Cope with Complexity a community notebook on the deepamehta software platform

Dear DeepaMehta Friends,

today is the first day after the maneuver in hannoever where some of us were demoing DeepaMehta’s latest features and connected the young DeepaMehta Society to the outer world. This took place during the last week at the Open Source Lounge from Linux Magazine, CeBIT’09. For some of us it was the first time at an event of this size and we felt very honored to stand side by side with all these big projects. We are looking forward to see how many new connections overlast the mixed up philosophical, technical small talk but some of our visitors have been really amazed by the work that let us, as such a small community, provide such a powerful tool. We definetely made some new friends during a CeBIT in 2009 , which in this year, some of the yearly visitors described as a bit ailed and the organizers themselves titled with “crisis ! chance !”

Since we hold up high our spirit of optimism during the last 9 years and still developing a more useful tool for end users of information technology, we always look at the chances and never speak of crisis. Ready to shake hands with strangers and our bright shiny smile of confidence may have won us some praise as one of the very few innovative software approaches at this event. We have a user centred perspective on our displays and you can follow some of our most up to date approaches (just in german language) at our three, soon to be released video recordings from the Linux Magazine. We will link them in right here.

For us it was great to met up with some people of other software projects who are not based in Berlin and who visited our demo point for a conversation.  Also it was of great value for us to watch and listen to experienced enterprise players from germany and other countries across europe. Us was affirmed more than once that DeepaMehta and it’s approach isn’t just ahead of our time when we think of semantic desktops, also when we think of authoring and publishing content into maps and topics accessible through the web. Additionally it was also nice to hear from some of our long time followers that they were very happy to look at the latest improvements on the way to setup DM, to take it away as a platform independent application on their portable memory and are able to do so with the help of an one-click installation.

A special thanks for all the people who supported us and made this event happen ! Nice greetings to all people who are following us for quite some years now and want to support and work hand in hand with us, in the very near future. We are also looking forward to hear from those of you who read or heard about our approach for the first time through this big event and it’s media coverage.

It’s hard not to cover all of the nice experience we had during these exciting days, but maybe you can help us and our readers with that if you share your story about our meeting on the web and spread the word.

Cheers !

Dear DeepaMehta Friends,

i kindly invite you to the first DeepaMehta Chat on Sunday at 12o’clock for lunch (at Berlins GMT +1)

Just open up the DeepaMehta Chat Topic out of the DeepaMehta Shared Workspace in your Topic Map Selector. If you are already logged in to deepamehta.de this screenshot helps youto find the right one, just if you really don’t know what i am talking about. With this, i try to help everyone to get started

Our Topic is “Cleaning up in collaboration”. The results will be awesome!

Looking forward to chat with you,

Malte

The last release is now over 2 years old and since the yesterday, the 1st november 2008, we are happy to provide you the beta 8 release packaged and served to you from the community. Yesterday we had a nice ubuntu release party here in berlin and we were happy that jörg provided the listening audience something what Thilo called a more “brain candy” session in contrast to the mostly “eye candy” slides of the other desktop folks.

Here’s the new release, that’s all i wanted to say.

Intrepid Ibex Release Party with DeepaMehta, starting at 6pm.

Jörg was asked by Clemens, if he would like to contribute a short Session about the DeepaMehta Semantic Desktop Vision on upcoming Saturday, 1st November at the c-base. I will be there, too. We thought of finalizing our release too. Since a long time i also want to provide some Drag & Drop Flavours from Ubuntu cause i really want that feature working with my local installation. So check out the wiki for more, there will be also some news about the new KiezAtlas coming soon. Yesterday i produced three Screencasts which try to show the Workflow of a Kiez-Administratar while brainstorming new Scenarios and GIS-Layers, pretty cool “Visual Programming” in KiezAtlas 1.6.2

By the way, i am in love with pointing out so: If someone would like to extract the ShapeTopics out of the KiezAtlas Project into a custom DeepaMehta Application for drawing new Topic Visualizations right in the current Client, i would prepare a perfect dinner for him with “all inclusive” drinks.

About the Wiki & First Screencast

We choosed a new Welcome Page for our wiki and started to prepare the next user meeting at TU berlin. For this evening i tried to give a short introduction about the different types of topicmaps which represent three types of working context in deepamehta.

About the future of the Addon: LaTexTopic

The sources for the custom implementations for the LateX Topics are on their wiki page. The problem with an exec started from java in it’s own thread remains as long as their are three files involved in making a png icon for dm. I think enrico mentioned another tool at the last community meeting which directly converts a tex file into png, in my map i found a tool named tex2im. I will give it a try cause this would enhance the usability of the current LateX Topic, very much.

Feel free to contribute some points on our agenda for the next meeting at 22 or 29.10 in the atomic cafe.

Dear physicist, mathematicians, typesetters and DeepaMehta Friends all over the world interested in knowledge mapping software! Here is your Topic Map Interface with LaTeX Formula support.

Excuse the bad quality. Just the minimum to see but the to maximum to hear

Video file is linked in here (.ogg – Video) (OTR-Example)

I am very happy since i found here another interesting posting
and finally looking forward to hang out at the atomic cafe

The Server

The DeepaMehta Server will hopefully be online very soon. The formalities are clear now but there’s a lot work to do for the newthinking team and we don’t have that a high priority in their current timetable, which is understandable but actively restraining access for some interested people, who wants to inform themselves about deepamehta framework. I uploaded the Article “Another computer is possible” into the wiki for making it available again. It is the latest publication about DeepaMehta.

The Introduction Event

At the last “Introduction Evening” there was a small meeting, cause leck of visitors. Some supporting voices for a possible foundation sat in and we spoke about short time goals. Here are some of those,

Good news is, that Jörg will try to publish the final release within september, you are invited for the last testing round explicitly, This should be celebrated with a nice release party and this would be the basement for some next step like a possible community mailing to all our users who wrote to us, cause they want to use deepamehta in their current work.

Also the restyled KiezAtlas was delivered for the Berlin Project goareas. Thilo proposed to write a KiezAtlas “User Case Study”.

We thought to open up the really traditional “introduction event” (where i also joined the community) from a moderate one, to something like a “regulars”-table.

One of the next informal meetings will take place in september at the TU in the Atomic Cafe and a possible developer meeting about some web service questions in the same weeks, feel free to join.

Nice greetings!

And thanks to Urs, pointing me out the very low-cost multi-touch pointing interface with a wii controller. Jakob has already a java port of a wiimote-lib running with opengl i will stick to him for introduction. 40 euros for the controller and one self made led-pointer should be sufficient. Wow,that amazed me nearly as much as flowmenu’s from winograd et al.

to those who haven’t recognized it yet, our collaboration demo server on deepamehta.de and the whole project page is down. the mail-accounts, wiki, blog and repositories are not affected. at the moment we are not able to name you a date to which those services are available again. the problem seems to be a new network card which had to be installed from the provider but the resp. driver (viarhine) is not running with the current server os.

hopefully online soon again,
your deepamehta project

at least i still have some club mate! excuse for the leck of updating everyone but for me typing into a keyboard is currently much healthier when it’s done one-handed. that’s why i am writing caseinsensitive oh that was the shift-key

we are currently using our mailing lists for discussion and want to ask you for the most important feature for the uber-release which means in german; “der übernächste”

dear visitor, for you there is a poll going on. please give us your vote. here is no barack/mccain election, no politics, but you can wish yourself some code for a new desktop! whatever you can imagine. multiple selection is possible.

[poll id="2"]

today i am going to write the last stupid university test, think what? it is about old school business fundamentals for decision makers . update:luckily i am through this now and it was like expected: stupid boring wish-wash talk. but now finally, i have weeks to give! especially thanks to the old school business makers who made this possible!

further updates

• small infotouch export app. is completed and will be released this wednesday
• latex2png is my next commitment. availale until the beginning of august
• tutorial production is sleepy, cause leck of story writing

but whats next?