Jure Cuhalev

Visualizing Slovenian coalition agreement

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 22:22:19 +0000

With the election of new Slovenian prime minister we also got formal release of a Coalition agreement. Since it’s a 72 page document, I was wondering what keywords would stand out. Here is the result:

Pogodba za Slovenijo 2012 - 2015 - word cloud (top 80 words)

While we’re at it, we can also take a look at the coalition agreement that Pozitivna Slovenija prepared. As we run them through the same process, we get:

Koalicijska pogodba - Pozitivna Slovenija - 2012 (top 80 words)

A few words on how to reproduce this:

Grab your favorite OCR software and convert scanned PDF into .docx
From Word save it into .txt file
Lemmatize the words so you normalize all the grammar rules
Apply stop-words (in this case mostly: ministrstvo*, vlada, slovenija*, ..)
Drop the resulting text into wordle.net

WebCampLjubljana Autumn 2011

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:30:08 +0000

Last weekend we finished latest addition to WebCampLjubljana series with another sold out event and with 160+ in attendance. We’ve had more than 20 talks and finished the day with a short series of lightning talks.

For this event I tried not enforcing any specific language of the talks, which in the end meant that we had most of the talks in Slovenian and Croatian and a few in English.

We’ve also switched to all digital cameras this time around and so we could release a nice archive of videos in just a week after the event: http://video.webcamp.si. There’s a surprising amount of work required to get such archive online.

Finishing off with a few pictures from Peter’s gallery and I hope to see you at the future events.

Rebooting the community

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:50:58 +0000

This year Kiberpipa will be 10+ years old and its’ event lineup is incredible. Over 350 events a year involving various talks, meetups, screening and everything. During this time a bunch of new technologies showed and demand for jobs as well as our interest shifted and I/we stared creating bigger and more exclusive events (as in: you can only attend if you speak).

It mostly worked, with limited success. What happens is that while the core members Kiberpipa and related communities are used to speaking and working out in the open, not everyone is. And we didn’t give new members of community a chance to slowly build up their involvement.

With this in mind, I’m hoping that we can get a few more meetups and events going where minimum level of involvement is a 15-min talk instead of a full 45-min lecture with all eyes on you.

Reverse Job Fair Slovenia – can we do it?

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 18:08:24 +0000

The word on the street is that there are more companies looking for employees than there are developers and IT geeks on the market. This means that the market balance is skewed and we need a reverse job fair.

In reverse job fair, the job seekers are presenting their projects and potential employers go around and try to sell their projects and jobs to them.

This is the theory at least. It works great in the Valley, but how about in Slovenia? The purpose of this post is to figure out if this is true also here.

If you would like to see such reverse job fair in Slovenia – Please fill in a survey.

Theme Hybrid is a better WordPress theme framework

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 01 May 2011 20:12:06 +0000

I recently had a chance to work on a number of WordPress related projects and I was pleasantly surprised as the platform had matured in every possible way since the early 2.x releases.

Today I just wanted to post a brief note to people who are still using random WordPress templates to base their derived templates on: please don’t do that to yourself. Most of the free themes are old, don’t have good customization options and are badly structured.

You’ll be much better off if you:

Read about Child themes - http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
Invest into a customizable theme – my preferred choice is Theme Hybrid but there are a number of other options. It costs 25USD/year to get access to support forums and tutorials that have saved me many hours of Googling.
Read their docs about how to override theme with custom style.css and functions.php

This means that you’ll often be able to make really great custom child theme with just a few lines of css and a few filters.

I

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 16:12:54 +0000

In my free time, I’m an Apple geek. This means that new OS X users come to me and ask me about essential apps for their shiny new Mac. After explaining to them that there is Microsoft Office for Mac and that they should chat using Adium, I try to sell them on idea of App launcher. Currently my tool of choice is Alfred App. I love it because it has a great personality, design and it works great (in that order).

It’s a helper app so you often don’t think about it, it’s just a quick Ctrl+Space away. After todays update, I’ve clicked around the preferences and discovered this gem:

They keep track of usage for me. Data geek in me is thrilled about this and I now also have a new argument for newbie OS X features – it’s that great that I run it on average 36.8 times a day!

Does your app give me such a great chart to share?

MobileCamp:Android – Ljubljana

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:34:04 +0000

If you’ve somehow missed it, we’re doing a MobileCamp targeted towards people who are involved with android (dev’s, marketers, etc.) – on 5th of March in Ljubljana. Do join us.

OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials book review

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 22:13:59 +0000

Guys at Packt Publishing were kind enough to send me a copy of their OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials book by Ruben Olsen to review, as I’ve written about OmniGraffle a couple of times and use it regularly.

While the book claims that it’s intended audience is everyone from novice to a pro. I’ve found it more suitable for novices that prefer to learn through user manual instead of exploring the real application and Googling for more complex solutions. The book covers all the parts of OmniGraffle, from creating basic diagrams, stencils, shapes and advanced editing tools. While I was familiar with most of the content in the book, the in-depth instructions with great screenshots still presented a few new tricks inside the application that I didn’t know that I miss – until now. Since OmniGraffle is available both in basic and Pro editions, they make sure to clearly mark if a feature is specific to Pro version.

If you have experience you’ll get through first two-thirds of 349 pages pretty quickly. The last third has best content, where author explains how to create great looking diagrams and organize your work as your files grow bigger. This is the point where I found a few aha moments as I didn’t even think to lookup advanced ruler and shape settings. There’s even a chapter on all the keyboard shortcuts that you can use, which while might sound geeky is something I’m definitely planning to learn in-depth to save time.

I’m not a big fan of books that basically cover all functions of user interface. That is why I appreciate example projects through which author shows how exactly are they useful for rapid prototyping of iPhone user interface or for creating boring workflow diagrams. I use OmniGraffle mostly for wire-framing, so creating a complex workflow diagram was something I always had problems with. The book explained all the possibilities and shortcuts nicely and even learned that it can create ideal distribution of objects on canvas for you.

If you care about your OmniGraffle skills check out their example chapter – Making your Diagram look good, which is one the best chapters in the book and very much suitable for pro users as well.

Overall, the book delivers on the promise – a bit for everyone and you can pick it up as a complete novice or if you’re a pro. I would recommend it to people who feel that they need to have a manual next to their application. If you’re a pro you’ll probably Google advanced topics as you need them as you already know most of the book.

Official page for OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials book.

I would also like to encourage Packt Publishing to figure out how to deliver their content to Kindle. I’ve read a few technical books on a Kindle while commuting and it was a real pain to get iPad just so I could read their digital PDF. Why not go with paper version? I’ve discovered that I can read Kindle version of a book in a week, that it took me a month for a paper version.

DjangoCampLjubljana – the day after

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 18:06:45 +0000

DjangoCampLjubljana was more of a micro-barcamp compared to 100+ attendees that we did before. It was also the first camp where more people showed up then signed up for tickets. So from initial 12 we ended up with about 16 participants. This turned out to be about the best size for such a group, so that everyone could hear everyone without having to use the microphone and we could have open discussion that mixed with presentations.

As for communication channel, we used EtherPad server and it worked great. There’s chat windows as well as collective note-taking editor that we used extensively. I can fully recommend setting-up dedicated EtherPad documents for each session track.

What did I personally learn from the conference?

Gunicorn is great for serving Django and I should learn it
Jinja2 is a great template engine, but is not compatible with Django’s
Django Forms are a big and complex topics that could do with better documentation.
If I ever need to build ajax projects – Dajax can help me
Django-history and Django-reversion can help with time based revisions of models.
AppEngine doesn’t solve any of my problems, but introduces many new ones.

Probably most important: Django community in Slovenia is growing and that everyone should join Django-slo mailing list to further participate.

Where not to illegally park in Ljubljana

Jure Cuhalev — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 23:19:32 +0000

Where in Ljubljana it’s most likely that your car will be towed away? In short: city centre, beginning of Vi? and around Metelkova.

Click for interactive version

or alternative visualization

Click for interactive version

Source of this data is page from Javni Holding Ljubljana that publishes your car info and the street it was towed away from. Gašper created Scraper wiki for it and is collecting data for last 3 months (aggregated source, if you want to reuse it).

Heatmap as a visualization technique was chosen because the data itself is very fuzzy (only street names are given, without the street number). It also tells you which neighborhoods to avoid.

If you want to help us bring more of such mashups into the world, please consider adding other sources of data into si.ckan.net. These pictures are end results of one such example where data was not hidden behind a telephone or a piece of paper (in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory behind a door that says “Beware of the tiger”).

Thanks goes to RTV Slovenia for hosting OpenData Hackday.