This time, he’s announced the new version of WikiDashboard that pulls live data from Wikipedia using the Wikipedia Toolserver. Instead of a local copy of the dataset from Wikipedia (that is instantly out of date), this version queries the Wikipedia database itself.

This is especially exciting to me, since this is a lot of the code I worked on this summer, now in production. The activity graphs are now clickable – pulling you deeper into the context and timeline of the wiki edits of a page you want to explore.

This type of digging into historical versioned data will only become more and more common. We are generating versioned data all the time, and these views allow for critical analysis and sythesis as we move forward.

I’m proud to be a part of it. Let me know what you find using these new tools.

PARC / WikiDashboard

I had a wonderful time at PARC this summer. I worked with Bongwon Suh and Ed Chi in the Augmented Social Cognition group very closely and I feel we got some quality work done. I’d never been in a corporate environment myself before this summer, and while I realize that PARC is not the average corporate environment at all, I definitely have a newfound appreciation for the depth of knowledge and pace of development happening inside. PARC is a great place to work and I would highly recommend their summer intern program.

Daily Porsche Count

One of my developed habits while being in the Bay Area this summer consisted of counting the number of Porsches I saw each day. The Daily Porsche Count, at first, was just a joke as I realized I’d seen three or four in about fifteen minutes my second or third day out there. I was living in Palo Alto and also spotted a Maserati, multiple Lotuses (Loti?), a couple Lamborghinis (one red, one yellow), and of course, the latest entrant, the Tesla. (The Tesla showroom actually went up while I was there, and they are incredible (both the showroom and the cars). )

Over the summer, I realized I had started counting the Porsches every day – and the average was definitely around 4 or 5. But sometimes I’d reach that quota before breakfast. It was a rare day I saw zero. The biggest Porsche Count was 21, the day I rode my bike across the Golden Gate Bridge and over into Tiburon.

The other interesting observation was that on the way home, via L.A. and Tucson, the Daily Porsche Count dropped (as expected). What was unexpected was that the Daily Corvette Count increased proportionately as we headed to L.A.

Additionally, the only Porsche I saw on the drive back to NC was painted on a barn in Kentucky advertising a no-longer-in-business pit stop down the road.

Follow-Up: I saw four yesterday in and around Chapel Hill. Maybe I’m a little more tuned to their existence now…

Wedding

I mentioned it above, but hadn’t mentioned it before – I’m getting married.

This takes over your life for a short while. There are lists upon lists. Spreadsheets and registries. Deadlines, supplies, and shipping. Gifts, Flowers, Suits, Photos, Dress, Vows. What a process.

Good thing we’ve been working together for a while. We have a fairly fine sense of our strengths and weaknesses, tone and timbre.

1 barn. 233 confirmed family and friends. Many cakes. A few surprises.

What fun.

Tahoe Hackfest

A couple weeks ago I attended the Allmydata.org Hackfest (5th in a series, as I understand it). Zooko and Brian Warner hosted a few people at the allmydata.org offices and fed them pizza and code. Adam Langley spoke about his recent posting of Obfuscated TCP. Oskar Sandberg talked about his current work proving some of Freenet’s original routing code was mathematically efficient. David Molnar shared his current PhD work at Berkeley (metafuzz and catchconv), which are used to find bugs in programs.

I don’t pretend to understand all of what happened in front of me at the hackfest, but I know that I’m definitely putting the next Hackfest on my calendar and going if possible. The pizza was good and I really like having conversations with people who know their math.

DiSo / Drupal

Within a week or so of the Hackfest, I found myself headed back up into the city for dinner at the DiSo / Drupal meetup. The conversations were not as directed as I’d hoped, but I met some interesting people. Chris Messina, Will Norris and Kieran Lal held court at one end of the table, and I talked with Andrius Kulikauskas, Neil Drumm and Dan Kurtz down on the other end. I think DiSo is poised to become as big as microformats are today – and eventually become the standard for how we’ll interact as individuals (I’d say “online” here, but I think it’s more than that). I cannot wait to have my people in my pocket – XMPP and OAuth enabled – making recommendations and filtering out the noise. Please get here soon.

WikiDashboard

Unrelated to the city of San Francisco, I’ve been at PARC for two months now, and I’ve finished my first milestone. The WikiDashboard code I’ve been working on shipped today. This is a big deal for me since just a few short months ago I saw it on the internet for the first time and thought it was a really cool project. Now, I’ve contributed my own code – and even got paid! A neat trick.

The last month and a half have really been a blur. Let’s see if we can work out why…

PARC
I met Ed Chi at ASIST last October when he hijacked a panel with his very interesting work on WikiDashboard. I had seen the work already and knew enough about it to approach Ed and pick his brain about how I could collaborate with the project. In December, while in Mountain View for IIW again, I made an appointment to visit PARC and see how things worked inside a research center famous for many years for doing cool things. I left with the plan to apply for a summer internship working under Ed in the Augmented Social Cognition group on WikiDashboard itself. In the Spring, I heard that they really wanted me and I made the decision to be in Palo Alto for four months. I’m thrilled with the work I’ve been doing for the past four weeks and the people I’m working with. There is quite a bit of interest in wikis and other collaborative tools in ASC and I am very pleased to be in the middle of it. I hope to be able to share a bit more about what I’m working on when the time is right.

Drive to California
Of course, after making the decision to be in California for the summer, I needed to work out how that was going to happen logistically. The decision was made to drive and so, for six days, many miles were covered, a sister was visited, and lots of money was spent on gasoline. All in all, a grand success – and one I look forward to duplicating on the way home in early September, except for the gasoline part.

IIW 2008a
Already being in Palo Alto, it was very easy to join in the semi-annual gathering that is the Internet Identity Workshop. This was my fifth(?!) and again, it was great to sit and talk with the people building this next generation of technologies. The climate has shifted even more now to business models and reputation – a far cry from the spec discussions and interop demos from only a year or two ago. I spent an afternoon talking with Eugene Eric Kim, yet again, and still find him one of the most compelling people working in this space. He’s got projects around the world and he’s excited about how these technologies are helping groups get their stuff done.

Park Alumni Society
Speaking of groups getting their stuff done – I’ve been in a heavy development cycle in the last couple of months. I’ve written more code and pushed more new features into production in the last 7-8 weeks than any time since writing claimID. I am the president of an alumni group at NC State and run our intranet and web presence as well. We recently added a unified login to our forums and wiki and the new application that runs the Park Office’s interactions with the scholars themselves. The effort required to network across classes and facilitate communication should go way down. I’m very happy with the result and hopefully I can start to sleep a little more soon.

Park Scholarships
The Park Scholarships itself is undergoing some change. The director of the scholarship has announced her decision to take a new position, and after eleven years, we need to find a new leader. I have been asked to be on the search committee by the Chancellor and I hope we can help deliver a candidate who can fill the rather large shoes being left behind in August.

ClaimID
ClaimID is getting some development love itself this early summer (in between rigorous interviews). Fred and I are integrating a new authentication mechanism into the mix. It works by selecting images instead of typing passwords. Watch this space as we work out all the kinks and make a new shiny thing.

iPhone
And with all of that, I’ve finally found the need to enter the modern world of telephony. I bought an iPhone before the trip out west, and have been thrilled at how much it’s changed my daily interaction with the information around me. Numbers, addresses, internet, camera, music, podcasts, calendar, maps – it’s in my pocket and it syncs with the stuff I already had. Very cool. Highly recommended.