Although things have been slightly hectic, I’ve still had some great chances to get in touch with the great outdoors. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been on a number of hikes and trips to the beach. Here are some photos (click for a brief description and full-size download):

I have a *ton* of blog posts I want to get done by the end of the year. I may spend some of my supposed down time fleshing out my fountain of ideas. Stay tuned!

Many of my posts the last few months have been geared towards Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Semantic Wikis. Since I last posted about Vannevar Bush’s vision for a Personal Memex, I decided to focus my efforts on building an impressive personal travel journal, and share the results to illustrate the capabilities of a Memex.

What’s this Memex thing all about?

While the process for setting up a Personal Memex can be quite involved, the idea is fairly simple. My memex is a personal semantic wiki that exists for the sole purpose of centralizing my research notes, learning activities, personal journals, and allows me to easily retrieve important data and memories that I enter into the system. My memex is built entirely from existing open source projects, and essentially runs MediaWiki (the wiki software used for Wikipedia) with a number of Semantic extensions, and a few extensions I have written for myself. The Personal Travel Journal is a single integrated feature and section of my Personal Memex.

Motivation

Although you can’t exactly call me a world traveler, I’ve gone on my fair share of trips in the last decade, and have spent a lot of time visiting my friends and family on the east coast. Since I purchased my first digital camera in 2000, I’ve literally taken thousands of photos and videos. And, back in 2005 I started keeping a written journal of the places I visited (family visits, weddings, vacations, weekend getaways, cruises, business trips, etc.) So far I can account for at least 60 major trips.

Ultimately, I wanted to have a central place to store all the details of the my travels (dates, places, people), And, have a nice personal (private) website where I can view photos, videos, maps, and comment on each trip. Sadly, for many people, as time passes memories of trips and events can often fade. With the help of the Memex, forgotten memories will be a thing of the past.

What can the personal travel journal do?

At first glance, the travel journal may look like a plain old webpage with some embedded photos. But, it’s much more powerful than you might expect. Here’s what you can do in a nutshell:

• Semantic markup and searching
• Visual timeline browsing
• Easy embedding of photo and video slideshows

Semantic Markup and Searching

This is arguably the most interesting and powerful feature of my travel journal. With the help of the Semantic MediaWiki extension, adding Semantic capabilities to a wiki makes browsing and searching a breeze. What does semantic mean in this case? Many wikis such as Wikipedia have tremendous amounts of text for each article, and in many cases you can find what you’re looking for doing basic searches (via Wikipedia or Google). However, it becomes *much* more difficult to easily issue a single query/search that asks:

“Show me all philosophers living between 1800-1850 who were born within 50 miles from Weimar, Germany and who published more than 6 books”

Unless you have a Ph.D in philosophy AND are a wizkid with Google searches, chances are you’ll spend a better part of a day doing research to find this answer. Thankfully the type of searching and browsing I’ll need to do for my travel journal is much more simplistic. Nevertheless, adding semantic details for each trip greatly helps with indexing and organizing. I’ve added the following semantic information:

• Trip start date
• Trip end date
• Trip location – Major city
• Travel destination – Important place, landmark, or area within the trip location
• Person – who was there

How does this work exactly? Like most wikis, each travel journal entry contains simple text with some basic wiki markup. In order to indicate that a particular piece of text is Semantic, you simply add some markup around it. For example, once added to a travel journal entry, the article will semantically come to life:

[[Location::Key West, FL]]
[[Person::Eric]]
[[TravelDestination::Duval Street]]
[[TripStartDate::2008/04/12]]

Now I can do searches that let me easily show all trips within a certain date range. Or, I can query for trips based on location or people who were there (Ex: Show me all trips between 2002-2004 where I was in Florida and my wife and I visited a beach, or for that matter Show me all trips where I was on a beach).

Although adding the semantic markup is fairly straight forward, it can become very tedious to remember the exact fields names and required fields for each travel journal entry. Thankfully a MediaWiki extension called Semantic Forms drastically simplifies this process. All I needed to do was create a template with the required fields and markup, and then let Semantic Forms create a new form for me. Now, whenever I want to add or edit a travel journal entry, I simply click a link and fill out a regular web form.

Since the journal entry is now created with the special markup, each article will show the semantic details:

And, I can easily search and create index pages that will show all relevant trips:

Visual Timeline Browsing

With the placement of my semantic trip details and SIMILE Timeline, I can easily browse and locate any trip.

I can drag or click anywhere on the timeline and instantly view my travel journal entry. Seeing all the trips on a single timeline also greatly helps with discovering where entries are with relation to each other.

Easy Embedding of Photo and Video Slideshows

This was actually a *huge* undertaking. It took me a little over a month to consolidate all of my photos and videos, and find a web-based solution for easily embedding multimedia slideshows into my wiki. I originally blogged about my search for flash-based slideshow software back in June, and have since picked SlideShowPro as my solution. I created a simple PHP Mediawiki extension and Perl webservice to dynamically locate my photo and video albums on disk, and generate the appropriate gallery and slideshow. I’ve organized all of my media into folders based on the date/time. So, all I need to do is edit my travel journal entry and add the following markup:

=== Photos ===

<embed_slideshow>
id=1
album_name=Dixie and Chan,Key West Day 1,Key West Day 2,Naples
album_path=2008/04-13-2008,2008/04-14-2008,2008/04-15-2008,2008/04-16-2008
</embed_slideshow>

Once added and loaded, the slideshow extension will process each album name and dynamically generate thumbnails and download links complete with media info.

What’s Next?

I’m really happy with the results so far! Not only do I have all of my photos and videos organized for the last 10 years, I’ve managed to fill out almost all of my travel details for close to 60 trips. I can safely say that the semantic browsing and searching capabilities helped my ability to recall, re-enforce, and write down many of my memories. The power of association is really amazing!

At this point, my Personal Travel Journal portion of my Memex is nearly feature complete. What are some other features and possible uses? I’ve already started experimenting with Google map integration for some trips.

Right now this is a manual process of adding latitude and longitude details. However, I can envision the ability to enhance this with geocoding/geotagging information of location details inside JPG using EXIF. Using my GPS and geotagging software, I’ve been able to automatically encode lat/long info inside each picture (Using RoboGeo for example). It would be great if I could dynamically pull the lat/long info outside of each picture and plot on a map for each journal entry.

This is only the beginning, so stay tuned in the future for new developments!

I just recently bought a new camera (my old Canon Powershot A610 display died). The replacement (a major upgrade really), is the Canon Powershot G9. I’m hoping to take some great shots on this trip…. but I do need to learn how to work the camera first

I’m still working on wrapping up my photo album from the trip. But, thought I would share a photoset that I uploaded to FlickR. These pictures are taken primarily at the Airport mesa and Bell Rock trails.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/56683314@N00/sets/72157600284885041/show/

The panaramic is a beautiful 360 degree picture at the top of the airport mesa.

Here’s a summary of the last few sessions I attended:

Developing Rich Domain Models

Chris Richardson, consultant and author of the book Pojos in Action, discussed how to implement a domain model using POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). I read Chris’ book late last year and overall was very satisified with it. In fact, I would highly recommend this book to anybody who wants to get an intro to peristence (Hibernate, JDO, Ibatis), Spring, and find out how to model their presentation and business tiers. Definitely fantastic! The session today covered many of the topcs from the book, and it was good to have this knowledge reinforced.

Benefits of the Build: A Case Study in Continuous Integration

Kirk Knoernschild, gave a great intro talk on the benefits of implementing continous integration. Here’s some more info:

Agile processes such as XP and RUP advocate continuous integration, where shorter iterations produce an incremental and functional growth of the system. The fundamental component of any continuous integration (CI) strategy is an automated and repeatable build. In addition to ensuring your application is always in a functional state, a robust build strategy enables a number of other important lifecycle activities.

War Stories: Fighter Jets and Agile Development at Lockheed Martin

Michael Zwicker, an Agile architect at Lockhead Martin gave a fantastic talk on how Agile methodologies were implemented at his company. This gives a shot in the arm to anybody who is hesistant about trying to go Agile. If it can work at Lockhead, a traditionally waterfall-heavy company, it can work in yours to. Other topics included key value expected and realized, barriers to initially implementing agile and how they were overcome, barriers to further agile adoption, and the value of training and agile tooling.

Michael also recommend an Agile tool that managed the project backlog: VersionOne

Highlights of the day

* After lunch I decided to walk outside for a little bit. I discovered a trail right beside the conference center called the San Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, and had a relaxing 45 minute walk.

* I discovered that the Hyatt right beside the convention center has a “Virtual Concierge” (I’m not kidding). Check out the link.

Transitioning to Agile: A Guide to Good Practices in Context

Michael Cohn, from Mountain Goat Software, gave an excellent presentation on how to introduce an agile process into a company. Michael dispensed some great tips on building teams, picking the right project for making the transition, and dealing with resistance. You can download the presentation and a related PDF on his website:

Transitioning to Agile: A Guide to Good Practices in Context

Introducing An Agile Process to an Organization

One particualr topic that Michael discussed really got my attention. While dealing with resistance and change, there is a popular model that can be used: CDE (Container, Differences, Transforming Exchanges). From the seminar

Self organization (CDE Model)
Container
A boundary within which self-organization occurs (company, project, team, city)
Differences
There must be differences among the “agent” acting in our system
Technical knowledge, domain knowledge, education, experience, power, gender
Transforming Exchanges
Agents in the system interact and exchange resources
Information, money, energy (vision)

I’m fascinated with the topic of change and system models, so I dug a little deeper and found some references to a new field called HSD (Human System Dynamics). The Human System Dynamics FAQ says:

Human systems dynamics (HSD) is an emerging field of research and practice that applies principles of complexity, nonlinear dynamics, and chaos theory to the study of groups of humans as they live and work responsibly in teams, organizations, and communities.

Google turned up a related paper on HSD and CDE titled: After the Dance with Whole-Scale Change(WSC) PDF. I plan on researching this further.

Scrum: A Five Letter Word Geeks to Need Learn

Michael Vizdos, a certified Scum trainer, gave an informative overview of Scrum. Prior to the session I had only briefly heard about Scrum, and by the end of the talk I felt that I had taken away quite a bit to think about. According to Wikipedia, Scrum is:

“… intended (for) use is for management of software development projects, and it has been successfully used to “wrap” Extreme Programming and other development methodologies. However, it can theoretically be applied to any context where a group of people need to work together to achieve a common goal – such as setting up a small school, scientific research projects or planning a wedding.”

When asked how Scrum differs from other Agile methodologies like XP, Lean, Crystal and others, here was the explanation:

- Scrum is more of a project management methodology, not software development. Scrum does not dictate how software is constructed.

- Scrum is a great into methodology. Once roles are defined and teams are built, many companies pickup some other methodologies (like Crystal Clear)

- Scrum is also used in other domains (sales, marketing, and program management)

There is also a more detailed process flow for Scrum in the Scrum (development) article on Wikipedia. Here are the highlights from that article:

“Scrum assumes that the software development process is complicated and unpredictable and treats it as a controlled black box instead of a theoretical, fully defined process. This is one of the biggest differences between Scrum and the Waterfall and Spiral methodologies, which view the software development process as a fully defined process. Most problems encountered when using these older, formal types of methodologies are :

* Requirements are not fully understood at the beginning of the process.
* Requirements change during the process.
* The process becomes unpredictable when new tools and technologies are used.

Another characteristic of Scrum is that the software development process isn’t treated as a linear process, unlike the Waterfall, Spiral and Iterative methodologies. In a lot of cases this linear process consists of the following four activities: Analysis, Design, Implementation and Testing. Scrum, however, doesn’t prescribe a sequence in which the activities must be implemented. A project can start with any activity, and can change between activities at any time. ”

Core Models and Patterns of Web 2.0 – What They Mean to Architects

The final highlight of the day was the informal “Birds of a Feather” gathering at the end of the day by the poolside at the Hyatt. James Ward, Flex evangelist for Adobe, lead a discussion with a group of about 15 people focusing on patterns and trends of the Web 2.0 phenonemon. Discussions focused on security, identity, trust, multi-platform architectures (ESB, MVC, RIA). Overall, it was a great chit-chat and lots of fun.

Overall, the day turned out to be fun and very informative! The SDExpo conference focuses on many areas of the software development sector: Java/C++/.Net, Web 2.0, process and people management, the business of software, testing, development methodologies, architecture and everything in between.

My main focus for this conference is on People, Process & Methods. But, I did attend some more techy presentation and picked up some great information. Here are some of the more interesting things I learned:

Combining Flex and Ajax to Overcome Browser Limitations

James Ward, a technical evangelist from Adobe Systems, gave an informative and compelling talk on the benefits of mixing Flex (Flash) and Ajax. I haven’t dug into Flex as of yet, but did learn a bit about it from this article a couple months ago:

How and Why AJAX, Not Java, Became the Favored Technology for RIAs
http://ajaxworldmagazine.com/read/333329.htm

Here is a description of Flex from this article:

“Flex is a way to develop Flash applications by programming. It includes a declarative XML language called MXML for laying out user interfaces, and a programming language called ActionScript, which is a superset of ECMAScript (that is, standardized JavaScript), with extra features like optional static type checking……. Flex applications compile directly into SWFs (Flash binaries), which are then Just-In-Time (JIT) compiled by the Flash runtime, for extra speed.”

James demonstrated quite a few visually impressive “Web 2.0″/RIA (Rich Internet Applications) that showcase what the next generation of web applications are starting to look like. Gone are the days of boring static HTML pages, tons of page reloading, and user boredom. Technologies like Flash, Flex, and Ajax are beginning to make web applications like like traditional desktop programs (and better in many cases).

Two particular things that interested me where the announcement of Adobe’s Apollo desktop engine, which allows web developers to create rich web applications and run them on the desktop (Windows and Mac, and Linux is forthcoming). And, an interesting benchmark application, that illustrates the different technologies that are used to transmit information between client and server. XML, SOAP, JSON, and a new binary protocol from Flash that appears to be significantly faster than the rest.

Crystal Clear: A Human Powered Methodology for Small Teams

Alistair Cockburn (Pronounced Co-Burn, the Scottish way) gave a great lecture on the Crystal family of development methodologies. I’ve just started my journey looking into Agile development (XP, Agile, Lean, Scrum, Crystal) and I have to say that the Crystal approach looks very promising. Per Wikipedia:

Crystal Clear is a member of the Crystal family of methodologies as described by Alistair Cockburn and is considered an example of an agile or lightweight methodology.

Crystal Clear can be applied to teams of up to 6 or 8 colocated developers working on systems that are not life-critical. The Crystal family of methodologies focus on efficiency and habitablity as components of project safety.

Crystal Clear focuses on people, not processes or artifacts.

Crystal Clear contains the following properties (the first three are required):

* Frequent Delivery of Usable Code to Users (required)
* Reflective Improvement (required)
* Osmotic Communication Preferably by Being Co-Located (required)
* Personal Safety
* Focus
* Easy Access to Expert Users
* Automated Tests, Configuration Management, and Frequent Integration

Key Note: Why Software Sucks

David Platt gave an enjoyable, comedic, and sobering lecture on the topic of his book of the same name:

Why Software Sucks…. and what you can do about it

From David’s website, here is an overview:

A Book for Anyone Who Uses a Computer Today … and Just Wants to Scream!

Today’s software sucks. There’s no other good way to say it. It’s unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It’s unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it’s hard to use, requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations.

It’s no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or for personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that’s the case and, more importantly, why it doesn’t have to be that way. And he explains it in plain, jargon-free English that’s a joy to read, using real-world examples with which you’re already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do about this sad state of our software—how you, as an informed consumer, don’t have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out.