fidzu : gnome

A dataset with all sessions of the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference is nice to have - for experiments and demonstrations with many technologies. The session catalog is exposed at a website here.

With searching, filtering and scrolling, all available sessions can be inspected. If data is available in a browser, it can be retrieved programmatically and persisted locally in for example a JSON document. A typical approach for this is web scraping: having a server side program act like a browser, retrieve the HTML from the web site and query the data from the response. This process is described for example in this article - https://codeburst.io/an-introduction-to-web-scraping-with-node-js-1045b55c63f7 - for Node and the Cheerio library.

However, server side screen scraping of HTML will only be successful when the HTML is static. Dynamic HTML is constructed in the browser by executing JavaScript code that manipulates the browser DOM. If that is the mechanism behind a web site, server side scraping is at the very least considerably more complex (as it requires the server to emulate a modern web browser to a large degree). Selenium has been used in such cases - to provide a server side, programmatically accessible browser engine. Alternatively, screen scraping can also be performed inside the browser itself - as is supported for example by the Getsy library.

As you will find in this article - when server side scraping fails, client side scraping may be a much to complex solution. It is very well possible that the rich client web application is using a REST API that provides the data as a JSON document. An API that our server side program can also easily leverage. That turned out the case for the OOW 2017 website - so instead of complex HTML parsing and server side or even client side scraping, the challenge at hand resolves to nothing more than a little bit of REST calling. Read the complete article here.

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20 May 2018 8:16am GMT

Digital transformation is an omnipresent topic today, providing a lot of challenges as well as chances. Due to that, customers are asking about how to deal with those challenges and how to leverage from the provided chances. Frequently asked questions in this area are:

• How can we modernize existing applications?
• What are the key elements for a future-proven strategy IT system architecture?
• How can the flexibility as well as the agility of the IT system landscape be ensured?

But from our experience there's no common answer for these questions, since every customer has individual requirements and businesses, but it is necessary to find pragmatic solutions, which leverage from existing best Practices - it is not necessary to completely re-invent the wheel.

With our new poster "Four Pillars of Digitalization based on Oracle Cloud" (Download it here) , we try to deliver a set of harmonized reference models which we evolved based on our practical experience, while conceiving modern, future-oriented solutions in the area of modern application designs, integrative architectures, modern infrastructure solutions and analytical architectures. The guiding principle, which is the basis for our architectural thoughts is: Design for Change. If you want to learn more, you can refer to our corresponding Ebook (find the Ebook here, only available in German at the moment).

Usually the technological base for modern application architectures today is based on Cloud services, where the offerings of different vendors are constantly growing. Here it is important to know which Cloud services are the right ones to implement a specific use case. Our poster "Four Pillars of Digitalization based on Oracle Cloud" shows the respective Cloud services of our strategic partner Oracle, which can be used to address specific challenges in the area of digitalization. Get the poster here.

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20 May 2018 8:15am GMT

"Tl;dr version": I've finished implementing the i18n of Fractal and I've submitted a first French translation of it. With some help from Daniel (my mentor) to complete the integration with the build system, so thank him for that! Here are my merge requests: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal/merge_requests/105 and https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal/merge_requests/107.

I am going to detail a little bit what was done in order to achieve this.

Integrate gettext-rs to the project

I first added gettext-rs as one of the dependencies of Fractal (in this commit), as I have explained it in the previous articles. Then, I put the initialization of gettext-rs by asking it to look for the locale files in ./fractal-gtk/po (in this commit).

Wrap all the translatable strings in the Rust source files

Then I took quite some time to examine every strings in the source files of the crate fractal-gtk to wrap all messages that would end up in the GUI with gettext (it turned out that I didn't really need to use ngettext). Wrapping some strings in the format! macro was less obvious to deal with though. For instance:

secondary = format!("You've been invited to join to <b>{}</b> room by <b>{}</b>",
                    room_name, sender_name);

Couldn't be straightforwardly rewritten like this:

secondary = format!(gettext("You've been invited to join to <b>{}</b> room by <b>{}</b>"),
                    room_name, sender_name);

Because the first argument of format! needs to be a string literal, so I had to use this work around instead:

let sentence_template = gettext("You've been invited to join to <b>{room_name}</b> room by <b>{sender_name}</b>");
secondary = sentence_template.replace("{room_name}", room_name.as_str())
                             .replace("{sender_name}", sender_name.as_str());

I explicitly did what format! would have done here without having the constraint of using a string literal. Because in some languages, the place of {room_name} and {sender_name} can be reversed. See this commit for more details.

Adding the support of gettext within the build system

Next, we needed a way to automatically generate PO and POT files and move MO files to the right place for gettext-rs to read. So I was going to have the meson build system helping me for that. I first added a POTFILES.in file which lists all the files with translatable strings in them and a LINGUAS file which list the languages for which we want to have PO files. And I've added a meson.build file and updated to one in the project root to be able to generate the mentioned file: you can run `ninja -C _build fractal-pot` to generate a POT file and `ninja -C _build fractal-update-po` to generate/update PO files. See these commit for more details on: the POTFILE.in, the LINGUAS file and the meson.build files.

Once the ability to generate the locale files implemented, Daniel helped my with this commit that removes the hard-coded path to bind the text domain for gettext. And he added a Spanish translation (see this commit). I also submitted a French translation, see this commit and this one.

After my MR merged, my first task for GSoC is completed!!

19 May 2018 3:23pm GMT

Similar to last year I managed to attend the Gulasch Programmier-Nacht (GPN) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Not only did I attend, I also managed to squeeze in a talk about PrivacyScore. We got the prime time slot on the opening day along with all the other relevant talks, including the Eurovision Song Contest, so we were not overly surprised that the audience had a hard time deciding where to go and eventually decided to attend talks which were not recorded. Our talk was recorded and is available here.

Given the tough selection of the audience by the other talks, we had the people who were really interested. And that showed during the official Q&A as well as in the hallway track. We exchanged contacts with other interested parties and got a few excellent comments on the project.

Another excellent part of this year's GPN was the exhibition in the museum. As GPN takes places in a joint building belonging to the local media university as well as the superb art and media museum, the proximity to the artsy things allows for an interesting combination. This year, the open codes exhibition was not hosted in the ZKM, but GPN also took place in that exhibition. A fantastic setup. Especially with the GPN's motto being "digital naïves". One of the exhibition's pieces is an assembly robot's hand doing nothing else but writing a manifesto. Much like a disciplinary action for a school child. Except that the robot doesn't care so much. Yet, it's usefulness only expands to writing these manifestos. And the robot doesn't learn anything from it. I like this piece, because it makes me think about the actions we take hoping that they have a desired effect on something or someone but we actually don't know whether this is indeed the case.

I also like the Critical Engineering Manifesto being exhibited. I like to think about how the people who actual implement cetain technologies can be held responsible for the effects of it on individuals or the society. Especially with more and more "IoT" deployments where the "S" represents their security. It's easy to blame Facebook for "leaking" user profiles although it's in their Terms of Services, but it's harder to shift the blame for the smart milk sensor in your fridge invading my privacy by reporting how much I consume. We will have interesting times ahead of us.

An exhibit pointing out the beauty of algorithms and computation is a board that renders a Julia Set. That's wouldn't be so impressive in itself, but you can watch the machine actually compute the values. The exhibit has a user controllable speed regulator and an insight into the CPU as well as the higher level code. I think it's just an ingenious idea to enable the user to go full speed and see the captivating movements of the beautiful Julia set while also allowing the go super slow to investigate how this beauty is composed of relatively simple operations. Also, the slow execution itself is relatively boring. We get to see that we have to go very fast in order to be entertained. So fast that we cannot really comprehend what is going on.

I whole heartedly recommend visiting this exhibition. And the GPN, of course, too. It's a nice chaotic event with a particular flair. It's getting more and more crowded though, so better while the feeling lasts and doesn't get drowned by all the tourists.

19 May 2018 3:07pm GMT

Oracle API Platform Cloud Services - API Design This is the first video of a series to showcase the usage of Oracle API Platform Cloud Services. API Management Part 1 of 2. Oracle API Cloud Services This is the second video of a series to show case the usage of the brand new Oracle API Platform CS. This is part one of API Management Oracle API Platform Cloud Services - API Management part 2 This is the 3rd video of the series. In specific here we will see the second part of the API Management functionality focused on Documentation. Oracle API Platform CS - How to create an app This is the 4th video of this series. In this video you will learn how to create an application. Oracle API Plaform Cloud Services - API Usage This is the fifth video of this series. In this video I will showcase how you will interact with the APIs that are deployed in APIPCS.

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19 May 2018 8:25am GMT

Yesterday I read a blog post about the new Riot.im Stickers. This is not a matrix.org feature, it's implemented as a widget, when you send an sticker you're sending a new event with the type "m.sticker", which is similar to the "m.image" event.

The matrix.org protocol is flexible so this is a good example of how to add new features to the clients that uses matrix without the need to change the protocol.

This is not a core feature because you can send images, but I think this is great and add a simple way to show reactions for the users, so as I was reading I thought that we can add this to Fractal, so I started to read how we can add support for this.

Reading the doc

The first thing to implement a feature is to read the specifications or the technical documentation so we can know what is needed... But there's no documentation yet about Stickers or widgets yet.

This is a problem because we can't implement a feature if we don't know what we should do. But free software give us a great opportunity when this happens, we've the Riot source code so we can look at the code and learn what they are doing.

Reading the code

Riot web is a javascript application that uses AJAX to communicate with different server APIs so the first thing that I did to start to understand the stickers thing was to open the firefox debugger and view how riot is communicating with the server.

From here I've learned that for stickers riot is asking to the scalar.vector.im server. But I don't understand the whole thing with the requests because riot does a lot of request to different APIs and I can't isolate the stickers thing easily.

To fill my understanding gap I go to the matrix-js-sdk and matrix-react-sdk and I did a quick grep to the source code looking for the API calls that I've view in firefox. With this I can understand the full stickers process.

Writing an example

To say that I know how this is working, it's not enough the code reading. To make sure that I've understood the whole process I need to write a simple program that does all the process and then I can say that I understand this.

So I started to write a simple python script using requests. This simple script does the request to the server and list all the stickers json so I can say that I'm able to communicate with the API.

Stickers in Fractal

After this small research I'm able to implement an initial sticker support for Fractal. I'll try to add a simple way to show and use stickers and a way to render stickers in the messages history.

If there's no secret problems we'll have a basic stickers support in Fractal soon.

19 May 2018 7:37am GMT