Author: Kreijstal

Ember js as a web development framework. Open Event on the frontend side uses a framework called Ember-js, and it is very necessary to understand it, if one has to contribute to the frontend, otherwise it will be extremely hard considering how big and complex ember can actually be, this is a collection of quick facts I’ve collected about ember.js, knowing this might also aid you in contributing to open-event even faster! Ember.js is a very opinionated web framework that uses a lot of the new ES6/ES7 features that provides a MVC workflow for devs to create websites in a more organized way, and introduces many new concepts, into designing user interfaces. Ember.js is better to create webapps, as it is to create a blog for example. Since it uses the MVC perspective of creating user interfaces. Another point I can mention is that ember.js is very non-intuitive, it has a big learning curve, and that means, editing ember.js webapps has an investment cost for every person that wants to edit them. This is independently if they already have knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, the reason is, ember.js has its own internal language, so if you read the output of the code it generates, you’re obliged to learn how the entire system works. It works not very differently from a node.js application converted into web  (browserify), the HTML code the user agent downloads is very small, it downloads two javascript files, one just defines functions with all your user data, (your routes, templates, compiled handlebars files), and another one that controls the other, it has the virtual machine interpreter, and boots the website up so to say. And that’s mainly one of the reasons why big websites that use ember.js take so much to load. Because every time you enter the website you download the entire website in a single javascript file, (of course once it is cached this should be done quicker, so the first time will usually last very long compared to others), it isn’t surprising because most modern web frameworks actually do this. I think it’s very important to know some details about how this specific framework works. As for the user side (the developer) is pretty much wonderful. You have an application.hbs file where your main app (the main user interface) is there, and you can just use commands to generate routes, when you add routes and they’re not assigned to any parent, they’re added as “children” of the main app. Before we get lost in the new Jargon, let me explain quickly what a route is, when you’re visiting a website you have in your URL a path of the website to whatever current file you’re looking, every new URL you visit might get added on your history if you have it enabled, and you’re allowed to go back and forth in history!  Every address is also a part of the website, a website is traditionally organized as a file system structure, there are directories, and there…

Installing Open Event Server  I’m going to walk you through the process of installing Open Event Server and possible issues you might encounter, this will probably be helpful if you’re stuck with it, but most importantly in building some sort of installer as I’ve stated numerous times before. Requirements for its installation Debian based distro or unix-like with aptitude package manager Enough memory and storage, (depends on whether you put the database on your system or not) Knowledge of UNIX-like systems First, here are the commands, I tried to make them as easy as a copy-paste but it probably won’t work depending on it, so I’ll talk to you about what each thing does apt-get update apt-get install -y locales git sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 if [ -z "$LANG" ];then export LANG=en_US.UTF-8;fi export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive DEBCONF_NONINTERACTIVE_SEEN=true git clone https://github.com/kreijstal-contributions/open-event-api.git --depth=1 cd open-event-server #libffi6 libffi-dev apt-get install -y redis-server tmux libssl-dev vim postgresql postgresql-contrib build-essential python3-dev libpq-dev libevent-dev libmagic-dev python3-pip wget ca-certificates python3-venv curl && update-ca-certificates && apt-get clean -y service redis-server start service postgresql start cp .env.example .env #sed -i -e 's/SERVER_NAME/#SERVER_NAME/g' .env #The above was used because before the repository came with an annoying SERVER_NAME which only listened to localhost, so if you accessed with 127.0.0.1, it didn’t work #pip install virtualenv #python 2.7.14 #virtualenv . python3 -m venv . #pip install pip==9.0.1 source bin/activate #pip3 install -r requirements/tests.txt pip3 install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt #pip install eventlet cat << EOF | su - postgres -c psql -- Create the database user: CREATE USER john WITH PASSWORD 'start'; -- Create the database: CREATE DATABASE oevent OWNER=john LC_COLLATE='en_US.utf8' LC_CTYPE='en_US.utf8' ENCODING='UTF8' TEMPLATE=template0; EOF python3 create_db.py admin@admin.com admin python3 manage.py db stamp head python3 manage.py runserver   Ok, let’s start with the beginning, we assume here you know how to open a linux terminal, and that you’re on linux. Description of commands Updating the repo apt-get update Ok, so let’s start with some assumptions, you’re either on ubuntu, or debian, apt-get is on every debian-based distro, so you can do this on linux-mint as well, but if you’re using other distro you might have to consult with your package manager guide where to get the packets that are needed. Unfortunately the open-event-server has dependencies and in order to get them we’ve used the package manager of ubuntu, that means some packages might not be possible to be found on every distro, and there is currently not support for that. Installing git and sudo apt-get install -y locales git sudo Ok, let’s also assume you’re on a barebones ubuntu installation, as many people are so let’s work on some very basic requirements that you probably already fulfil, git is not installed by default, so here we install it, we also install sudo, and the -y flag is to avoid being asked for confirmation. Setting the locales locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 if [ -z "$LANG" ];then export LANG=en_US.UTF-8;fi Okay so basically some very bare bones linux distributions don’t have the UTF-8 locale enabled, here we generate it in case it hasn’t, and if the $LANG variable…

Voice Interfaces (This blogpost is based on a meetup that was held about voice interfaces). Evolution of User Interfaces From keyboards, to GUIs, to Touch, and now Voice! First we used punch cards to talk to machines, it was very costly and was used mostly as research, it was our first experience with machines. Perforated cards. At the beginning of computing we found the first large computers, huge and noisy boxes and complexity of management that only universities and large companies could afford to drive. How it worked is that you wrote your code and used a machine that punched holes through it and the machine would parse this data, convert it to its own internal representation and start a job for it, these machines were new and many people wanted to use it, so there were long queues in order to use these machines, it was very expensive, and difficult to use, there was no user interface design at all. And they were not designed for the public, so they didn’t have that in mind. Fortunately, it was evolving and access to them was increasingly common although they were still products mainly for work issues. They were years in which some punched cards were used to enter the different orders, it was not comfortable at all. But Xerox arrived and its graphic interface. An important leap when interacting with a computer because, so far, only through command lines could and should be an expert. Unfortunately few remember the people of Xerox Parc and their contribution to the world of information technology. Most think of Apple and its Macintosh or Microsoft and Windows 1.0 as the "inventors" of graphical interfaces. But no, it was not like that. What we can not deny to Apple and Microsoft, especially to the former, is their weight in the creation of personal computers and their democratization so that we could all have one. Then comes the command line Command Line (or CLI) It is an Interface, a method to manipulate written instructions to the underlying program below. This interface is customary to call System console or command console. It interacts with the information in the simplest way possible, without graphics or anything else than the raw text. The orders are written as lines of text (hence the name), and, if the programs respond, they usually do so by putting information in the following lines. Almost any program can be designed to offer the user some kind of CLI. For example, almost all PC games in the first person have a built-in command line interface, used for diagnostic and administrative tasks. As a primary work tool, the command lines are mainly used by programmers and system administrators, especially in Unix-based operating systems; in scientific and engineering environments; and by a smaller subset of advanced home users. To use a command line, you just need the keyboard, you type commands and the computer replies to those queries, it is still widely used today because it is…