http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog TWiki - the Open Source Enterprise Wiki and Web 2.0 Application Platform used by millions en-us Copyright 2012 by contributing authors Peter Thoeny [peter09@thoeny.org] The contributing authors of TWiki TWiki http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog http://www.twiki.org/p/pub/TWiki/TWikiLogos/T-logo-140x40-t.gif http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201201x2 On Tuesday I was asked if TWiki.org was going to participate in today's blackout campaign to protest against SOPA and PIPA, the legislation to combat piracy currently in discussion in Washington DC. I first intended to just add a yellow box on the homepage asking to contact a representative to oppose these legislative bills, because they would censor the Internet and stifle innovation. There is a lot of coverage on the issue. I found these two most striking: 1. TED talk by Clay Shirky: Defend our ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2012-01-19T07:46:45Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201201x1 Great work, TWiki.org team! Year over year you create rock solid code. You guys rock! We just released TWiki 5.1.1 aka Istanbul Release. A big THANK YOU to everybody who contributed to this release! And special thanks to our release manager GeorgeTrubisky who built this release. We invite developers who appreciate to work on quality code to join us, get involved! TWiki 5.1.1 is now available for download from the http://twiki.org/ website. This is a patch release that adds some minor new features ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2012-01-16T23:57:42Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201112x1 TWiki as an enterprise wiki is frequently used across many teams in an organization. Over time more and more content is maintained in TWiki. Teams use many other enterprise systems in their daily activities, such as bug trackers in Engineering, CRM and ERP systems in Sales, and inventory systems in IT. With this there is a need to make these systems talk to each other. When an enterprise wiki is used as an intranet it lends itself to become the platform to glue these enterprise systems together. ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-12-21T01:34:37Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201111x3 CERN, the Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research. At the European Laboratory for High Energy Physics, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator is colliding beams of protons at energies of 3.5 TeV, recreating conditions close to those at the origin of the Universe. The four main LHC experiments, Alice, Atlas, CMS and LHCb are complex detectors with millions of output channels. These experiment detectors, large as cathedrals ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-11-15T01:17:37Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201111x2 Sometimes it is desirable to export TWiki forms based data from TWiki applications. CSV (comma separated values) is a simple file format that is widely supported by many applications, including spreadsheet programs such as Excel. This blog introduces the CSV format and explains how to generate a CSV file on the fly in a TWiki application. The CSV format is not clearly defined, there is no real CSV standard. In common usage almost any delimiter separated text data may be referred to as a CSV file ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-11-14T23:57:48Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201111x1 I gave two technical sessions last month at the Valley Code Camp, one on How to Run a Long Background Process in a Web Application, the other one on How to Create a TWiki Application. Video blogger David Spark of Media Solutions and Dice interviewed me about real world examples of enterprise collaboration. I mentioned two TWiki related examples. David Spark interviewing Peter Thoeny: Two Adopted Real World Solutions for Enterprise Collaboration. David Spark: Collaboration across the enterprise is ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-11-01T08:06:39Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201110x3 Yesterday I attended a Rajeev Circle event at Stanford University. Professor Rajeev Motwani was an extraordinary connector between Stanford University and the entrepreneurial world in the Silicon Valley and beyond. The Rajeev Circle meets regularly to further his legacy in the areas of science, mentorship, investment and philanthropy. In yesterday's meeting we had the honor of getting advise from Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, Ron Conway, super angel of the Silicon Valley, and others ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-10-28T16:19:13Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201110x2 Want to surprise your friends on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus? How does this work? The text appears to be upside down (flipped), and it is possible to paste it into text boxes on Facebook and other websites, even though there is no such thing as an upside down character set. Some drawing programs offer text rotation, but that is handled at the application level. So how does upside text work in normal text input fields? Most websites nowadays support Unicode, which is a universal standard to represent ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-10-20T17:13:12Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201110x1 At Twiki we are fortunate to have a large and active base of users. Due to the long term success of the TWiki open source project, we estimate about 50,000 teams use the collaboration platform world wide, across Fortune 500, Governments, Universities, and SMB. One of the perks of selling enterprise software is the opportunity to meet a range of great customers using our technology in interesting ways. This blog is a shortened version of a Inc blog. Recently a VP of IT at Morgan Stanley submitted ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-10-06T17:29:12Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201109x3 This is an advanced topic that teaches how to to parse nested tree structures such as programming languages and spreadsheet formulas using regular expressions in Perl. The article is generic enough to be used in other languages that support regular expressions. expressions are very powerful to parse and modify text. They are also very fast to process large text over and over again. For example, the TWiki engine makes heavy use of regular expressions to turn TML (TWiki Markup Language) into HTML. ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-09-17T05:48:30Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201109x2 Web applications need to respond quickly to user actions. From a usability point of view, anything that takes longer than a second or two will distract the user from the task at hand. What can be done if a process takes longer, or much longer? When I implemented the BackupRestorePlugin I realized that taking a backup of a midsize TWiki site can take many minutes, which is too long for a web page to load the browser might even time out. Here is what should happen as seen by the administrator who ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-09-22T01:33:15Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201109x1 TWiki has a reputation of being difficult to upgrade. The TWikiUpgradeGuide describes how to upgrade TWiki, which is a manual and elaborate process that can take a long time. No more. TWiki has now a point click solution to upgrade a TWiki site with the help of the latest BackupRestorePlugin released on 2011 09 05. The plugin can be installed on older TWiki releases as low as TWiki 2001 09 01 (Athens Release) to easily create a backup that can be restored on a new TWiki release. On restore it is ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-09-07T02:42:37Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201108x1 New TWiki 5.1 release for enterprise collaboration with primary focus on usability for non technical users. TWiki's user base consists of millions of users on 50,000 installations in over 130 countries, backed by an open source community of hundreds of contributors and 50,000 twiki.org users. On behalf of the TWiki.org community I would like to announce the general availability of TWiki 5.1 Community Release. The primary focus of this release is usability enhancements, such as point and click user ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-09-07T02:41:54Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201106x1 First, what is Long Tail? From Wikipedia: "The Long Tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a 'normal' or Gaussian distribution. The Long Tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy." In statistical terms, the horizontal axis of the graph represents a sorted data set ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-06-04T07:28:15Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201105x3 Over the last decade I have seen organizations change fundamentally by applying wikis and other social media technologies at work. I was recently invited to speak at a panel on "Social Business as the New Organizing Principle" organized by Bay Organizational Development Network (OSBN) on 2011 05 02 where we talked about the paradigm shift social media brings at the workplace, some of which I am sharing here on twiki.org with a broader audience. Key point: Organizations that adopt social media internally ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-06-04T03:36:38Z PeterThoeny http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/BlogEntry201105x2 I recently installed TWiki in the cloud, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I am sharing my installation experience for all to enjoy. EC2 is part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing users to rent virtual computers on which to run software. EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications by providing a Web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to create a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing an operating system and any software desired ... - last change by PeterThoeny 2011-05-28T22:46:45Z PeterThoeny