Technical Ramblings

Went to BarCampBoston today. Took Schuyler, Jo, and Gregor with me. Had a great time, the venue provided by Monster was absolutely incredible in a lot of ways. I’d really like to thank the people at Monster for their time and effort pulling things together: everything at the conference *just worked*. (It’s like it was a mac or something!)

Schuyler and I gave a presentation on mapping on the web, centered primarily around OpenLayers and the uses for it:

Ever since Google first ’solved’ interactive web-based mapping for the masses, providing an API to put your data on top of, people have explored the space at an ever increasing rate. From Google Maps Mashups to all new datasets created out of the existing data, and hacked into that ever-lovable interactive mapping interface, people are creating new, exciting, and sometimes even innovative ways of looking at existing data.

Come discuss the things you’ve done with maps, the things you’re doing with maps, and what you think of the ‘mapping revolution’. See what alternatives there are to Google… and why you might not want to be quite so dependant on the corporate data silos.

The links which were shared during the meeting are available from my BarCamp Presentation page.

If someone sets up a way for me to obtain, nightly, the worldwide output of the getnodes function for the whole world, and the corresponding getlines call from those returned nodes (as described in the file dao.rb), before the 10th of June, I will donate $200 towards the OpenStreetMap project.

I will also, from this data, set up a rendered version of OpenStreetMap, in a tiled instance of OpenLayers, on hardware that can support a lot of traffic, and build code that will convert this data into a shapefile every night, to be used by whatever projects people want to use them for, releasing the shapefile under the same license as OSM.

Anselm Hook has offered to match that contribution.

Anyone else who is in, please comment here, and I will communicate it to the OpenStreetMap developers.

A Windows Live Local truck just drove down the street next to the park I’m on. Looked like it had a camera on top of it. Seems that Cambridge may be picking up some more content from Windows Live Local in the near future…

Was a brown Ford Explorer, with some kind of camera-type mount on the top. Sadly, I didn’t snap a picture before it turned the corner.

I’m going to be giving a lightning talk called ‘Geolocation with GSM Cells’ at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, on June 13th, 2006.

Depart: 12 June, Boston, 4.40 p.m. and arrive in San Jose at 8.05 p.m. (JetBlue flight #471)

Conference: 13th->14th, Where 2.0, Fairmont Hotel, San Jose. (I still am not exactly sure where I’m staying during this time period.)

Staying in San Francisco on the 15th->16th.

Return: 16 June, 10.35PM, Oakland, (JetBlue flight #476)

I hope to get to do a bunch of things in SF: I love that city, and I did not get nearly enough time there last time.

Anyone out that way, either for the conference, or just in the San Francisco area, that I should plan on meeting up with? I know that there’s a lot of West Coast hackers that I talk to regularly, but the West Coast is big I’d love to meet some people I’ve only known online in person while I’ve got the chance.

I’m not busy, and have some interesting stuff to talk about this Friday, so I’ll be leading a meeting of the Geomancers Geo Interest group this Friday, May 5th, from 5pm-7pm at the Muddy Charles Pub, located just inside 142 Memorial Drive in Cambridge.

This time, I’ll try to actually be on time

Some things I’m interested in showing off:

* A web map of Boston put together from MassGIS sources
* Some work done on Openstreetmap map data to create a usable web mapping service out of the monthly data exports
* Talking about what I’ll be presenting at Where 2.0
* A demo of http://www.wayfinderearth.com/ on my cell phone

Anyone is welcome to come by: Bring laptops, and you can get online via MIT’s network, bring cash (no cards!) and you can grab a drink — beer or soda.

I’ll try and grab us two tables, since last time we kind of overflowed the one we had.

(Note that I’m perfectly happy to have other people arrange these meetings: depending solely on me as admin contact is probably flakey at best. I still haven’t heard what time is best for other people, so until I do I’m just going to send ou t these emails when I have nifty things to show off and time to show them off in.)

The Microsoft Cell Phone: Cute, quirky UI hides slow features in places that make sense to anyone who uses the phone for more than a year, but are confusing to first time users. Claims to cater to ‘Professional’ users, and therefore has enterprise versions of everything, but this means that the severs the phone connects to for all non-voice traffic are constantly down or unusably slow.

The Linux Cell Phone: Control options for everything, from the tone and volume of each keypress, to the type of digital encoding desired for voice. However, no one has yet coded a decoder for the digital transmission coming back from the cell towers, so all you get is a series of binary beeps. Mail to the cellphone-users mailing list asking if anyone is working on this feature is replied to with “Patches Welcome”.

The OS X Cell Phone: Originally build from the Linux Cell Phone, but with a working incoming decoder. Attempts to be the ‘hip’ phone include rotating images of the person you’re calling, and an intensive graphical display for every number entered when dialing. Due to its lack of ‘enterprise’ features, this phone is kept entirely out of the professional marketplace.

Okay, so it sounded better in my head than it turned out.

Starting around April 1st, I’m going to be looking for a new fulltime position somewhere. If you have someplace you think might be good for me, and you know they’re looking for people, feel free to let me know.

Some of my previous work is pretty much the best resume I’ve got — the simple format I’ve got a text/pdf resume isn’t cleaned up yet.

I’m most interested in projects related to mapping, and take a secondary interest in anything open source. I primarily work in PHP and Python.

Contact can be made via email.

Thursday night at the Merrimack Linux Users Group, we met at Marthas, in Nashua., as per our usual. We accidentally ended up split into two groups to start, but shortly after I arrived at 7:20, adjourned upstairs.

It was one of the larger meetings I’ve been too, with about 15-20 people in attendance all told. The informal discussion was centered around theWRT54G, and OpenWRT. Our friend from the Great White North (”That’s Maine, right?”) showed off his WRT router, which he had hacked to bitsand back again. Hardware changes include:

* Addition of two serial ports, one for the console, one for standard serial comms.
* Addition of SD Memory card
* Modification of USB GPS to work as serial GPS
* Modification of power input to work from cigarette lighter.

The router software was then modified to work as a wardriver-in-a-box: GPS and wifi hotspot locations are recorded and stored to the SD card.

There was then some discussion about geo stuff: GPSes, how to work withthem under Linux, how the GPS system works, and more.

Some stuff which were tossed around:
* gpsd, the gps daemon that makes communicating with GPS devices easier under Linux. This software basically turns a GPS device into something you can telnet to and ask for a current position.
* GPSDrive. This is mapping software, which downloads free maps from the web, and displays your current location on the map.
* Kismet, a wardriving program.
* The increase of macs in the Linux users culture.
* Open Guide to Boston (http://boston.openguides.org/)
* Lots of hardware mumbo jumbo I didn’t understand
* Some software stuff about the WRT54G, a la discussion of NVRAM.

Afterwards, we adjourned for dessert, and discussed the incompetencies of the Mass RMV (http://crschmidt.livejournal.com/311494.html), the interesting ways of escaping West Berlin without a passport, and more geo geekery.

I think that’s a good summary of what was discussed: I had a few pictures that I’ll put on Flickr of the hacked device and the flock of geeks adoring it, at some point.

(Originally posted to GNHLUG mailing list. GNHLUG is the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, one of the most intelligent and helpful bunches of Linux people around. I trek up to Nashua from Cambridge once a week to meet with these people because I can’t imagine a more interesting bunch of people to hang around.)

One of my biggest problems so far in my writing of mobile software is that I don’t have any form of regular communication with the users of these applications. Support queries, questions, etc. get posted in blogs and so on that I never read, feedback is posted to wikis I never use, or worse, it goes into email and conversations are lost forever.

In a possibly misguided attempt to fix this, I’ve set up a Symbian Hacks mailing list. This mailing list is designed to serve as a feedback mechanism for the code that I’ve written for the mobile platform, and hopefully will encourage me to give back to the community in more meaningful ways.

If you’ve ever used something I’ve written on your phone, please join the list and just send an email saying “I used $foo and I loved it!” You will really make my day.

Recently, as part of the attempt to expand the realm of the full Swhack Cultural Forum experience, we’ve been investigating the possibilities for creating a virtual world. Yesterday, on the advice of Yoz, I set up a LambdaMoo based on enCore.

enCore is a nifty extension to LambdaMOO which includes a complete web interface for interacting with the MOO. This allows for object creation without learning tons of specialized commands. It makes interactions with the moo a bit easier for beginners, while still allowing “old hands” to do what they would have done in the past, via the telnet interface.

However, part of the goal of the interactive fiction aspect of the task was to have automatic interactions - without anyone else. LambdaMOO provides the equivilant of IRC+World Building, but aside from scripted tasks, there isn’t any “Quest” or other similar aspects. This makes LambdaMOO unsuitable for the task at hand, although it provides an excellent platform for initial world building, which can be used to come up with the platform for our IF world before we actually have to implement it.

However, that leaves me wondering what *is* out there for something that’s more “adventure” based. I know that Rivers Of Mud (ROM) based MUDs have this kind of functionality, but I’m not sure if they’re easy to build on. I don’t know what other kind of MUDs are out there, how hard they are to work with, or anything else about them.

Does anyone here run a MUD? Anyone know which ones would be easy to set up and allow for interactive building, while still supporting a relatively wide range of pre-built stuff so that we don’t have to do everything ourselves? Monsters, Questing, and similar abilities would be nifty, as would some pre-built world areas so that the initial environment isn’t *totally* empty.

I’m completely inexperienced in the field, but would love to hear from other people.