Technical Ramblings

A friend of mine recently had his account ‘restricted’ by Flickr for “potentially offensive content”. His comments on Flickr’s treatment of the issue are concerning to me: as he describes in his entry:

They still haven’t gotten around to telling me what this content IS or why it is potentially offensive. … “There are millions of people visiting Flickr who may not see the world the same way you do” is certainly true, but a dangerous way to run a community.

I understand Flickr’s needs for the adequate use of controls on users accounts in order to make the site they want it to be, but threats of account termination on a service like Flickr are very concerning to me. I’ve invested a lot of work in my photos on Flickr, and although I’d like to continue to use the service, the feedback of anonymous users being able to lead to account termination with no human feedback in the loop is a scary prospect.

I’d love to hear that this is an oversight somewhere, but if I don’t see Dan get some feedback on his issues, maybe I should consider abandoning Flickr as the primary place to host my photos. Convenience isn’t really worth the possible risk of having an account terminated — presumably taking all its content with it — without even having feedback from a human on why. Clearly, that risk always exists with the Terms of Service that exist on the site — almost every site I’ve seen which has lawyers behind it has some sort of “We can do whatever we want, and in that case, you’re screwed” clause in their terms of use — but to have it become clear that they follow this path in something that seems a routine matter to resolve is a somewhat scary precedent.

In the Flickr authentication API documentation regarding their Authentication Specification, the example in section 9.2 seems to have an invalid value.

They provide the following:

• API Key: 987654321
• Parameters: method=flickr.auth.getFrob
• Secret: foobarbaz

According to section 8, this should result in taking the md5sum of:

foobarbazapi_key987654321methodflickr.auth.getFrob

Which is 91216d07a9e945a8e2bf2b2660e7ba86 . Hoewever, the md5sum used in the api_sig parameter in the example is 5f3870be274f6c49b3e31a0c6728957f. (I’ve tried several different combinations, and been unable to figure out what this value might be based on.)

This yws-flickr post also confirms that the documentation appears to be incorrect.

I couldn’t find the appropriate place to put this given a short search, so I’m publishing it here in hopes that it will remind me to inform someone who might be able to fix it. (There are 5 authors listed on the spec: Emailing all five of them feels like overkill, especially since I’m pretty sure that not all of them still actively work on flickr.) If you know anyone who might be involved, feel free to pass it on…

My most ‘interesting’ photo

One of the things that has always confused me is how Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ score worked. It’s clearly not based directly on views — my most ‘interesting’ photos have ~500 views, while my most popular ones have ~5000. The same is true of comments, tags, groups, etc: Some of my most interesting photos are, all in all, the least obviously ‘popular’ ones.

However, reading through the patent on Interestingness, I see:

[0027] The statistics engine generates statistics and other metrics based upon aggregated metadata. In one embodiment, the statistics engine determines the popularity of metadata (e.g., tags) within a grouping of media objects over a predetermined time period. For example, the statistics engine may determine the number of different users that have assigned a particular tag to one or more media objects within all groups on the system, within a single group, or within a set of media objects, over the last 24 hours. The aggregation engine may determine (and display) a histogram of the tags, and may determine the most frequently assigned tags (at any point in time or over a predetermined time period) by determining those tags either having a frequency exceeding a minimum threshold frequency or belonging to a predetermined number of the most popular tags.

The patent application doesn’t directly claim that this is used in the interestingness calculation, but this type of time-period based tag aggregation/valuation is clearly a non-obvious metric that can’t be calculated by looking directly at user-visible information on a single photo.

Still, none of this really changes the fact that I wish that flickr had a per-person ‘most interesting this week’ sort: my ‘eastern bunny’ photo above has been at the top of the interesting list for ages, and I want new interesting photos, damnit!

I finally finished uploading all the photos I took at/around the FOSS4G conference.

FOSS4G 2008 Set

Includes photos from:

• Various nights hanging out at the bars/hotels during the conference
• A trip up Table Mountain with OpenLayers/OpenGeo folks
• GeoDjango Workshop
• Sessions, exhibition hall, etc.
• Pictures from the Gala Dinner at Moyo
• Closing Session
• OSGeo AGM
• OpenLayers Workshop
• GeoServer Workshop

Photos that are taken at the conference center/of conference proceedings are also tagged with foss4g2008:

foss4g2008 tagged

And most photos of people who I recognized are tagged with first name in the title, and with a username (as used on IRC or other unique identifier) attached as a tag:

Photos of Arnulf
Photos of Steven

Photos of the OSGeo AGM are also tagged as such:

OSGeo AGM Photos

I’ve made my tagging settings as open as possible, but I believe you still need to be a contact on flickr in order to add notes/tags to photos: simply add me as a contact, and I’ll add you back.

Any names I got wrong, please let me know, either via email or by simply commenting on the flickr photo.

Thanks to all for helping to create such a photogenic conference.

A bit more than a year ago, when I was just learning how to use the Google Maps API, I put together a patch for the OpenGuides software, adding Google Maps support. It seemed the logical way to go: It wasn’t perfect, since Google Maps are obviously non-free, but it seemed like a better way to get the geographic output from OpenGuides out there than anything else at the time.

Since I did that, I’ve learned a lot. Remember that 18 months ago, I’d never installed MapServer, had no idea what PostGIS was, and didn’t realize that there were free alternatives to some of the things that Google had done. Also, 9 months ago, there was no OpenLayers, or any decent open alternative to the Google Maps API.

In the past 18 months, that’s all changed. I’ve done map cartography, I’ve done setting up of map servers, and I worked full time for several months on the OpenLayers project. Although my direction has changed slightly, I still work heavily with maps on a daily basis, and spend more of my time on things like TileCache, which lets you serve map tiles at hundreds of requests/second.

So, about a month ago, I went back to the Open Guide to Boston, and converted all the Google Maps API calls to OpenLayers API calls. The conversion took about an hour, as I replaced all the templates with the different code. (If I was writing it again, it would have taken less time, but this was my first large scale open source Javascript undertaking, long before I gained the knowledge I now have from working with OpenLayers.) In that hour, I was able to convert all the existing maps to use free data from MassGIS, rather than the copyrighted data from Google, and to have Google as a backup: a Map of Furniture Stores can show you the different. You’ll see that there are several layers — one of which is a roadmap provided by me, one from Google — and one from the USGS, topographic quad charts.

It’s possible that some of this could have been done using Google as the tool. There’s nothing really magical here. But now, the data in the guide is no longer displayed by default on top of closed source data that no one can have access to. Instead, it’s displayed on top of an open dataset provided by my state government.

This is how the world should work. The data that the government collects should be made available to the people for things exactly like this. It shouldn’t require a ‘grassroots remapping’: There are examples out there of how to do it right. I find it so depressing to talk to friends in the UK, who not only don’t have the 1:5000 scale quality road data that Massachusetts provides, but doesn’t even provide TIGER-level data that the geocoder on the Open Guide to Boston uses.

Free Guides, with Free Maps. That’s the way it should be. The fact that it isn’t everywhere is sad, but at least it’s good to know that the technology is there. Switching from Google to OpenLayers is an easy task — it’s what happens next that is a problem. You need the data from somewhere, and it’s unfortunate that that ’somewhere’ needs to be Google for so many people. I’m thankful to MassGIS and to the US Government for providing the data I can use, and to all the people who helped me learn enough to realize that using Google for everything is heading the wrong way when you want to not be beholden to a specific set of restrictions placed on a corporate entity.

So it seems clear to me that the Pipes application is a step in a really cool direction. I don’t know if there’s anything incredibly innovative in the idea of making programming easy, but Yahoo! has gone a long way towards the goals that other people have put into place. Ning thought that letting people code would be the way forward: give them a sandbox, let them copy paste, and they’ll build applications. The idea was right: there are a lot more people out there who want to be builders that aren’t. It turned out that the people who want to be builders didn’t have the skill level that they needed to build PHP code, even with mix/match and copy/paste.

Yahoo! Pipes is the followthrough on that idea: make it possible for people to take a set of input, and get a set of output, passing it through multiple filters.

The next step is obvious: Let people turn the filter settings into a web page, with the output being another web page. Search for all content 5 miles from a given Craigslist location: Take the user input as drop down boxes or something in an HTML form, and make the output a Yahoo! Map. Boom: you’ve turned everyone who can create a pipe into a web application builder. Stick ads along the bottom, and you’ve done one of the things that Ning tried to do: make money off applications in the same way that so many have made money off content.

I’m sure that Yahoo! already has this in mind, whether they’ve written about it or done it yet or not. It’s only a matter of time. It does make me wonder if someone could build something that did this without needing Yahoo! to do it… It seems like at the moment it would require altering a pipe on the fly, which I don’t see a way to do, so either there needs to be a further API, or we’ll all just need for it to get done

Update: Looking today, you can control the input of text inputs from the URL that you fetch the RSS with. This means that I can go ahead and build the pipe thingy for my own pipes as is. That’s pretty cool. I’ll show one with MetaCarta stuff on Monday.

Perhaps I’ll build an OpenLayers based Yahoo Pipe output viewer. It wouldn’t be that different from the GeoRSS viewer… but it would need a way to visualize non-Geo content. Ponder ponder.

In the vein of my previous post, I bring you another nifty trick: This time integrating Google Maps and Mapserver (kind of).

Visit static renderer. Browse Google Map. Then, when you’re looking where you want to be, hit the link up top, and off you go — transported to a world where data is public domain or licensed for re-use

I’m still trying to find a happy medium level of size of markers — when you’re zoomed way out, they’re too big, but when you zoom way in, they’re too small, so I don’t know what to do, but it *works* and that’s the important part.

Interface suggestions welcome — perhaps a side by side view is better? (I think I may be having a bit too much fun…)

After hours of fighting with Postgis, Schuyler finally got bia into a state where she would do the right thing when told to install it, so I was able to load the data from the Open Guide to Boston into postgis, and from there, to talk to it with mapserver. The result is a couple of pretty cool looking maps: Boston Metro, and Boston Metro Big, 1000×800 and 2000×1600 respectively.

The maps underneath are provided by Public Domain datasets, wrapped up in a tidy little easy to use package by the folks at OpenPlans through their “Sigma” project, and I’m extremely grateful to them for their efforts! They’ve saved me a ton of work, and allowed me to produce something that looks pretty damn cool.

If that’s not an advertisement for Open Geodata, I don’t know what is.

I’ve set up a mailing list for the Open Guide to Boston: sign up if you’re interested.

Likely topics on the list:
* Local get togethers to discuss the guide — technical, social, intro to beginners, etc.
* Requests for help in some aspect of the guide — looking for images, or help maintaining some specific feature.
* Discussion of changes made to the guide technically
* Discussion of changes made to the guide socially: policies, etc.

Thus far, there has been no traffic, but I’m about to change that, because I’m working on redesigning the site, and I’m a very bad designer. (I have a few tricks and tips I learned from working as one for far too long, but nothing that makes me qualified.)

So, if you’re interested, please feel free to join the list.

I just closed comments on all posts older than this one. In the past 3 days, I have received 892 spam attempts-at-comments. Everything goes through moderation, so this doesn’t end up being an issue for anyone except for me, who has to sort through all the notifications and spam to try and find the wheat in the chaff.

I hate sites that do this, but it was getting *really* annoying, and nobody comments anyway.