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Live broadcasts and documentation from a remote tech outpost in rustic Portugal. Sharing off-grid life, the necessary research & development and the pursuit of life, without centralized infrastructure.
Apollo-NG is a mobile, self-sustainable, independent and highly-experimental Hackbase, focused on research, development and usage of next-generation open technology while visiting places without a resident, local Hackerspace and offering other Hackers the opportunity to work together on exciting projects and to share fun, food, tools & resources, knowledge, experience and inspiration.
Another Hackathon-Weekend passed by and the DSpace-Client and its backends are really shaping up nicely. A lot of code was refactored during the weekend, taking full advantage of amd, backbone and ender now. The first real-time data sharing overlay was tested successfully as well, so we managed to get a lot of the basic features we imagine to have in DSpace working.
Due to the demo build deploy, the nodejs installation was updated to 0.8.17 but the etherpad-lite, which serves the Apollo-NG pads was too old for the switch. Etherpad-Lite was updated to latest, but the db-data of the old pads wasn't compatible to migrate from old format sqlite3 to new MySQL storage. All pads that weren't obviously marked as abandoned have been restored (content only - no history).
More people and groups like the MuCCC and RBOSE seem to have been using the Apollo-NG pads than expected 2 years ago. After 24 hours of downtime of the pads everything is up and running again, offering new features, like import/export functions and the ability to save revision points in the timeline. Since the data changed from sqlite to MySQL there should also be a small gain in performance and long-time reliability. Sorry for the inconvenience, hopefully, the new pads will run as stable for the next 2 years, as the other one did before.
If you are missing a pad or data from it, just drop a note. The data of the old pad will be stored for the next 14 days, afterwards it will be purged.
A lot is happening and a a few more people have started to contribute their time, skills and knowledge to push DSpace into the realm of reality.
Last Saturday, Niklas Cathor, also a strong supporter of federated technology, dropped by and joined the hackparty to just start hacking on moving us to amd.
Alice and elf-pavlik have continued working on DSpace, fixing a lot of issues and we moved the client to something almost usable. The UI will receive another major overhaul, targeting mobile usage on smaller screens with intuitive touch gestures instead.
It was great to be sitting in a bus and see the Tikiman (our current development mascot, representing the users location) move on the map. It will be even greater when we can share our positions and movements :)
Today a new tileset for Munich was put into production, which hopefully will make rendering on low end devices and small bandwidth connections even faster. The new map reduces the amount of data transfered to the client by over 60%. As always, you can see the development progress live on the demo-site:
After the fruitful session on the weekend, we used the opportunity of still being together in Munich to scheme up the new internal structure and models/views:
Changes in the develop branch to follow the new model are already underway and DSpace is now an official Apollo-NG R&D project, so everything will start moving into the dspace namespace from now on.