned twice for the same job.



Then, knowing that my friend is a bit demanding, I tried to filter by salary amount. I just loved the dragon letting me know that my filtering is messing it all up since very few of the jobs have salary level filled in.



I knew about the nice linkedIn references feature before (showing who are the people on linked in that specify that company as a workplace) but unfortunately I couldn't get it to work tonight...



Not really showcase-of-all-features kinda story, but it's really the first time I needed the balaur, and it does a pretty good job! I admit I never looked on the jobs sites to compare the experience but I like the aggregating balaur, and most specially it's semantic features (filtering, eliminating duplicates, basically helping me a lot with the search).

Great job guys!

Ubiquity fun (at the Scripting Challenge)

The PSW command I told you about in the previous post was my entry for the Scripting Challenge at the Scripting and Development for the Semantic Web Workshop, which took place on Sunday, in Crete, collocated with ESWC 2009. The challenge idea is to create a < 1000 lines script which uses the Semantic Web to create real-world applications.

I couldn't go there to present it, so I created a screencast / demo to replace my live presentation:



Unfortunately I didn't win, it was the Researchers map that took the prize this year, but I got quite nice feedback (thanks everybody!) and new Twitter friends :). Also, it was very fun from one end to the other: from creating the script, to the paper describing the script, to creating the screencast (interesting experience, long live recordMyDesktop and mencoder) and getting feedback about it almost live on Twitter and Facebook, as the scripts were presented at the workshop and I was home having (late) lunch.

I'm now working on advancing the idea, to also have it a part of my MSc (that's why blogging takes a while, because MSc takes the other whiles in my life :) ).

Ubiquity fun

And my new Ubiquity command is done!

It's a simple prototype of a semantic search command, using data from semantic data repositories available through SPARQL endpoints to answer user questions like find director of Closer or find author of Parallel Algorithms in dblp and microformats to insert the result in the web page, to preserve the semantic markup of the response when user is editing web document (rich text areas or simple text areas).

Have a look at it on its info.uaic home: http://students.info.uaic.ro/~lucaa/psw/. (Update: the new 'home' is at http://www.infoiasi.ro/~lucaa/psw/ since my infoiasi account changed).

It can be heavily improved in terms of data operation, as well as user interface, but it's quite a nice toy.

(I'd love to show you how nice it finds the license of XWiki on dbpedia but somehow my print screen command does not work when Ubiquity is up, and I also need to find out why it fails to load the results when I add it from an extension and register it programatically, but that's gonna be another night...)

Wrong operating system?

I love this world: I love the new software and technology launches, the fuss around new services and new applications, the way we use technology, the way we combine it, etc. I start thinking that I'm living the best possible worlds and sometimes I feel so surprised and somehow proud of being contemporaneous and partially part of this.

This week brought us, among so many others, Chrome (the oh-so-talked-about Chrome) and the new Picasa (namely 3) + Picasa web . Nice stuff from google, cool things to play with.
Today I wanted to install the new Picasa and, of course it is not available for Linux, yet. Not to mention that Chrome is only available on Windows. Not to mention how much did I wait for Picasa 2.7 with (finally!) upload to web albums for Linux and how thrilled I was to have it this spring.

And I could mention such a long list of applications following the same pattern...

With so many cool applications available on Windows and Mac and the application developers completely ignoring Linux users, I found myself wondering today: am I using the wrong operating system for my software needs? I mean, maybe the type of user I am, the software I need and the way I use my computer in conjunction with the web is not the stuff that a Linux user would do, or what Linux is made for. It's not about not knowing or not wanting, I can tweak stuff, I can hack my Linux system, sometimes I get too involved in trying to make a webcam work or fixing sound / network / etc drivers problems, etc but I might be too social (wtf other would I need a photo management program for?) or too "trendy" for a Linux (wtf other would I want Chrome for?)

But still, I am using Ubuntu (8.04!), the Linux for girls ;) and given its popularity I should have more!

Yeah, I know my problem is obsolete in the context of the web operating system (or whatever the name of the concept is) but still, some doubts darken my clear skies of hope: Chrome on Linux? Firefox on Linux at the same level as for other OS? Plugins?

Don't get me wrong, I love my operating system, I love its openness, I love its freeness, its ubiquity (being able to have it everywhere just the same and for the same 0 charge) but I'm wondering whether we're the right one for each other.

I understand it's all about money and business (why the hell would application developers write Linux versions of the applications when Linux OSs users are so few (supposedly) and can wait anyway since they use a free operating system and should not expect too much from life because they don't pay?) but I just wish we lived in a (more) perfect world...

Microformats dinner at Strasbourg

Since microformats are turning 3 today (their day, the american 20th june), and all the fans in the world should celebrate it properly, let's do it:

Microformats dinner @ Strasbourg,
on Saturday, 21 june 2008, 20:00 CET,

at Fondu d'Art, 48 rue du Jeu d'Enfants, 67000, Strasbourg, France

Comment this post or direct message or reply me on twitter if you plan to come.


I should mention that the place I chose is supposed to have WiFi so you can also "register" for a remote dinner!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Look, ma, no code!

I read the other days an article about a guy that devised a method to turn off the lights in his bedroom by tweeting about it. My mind immediately started flying towards writing Jabber protocol extensions for communicating with the fridge, the washing machine, the dvd player or the heating system. E.g. "coming home with a girl / guy" on the home group would trigger synchronized actions: heat a little up, cooling wine (only if it's white), start slow music, etc, etc. Since it works for Twitter it would definitely work for Jabber, on both ends: the sender and the home appliance implementation: it's just the same thing (same 80, same plain text, same openness). Jabber also feels more like the right way to implement it: its extension mechanism can allow from a simple text message (which you could actually send without extensions) to sophisticated any-purpose structured data, all thanks to XML almighty. Actually I start to wonder right now if that does not exist already, it seems so clean and cool and not even rocket science.

It was no earlier than today that I asked myself: ok, then WHY didn't the guy (or anybody) do it for Jabber? It's obviously a better choice. But it isn't as simple as Twitter. Jabber is a heavy protocol, although open and everything, there still are 2 (or 7, if you want to be strict) RFCs about it. Yeah, a lot of libraries come to save us from reading them but still, library? look, on Twitter I can only do it with a simple regexp! ("Look, ma, no code!"). It hit me that this might be the explanation for all the "twitter hysteria": not the need for social interaction (bla, bla), the need for microblogging in an ever time constrained world, the need of accessibility in the increasingly mobile world or whatever, just its simpleness. And it's no surprise, in the end: all the right things in life are simple.

Definitely something to remember, if we happened to forget it, for the next world changing application we design!

I got naked

Let me see you stripped! – Rammstein, Stripped

As proposed by the CSS Naked Day Initiative, I got naked today: my blog has (almost – because Blogger is a little shy when it comes to it) no styles, for the evening of April 9th and the following night!

Dare to get naked too!

The book has appeared!

The "Web 2.0 programming" book is now ready to be released in shops: yesterday I have seen (touched and smelled) the final and printed version of the book. The Polirom publishing house has done a great job after all and the result is one we can be proud of. In the book you can read:

• Andrei Mihaila's chapter about load balancing in web clusters




• Sabin Buraga's chapter about JavaScript programming. Sabin is also the coordinator of the volume, i.e. the one that 'directed' the whole process of writing and publishing the book.




• Ciprian Amariei and Andreea Pantescu's chapter on collaborative code review




• My chapter on web recommendations using microformats




• Cati (Ecaterina Valica)'s great chapter on mashup applications

You can find more details about the book either on the blog dedicated to the book (where you will be able to comunicate with the authors and the other readers), on the presentation page of the book, or on the polirom website.

End of Summer < Web />

So it's gone now. It was a very fine workshop with talks on all kind of topics: it started with Mădălina Cocea's journalism 2.0 on Saturday morning, then went through Marius Măruşteri's medical collaborative systems and Sergiu's web accessibility standards presentations and Ştefan Tăbăranu's presentation of Levi 9. Then, a short coffee break (oh, btw, veeery good coffee). Then, when we just got more into the "tech stuff" we went out of it again with Alina's presentation on e-business in relation with semantic/data web, Radu Sora's presentation on how to be a successful programmer in a company where you have so many other things to deal with besides programming, and Cristian Bârlădeanu's presentation on developing a web product by one's self, in a failure minimizing manner. Coffee break, again, and then we got back in the tech stuff with Andrei Iacob's presentation on Silverlight (I was eagerly waiting for this one, since I read about it a couple of days ago and I was very curious to see it in action – we had some demos as well) and Augustin Ciobotaru's SQL injection demo. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay for Bogdan Pistol's presentation on ArgoEclipse.


The second day (which is today, but will be yesterday by the time I will have posted this), we got heavy teched with Caty's presentation on mash-ups (again, a very interesting thing to learn more about), my presentation on microformats, Marius Butuc's presentation on XHTML 2.0 (with some fine demos) and Sorin Damian's presentation of Visual Studio ORCAS (with some code as well). Again, coffee break (it seems we had some cookies left from the other day).
Then we watched the youngsters in competition (the web applications competition) and realized that indeed they had a lot of things to learn from our tutorials – if only they had listened carefully enough. After a British Council offer presentation, we got our prizes and dropped a goodbye tear for this year's edition (there were the prizes for the competition and some 'public awards' for the 'performers' as well – I got a fine 'Java for web applications' book).


The pictures are here (I hope I will not crash in bed tonight before I add the captions so you know what's it about) – there will be a selection and only a few of them will remain online but for the moment they're all up there.


Despite my concerns on the presentations I had to make, seemingly it went fine – it could have been better but hey, I'm not perfect every day!


Yes, I really got the taste of it, waiting for the next...
(sigh)

Here we go again...

Yes, I do stare at XML all day long


Just when I thought I saw everything...
Today, Yahoo! Tech!
First of all, there is a special reason for which the guys that designed microformats figured out a method of specifying uids for each of the microformats: when parsing the same page twice, we MUST have a way of testing microformats equality to realize that we already know the precious info one has to offer! So, yahoo tech guys, you might wanna add a rel='self' (or rel='bookmark' or anything that would mean 'id', with its most permissive interpretation) to the 'a' tag in the title of the review!

First-and-a-half of all, the 'description' of the yahoo tech review is its 'item fn' as well. (according to this, the text of the review and the formatted name of the item are semantically equivalent) Now what could that mean? Hmmm... Seemingly, that it's reviewing the "I bought this product 2 days ago and I think is really cool" item. Is this just because 'item' is required and some 'specification compliant' programmer thought he/she should stuff it in somehow?

Second of all (and this is the cool part – I tend to keep good things for the ending), the short review links to a 'longer', 'one-on-the-page' review, through that 'a' tag I mentioned. But guess what: NO hreview markup AT ALL on this new page. Nothing. Empty. Stupid simple html. Pleaaaase, have mercy!

Notice now how I am writing my post in a conversation-like manner: because Neil was so kind to react, I am probably expecting that to happen again (yeah, dream on!).

Now I decided that I REALLY should do something to prevent things like this in the future: and I will start by highlighting some 'tips on how not to screw up semantics' in my presentation on microformats. Even if it won't change anything, at least I will be sure I tried my best.

Microformatted week

First of all I must mention that last week I was pleasantly surprised to see the reactions to my post about Summer <Web /> online.
I must thank Edward and Neil for their immediate responses (changed markup on eventful and added summer web on upcoming). Also, I was surprised (and happy) to notice that the class=url's on upcoming are now attached only to the right elements, yeeeeey!

(I also noticed that Tantek Çelik was wearing an upcoming T-shirt at the microformats dinner at web 2.0 expo. I want one too!)

Second of all, I've just started v0.3 pre-alpha of my Bsc project. I also have a print screen of v2.0 "in action". I was just browsing microformateurs.org (using the dev firefox profile by mistake) and it highlighted the microformats dinner event:



Now don't get enthusiastic, it's just the urlRecommender outlier there... :), no 'smart' predictions yet.

I also thought of some things to mention in my microformats presentation at summer <Web /> to make it cool and attractive for everyone and to tease the developers.

And, I almost forgot to mention, I am now a very happy listener of Queen - Greatest Hits, volumes I, II and III.

So it's a joyfull, microformatted lunch I'm having right now:
<div class="hLunch">
<span class="mainCourse">
<a href="http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/230458" rel="vote-for">Yummy potato moussaka</a>
</span>
with
<span class="drink">sparkling water</span></div>.

Summer <Web /> online

Since everybody is blogging and spreading the word about it (well, at least Sabin Buraga and Alina Mierluş) I thought I should contribute too: I started submitting the thing online, to "major" events websites: Eventful and Upcoming.
I had some fun with that tag in the title of the event, but the great discovery was that, as opposed to upcoming's policy on url classes, eventful just does not allow you to add an url (a class="url") for your event. At all. Whatever you do, wherever you add your link, it will not be THE url of the vevent. Their class="url" is for the permalink of the event on eventful. That is, still on their website. I wonder if this is marketing (all events homepages are on eventful) or just plain wrong applied semantics, AGAIN.

The happy end of this story is this.

For the upcoming story there is no happy-end: I couldn't add FCS as a venue on upcoming (I tried like 3-4 times):

and because you cannot add events without venues, summer <Web/> 2007 is not on Upcoming. Yet. I'll try again the next days, maybe this is only because of the changes they're going through now (merging upcoming accounts with yahoo accounts), though I can't see any connection.

Does anyone know if there is a Romanian events website? We should submit it there, too...

Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that I will be talking about microformats at Summer <Web/> 2007. See you there!

Far from a better world...

Motto: the optimists say we are living in the best possible world. The pessimists fear so!

Anyone missed my outraged posts on idiot markup and stupid programmers?
I thought so!

Upcoming.org seems to have had a checkbox on their hiring form saying:
"Are you a dumb head that cannot cope with correct semantic markup?"
and hired only the ones that checked it!

My newest discovery regarding the upcoming.org markup (no, I will not go insane from reading XML all day long) is that they just throw URL's (class="url") wherever they feel to! Their event details page is one huuuuge vevent div stuffed with all sorts of things (let's not discuss about this now, they're not the only sinners), among which a list of all users attending to / watching the event. Since those are users, of course they also have user pages on upcoming. Why not put the link to the user page here? Why not add a 'url' class to that link? So, it's enough to write your simple XPath to the url of the event and you'll get yourself a list full of crap (the more people attending the event, the more crap in your event url list!). The author of the event (the one that posted it on their wonderful website) is also a user and the link to him/her is also a url class link. Inside the vevent div as well, why not?

I would really like to know what those guys think "semantic markup / microformats" mean...

I wonder what does this button doo? (reloaded)

Well, I got it: the print-screens! Unfortunately, I'm pretty slow (in thoughts) and I couldn't get a print-screen of the progress bar...

1. The panel appeared: notice how it covers the text and its close button in the bottom-right corner:


2. I clicked the button. Notice how the advertisement disappeared but the panel didn't: the black thing is still covering the page!


The same webpage displays another advertisement, pretty much in the same way: a non-closing-panel on top of the text. But this was only the container: the actual ad was a smaller panel bouncing inside the container. And guess what: the close button was attached to the bouncing panel!!!! Sooo, in order to close it, I had to move around to catch it: of course, I missed twice so I got myself two popups opened by the stupid ad!

Finally, I had to reload the page until no ads were displayed at all (it seems it does such things besides changing the ad) in order to read something (a pretty interesting article after all).

This is to prove that reading newspapers online is one of the best things to do to "relax" -- it seems somehow that newspapers pick the most stupid programmers for their websites.

I wonder what does this button dooo?

Motto (from Cartoon Network ancient wisdom):

Deedee: I wonder what does this button doooo? Can I push it, Dexter, can I, can I?!?!?!
Dexter: No, Deedee, do NOT push that button!

Remember the pop-up advertisements that we all hated? Thanks God (or the popup blockers), they're history now!
But because creativity is a key component of a web developer, another invention invades our browsers: the javascript popup panels with advertisements. The blockers didn't get them, yet! :)

For those who haven't seen them yet, they are panels that open when you enter the page, covering parts of the page content, that show text and/or sounds to get your attention and make you buy whatever they want you to buy. Besides this classic version, there is a new variety of the ad: there is a regular ad panel but when you hover it, it gets laaaaarger and starts making sounds. Of course, this kind of hover-activated panels are 'strategically' placed in the page: you'd have to take a 700 pixels wide ellipse detour to avoid it. But, hey, that's their purpose, to annoy you until you buy!

There is no really big problem actually: they all have a close button, a mute button (not like the stupid beer that made sure all the office knows you read gsp), or whatever annihilation method.


I mean, that's what I thought until a few days ago, when I entered some online newspaper (I don't remember which one) and it popped:
millisecond 1: 'OK, I'll close it!'
millisecond 2: 'oooh, no close button...'
millisecond 2.5: 'oooh, it hasn't loaded yet (it's just a blank panel covering my web page), that's why...'
seconds 1 to 5: the ad's PROGRESS BAR saying: 'Loading, please wait...'
Whaaaaaat? NO, I will NOT wait for you to load an advertisement I don't want to see!!!!

So what do we do know? Should we stop visiting the annoying websites? Is it fair to avoid bad-designed websites or bad-programmed websites? What makes us come back to a website: the content or the design? (I sound like Carrie Bradshaw again!)
The publisher of the information is, frequently enough, not the one that designes/programmes the website. So, by not visiting it anymore, we actually hurt the publisher when it's the developer we should hit.
Of course, the publisher chooses the programmer so if it's stupid, he/she should pay. Yet again, frequently enough, the publisher has no idea about technical stuff, so he/she cannot evaluate properly the work of a programmer (I could bet that the online newspaper had no idea about the fact that a slow internet connection might cause an advertising to load for a few seconds and annoy me (the user)). Doubtless, the programmer will always blame the content if a website isn't visited enough.

So (to make it an awareness raising post): PUBLISHERS from all around the world, hire someone and pay him/her damn well to TEST your website's functionality in all the imaginable and non-imaginable ways because it's your image and your money we're talking about!

The w3b: 2day and tomorrow

Documenting for the bsc and in actually no mood of doing it (yes, Buraga WILL kill me!), I stumbled upon an article on Metacrap.
You might find it resembling to my article on tags here-and-there.
And I know, you already knew all that stuff, it's obvious, isn't it?

Anyway, it made me ask myself: does web converge asimptotically to 3.0? That is, are we going there but will never actually GET there?
Either way, for its beauty it is worth...

Towards a better world...

Why people ignore tagging?

I mean, it's the bloody future of the web, and they just ignore it: either don't tag stuff or they tag it with the slow, non-functional part of their brains.
When I found out about upcoming.org using hCalendars, I thought: oh goodie, gold mine: semantically marked events, free test data for my bsc!!!
BUT (the omnipresent 'but'), when I really started scraping it, I found out that figuring out semantics it's haaaard and misinterpreting standards (or recommendations, not to be so harsh) might be a hobby for some: gorgious abbr-locations, with void titles: I mean title="". Then why the f did you put that location class there in the first place?
And, to get back to the tags (which is the reason of this post)... take a look at the Sun mashup event today... Interesting, is it? BUT how am I suppose to discover it if it isn't tagged at all??? And this is not some mistake of an author, it's a habit (lots of events don't have tags at all).
I wonder, is it because upcoming DOES NOT have a field for tags in the 'add event' form? Hmmm... or because the 'add tag' button is pretty hidden on the event page? (it took me a while to find it. I admit, when I analyzed the tags of the events I was looking at the markup).

So which people are we talking about ignoring tagging? We might be talking as well about the developers: it's them who should realize the importance of tags and make it easier for users to produce tagged content. But since upcoming is 'a Yahoo company', I'm not surprised: it's not their first and personally, I'm expecting more...

If some developers don't realize the importance of semantic markup, maybe users do, and maybe it's us who should start the 'web revolution': your favourite events site does not provide tagging? Report it to the developers, send an email, make a request, state your wish for a better world! The website you upload your pictures to does not tag them? Change it! there are a lot of sites that do! Flood the upcoming mailbox with your requests to a decent tagging process so that next time you would be able to find out about the Sun mashup event...