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Spring is for Speaking: JSConf, WordCamp SF, IACL

mitcho — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:37:04 +0000

I recently confirmed three different very exciting speaking gigs which I’ll be doing this spring:

JSConf.us:

I’ll be putting my Mozilla Jetpack Ambassador hat on to represent Mozilla Labs’ Jetpack project at the premier Javascript conference in North America, JSConf.us, which this year will be April 17-18 in Washington D.C. and has a pirate theme.¹ I’ll be giving a short talk in the main session and will also lead a hands-on Jetpack workshop in the hacker lounge. I’ve heard that JSConf is a lot of fun and I’m really looking forward to it!

WordCamp San Francisco:

I’m honored to have been invited to give a talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2010. WordCamps are community-organized events for the WordPress community, and the San Francisco WordCamp is the original and biggest. WordCamp SF will be at the Mission Bay Conference Center on May 1st. Tickets available.

My talk is tentatively titled “Abstract Your Code.”² WordPress is a great platform to build amazing content-rich applications on, and many of us have written new functionality in the form of plugins. I hope to encourage developers to make their code more portable and reusable after the project is done—or, ideally, to even start with abstraction in mind—to add to the “life” of the code and to consider then open-sourcing that functionality.

Hope to see you there!

International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL) 18:

Finally, I’m thrilled to say that I got a paper accepted to the annual meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics which this year is at Harvard on May 20-22. IACL is the big conference for Chinese linguistics, with about 180 papers presenting. I’ll be presenting Two Onlys in Mandarin Chinese, my recent work on the formal syntax/semantics of two only words in Chinese: zhǐ (只) and éryǐ (而已). I’ve put up a handout of some of this material in work-in-progress form which I recently presented at SNEWS.

I’ll fit right in. ↩
Sexier title suggestions welcome. ↩

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Jetpacking in Boston

mitcho — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:19:06 +0000

A couple weeks ago I gave a talk at the Boston Javascript meetup introducing Jetpack and filling people in in the latest developments in the project, including the Reboot. Between 20 to 30 people came to the talk which was at Microsoft Cambridge. Here are the slides from the talk:¹

Extend the Browser with Jetpack

I felt the audience was very engaged and we had almost a dozen questions in the question period and throughout. Most of the examples centered around the use of capabilities and the new security model. For example:

What level of granularity will the manifests have? Do you have to just say “I use xhr” or “I talk to twitter but not facebook”?
What will be the review process for capabilities?
What license will capabilities use?

Perhaps I simply did not present this material in the clearest manner (it didn’t help that I didn’t have any particular slides covering the capability and manifest model) but it also reflects the reality that these particulars of the manifests’ security sections are still being fleshed out. I’m looking forward to the next time I speak on Jetpack when hopefully the discussion of the Reboot will be more concrete and I’ll be able to give a clearer overview and demo of these aspects of the Reboot.

If anyone would like the Keynote deck, just let me know. ↩

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Mashing up the browser in Maine

mitcho — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:00:32 +0000

Last week I was invited to give a talk at the TechMaine annual conference in Portland, Maine.

Being a longer time slot than I previously have used to talk about Ubiquity, I decided to dedicate a good portion of the talk to Jetpack. Being outside of Mozilla for the past few months, this gave me an opportunity to get reacquainted with the Jetpack APIs. I myself was impressed by how easy it was to develop a quick Jetpack. I ended up preparing two to live-code during the talk: one called Helvetica which, with one click, replaces all fonts on the current page with Helvetica; and You Are Here which uses an open API from IPinfoDB to display the physical location of the domain you are currently visiting in the status bar. Both are now on the Jetpack Gallery.

Unfortunately there was a bit of a snowstorm leading up to the event, but there was still a nice turnout and I got to meet some fantastic people there. Ken Shoemake of slerp and quaternion fame came up to me after my talk and said “the Ubiquity parser reminded me of the dancing bear… it’s less surprising that it works well as that it works at all.” I also enjoyed the other great presentations in the technology track, covering the virtues of REST and basic iPhone development.

Mashup the Browser with Ubiquity and Jetpack

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Extending WordPress talk at the Boston WordPress Meetup

mitcho — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:40:19 +0000

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Boston WordPress Meetup. The Boston WordPress Meetup meets monthly at the Microsoft Cambridge Research Center which is a fantastic venue right on the Charles river. Last night we got to be up on the 10th floor which has a great view of Boston right over the river. There was pretty good turnout, with about thirty or fourty people there.

My talk was a general introduction to WordPress plugin development, beginning with the concepts of actions and filters, and concluding with a description of HookPress, my new plugin which enables webhooks in WordPress. Here are the slides:

Extending WordPress with (Web)Hooks

View more documents from Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine.

The talk included some live coding which is always dangerous, but it all went off without a hitch.

Kurt Eng was kind enough to get video of the talk as well which hopefully we’ll get up on wordpress.tv in the near future. Bryan also sent me a link with some photos on Flickr.

Thank you to all who attended¹ and of course to Microsoft who provided the venue and food! The Boston WordPress Meetup is a great community and I hope to keep supporting it and its activities.

For anyone who attended, I would greatly appreciate feedback on the talk at SpeakerRate. ↩

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Talking Ubiquity in Japan: 拡張機能勉強会にて発表

mitcho — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 02:29:30 +0000

Yesterday I presented on Ubiquity internationalization and the new parser design at the Mozilla Extension Development Meeting (Japanese), a community event organized by some extension developers in Japan. There were a couple other Ubiquity-related “lightning talks” as well, so I’ll summarize some of the interesting ideas from those talks below.

昨日第11回Mozilla拡張機能勉強会で Ubiquity の国際化と次世代パーサについて発表してきました。色々鋭いコメントをいただき、僕も良い勉強になりました。^^ スライドの方をslideshareに載せたので、是非参考にまた見てみてください。ライトニングトークでも Ubiquity の話で盛り上がったので、そのLTの内容で特に面白いと僕が思ったものを下に英語でちょっとまとめてみます。

Mozilla Ubiquity の国際化と次世代パーサ

mar of Japanese SuMo fame (not that sumo) presented on his foray into the development of an improved Japanese parser based on Jono’s. One interesting approach his parser took was to split up the input on delimiters like commas and parse each “clause” and then combining the arguments for one execution. This allows certain types of fronting constructions. For example:
```
...を   送って、 dynamisに
...-NOM send, dynamis-to
```
“To dynamis, send …”
This type of input, aside from being pretty natural in Japanese, has the advantage of offering the parser an unambiguous argument parse within each clause, cutting down on the possible ambiguities.

mar’s discussion, however, also naturally touched on the limitations of the current NLParser implementation, making localization of individual commands and the suggestion of verbs quite difficult.
Hitoshi SASAKI of the Sasaki Lab at Takushoku University discussed some possible applications of Ubiquity in an educational context. In particular he demoed a `hiragana` command which takes some sentence in kanji and rewrites it in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic alphabet. What’s more, the command lets you specify the appropriate grade level for the substitution, making it appropriate for elementary school kids and non-native speakers alike. Sasaki thought the ability to access this kind of functionality right from the content page was of great benefit to this application.

Thanks to dynamis for supporting my Japanese presentation and making this happen! ^^

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