Category: Geek

The presentation I was going to do at NDF

Unfortunately I had to pull out of doing my lightning talk at NDF, I simply didn’t have the time to be able finish what I was going to present. I felt it was better to pull out than do something that wasn’t up to scratch, not really fair on the conference attendees otherwise.

But I still think the idea has some merit, so here is a snippet of the unfinished, rough edged, cut down for youtube, thing I was going to present

Massive thanks to Andrew Caudwell who writes Gource, without which this would not be possible.

It’s running circulation data with 1 minute = 1 day, but it’s equally interesting running a bit slower. There is a lot more I wanted to do, like using the actual book covers, visualising more data, like acquisition, and cataloguing .. tracking an item throughout its life. All of which is easily doable, just with more time.

Anyway, I hope people get something out of it.

What am I doing over summer?

Basically I had lost track of all the presentations I had committed myself to giving, so wanted to note them down here so I don’t do that again.

I don’t think I have missed any, if I have please tell me 🙂

UPDATE: I did forget one, added now

Brain dumping after Auckland Libraries’ Youth Hui 2013

So last week I had the pleasure of attending a hui organised by the Auckland Libraries. The full title is ‘New Rules of Engagement: Future Directions for Children’s and Youth Services at Auckland Libraries’, subtitled ‘A hui of awesome awesomeness’. It certainly was awesome, unfortunately I could only stay for 1 day of the 2 day hui, but I did get to hang out with some librarians and some of other speakers the day before it.

I was on a panel about digital spaces for children and youth, I talked mainly about the OS Academy we run here at Catalyst, and how successful that is  in engaging youth. There were quite a few questions during that panel discussion and during lots of other ones, and it sparked some ideas, so I am going to write them down here before I forget them.

  • A FLOSS Academy for Librarians – this came from a question where the asker said something to the effect ‘How do we know what we don’t know?’ I think an academy modelled after the academy we run for High School students would be a great way to expose people to a lot more that is out there.
  • Everyone seems to agree that there is much more to librarianship than what you can learn in an academic course, but there was no real agreement on how to balance that with the fact that payscales are often tied to said courses. Some places you can’t even be called a librarian without them. Professionalism destroying artisanship again?
  • Fun is fun, and the key to engagement, dress it up however you like but this seems to be what it boils down to.
  • An idea I had for next year would be a ‘Spectular fails’ session. All the ideas you had that went horribly wrong. These are massively useful learning tools for others.
  • In the same vein, how about a fails track at LIANZA sometime. Fail often and fail loudly 🙂

That’s about all I can remember, it was a great conference, one I would be keen to attend again. Much thanks to all the organisers and attendees

 

Blog stats from 2012

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 8,100 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 14 years to get that many views.

In 2012, there were 62 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 272 posts.

The busiest day of the year was December 12th with209 views. The most popular post that day was RDA Support in Koha.

Read the full report

Yes, you should rewrite it. NO! Not like that!

Something I hear and have heard a lot in my life as a programmers is

We should rewrite this, I have no idea what it is doing

Now, your instinct to rewrite is almost always the correct thing to do, but almost always the implementation is wrong. Why is this? Well it’s because of the same reason we want to rewrite it, we don’t know what it is doing. So often we end up causing regressions, or accidentally leaving features out.  How do we get around this? This is where I stand up and go to put on a broken record. The answer is unit tests, in fact ask me anything I’ll probably say unit tests.

  • “How do I make Koha do this?” “Well first you write a unit test and then …”
  • “I want to change this template” “Have you run the xt/tt_valid.t on that?”
  •  “Want some coffee?” “Is it unit tested?”
  • “Where’s the remote?” “Oh, I wrote a unit test for that.”

But seriously, if we invest time in writing tests, forcing us to learn the behaviour of the current implementation, we can then make sure our refactor/rewrite still passes these tests. We can also make sure any new behaviours we add have tests written for them too, after having to implement tests to test existing code, writing tests before writing the code seems a lot nicer.

I’m sure this is new to no one, and I’m really writing it as a reminder to myself, but hopefully it may be some help to others too. Go forth and refactor/rewrite  🙂

Effective communication aka making your point without being a jerk

It seems like common sense, but all too often in the tech sphere people forget a really simple rule.

It doesn’t matter how correct you are if the way you communicate only serves to alienate those you seek to persuade.

Koha has fortunately been quite lucky in this regard 99% of the people involve understand that the project is about far more than code and that people are what really matters.

But it can happen anywhere even occasionally with Koha. It’s even more unfortunate when it is a goal people agree is well worth it. So people agree with the message but the delivery of it only serves to make people less likely to listen.

Unit testing in Koha

There are currently 9229 unit tests in Koha, that is up from 8200 when 3.2.0 was released (15 months ago). So in the last 15 months 1009 unit tests have been added to Koha.

Well done to all those people adding tests, the coverage is slowly climbing, and errors are  being caught before release time.  So if you want to contribute to Koha, but don’t know where to start, write a unit test, we’ve had 14 year olds do it 🙂

Signoff Statistics for January 2012

In January 2012, 82 bugs were marked signed off, here are the people who signed them off.
  1. Jared Camins-Esakov – 14
  2. Chris Cormack – 13
  3. Nicole C. Engard – 9
  4. Katrin Fischer – 8
  5. Owen Leonard – 8
  6. M. de Rooy – 7
  7. Liz Rea – 4
  8. Jonathan Druart – 3
  9. Gaetan Boisson – 3
  10. Paul Poulain – 3
  11. Julian Maurice  – 2
  12. Aleksa – 2
  13. Magnus Enger – 1
  14. Christophe Croullebois – 1
  15. Duncan – 1
  16. Mason James – 1
  17. Koustabha Kale – 1
  18. Melia Meggs -1

Statistics for 3.6.3

Koha 3.6.3 (the latest stable release) was just released. Here are the statistics for it
  • Processed 137 changesets from 35 developers
  • 14 employers found
Developers with the most changesets
Chris Cormack 15 10.9%
Katrin Fischer 14 10.2%
Owen Leonard 12 8.8%
Duncan Tyler 11 8.0%
Paul Poulain 10 7.3%
Frédéric Demians 8 5.8%
Marcel de Rooy 7 5.1%
Chris Nighswonger 6 4.4%
Jared Camins-Esakov 6 4.4%
Adrien Saurat 5 3.6%
Ian Walls 5 3.6%
Chris Hall 4 2.9%
Connor Dewar 3 2.2%
Sophie Meynieux 3 2.2%
Henri-Damien LAURENT 2 1.5%
Nicole C. Engard 2 1.5%
Magnus Enger 2 1.5%
Liz Rea 2 1.5%
D Ruth Bavousett 2 1.5%
Julian Maurice 2 1.5%
Marc Balmer 2 1.5%
Garry Collum 1 0.7%
Dobrica Pavlinusic 1 0.7%
JAMES Mason 1 0.7%
Sam Sanders 1 0.7%
Jesse Maseto 1 0.7%
Admin User Koha 1 0.7%
Fridolyn SOMERS 1 0.7%
Albert Oller 1 0.7%
Christophe Croullebois 1 0.7%
Alex Arnaud 1 0.7%
Frère Sébastien Marie 1 0.7%
Frédérick Capovilla 1 0.7%
Tomas Cohen Arazi 1 0.7%
Srdjan Jankovic 1 0.7%
Developers with the most changed lines
Frédéric Demians 137880 97.8%
Chris Cormack 737 0.5%
Chris Nighswonger 404 0.3%
Owen Leonard 204 0.1%
Paul Poulain 200 0.1%
Henri-Damien LAURENT 195 0.1%
Katrin Fischer 182 0.1%
Adrien Saurat 171 0.1%
Magnus Enger 131 0.1%
Jared Camins-Esakov 112 0.1%
Duncan Tyler 109 0.1%
Marc Balmer 102 0.1%
Marcel de Rooy 74 0.1%
Srdjan Jankovic 72 0.1%
Alex Arnaud 51 0.0%
Tomas Cohen Arazi 43 0.0%
Nicole C. Engard 33 0.0%
Frère Sébastien Marie 33 0.0%
Connor Dewar 29 0.0%
Julian Maurice 18 0.0%
Ian Walls 15 0.0%
Chris Hall 10 0.0%
Christophe Croullebois 10 0.0%
Frédérick Capovilla 10 0.0%
JAMES Mason 8 0.0%
Sam Sanders 8 0.0%
Sophie Meynieux 7 0.0%
Albert Oller 6 0.0%
D Ruth Bavousett 5 0.0%
Dobrica Pavlinusic 5 0.0%
Liz Rea 2 0.0%
Garry Collum 2 0.0%
Admin User Koha 2 0.0%
Fridolyn SOMERS 2 0.0%
Jesse Maseto 1 0.0%
Developers with the most lines removed
Paul Poulain 160 0.1%
Alex Arnaud 48 0.0%
D Ruth Bavousett 3 0.0%
Developers with the most signoffs (total 339)
Chris Nighswonger 131 38.6%
Paul Poulain 87 25.7%
Chris Cormack 40 11.8%
Katrin Fischer 35 10.3%
Liz Rea 7 2.1%
Nicole C. Engard 6 1.8%
Ian Walls 4 1.2%
Marcel de Rooy 4 1.2%
Owen Leonard 4 1.2%
Frédéric Demians 4 1.2%
Koustubha Kale 3 0.9%
Jared Camins-Esakov 3 0.9%
Duncan Tyler 2 0.6%
Magnus Enger 2 0.6%
Stéphane Delaune 1 0.3%
François Charbonnier 1 0.3%
Gaetan Boisson 1 0.3%
Federico Rinaudo 1 0.3%
MJ Ray 1 0.3%
Frère Sébastien Marie 1 0.3%
Julian Maurice 1 0.3%
Developers with the most reviews (total 0)
Developers with the most test credits (total 0)
Developers who gave the most tested-by credits (total 0)
Developers with the most report credits (total 0)
Developers who gave the most report credits (total 0)
Top changeset contributors by employer
Catalyst 26 19.0%
Biblibre 25 18.2%
(Unknown) 18 13.1%
BSZ-BW 14 10.2%
ACPL 12 8.8%
ByWater-Solutions 10 7.3%
Tamil 8 5.8%
Rijksmuseum 7 5.1%
C & P Bibliography 6 4.4%
Foundations 6 4.4%
Libriotech 2 1.5%
BigBallOfWax 1 0.7%
Libeo 1 0.7%
KohaAloha 1 0.7%
Top lines changed by employer
Tamil 137905 97.8%
Catalyst 833 0.6%
Biblibre 684 0.5%
Foundations 429 0.3%
(Unknown) 274 0.2%
ACPL 204 0.1%
BSZ-BW 184 0.1%
Libriotech 131 0.1%
C & P Bibliography 112 0.1%
Rijksmuseum 74 0.1%
ByWater-Solutions 56 0.0%
BigBallOfWax 55 0.0%
Libeo 10 0.0%
KohaAloha 8 0.0%
Employers with the most signoffs (total 339)
Foundations 131 38.6%
Biblibre 91 26.8%
BSZ-BW 35 10.3%
Catalyst 33 9.7%
(Unknown) 14 4.1%
ByWater-Solutions 10 2.9%
BigBallOfWax 8 2.4%
Tamil 4 1.2%
ACPL 4 1.2%
Rijksmuseum 4 1.2%
C & P Bibliography 3 0.9%
Libriotech 2 0.6%
Employers with the most hackers (total 37)
(Unknown) 11 29.7%
Biblibre 8 21.6%
Catalyst 4 10.8%
ByWater-Solutions 4 10.8%
Foundations 1 2.7%
BSZ-BW 1 2.7%
BigBallOfWax 1 2.7%
Tamil 1 2.7%
ACPL 1 2.7%
Rijksmuseum 1 2.7%
C & P Bibliography 1 2.7%
Libriotech 1 2.7%
Libeo 1 2.7%
KohaAloha 1 2.7%

 

Sign off statistics for December 2011

In December 2011, 146 bugs were marked signed off. Katrin asked me if I could run some statistics on the signoffs, so here goes.

  1. Chris Cormack – 68
  2. Katrin Fischer – 28
  3. Nicole Engard – 9
  4. Owen Leonard – 9
  5. Duncan – 7
  6. Liz Rea – 7
  7. M. de Rooy – 4
  8. Jared Camins-Esakov  – 2
  9. Francois Charbonnier – 2
  10. Koustubha Kale – 2
  11. Magnus Enger – 2
  12. Frederic Demians – 1
  13. Frere Sebastien Marie – 1
  14. Sophie MEYNIEUX – 1
  15. Alex Arnaud – 1
  16. Marc Balmer – 1
  17. Jonathan Druart – 1

If people find this useful I’ll run them again at the end of January, the aim being to get more people signing off, and a more even spread.