What I did in October

October in Galicia has a weather surprise for every week. I like it because every time the sun appears you feel like you gotta enjoy it – there might be no more until March.

I didn’t do much work on Tracker this month, beside bug triage and a small amount of prep for the 2.3.1 stable release. The next step for Tracker 3.0 is still to fix a few regressions causing tests to fail in tracker-miners.git. Follow the Tracker 3.0 milestone for more information!

Planalyzer

In September I began teaching English classes again after the summer, and so I’ve been polishing the tool that I wrote to index old lesson plans.

It looks a little cooler than before:

I’m still quite happy with the hybrid GTK+/webapp approach that I’m taking. I began this way because the app really needs to be available in a browser: you can’t rely on running a custom desktop app on a classroom PC. However, for my own use running it as a webapp is inconvenient, so I added a simple GTK+/WebKit wrapper. It’s kind of experimental and a few weird things come out of it, like how clipboard selections contain some unwanted style info that WebKit injects, but it’s been pretty quick and fun to build the app this way.

I see some developers using Electron these days. In some ways it’s good: apps have strong portabilility to Linux, and are usually easy to hack on too due to being mostly JavaScript. But having multiple 150MB binary builds of Chromium dotted about my machine makes me sad. In the Planalyzer app I use WebKitGTK+, which is already part of GNOME and it works very well. It would be cool if Electron could make use of this in future 🙂

Hydra

I was always interested in making cool visuals, since I first learned about the PC demoscene back in the 1990s, but i was never very good at it. I once made a rather lame plasma demo using an algorithm i copied from somewhere else.

And then, while reading the Create Digital Music blog earlier this year, I discovered Hydra. I was immediately attracted by the simple, obvious interface: you chain JavaScript functions together and visuals appear right behind the code. You can try it here right away in your browser. I’ve been out of touch with the 3D graphics world forever, so I was impressed just to see that WebGL now exists and works.

I’ve been very much in touch with the world of audio synthesizers, so Hydra’s model of chaining together GL shaders as if it was a signal chain feels very natural to me. I still couldn’t write a fragment or a vertex shader myself, but now I don’t need to, I can skip to the creative part!

So far I’ve only made this rather basic webcam mashup but you can see a lot more Hydra examples in the @hydra_patterns Twitter account.

I also had a go at making online documentation, and added a few features that make it more suitable to non-live coding, such as loading prerecorded audio tracks and videos, and allowing you to record a .webm video of the output. I’m not sure this stuff will make it upstream, as the tool is intended for live coding use, but we’ll see. It’s been a lot of fun hacking on a project that’s so simple and yet so powerful, and hopefully you’ll see some cool music videos from me in the future!

The Lesson Planalyzer

I’ve now been working as a teacher for 8 months. There are a lot of things I like about the job. One thing I like is that every day brings a new deadline. That sounds bad right? It’s not: one day I prepare a class, the next day I deliver the class one or more times and I get instant feedback on it right there and then from the students. I’ve seen enough of the software industry, and the music industry, to know that such a quick feedback loop is a real privilege!

Creating a lesson plan can be a slow and sometimes frustrating process, but the more plans I write the more I can draw on things I’ve done before. I’ve planned and delivered over 175 different lessons already. It’s sometimes hard to know if I’m repeating myself or not, or if I could be reusing an activity from a past lesson, so I’ve been looking for easy ways to look back at all my old lesson plans.

Search

GNOME’s Tracker search engine provides a good starting point for searching a set of lesson plans: I can put the plans in my ~/Documents folder, open the folder in Nautilus, and then I type a term like "present perfect" into the search bar.

The results aren’t as helpful as they could be, though. I can only see a short snippet of the text in each document, when I really need to see the whole paragraph for the result to be directly useful. Also, the search returns anything where the words present and perfect appear, so we could be talking about tenses, or birthdays, or presentation skills.  I wanted a better approach.

Reading .docx files

My lesson plans have a fairly regular structure. An all-purpose search tool doesn’t know anything about my personal approach to writing lesson plans, though. I decided to try writing my own tool to extract more structured information from the documents. The plans are in .docx format¹ which is remarkably easy to parse — you just need the Python ‘unzip’ and ‘xml’ modules, and some guesswork to figure out what the XML elements mean. I was surprised not to find a Python library that already did this for me, but in the end I wrote a very basic .docx helper module, and I used this to create a tool that read my existing lesson plans and dumped the data as a JSON document.

It works reliably! In a few cases I chose to update documents rather than add code to the tool to deal with formatting inconsistencies. Also, the tool currently throws away all formatting information, but I barely notice.

Web and desktop apps

From there, of course, things got out of control and I started writing a simple web application to display and search the lesson plans. Two months of sporadic effort later, and I just made a prototype release of The Lesson Planalyzer. It remains to be seen how useful it is for anyone, including me, but it’s very satisfying to have gone from an idea to a prototype application in such a short time. Here’s an ugly screenshot, which displays a couple of example lesson plans that I found online.

The user interface is HTML5, made using Bootstrap and a couple of other cool JavaScript libraries (which I might mention in a separate blog post). I’ve wrapped that up in a basic GTK application, which runs a tiny HTTP server and uses a WebKitWebView display its output. The desktop application has a couple of features that can’t be implemented inside a browser, one is the ability to open plan documents directly in LibreOffice, and also the other is a dedicated entry in the alt+tab menu.

If you’re curious, you can see the source at https://gitlab.com/samthursfield/planalyzer/. Let me know if you think it might be useful for you!

1. I need to be able to print the documents on computers which don’t have LibreOffice available, so they are all in .docx format.