I just found out that HelloEnjoy created an interactive music video for Lights using Three.js and WebGL. They wrote up the technology here: http://www.netmagazine.com/features/behind-scenes-lights-latest-webgl-sensation

It’s a good read — there are details about how they chose visuals to go along with different sections of the music, how they created the terrain, challenges they ran into and how they solved them.

We used a tiny bit of Three.js for MobileGraffiti at AngelHack =)

Today they hosted a grand reunion party at Willard Park (yes, I did just make that localwiki page… if I keep this up, I’m never going to get this entry in time for iron blogger). DeCadence founder Mark Skandera came from across the country (he was able to schedule a talk for the math department at berkeley on Monday to coincide with the DeCadence renuion!) and gathered us around and told us again how DeCadence got started — how as an undergrad at Brown there were a few thousand students and 8 a cappella groups and how he’d never had the time to join one; then when he got to Berkeley for grad school there were tens of thousands of students and only 5 a cappella groups; how the lists of auditionees for the 3 that weren’t women-only were super-long; how he formed his first small group out of these lists and people he heard singing in the shower at i-house; how their first rehearsal spot was a closet under the stairs at i-house with an out-of-tune piano.

There are people in current DeCadence who hadn’t yet been born when Mark formed the group.

That blows my mind.

Current DeCadence got us a cake and organized sandwiches and songs to sing and everything. We stood in an enormous circle and sang “Like A Prayer”, which has got to be the longest-running arrangement in the group’s history, since they still sing it today.

It’s an amazing, talented group. Our alumni group Spot the Octopus turned out well today — we meet every Monday for rehearsal, and our only performance opportunity is when DeCadence invites us to open for them, which they did for their Thursday concert a few days ago =) We sang Sorry, Kraken, and debuted Always for them, Fritz’s first major solo =D And DeCadence was amazing. Really together in all ways. They sound great.

This year we also celebrate a few new DeCadence babies from across the country, and the first actual intra-DeCadence wedding coming soon (Alangela). We kicked a bouncy ball at each other and there were shenanigans. Lisa and Tom biked away with Watson in a pannier, which was pretty much the cutest thing ever.

It’s much warmer and sunnier in Berkeley than it is out here by the ocean, in the fog.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.’ We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

When I saw this quote, it was attributed to Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural address. When I looked it up later, the internet told me that not only did he not write it, he didn’t even quote it in any speech. Williamson’s wikiquote page references this as a common misconception, and links to a page with the full text of both of Mandela’s 1994 inaugural speeches. It must have gotten passed around in email forwards until it became truth, which is amazing. Memes are incredible and display incredible resilience. I wonder if people like quotes more if they’re surrounded by the aura of someone famous and important, and how it makes people feel when they find out quotes are by someone else, or how bad I feel about judging someone as less famous and important because I’d heard of the first person but not the second.

But Williamson is organizing the effort to get us a Department of Peace!

I’ve also just watched this incredible Niel DeGrasse Tyson quote, via maiki. This is powerful.

In high school, I volunteered every other Sunday morning at the Tech Museum of San Jose. It was awesome. When I was applying to colleges, I asked my exhibit coordinator Gabrielle (an incredible, talented, energetic woman, I totally idolized her and now miss her and wonder what she’s up to) for a personal recommendation. She asked me, as an exercise, what I thought my strengths are. I had no idea and said something vague about scoring well on standardized tests, which I guess proved that I was smart, or how I played with the robot at the counter. She said, “let me tell you about what I think your biggest strength is. [Another volunteer] was always shy, but as soon as she was on shift with you, you welcomed her and made her come out of her shell. Now she’s a great volunteer who’s way less afraid to interact with people. That’s amazing.”

When I’m not afraid, I can help other people shine.

For now, all I see is this gem called rubytree, which I haven’t even tried yet, but it appears to have a general node-based tree and a binary tree.

I care because we did this (find the longest repeated substring) as a contest in cs170 in 2003 and sometimes Peterson and I still talk about it even though it was nearly a decade ago. I came in 43rd out of 113 then. I really, really wish I just copied my code into my livejournal back then, because I would have loved to see it now. I used to do stuff. I wonder if I have a backup buried somewhere on an old hard drive.

One day. In that marknelson.us article, I get the parts about the suffix trie, but the parts about the suffix tree are too much for me to masticate.

In other news, I am reading JavaScript: The Good Parts on Jen-Mei‘s recommendation, and dreaming about going to Fluent (o’reilly javascript conference) in May.

JavaScript: The Good Parts has a butterfly on its cover. I wonder what language Nabokov would program in. What is the most extravagant, versatile, expressive language? Also, what languages are like Russian, then what languages are like English? Maybe English is like JavaScript… cobbled together from a bunch of influences.

Also, 5:50AM WHYYYYY

Yesterday, I volunteered at blackgirlscode (alice!), and I decided to walk home from the M stop. I walked through Stern Grove, and discovered that the dog park is absolutely ginormous, that there’s a duck pond at the end of it, and that if you come out the other side, you end up at wawona and 34th just north of lakeshore plaza. The duck pond had a lot of mallards, a few black ducks with a white bill that were smaller than mallards, and two bigger gorgeous white ducks with black feathers on their wings and tails.

It was good to walk around in semi-nature for a while. I took a thousand pictures of a banana slug, paths, some blossoms, and of a park bench in front of eucalyptus trees.

Then Elvin came over and we got milk tea, and a whole bunch of us programmed all night. Peterson worked on his graphics engine, Fritz worked on his iOS app idea, and Elvin and I got set him up with rvm, mysql, and rails on ubuntu. We’re starting our new project =) One of our prizes for winning BeMyApp was a free GitHub Bronze organization for a year, so I redeemed it last night, and had to think of an organization name. Judy And Friends seemed too … JudyCentric, but we kind of liked the acronym, so I came up with Just Another Flamingo. So that’s what we’re called on github now. I’m looking forward to working on our logo. Haha…

This morning I woke up panicking again. So Fritz took me to archery at golden gate park, where they have a public range. I haven’t gone to do archery with them for months… not since the last time I wrote about it here. They’ve gone a lot, and acquired new equipment. I think archery is really good for me, because I love form. haha.

I’m trying to relax, and get some perspective back. Also, I have to not fail at Iron Blogging. I almost couldn’t write this post because I have to write about BeMyApp, Angelhack, PyCon, Women Who Code, Sean’s CSS class, and so much more. But if I keep on operating that way (not writing posts because of all the other posts I haven’t written yet), I’ll just continue to never write posts, and that would be terrible, not to mention costly. Just write!

Just live! I’m not perfect. I feel really stressed about that. I need to be okay with being not perfect, and then I’d be able to do so much more.

I have GOT to go to bed, but not before posting about what the heck just happened. PlayPitch is our iPad app that teaches basic music literacy by showing you a real score and using the built-in microphone to listen to you as you play along with any instrument (or voice or whistling), giving you real-time feedback about whether you’re playing the right notes. =) We’ve even got an expressive lion conductor mascot named Gustav Mauler.

It was an incredible weekend… Far and away the BEST thing about the weekend was how well the team worked together. Chiu-Ki and Elvin had never written for iOS before, so Peterson got them up to speed and they were hacking away at full throttle. Peterson and Bosco got elbow-deep into pitch-detection algorithms and FFTs and iOS tools. Late, late, late on Saturday night, we were able to link the two sides together. Here’s the result:

Check out Chiu-Ki’s AMAZING post here: http://blog.sqisland.com/2012/02/bemyapp-hackathon.html

Follow us at:

• Website (for now): http://playpit.ch (I just got playpitchapp.com too)
• @playpitchapp
• facebook.com/playpitch
• On the AppOlympics voting site

I was at Eudemonia for BATLL IX (Starcraft tourney!!) all day, and caught the last BART home. I got off at Daly City and walked towards the cab line. I was fourth in the group of passengers. The first two passengers got in to taxis without incident. The third passenger waved me ahead of him, so I was up, but there were two taxis at the “front” of the line — it seemed that one of the taxis was trying to cut (or maybe he was just trying to save space since there was a big influx of passengers coming out of the last BART) so the driver of the taxi closer to the curb was really pissed. He yelled at the passenger in front of me (who was waving me forward) to get in the car, saw that he was waving me forward, then yelled at me, “where are you going? Which of you is going farther?”

This made me not want to get into his car. I mean, I understand that in order to survive in a capitalist society, you have to take the fare that’ll get you more money instead of wasting your time with one that doesn’t go very far. It was just really abrasive.

I told him where I was going. He yelled at me to get in again and repeatedly. I got in. Instead of taking off, he cussed out the driver immediately to his right (the one that looked like he was “cutting”) and ended with “get the fuck out nigga”. This incensed the other driver such that he pulled ahead suddenly to block my taxi from leaving, effectively pinning us to the curb. So my driver got out of the car to cuss him out some more. I considered getting out of the car, but was paralyzed. Driver got back in the car. Other driver didn’t budge (so we couldn’t move anyway). My driver got out of the car to yell some more obscenities at the other guy.

At that point I finally got out. I walked away quickly and turned my back on the driver who was yelling at me to get back into the car. At this point, passenger #3 (the one who’d waved me forward) was still just waiting passively, and there was a fifth passenger who saw an opportunity to play the two warring drivers against each other. “He’ll take me to Oakland for $60,” he said to the allegedly cutting driver. “What’ll you take me there for?” Then he said, “This guy’s cutting,” pointing at the guy he’d just been talking to. “Nobody get in this motherfucker’s cab.”

I walked briskly away and went out of line of sight so that the driver would stop yelling at me to get into his car. I briefly considered going backwards in line but the other drivers were getting out of their cars to see what the commotion was about. It wasn’t worth it. I walked to the now-closed bart-station and yelled through the grate at the departing station agents: “What should we do if the taxi drivers are fighting?” Their receding backs said, “If they’re fighting, call the police” and zero fucks were given. I guess it happens all the time. And I can’t really blame them, they were off shift. I felt scared and alone.

I called Fritz to get him to pick me up. He hurried here. But as I was waiting, the driver whose car I was in briefly kept yelling at me, so I walked farther away. He went around the station to get closer to me and kept yelling for me to get in his car, so I walked across to the other side of the station. He then went around AGAIN to yell “I’m so sorry,” and try to get me to come to him, and I was freaked the fuck out. He left right as Fritz arrived.

I’m done travelling at night. I’m also buying a fucking car.

Also, this is cutting it really close for Iron Blogger, but I made it in before 3am!

Here are official links to slides (via @WikipediaMobile) and video (via @stevesgill). =D

I was also super-excited that someone asked a question about easily surfacing the content of a page. She was interested in making the content more accessible, because people today are overwhelmed by all these tags and information. Tomasz even got a microphone over to me so I could say how Neil and I did it in our app (we used parse, not query, and regexed out all the html tags, and Neil thought of taking out everything in tables to skip the infobox! haha. It’s a bit hacky still.) And when I sat down, my phone vibrated, and there was a tweet from Words With Bears teammate Jen saying that she’d seen me on the livestream… haha!

Then I talked to Hearplanet, which is providing text-to-speech MP3s of places of local interest for tourists/city explorers. They’re using Wikipedia as one of their channels of information. Fascinating.

My notes from Tomasz’s and Yuvipanda’s talks are below / through the jump!

weinre
WEb INspector REmote (phone)
debug.phonegap.com – gives you a full instance of that browser
used to be in webibl? now in coffeescript

html5

- ios: titlebar and tabbar
- android creaets a native menu
…i missed the third

apache cordova plugin vs project? now everything is a plugin
- geolocation (in the web browser). native geo that ships w/ the browser
- github.com/phonegap/phonegap-plugins lots there

a phonegap made of only the apis you want

phil – wikimedia zero, where data from wikipedia is free in africa (orange)
—my own thought: maybe twilio could do a similar thing

tomasz:

why an app?
- wikipedia != ads and there are other apps that show ads D:
- wikipedia on every phone. we work with carriers all the time and we want the app to come pre-installed. provide free access to information (no ads)

free open interoperable
simplify all the interfaces that are available. project wants to push standards adn simplify. “the purpose of phonegap is for phonegap to not exist”

android app
droid@screen – lets you connect your android to your computer with a cord and it’ll show your droid’s screen. demoing with the emulator sucks and is slow.

yuvi:

what went well?

reuse
1. jQuery
2. Localization libraries – message / tags
plugin re-use
appmenu, urlcache, sharing, globalization, toast (notification system that android gives you), webintents, other ios specific plugins
- all the things that web browsers shoudl do but don’t yet, we do with plugins

contribute back
- plugins

per platform overrides
- app code is always ‘general’ can run anywhere
- platform specific overrides deal with idiosyncracies
- different plugins in android and ios. separated. menus working everywhere.

lowering the barrier to entry for vounteers

https://github.com/wikimedia/WikipediaMobile

- new people were able to contribue production-quality code fast
- time to pull request is under a day

what sucked?

debugging is a problem
- the one thing that is missing is you can’t do script(???) (strip? what?) debugging. have to do printfs. if you’re coming from web or c it’s a pain. in ie you don’t have winery but you don’t have console.log.
the app: you can run it in safari. or chrome with web security disabled. and it works. can’t test phone-specific stuff in there but since we keep phone-specific stuff separate, we are able to run it in a proper desktop browser and test it that way if you were just working on javascript stuff.

iframe bugs

scrolling bugs
- typical css scrolling not until ios5 and android 4. (very common thing of having one part of your app that stays there while you scroll).
- webkit (newer versons of android) have these fixed

focus bugs
- if you have an input element and you have something on top of it, no matter what you do, the input element gets the focus. you cannot have ui elements on top of input. necessitate that lots of hack happen after every dom change, makes our code not cute D: also bugs without workarounds (had to take out the feature)

android core devs not caring (about webkit bugs)

zepto.js
- jquery-compatible library (you can think you’re using jquery but it’s smaller cuz it doesn’t have all the ie stuff). waht that acutally means is that it’s smaller (important for mobile device, bandwidth and memory). in theory, incredible idea but doesn’t actually quite work. very subtly incompatible. ex jquery exacts(?) thing is missing (?)

pure js architecture – not mature enough, not many examples

problem w/ moble projects
- when people interact, look at this graph
participation -> quality -> reach

showcase 2 applications as part of the weekend code challenge (november of last year) –
- built a phonegap-extended version of existing app that let you take pictures and add them to articles (for pipeline of contributing). not as interesting if you can only upload images.
- 2nd application – looks like nearby view in other apps, but shows you the articles near you that have problems. show to our mobile users – what’s missing in wikipedia. it’s difficult to figure out how to get involved (so many choices). so this is near you and missing images. build a contribution pipeline by building very specific calls to action. that’s what we’re showcasing now — how people can get involved.

one of the fundamentals to wikipedia is editing.
- writen in mobile browsers, will be in apps in a few months. make the experience the same

“let’s push mobile contribution”

mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org
tomasz@wikimedia.org
@wikimediamobile

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_projects

http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Presentations

q: how to make accessible to audio-only ppl
a by tomasz: how do we surface that first paragraph as quickly as possible
OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS QUESTION IS BEING ASKED! I raised my hand and answered it by saying that you use the api with the “parse” action (instead of the “query” action) and get a json, then strip the html, and also strip everything in a table tag (cuz the infobox is first and in a table tag) — then it’ll start reading it from the beginnign of the article =D

]]> http://judytuna.com/2012/02/phonegap-wikipedia-meetup-123/feed/ 1 http://judytuna.com/2012/01/wikipedia-sf-hackathon/ http://judytuna.com/2012/01/wikipedia-sf-hackathon/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:26:29 +0000 judytuna http://judytuna.com/?p=1581 Continue reading →]]> I went to the Wikipedia SF Hackathon this weekend at Parisoma! Neil and I coded a phone gateway for the English Wikipedia on Twilio. You send it a text with your search query (like “Barak Obama” or “Seattle”) and it calls you back in a few seconds and reads you the entire text of the article. =D

CODE: https://github.com/judytuna/SMS-Wikipedia — it calls the Twilio API, in Ruby, using Sinatra, hosted on Heroku. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this if Twilio (the amazing Sasha is the best developer evangelist ever), Ruby (sfruby.info like woah), and Heroku (who sponsored one of my early wwcode-rails meetups, and also sponsors Blazing Cloud sponsorships!) didn’t have the community presence that they do. Seriously, I can’t believe I get to live in San Francisco where all of this is happening RIGHT NOW. Look at this technology! Look at what it’s enabling us to do!

Romy wrote super-comprehensive notes on our product and process and drew pictures here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Hackathon_January_2012/Teams#Wikipedia_SMS_.2B_IVR_on_Twilio

On Thursday, I had gotten an email urging us to check out the project ideas, and came up with the SMS gateway idea and added it to the project page.

Why did I want to do this so badly?

• I didn’t have a smartphone until December and always wished I could look stuff up on Wikipedia when I wasn’t near a computer.
• When we get phone tree stuff working, this could be used by illiterate or blind people.
• In areas where access to tech is low but phones (not smartphones) are ubiquitous, this could be a way for people to look stuff up on wikipedia. This is mind-blowing.

It was an amazing experience and I learned so much from Neil and our team won first place!!!!!! The prize: flight and hotel to another wikimedia hackathon. The next one will be in Berlin in May!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’ve never been to Berlin! I’ve been to Europe once–London and York, with my high school choir, in 2000.

We have lots of ideas for the next steps of this app. I am considering setting up a kickstarter (as long as it’s okay with the wikimedia foundation??) to pay twilio for the app (actually I have no idea about this…)… It’s still in the “twilio sandbox” for now so I can’t show it to you yet (because your number has to be a “verified number” for MY twilio account in order for it to call you back I think). But I’m about to put my credit card info in so I’ll be able to show it off to the world soon.

The app definitely works =)

At the Hackathon, I REALLY enjoyed the PhoneGap demo. Tomasz and Yuvi showed us the Wikipedia app that they just pushed to the Android store last week, and guided us through adding a menu item. js! css! wow!!! I think the tutorial that they used would be ideal for a Railsbridge-style workshop (it starts with “how to get stuff installed” and it was surprisingly fast and easy).

So PhoneGapBridge is incoming. I’ll plan it 2 weeks off of a Railsbridge. =D

I’m learning so much. I met so many amazing, amazing people. I got interviewed by Wikimedia Foundation Storyteller Victor–how cool is his job title? I got my picture taken with leaves. I told him that I had serious class issues and loved online communities and want everyone to have access to information and nothing scares me more than loss of free speech and was generally completely incoherent but I kept banging on my knees the whole time because of HOW EXCITED I AM.

I am a dork

I wondered where I’d seen Toki Wartooth Brandon and then realized this morning that it was the fundraising banners! I basically couldn’t believe I was there all weekend. They’re right here in San Francisco!

I told everybody who would listen about Lukas and Elsa’s Occupedia, which is an initiative to create meetups that encourage underrepresented groups to contribute to wikipedia. Lukas wrote about the first event and I showed everybody haha.

I fucking love wikipedia. I love the wikimedia foundation. I want more. I was talking to Daniel from Germany, who said “I want to see a separate mobile app for a different set of users — the ones that spend a lot of their idle time patrolling new edits. There should be an app that lets them to it easily at the bus stop.” PHONEGAP HOOOOOOOOO

Sumanah was amazing and kept things going and was crazy and enthusiastic and welcoming. I met Leslie, a network engineer, who knew someone else that I knew from Railsbridge. I talked to Danielle (women in tech!), Elizabeth (Android!), and Rosemarie (who I’d met at wwcode-rails!). Phil asked me how I was going to pay Twilio for it D: I learned about Microsoft’s bridges with open source from Ben and Doug and it was fascinating and I tried asking them about openkinect/k4w, but their department doesn’t interface with xbox stuff =) I met Rupa of CodeChix and there are machinations afoot.

AAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!! I AM SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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