Everything needs some refreshment from time to time, that doesn’t mean that it has to change completely. Before the SABRE conference 2012 I’ve tweaked the OntoWiki GUI a little bit, to provide an eyecandy and up-to-date look for presentations.

To get the story started: I created the CSS framework of the OntoWiki GUI in 2008, still with the constraint that it has to work even in IE6. You know that your hands are in chains with that, no chance for the cool stuff. Later this policy changed, but therefore it ended like this, the Silver Blue theme:

Now, 4 years later, browser support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 is much better, so let’s play a little bit. I did not changed any markup code, I only used some CSS for the update. I moved the main application window to top bar, then I’ve added box shadows, gradients and round corners. Silver Blue facelift 2012:

From that point it needed some changes on color definitions (what was not too trivial because we do not have pre-proceeding tools like SCSS here in OntoWiki) and we got another theme extension, called Dark Orange:

These updates are not in the develop branch of OntoWiki right now but they will probably merged into it later after some more testings. Currently you need to check out the GUI-Facelift feature branch to use the GUI updates.

Very often we only need some quick tips and tutorials to solve our problems. Nethertheless it is still great to dive in deeper, get a wider background of knowledge. So, books are still great.

This list is based on three compilation done by Linux Mint tumblr and my bookmarks about books.

All of the book are free, at least free as in free beer. Some of them are licensed under a free and open license. Most of the books are available in various ebook formats and paper versions, please consider to buy one if you like it. Now, enjoy the list:

General Usage & Administration

• The Debian Administrator’s Handbook (Raphaël Hertzog, Roland Mas, 2012)
• Linux: Das umfassende Handbuch (Johannes Plötner, Steffen Wendzel, 2012)
• Linux Sea, a Gentoo book (Sven Vermeulen, 2009-2012)
• GNU/Linux Advanced Administration (Remo Suppi Boldrito, Josep Jorba Esteve, 2008)
• Introduction to Linux: A Hands on Guide (Machtelt Garrels, 2002-2010)

FLOSS & Philosophy

• After the Software Wars (Keith Curtis, 2009)
• Open Sources 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2006)
• Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans (Peter Wayner, 2000)

Creation & Programming

• Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project (Karl Fogel, 2005-2010)
• Linux Kernel in a Nutshell (O’Reilly, 2006)
• Linux Device Drivers (O’Reilly, 2005)

$ learn -cli -bash -o=brain.txt

• Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide: An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting (Mendel Cooper, 2012)
• Bash Guide for Beginners (Machtelt Garrels, 2003-2010)
• Command Line (Various Authors, 2009-2010)
• The Linux Command Line (William E. Shotts, 2009)
• LPIC 101+102 Examination: Modular Training Notes (Leading Edge Business Solutions, 2006)

More Books & Resources

• FLOSS Manuals
• The Linux Documentation Project Guides
• Linux Training: The Linux-Training course
• Linux From Scratch

You need to attract people to make Open Source software projects successful. That’s the reason why I wanna say thank you to everybody who spread the message about PubwichFork. You are as important as the software itself.

Creating an Open Source software project is easy, getting attention is hard because we have so many great software projects. Small FLOSS projects do not have budget to buy commercial advertising, neither they have a big community at the beginning — they live on word-of-mouth recommendations.

WebResourcesDepot, La Ferme du Web and PHPspot introduced PubwichFork to their readers after the PubwichFork 2.0 was released. Recently the Hot Scripts Blog list it in their top three most popular social wall scripts.

I want to thank especially every single person who tweeted and bookmarked it, contributed feature requests and bug reports.

Please keep it on! Do not stop spreading the word. It’s important!

Some days ago Github asked users to verify their email addresses again, this was only the prelude of the recent Github release. Today Github refreshed their notification system/interface, it changed the meaning of watched repositories and rolled out the new starred repositories feature. What about usability, accessibility and more improvements?

As you can read in the blog post “Notifications & Stars”, Github rolled out a big update on their portal, with a lot of changes:

• Watched Repositories: Github changed the semantics and function of what they mean and how they work. It was a list of repositories you want to keep track on updates, now it is a special list of repositories you will get notifications via web interface and email, you can opt-in/out via your notification settings. There is also a main option to automatically watch all repositories you’re given push access. Per default that main option is activated, and you will get all notifications via web and email if you don’t opt-out.
• Starred Repositories: You can star (or unstar) repositories you find interesting and you want to keep track of, it simply is the old feature of Watched Repositories. All your old watched repositories landed on that list with the recent update.
• Notifications: the web interface now rolls up messages into threads of activity, similar you know it from threated view in email clients and forums. Notification settings has been simplified , and you can configure different email addresses for notifications based on the organization a repository lives in. The notifications button moved from the menu right to the logo on the left, only a blue dot indicates that you have new notifications.

What to do now?

1. check your notification settings
2. manage your list of watched repositories

Did it introduce problems on Usability and Accessibility?

I’m wondering if these changes could be problematic because Github changed functions users learned how to use long time ago, some could harm usability and accessibility of Github:

• A blue dot as mark for new messages is an indication only based on color, that make it harder to use it, e.g. for color blind people or on bad monitors, adverse light, etc. Github may add a counting number of unread messages here, or additionally use two different symbols for “unread” and “all read”.
• Changing the meaning of a function is critical! Not just in your code, also in your user inteface. I really would like to know how many people will be keeping on to use “Watch Repository” instead of “Star Repository”, maybe they just didn’t read the Github news(letter), forget the new meaning or just hitting that button because they always have used it. Good luck with your email box full of notifications. I can imagine some reasons whay Github uses now the starred metapher and why they add a new process how to watch repositories, but maybe it would have been better to add missed functionality to the watched list, and maybe only renaming it later.

Room for improvements

In my eyes they even don’t go the whole way on their changes how to manage watched/starred repositories. I really wished they would have been added filters on those lists, e.g. time of last update/commit, number of branches/forks/contributors/languages/size, etc … it could help (at least me) to sort out inactive projects, or repositories you are not interested in anymore. Currently the lists are not very usable, it is just an paged list, I don’t even know how many repositories I’ve starring/watching currently.

Just my 2 cents.

PS: Don’t get me wrong, Github is still a great web service!

• Stuff print designers should be care about: The ColorHug is an open source display colorimeter. It allows you to calibrate your screen for accurate color matching. The ColorHug is a small accessory that measures displayed colors very accurately. It is held on your display and plugged into a spare USB port on the computer for the duration of the calibration.
• Developers these days are spoiled with choice when it comes to selecting an MV* framework for structuring and organizing their JavaScript web apps. TodoMVC offers the same Todo application implemented using MV* concepts to compare the most of the popular JavaScript MV* frameworks of today.
• If you need to administrate various Wordpress installations on different web servers, you may check out Infinite WP, an admin panel to manage multiple Wordpress sites: one single master login, instant backup and restore, one click update to manage plugins and themes.
• Camerapedia is a free-content encyclopedia of camera information, a repository of information about all still camera brands and models. Check it out if you like analogue or digital photography.
• Seems that Adobe started to dive into the Open Source movement, now they released Source Sans Pro, their first open source font, under terms of Open Font License. Maybe there is a future Adobe stops that Photoshop stuff and starts contributing to Gimp :)

In the light of current events check out the infographic and video of 7 Minutes of Terror, about the landing of Curiosity on Mars in around 9 hours.

(Source: delicious.com)

How can you see that the Semantic Web is not only a nerdy imagination? Google is using and promoting it. The company now added a Structured Data dashbord to its Webmaster Tools, under “Optimization!”

What is it?

Google calls semantically annotated data Structured Data, now they added a dashbord for Structured Data to their Webmaster Tools, supporting site administrators to control how annotated pages are perform. Read: Google wants you to annotate your stuff! They need your help to understand your content better. You will find the Structured Data dashboard under the Optimization menu.

Dashboard Features:

• Site-level view: shows root item type and vocabulary schema of the annotated data from your site indexed by Google.
• Itemtype-level view: showing pages and special attributes for indexed item types.
• Page-level view: details page showing all attributes of every item type on the given page, it contains a link to test the given page using the Rich Snippet testing tool.

The dashboard provides a very good overview how your annotations work and perform, seen through Google’s glasses.

Limitations

The dashboard shows how the annotations perform, it doesn’t tell you why they perfom that way.

Example: I use the dashboard on a site with only two pages, both they are annotated using schema.org vocalbulary and Microdata syntax. Until July 27th Google had their 2 item types indexed, from July 31st Google misses 1 item type. I didn’t changed anything on the annotations. The dashboard do not show indications about the reason. Does Google just re-index the content, did the algorithm change, is their now a conflict with other Microformats markup on the page. I just can guess, adjust the markup and wait some days to see the result in the dashboard (the rich snippets testing tool parses the item type correctly).

Why they add the dashboard?

Common information retrieval on text bodies and using vector rooms on text snippets is not enough anymore, because we have to much data out there. We need semantic annotation on that data to support machines understanding the data, using and creating real information from that data. Google, Yahoo and Bing know that, last year they created schema.org, providing a simple vocabulary to annotate your web documents and the things they are about by using Microdata syntax.

Last two weeks were full of great links and resources, here you are:

Typography

• Linux Libertine is a community driven Open Fonts project, delivering alternative font families and styles to fonts like Times New Roman, Linux Libertine and its tools are released under GPL/OFL licenses. The fonts cover the codepages of Western Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, IPA and many more. Furthermore, typographical features such as ligatures, small capitals, different number styles, scientific symbols, etc. are implemented in this font. Linux Libertine thus contains more than 2000 characters.

Semantic Web & Data

• The ESWC discusses the latest scientific results and technology innovations around semantic technologies, some of the ESWC 2012 video lectures and keynotes are available, around the topics Social Web, Linked Data, Machine Learning, Semantic Web in Use, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.
• The Data Hub is a community-run catalogue of useful sets of data on the Internet. You can collect links here to data from around the web for yourself and others to use, or search for data that others have collected. Depending on the type of data (and its conditions of use), the Data Hub may also be able to store a copy of the data or host it in a database, and provide some basic visualisation tools.

Social Web

• Ryan Barret built some open-sourced bridges of Salmon, ActivityStreams, PortableContacts and Webfinger for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ that don’t implement it themselves.

Web Development

• Jam is a package manager for JavaScript. It manages library dependencies and it supports automatically optimized custom builds of popular libraries.
• Yeoman is a robust and opinionated client-side stack, comprised of tools and frameworks to support you to create web applications. It helps in scaffolding, compiling CoffeeScript & Compass, linting your scripts, image optimization, build processing, JS package management and unit testing. It isn’t released currently but you can enter your email to get notified if it gets available. Paul Irish spoke about it on Google’s IO 2012 conference.
• On YouTube you can find all videos of the talks done at the EuroPython 2012 conference in Italy.
• Motorola published Montage, a framework for building modern HTML5 web apps by providing modular components, real-time two-way data binding, CommonJS dependency management, and more.

Other Tools

• If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. It can convert documents in markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, DocBook, or LaTeX to HTML formats, Word processor formats (docx, odt), Epub, DocBook, TeX formats, PDF and Lightweight markup formats.
• The goal of pdf.js is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering Portable Document Format (PDF) without native code assistance. It is community-driven and supported by Mozilla Labs.
• Some of you read about Svbtle. There is a unofficial Wordpress theme to create the Svbtle feeling on administration/writing and viewing your blog. The theme misses the responsiveness of the original Svbtle layout but as the theme is open source, you can add it and push it back to the project owner.
• Adobe published Brackets, an open source code editor for the web, written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

(Source: delicious.com)

Situation in Syria is gone worst, a lot of people are imprisoned, their families do not know what happened and how they are. Too many people do not have really a voice, chances are rare to give them a face and a name in our media. Take your opportunity to show support and solidarity.

#FREEBASSEL is a campaign to bring about the safe and immediate release of Bassel Khartabil from wrongful detainment in Syria since March 2012. He is a well known contributor to global software and culture communities like Creative Commons, Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, Open Clip Art Library, Fabricatorz, and Sharism. He is missed by these communities, his family, friends and loved ones. The campaign says, “We will not stop campaigning for him until we see him as a free global citizen once again.”

On March 15, 2012, Bassel Khartabil was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus. Since then, his family has received no official explanation for his detention or information regarding his whereabouts. However, his family has recently learned from previous detainees at the security branch of Kafer Sousa, Damascus, that Bassel is being held at this location.

Bassel Khartabil has been unjustly detained for nearly four months without trial or any legal charges being brought against him.

I do not believe that signing the support letter will really help him but at least it shows your solidarity, so I invite you to join that petition. I did.

We, the signees of the #FREEBASSEL campaign, demand immediate information regarding his detention, health, and psychological state.