Publish your research!

Research is often payed by public money, so the results should be available to the public as well! - This demand is heard a lot and one of the good reasons to publish research software as open source software.
At GPN18 I gave a talk called "Publish your research! - Warum öffentlich finanzierte Forschung nicht veröffentlicht wird" which tries to give an overview why this is not happening. Attention: It's in German.

Reloaded: RocketScience and Software Engineering

In 2015 I gave two talks about Rocket Science and Software Engineering, focusing on all the things which went wrong in the history of space exploration due to software errors. (See this old blog post)
People likes these talks and so I got asked to give them again. So I updated them, tweaked them for the audiences and did what I was asked for. First as the keynote at the Swiss Python Summit and then at GPN18. Both talks were recorded and can be found online:

Swiss Python Summit: "Rocket Science and Software Engineering" (English)

GPN18: "Disintegrating Rockets - Softwarefehler in der Raumfahrt (und wie wir versuchen sie zu vermeiden)" (German)

Conference organization 101

To run a conference is a lot of work. And I know what I am talking about: I am part of the organization team of FrOSCon since years, and also was one of the main organizers of EuroPython 2014, PyCon.DE 2013, and ProvenanceWeek 2014. I also organize internal workshops for work and help our at a lot of other conferences I attend.

To make this work easier (especially IT) people tend to develop tools which support them. The problem is that these tools often stay internal or at least completely invisible.

To change this I held for the first time a talk on my own conference and presented (open source) tools which were created by conference organizers for conference organizers.
Unfortunately (for Non-German speakers) the talk is in German.

 

If you dislike YouTube, you can also watch and download the video here: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2016-1833-konferenzorganisation_101

Semantic MediaWiki - Making multiday calender events

I just introduced a calendar in my semantic media wiki using the calendar format of the Semantic Result Formats extension. This format works quite straight forward: You define which attribute (must be of date format) shall be used, and each entry having it is displayed in the calender with its page name as a link. You can also restrict the selection by category.

{{#ask:
[[date::>{{CURRENTYEAR}}-1-1]]
|?date
|format=calendar
|limit=400
|sort=date
|order=ascending,ascending
}}
Shows all entries with a date attribute since the first of this year (max 400 entries).

The only problem is that the calendar can just handle single day events. It does not anticipate an end date. In the web I found no easy solution, so I came up with my own. I used the recurring event functionality.

Talk: RocketScience and Software Engineering - A retrospect [German]

On an event called "Jugend Hackt" (Youth Hacking) I was invited to give an extended lightning talk about software engineering in the field of rocket science. The kids really enjoyed the talk and so I decided to hold it again in a lecture series called "Datengarten" (data garden). You can find a video of the talk here, but attention: It's in german!

Dynamic Delegates in PyQt4

I wanted to create a table allowing the presentation of and input for different attributes. This meant the table had to contain different input elements like combo boxes, lists, calendars, etc.. These could also occur together in one cell and act as one input element, i.e. to allow the user to extend an existing list (see "Ressource type" in the image below).

The framwork to be used: PyQt4.

The concept provided by Qt4 is to use delegates. These allow the developer to modify the behaviour from each cell in a table. The problem is that delegates only can handle one input element, not multiple.

SPARQLizer - Developing an Android App

Writing SPARQL queries is often no fun. They get long fast and complex too, latest if you start writing federated queries. On a desktop this may be sometimes annoying, but most people can handle it. But on a mobile device without a real keyboard and a small screen, writing queries is nearly impossible.

This is why I came up with the idea to write an Android app which supports you writing SPARQL queries.

First I looked what already is existing and stumbled over SPARQL Droid by David Read [Blogpost]. With this app you can create your own triple store on your phone by writing or loading RDF. It can also query this local or remote stores, but a support for the user writing queries is not in the focus of this app.

The main functionality of SPARQL Droid is based on AndroJena, a port of the Jena library to the Android platform. David Read wrote a nice tutorial how to use it which I used as the basis of my app SPARQLizer.

The current code can be found at github. Currently I am just implementing the most basic functions, like executing, storing and loading queries, and so on. If you want to contribute to the project or have any ideas regarding features, please let me know.