Month: February 2017

Social Media Research Toolkit

Social Media Research Toolkit — a list of 50+ social media research tools curated by researchers at the Social Media Lab at Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University. The kit features tools that have been used in peer-reviewed academic studies. Many tools are free to use and require little or no programming. Some are simple data collectors such as tweepy, a Python library for collecting Tweets, and others are a bit more robust, such as Netlytic, a multi-platform (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) data collector and analyzer, developed by our lab. All of the tools are confirmed available and operational.

Via Four short links: 14 Feb 2017.

GitHub starts the Open Source Guides

GitHub blog is “Announcing Open Source Guides“:

we’re launching the Open Source Guides, a collection of resources for individuals, communities, and companies who want to learn how to run and contribute to open source.

[…]

Open Source Guides are a series of short, approachable guides to help you participate more effectively in open source, whether it’s:

  • Finding users for your project
  • Making your first contribution
  • Managing large open source communities
  • Improving the workflow of your project

These guides aim to reflect the voice of the community and their years of wisdom and practice. We’ve focused on the topics we’ve heard about most, and curated stories from open source contributors across the web.

I think it’s a great idea and I really like the execution too.  Most of what I know about Open Source comes from years of participation, and from reading old books, manuals and licenses – not something that is easy to share with people who are just getting their feet wet.

GitHub’s Open Source Guides are very simple, concise and specific.  And they cover a variety of subjects, not just the legal or technical side of things, but also communications, support, marketing, etc.

Fixing outdated Let’s Encrypt (zope.interface error)

I’ve started using Let’s Encrypt for the SSL certificates a while back.  I installed it on all the web servers, irrelevant of the need for SSL, just to have it there, when I need it (thanks to this Ansible role).  One of those old web servers needed an SSL certificate recently, so I thought it’d be no problem to generate one.

But I was wrong. The letsencrypt-auto tool got outdated and was failing to execute, throwing some Python exception about missing zope.interface module.  A quick Google search brought this StackOverflow discussion, with the exact issue I was having.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/letsencrypt", line 7, in <module>
    from certbot.main import main
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/certbot/main.py", line 12, in <module>
    import zope.component
  File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/zope/component/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
    from zope.interface import Interface
ImportError: No module named interface

However, the solution didn’t fix the problem for me:

unset PYTHON_INSTALL_LAYOUT
/opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto -v

Even pulling the updated version from the GitHub repository didn’t solve it.

After poking around for a while more, I found this bug report from the last year, which solved my problem.

I recommend:

  1. Running rm -rf /root/.local/share/letsencrypt. This removes your installation of letsencrypt, but keeps all configuration files, certificates, logs, etc.
  2. Make sure you have an up to date copy of letsencrypt-auto. It can be found here.
  3. Run letsencrypt-auto again.

If you get the same behavior, you can try installing zope.interface manually by running:

/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/pip install zope.interface

Hopefully, next time I’ll remember to search my blog’s archives …

Update (May 31, 2017): check out my brother’s follow up post with even better way of fixing this issue.

Morphos – morphological solution in PHP for English and Russian

If you ever had to deal with morphology in English, you probably found one or two libraries to help you out.  But if you had to do that for Russian, than I’m sure you are missing a few hairs, and the ones that you still have are grayer than they used to be.  I’ve got some good news for you though, now there is Morphos (GitHub repository).

Morphos is a morphological solution written completely in the PHP language. Supports Russian and English. Provides classes to decline First/Middle/Last names/nouns and generate cardinal numerals.

Just look at this beauty!

var_dump($dec->getForms($user_name, $dec->detectGender($user_name)));
/* Will produce something like
  array(6) {
    ["nominativus"]=>
    string(8) "Иван"
    ["genetivus"]=>
    string(10) "Ивана"
    ["dativus"]=>
    string(10) "Ивану"
    ["accusative"]=>
    string(10) "Ивана"
    ["ablativus"]=>
    string(12) "Иваном"
    ["praepositionalis"]=>
    string(15) "об Иване"
  }
*/

Just this alone can make user interfaces and emails so much better.  But there is more to it than that.