Jure Cuhalev

On spreading knowledge

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 22 May 2010 22:55:13 +0000

How far are you willing to go to spread your knowledge and make world easier for people to use?

Seen on a wall in Berlin.

Posted URL – http://addresstrick.tk/ is actually a really useful one if you’re a Windows user.

No related posts.

We’ve built the network: now where do we get the content?

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 15 May 2010 17:54:35 +0000

Wireless Community Weekend 2010 at Berlin is a conference of different wireless networks around Europe. One of the sessions we held was on what kind of services people are running on their networks and what should be develop (as a community) next to enrich our infrastructure.

We’ve built the network: what now?

Services

radio and video streaming http://rund.freifunk.net or http://www.livestream.com/dubnighttv/
Voice over IP http://wiki.ninux.org/Elenco_Telefonico_rete_VoIP_di_ninux.org
Public web Cams (over the roofs, bird nest’s – very popular in Berlin)

Discovery

Splash screen:

They don’t really work in most experience. People don’t read them or respond to them.
Intercepts connections and makes a bad experience
Problems when being on dual stack
If you have it: don’t mention money as people will go away (even if just for donations). Explain what will happen after they press the login button.
Use SSID as name that you want to announce (use WWW so people know it’s a website)

mDNS:

Service discovery, networks
Music sharing services (iTunes like sharing (DAAP))
Serverless chat
Good resource: http://wiki.ninux.org/ZeroconfServices

Kiberpipa.net is running:

Video streaming from Cyberpipe (lectures – http://video.kiberpipa.org)
VPN for end users
Local irc server with SSL suport (irc.sioff.net)
VPS to run and learn about Linux (all the servers are accessible inside network + ipv6 only connectivity from the outside world)
Multiple-storages (NAS) for sharing stuff/run your own FTP server
Peering connectivity to other Freifunk networks/hackerspaces

Other services that people are running

Used books
Weather report
Blog server
Radio streaming
DNS servers that do all the fancy remapping (service to all the users)

Wishlist:

WE NEED working SPLASH SCREENS
nodes running their own webserver
automatic name registration system (web site)
alternative domain names redirection (custom zones)
internet caching services (uncensored)
decentralized community radio station / shared radio schedule (gsoc project this year): http://radiomate.org and http://fusoradio.net
game servers (freeciv works!)
mesh-partys (like lan party)
local search engines
good service discovery service. What is the most common way to announce new service around the whole network: mDNS?

Want to share your experience in running services on your wireless networks? Share it in the comments.

Self organizing travel information in the wake of volcanic ash cloud

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 17:49:30 +0000

I’m at Campus Party EU in Madrid this week and while it was a decent event, the part that it’s interesting is to see how community of over 200 international participants organize themselves as most of the flights back are canceled. As almost here is versed in IT technologies it is safe to say that we’re seeing the future of citizen self-organizing using modern collaboration technologies.

1. Projecting Twitter stream to the stages. This was more of a gimmick and nice to have back channel before, but during the time of the crisis provides an excellent overview of the chatter and what people are saying or trying to organize.

2. Travel Wiki, where people started writing down which cities or towns they need to get and what are different options of travel and prices.

3. Official blog that keeps everyone updated with the latest information. This if of course transmitted to the wiki and twitter stream.

All the solutions, except for the official blog, relay on the crowd to filter the information and self organize while everyone thinks of the solution. It ensures people don’t panic and there are centralized and maintained places to find the latest information, reducing the level of misinformation and things lost in translation.

Positioning of radio buttons

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 09:31:30 +0000

Usability of 3rd party modules is often interesting and you can see evolution of the product through the interface. Breezing Forms is not exception to this, as it uses interesting formation of radio buttons to indicate validation options.

Trick question: what is current setting?

Yep, it’s None. Not Library that it seems from the first glance. Readability of this form can be greatly improved by moving radio button field to the left of text:

The lesson here is that if you’re forms are making you hesitate before clicking, you probably have to rethink them.

Update: D. submitted further improvement in the comments (thanks!):

Visualizing budget of Slovenia for 2010

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:03:05 +0000

Slovenian budget is a 12 billion euro monster that most citizens don’t understand or even have remote idea how it’s structured and where does their money go. As it turns out, people are just not good at taking abstract numbers to go into billions and understanding proportions and what it means to spend 50 million on one thing and 1 billion on something else.

That is what I’m trying to solve with this Visualization of budget of Slovenia for 2010. Show where the money is going as well as tell a story of a country that’s so much in debt that it would be a reason for panic if it happened to a person or a company. Yet we don’t seem to talk or address the issue that we’re 3.6 billion EUR short of making budget and that we have to borrow more money to pay our old debts.

(click on image for interactive version)

Income

Spending

(red is debt)

Lesson

Having access to experts or your own understanding of the data you’re trying to visualize is essential. In this case we had to reassemble budget since they form listing in a way that presents debt separately from the rest of the budget.

Showing a story of Kiberpipa’s intranet opensource project

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:15:00 +0000

Kiberpipa is a large organization with lots of volunteers. This means that whatever you do, you’ll have organizational problems and you’ll see technology as a way to solve them. To a certain degree of course. A few years ago Boštjan and I saw this as an opportunity to reinvent the wheel and write our own groupware software. This is is how intranet project (yes, a terrible name from branding perspective) was born almost 5 years ago.

Since then a number of people have picked up the project and used it to improve their Django skills as well as help Kiberpipa get a bit more organized by a way of technology. While learning my way around some video editing software I’ve thrown together a video of commits of pieces of code into intranet’s code repository. Project used to generate frames is an open source Java based code_swarm. I’d like to encourage it to try it out and run it on your own source repositories.

This is the story of the following video. Please watch it in ‘full screen’ for the best experience:

Kiberpipa Intranet Codeswarm (2006 – 2010) from Jure Cuhalev on Vimeo.

Visualizing Slovenian IT tax spending

Jure Cuhalev — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:25:35 +0000

My latest released project is focusing on Visualizing Slovenian IT tax spending (139 million euros), the idea here is to take otherwise meaningless numbers and display them visually in a way that tells a story of who is spending how much and on what. The data set comes directly from the government in semi-clean XLS file. Visualization technique I’ve decided on is treemap visualization to represent the data with different box sizes relative to each other.

Give it a try for yourself:

Launch the interactive Slovenian IT tax (in Slovenian)

While visualization itself is nice, there are a two points that you have to be careful about when releasing such visualizations to the public:

Transparency of data and data transformations

In my case, the data set came directly from the government. In order to make sure that everyone can check my calculations I’ve included links to their file as well as provided a local copy in case their version changes or disappears.

You’re loosing and reinterpreting data with every visualization. That is why it’s important to also include transformation scripts so that others can check your work and possibly build on top of it or at least make sure that you didn’t do anything tricky with the data.

I’ve opted for a github repository where I’ve pushed all the associated files: http://github.com/gandalfar/itproracun. It’s a bit chaotic but it should be pretty self-explanatory to any python and JavaScript developer.

Telling the story
Every data visualization is trying to tell a story. It might not be obvious to the visualization author but it helps to identify this early in the process.

I started with just a simple breakdown based on the institutions:

It’s very noisy and it’s hard to compare different institutions to each other. Initial comments to this were that it’s not shiny enough. Cleaning the interface up I came to the following revision:

It’s much cleaner and what basically showed that I need to find an angle to this data. I decided to focus on the ratio between software and services vs. hardware and network equipment. Final version now tells a story of how police is spending a lot of their IT money on network and hardware equipment, while Tax Office is spending much more money on software and services.

Agenda of this last version of visualization should be clear to anyone who takes a few moments to study it.

Other lessons learned

Visualization toolkit should be powerful on one hand, but offer first results without too much work. JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit does this job very well. There are some interesting tidbits that are not entirely clear from the documentation, but become obvious once you start thinking how the rendering works.

The biggest time sink is parsing and cleaning up the data. Don’t expect that the .xls file will make any sense from the programmatic point of view, even though it mostly looks fine when viewed manually. Small parsing errors, moved cells and strange line breaks made parsing this data the biggest challenge.

Big thanks go the community of Slo-Tech and my brother that gave valuable feedback during the development.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this visualization. Let me know in comments what other points of view you’d like to see as well as your ideas how to further improve it.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – How to Create A Viral YouTube Video

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:45:47 +0000

OK Go recently released video for their song This Too Shall Pass, of their new album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, and it shows that they really understand viral web video and that their target demographic consumes their content on YouTube and Facebook.

First, check out their video, if you haven’t yet. It’s really worth watching, even if you don’t like their music. Analysis after the jump:

As you’ve seen it’s a Rube Goldberg inspired music video that is doing everything it can to keep your attention. It starts with a shock view of singer that looks like he just slaughtered a cow and as that grabs your attentions it gives you an interesting machine to observe as you watch the video. If they kept your attention for 30s you’ve probably managed to be enthusiastic enough about it to instant message it to your friends as well shared it on Facebook etc.

Based on their recent open letter, this is exactly what brings money today to a band – YouTube advertisements and the only way to actually make serious money on YouTube, besides having 500 videos that you released over last 2 years is to go viral with a well thought our video.

This brings to a completely new problem: what sells of the internet is porn, but if you can’t show that, kittens and lolcats will do. So the best tactic for an indie band that would like to get a lot of views would be to get some cute girls and somehow embed fuzzy kittens and puppies into their video. This way you’ll have a few bonus points in terms of views and maybe you’ll be able to achieve tipping point that will allow you to skyrocket the number of your views.

Did you spot any other details in the video that would contribute towards virality and sharing?

MobileCamp Ljubljana in late March!

Jure Cuhalev — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:03:57 +0000

Who needs to sleep when you’re having so much with the BarCamp like events, right? Building upon this idea we’ve announcing MobileCamp Ljubljana, that’s going to take place on 27th of March 2010 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering.

I’m excited about this MobileCamp for two main reasons: we’ll be bringing local mobile phone developers together for the first time in such numbers. This is important for Slovenian Mobile scene as there many indie iPhone and Android developers that need to see that their peers are active in the industry and that they’re not alone.

The second is that this venue is much bigger in terms of space so we should be able to introduce more people to concept of unconferences as well prepare grounds for a series of smaller MobileCamps later in the year if there will be enough demand.

We’re seeing increasing demand for iPhone and Android developers from companies and entrepreneurs as well as demands for applications from users, so lets expand this market fast and catch-up with the rest of the Europe. This time we’re switching back to English as primary language and we’re hoping to attract broader community also from the neighboring countries.

As always, go to http://www.mobilecamp.si for all the gory details and how to sign-up for your spot at the MobileCamp.

RealTime WebCamp reflections

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:42:39 +0000

We can say once again that our last event, RealTime WebCampLjubljana, was a great success. We didn’t run out of coffee, there was enough electricity and WiFi as well as a great mix of people and the quality of talks and discussions was astonishing.

There are a few things that we did differently this time that had effect on the ‘camp feeling:

Smaller group – instead of going with 150+ we went for 50+ crowd. More intimate and it allowed for more open discussions.
Two tracks only – moved from 3 tracks format to 2 tracks as there was less people and we also had to optimize for the available rooms. We still managed to create a nice balance of tech vs. non-tech oriented talks.
Slovenian language – despite protests from our friends in Croatia, we decided to go with Slovenian as a primary language this time. My current feeling is that this made it easier for everyone involved and we should consider sticking to Slovenian for smaller camps that are not intended for international audience.
‘Hackish venue’ – instead of going for university or conference venue, we crashed in Hekovnik this time, a new hackerspace in Ljubljana. This had a totally different feeling of more ‘ad-hoc’ and less sterile environment. It seemed like people enjoyed this more.

There is still a question – how to encourage people to prepare more sessions and how to time the event. Going for early Saturday morning as a start (8am-ish) seems to work great for now. Regarding more sessions, I’m not sure if we can expect more than 30% of attendees to run their own session, would be interested in recommendations on any literature on the topic of facilitating sessions.

Did I miss anything important that we should take into consideration for our next ‘camps?