links for 2008-05-20

Integrating Rally with Trac

My company uses Trac as a ticketing engine and wiki and Rally for requirements management. We’ve been investigating ways to combine the two. (Of course, Rally has its own defect tracking system, but Trac is pretty well entrenched and integrates with our source repository.)

Rally provides a pretty well defined REST-based API, and much of their integrations are built using the RallyRESTAPI Ruby gem. So I went hunting for something comparable for the Trac side. It looks like Rtrac might be the way to go. One challenge is that the Rtrac documentation is scanty and it’s not clear how one might do an arbitrary ticket query (say, all tickets saved since a certain date). But we should be able to use some of the existing Rally integration examples to proceed.

links for 2008-05-19

The Fennell roast

Fennell, with iPhone and pipe, at the partyI had a bit of driving to do this weekend; I traveled from one Arlington to the other, from Massachusetts to Virginia, so that I could help Craig Fennell celebrate his impending nuptials. It was a great time, quite mellow as these things go. Lars Bjorn and his wife Erin were great hosts, and I got to spend time with quite a few folks I hadn’t seen in years (Kevin Dixon, John Duncan, Ananth Kadambi, Ben Johnson, Dan Roche, and even Guido Peñaranda) as well as some folks I hadn’t met (mostly the rest of Craig’s bandmates in Wonderjack, as well as his brother and sister). It was a great evening, and my only regret was that I had to drive sixteen hours (eight each way) to be there for only sixteen hours.

(It’s kind of funny that, even with gas at $4 a gallon, the car was still the cheapest way to go this weekend; $50 cheaper than Amtrak, $150 cheaper than JetBlue. I don’t think that will be the case for too much longer, though.)

Anyway, it was a great time and there was much reminiscing. I wasn’t in the VGs with Fennell, Dan, Ben, and Ananth, but had enough common experiences that we stayed up talking until late in the night about music. I’m looking forward to hearing the Imogene Heap cover that this year’s VGs did–we all passed around Fennell’s iPhone so we could hear parts of it, but I think it probably will sound better over speakers.

links for 2008-05-16

About today’s theme: Cutline

Cutline 3 Column WordPress ThemeI swear I’ll stop writing about the site soon, but right now the visual aspects are kind of front and center in my mind. Today’s theme is called Cutline, and it’s by Chris Pearson. It’s a very popular theme, currently number one at the WordPress themes site.

Things I like about it:

  1. Appearance: crisp, graphically well laid out, doesn’t use the Microsoft sans serifs (though I’m not crazy about Arial/Helvetica as they ship, and will probably make some tweaks here).
  2. Post layout: brings the interaction element right up top.
  3. Easy to manage.
  4. The headline image has interesting placement, the author has provided an easy way to randomize the headers, and the non-obvious image dimensions have made me think about how to pull details out of larger photos.

Things I don’t like:

  1. The typographic color is all off. The posts disappear in the middle of the page because the sidebars are so dark. Partly this is because of…
  2. The heavy use of horizontal rules as separators. The dark lines pull my eyes all over the place. And the bold Helvetica/Arial for the headline type in the sidebar is overkill.
  3. The title region plus the header image pushes the site pretty far down the page.
  4. Not liquid layout. I appreciate the fact that I don’t have to cram everything into one sidebar, but it makes the page harder to work from an information perspective, and it limits the resizing I can do. Plus the sidebars are sized in pixels, so that limits the amount of text resizing I can do.

I can fix #1 and 2, and have some ideas about #3, but #4 is something I’d rather not try to fix myself. I’ll have to see how other themes handle this issue.

Anyone have strong thoughts about this theme?

links for 2008-05-15

Adding Wikipedia articles to Google Maps

Google started baking some mashups into the main Google Maps interface earlier this week. As a Wikipedia editor, the one that intrigued me was the ability to hover over a feature on a map and click through to a related Wikipedia article. The question I had was, how do I change my article so that it appears on the map?

Fortunately, it appears to be a pretty simple process, with only one complicated bit, the first one:

  1. Find the place. That is, the place that the article is about. Google Maps is of course your friend here. Once you’ve found the location, double-click to center it in your browser.
  2. Get the coordinates.  This actually isn’t as hard as you might think, thanks (again) to Google Maps. The article Obtaining geographic coordinates provides some helpful suggestions, with a special section on Google Maps. I particularly like the bookmarklet provided, because it makes the workflow so simple–find the place as above, then use the bookmarklet to get the coordinates already in a template. Whatever your method, you’ll want to use the appropriate precision.
  3. Add the appropriate template to the article. There are a few different templates that add geographic coordinates to an article, and some Infobox templates (including Template: Infobox University) include a coordinate parameter. But if you use the bookmarklet I mentioned above, you get the coordinates handed to you in a coord template, which is the one you want to use for compatibility with Google. The only change I’d make is to add the display=title parameter, which floats the coordinates up to the top of the page.
  4. Set the template options. The two I recommend are display=title and type= the appropriate value; for a building, use landmark. This is important because it sets the zoom to the appropriate value.
  5. Preview, making sure to click through and check the map link, then publish.

As an example, I added coordinates to the article about the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Now the next question will be: how long does it take those coordinates to percolate over to Google Maps? I suppose we’ll find out.

Housecleaning

Still working on getting the new site up and running. I reinstituted the blogroll today, starting from scratch (it’s amazing how many links, old friends’ blogs particularly, have lapsed). If you’re reading this in RSS, you’ll have to go to the site to check it out.

I also removed the del.icio.us widget from my sidebar, because (drumroll) I was able to get their autoposting service to work. So that post with all the links? That’s my bookmarks from yesterday. Right now it’s set to fire daily between 6 and 7 pm, so you’re pretty much guaranteed that you’ll get a daily update from me, though it may not be my wittiest, wisest prose.

One downer: There doesn’t seem to be a way to format the posts. So you’re stuck with my unfiltered output and an ugly format. Maybe once I finish rebuilding the site theme the autoposts will start to look better.

links for 2008-05-14

Arlington infrastructure

Doc Searls has a nice photoset of Arlington’s infrastructure as seen from the most infra structure of all, the remains of the rail line that forms the Minuteman Trail. He also points to a blog about the trail that makes for interesting reading.

Doc and his commenters have done a lot of digging on Arlington history, and made some good observations about the town, such as the homemade curbing in many streets (legacy of our “private road” peculiarity).

Wiki barnraising

I’ve been a Wikipedia editor in earnest for almost a year now. In my focus area (articles about the University of Virginia) that’s mostly been a quiet, solitary pursuit–writing new articles, revising existing articles, reverting vandalism, but rarely interacting with other editors. I saw a hint of the social side of Wikipedia over the last two weeks that gave me a feeling for how the site’s creativity and collaboration works, at a very rapid pace.

It started for me with a notice on the Raven Society page, suggesting that the article be merged with one on collegiate secret societies in North America. I replied that the Ravens were hardly secret, and given their role in preserving Poe’s memory I thought they merited their own article, and that closed the matter. But I checked out the other article, curious to see how they handled the secret society problem.

(I also edit the list of secret societies at the University of Virginia, which is a pretty thankless job. Despite its “anyone can edit, anyone can improve” philosophy, Wikipedia has pretty strict guidelines for its editors, such as a strong preference for notable, cited content. This leads to an apparent oxymoron, gleefully cited by many contributors, who ask, “How can there be references for secret societies? Aren’t they secret?”, generally while adding “The Nougat Society” to the list. I ended up proposing and enforcing a rule that only societies that could be referenced to a publication could be on the page; “after all,” I wrote, “if the society makes so little difference to the University that even the Cavalier Daily won’t write about it, it isn’t notable enough to be in Wikipedia.”)

I found much the same issue on the collegiate secret societies page, and that the editors there had evolved a similar brightline to guide editing. But another editor had a more ambitious plan; rather than a simple list, he structured an article with sections for each of the schools with large numbers of societies, a general introduction, and a restrictive list of societies that had their own articles. With a number of sections already created, he threw open the floodgates and hung out an Under Construction sign.

I pitched in and wrote the UVA section. Others added too. In three days the basic article was complete in draft form, having gone through some fifty or so revisions by about 10 editors, and at least one good fight.

It’s a lot of fun to watch the process, and makes me think that a similar approach could work for other content, provided there are enough interested editors.

Beautiful day

It was an amazing weekend. I spent the last half of last week dying of some sort of cold/allergy–it was so bad that I think I was running a fever a couple of nights. But on Saturday morning I could move again. And it was a good thing: since it rained the whole previous weekend, my lawn hadn’t been cut yet and it was almost ready to start swallowing small dogs and children.

So I got the mower going for the first time in 2008. It was slow going; the grass was so long and heavy with dew that I had to empty the bag every two rows, and had to scrape the deck clean every four so that the blade wouldn’t get choked. But it was nice to start getting the outside of the house into shape again.

This should be a nice week. No Tanglewood commitments for a while, and I have a trip this weekend to DC to see Lars Bjorn and Craig Fennell, along with some other folks I haven’t seen in a very long time. The occasion: Craig’s bachelor party. Which, since we’re all in our late 30s, should be fairly mellow.

New mix: Picture of you where it began

pictureofyou.jpg
Inaugurating the new blog in style, here’s my latest mix, which started as a party and ended as a lullaby. Of course, the Art of the Mix service is down right now, but here’s a quick tracklist:

  1. Italian men, “Su Tenore A Ballu” (field recording)
  2. M.I.A., “Bamboo Banga”
  3. The Beatles, “She Said She Said”
  4. The Arcade Fire, “Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)”
  5. Vampire Weekend, “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”
  6. Beirut, “Elephant Gun”
  7. Guided by Voices, “As We Go Up, We Go Down”
  8. Elvis Costello, “Clown Strike”
  9. Talking Heads, “Stay Up Late”
  10. Grandpaboy, “Psychopharmacology”
  11. Elvis Presley, “Crawfish”
  12. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, “100 Days, 100 Nights”
  13. Bob Dylan, “Call Letter Blues”
  14. Sonic Youth, “Shoot”
  15. Black Angels, “You in Color”
  16. Mission of Burma, “Dead Pool”
  17. Radiohead, “House of Cards”
  18. Frank Sinatra, “Last Night When We Were Young”
  19. Duke Ellington, “The Controversial Suite (Later)”
  20. Low, “In Metal”
  21. Big Star, “I’m In Love With a Girl”

Copies to the usual suspects on request; just leave a comment. (Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say that!)

Update: Art of the Mix came back online sometime since I wrote this, so the mix is linked now.