The Geeky Junkyard of kingler

Continued from WordCamp 2007: Part 1

Following the HyperDB talk, Jeremy Zilar talked a bit about the blogs at New York Times that he maintained. It is interesting to note that they are running all the blogs on a single install of WordPress 2.0.5.

Rashmi Sinha’s talk, Designing Massively Multiplayer Social Systems, focused on the general topic of social networking. I think she made a good point about the importance of choosing the right popularity metric for the right purpose. Slideshare can sort the slides according to Latest/Most Viewed/Featured/Most Commented/Most Favorited/Most Zinged/Most Downloaded/Contest, each represents a popularity metric for a certain purpose. It is quite useful to me as well, since we are designing a blogging site for the Chinese bloggers recently.

In the afternoon talks, I have to mention the talk by Liz Danzico of Happy Cog Studios, Usability Analysis of WP. She is helping the WordPress team to re-design the next generation administration pages based on the usability analysis done on many WordPress users. During the talk, she mentioned that the Dashboard interface would be redesigned to allow customization using AJAX drag and drop features and possibly turn off the developer RSS feed and add a new feed from somewhere else. The menus will also get re-organized so that it would be easier for new users to access to certain commonly used pages. Because of the history of WordPress, the administration panel in WordPress is quite outdated and really needs a new look and re-organization. Considering that these changes to the backend administration pages should be expected in WP 2.4 release (probably by the end of the year), the wait for a better admin panel will be over soon.

Matt Mullenweg gave the most anticipated talk of the day, State of the Word. I loved his style of presentation and his honesty of pointing out some of the issues that they have not resolved. The developer team of WordPress has now adopted a better release scheme and promises to do 4 major release every year. In the next version of WP 2.3, tagging will be included, along with some features of plugin update notification, based on the central plugin repository on WordPress.org. WP 2.4 will likely to include the admin panel enhancement and possibly a core file update system (think about a button to upgrade your WP install).

Anyway, the WordCamp event ended with the Developer Duke-out, where Matt and other core developers, went up stage and talked about various issues and mostly fun topics related to WordPress. For example, they talked about their most-hated features of WordPress(haha), and the comment review and the image upload feature were on the top list. They also talked about their favorite text editor: most of them actually use nano under Linux. I have to say most of the developers are very geeky looking, and a bit shy on the stage, except Matt and Andy.

Now, let me wrap up my first WordCamp experience. It is quite a nice meetup for the WordPress users and developers, and the future of WordPress looks pretty good as the number-one open source blogging platform. I definitely learned a lot from discussions with the core developers, but I have to say that not that many attendees of WordCamp are actually developers or contributors, so the talks even on the developer’s day are not really deep into the WP core. Maybe I am just expecting too much here

One suggestion I have is that probably next year, the event should be broadcasted live to the World. After all, many WordPress developers do not have the time and money to attend such an event. Live broadcasting would make things much better.

[END]

Last weekend, I went to WordCamp 2007 in San Fransisco. In case you didn’t get the news, WordCamp is the annual gathering of WordPress bloggers and developers. This year’s event was packed with 2 days of great talks, but I only got the chance to attend the second day, which focused on developers and the future of WordPress. George, however, attended the first day and mentioned that the talk on SEO tips given by Matt Cutts from Google was pretty good. Wish his slides were published somewhere.

As a WordPress plugin developer and also a wp-hacker, I was quite excited about the technical stuff the core WP developer team talked about during the second day.

The first talk(view the slide here) was from Barry and Matt. Barry, the sysadmin, mentioned some amazing stats from WordPress.com and talked about the performance tuning, like APC and WP-CACHE. Matt then introduced HyperDB, the failsafe/redundant/cluster MySQL database class used in the WordPress.com backend. Although I am on the HyperDB maillist since day one, I was having doubts about HyperDB. However, from what Matt talked about, HyperDB does actually many things that I have in mind. Coupled with the new MySQL Proxy, High Availability WordPress clusters would be much easier to build now.

[to be continued…]

The graphical programming tool, Labview, is great for scientific instrumentation, because it is easy to use and yet very powerful and feature rich. However, the graphical interface sometimes can be a hassle, especially when you want to do complicated mathematical operations. Like a look at the example here for adding up two 1’s. Drawing the wires can be a headache if you are doing many many more operations.

This is when you will need the MathScript in Labview. It is similar to MATLAB syntax and does a good job complimenting the all-graphical programming of Labview.

Today, I received an email saying that NI just released an online beta demo (link). With the demo, you can actually run MathScript programs without installing Labview! It can even output 2D or 3D plots. This is great for plotting function for any school project

Try some simple codes:

a= 0 : 0.1 : 2*pi
plot(a, sin(a))

???????????????????????????

National Instrument High Speed DIO drivers can read and write a specialized file format HWS (Hierarchical Waveform Storage). It is actually a subset implementation of the famous HDF5, which is best data format for large scientific data (we are talking about terabytes here).

Anyway, as I started playing with .hws file a bit more, I found it quite easy to use, and because it is based on HDF5, I can use any software that supports HDF5 to open the HWS file! And, no surprise here, MATLAB, from ver 6.5, has functions to read and write HDF files.

However, MATLAB’s hdf5read() function requires an unique dataset attribute for the data that you want to load from the HDF5 file. So, to read the NI-HWS file, we need to figure out the dataset attribute. Using HDF Explorer and HDF Viewer application, I was able to find the correct attribute to read the HWS file in MATLAB. Here it is

hdf5read('test.hws','/wfm_group0/axes/axis1/data_vector/data');

The second paramter is the HDF5 attribute for the actual dataset in the HWS file.