I know their “motto” is “Don’t Be Evil” .. but I think it should be “Don’t Be Smart” instead.. this is some dumb thinking from Google. Trust me.. I know better than Google on how I want to download and install my software.

This is just the latest in a whole lot of similar statements I’ve seen from many people across the web in a variety of situations talking about how “I know how to manage my machine”, with the underlying meaning being something like “You should act as if people who are working with your software know how to work their computers.”

When I put it that way, does it really sound right? Is there anyone who thinks that the *majority* of users of Google Earth actually know how to run their machines? Is there anyone who thinks that it makes sense for Google to build and QA two different install mechanisms — one for technical users who know what they’re doing, and one for those who don’t?

Very few companies the size of Google do anything on a whim. I expect that some thought went into the development of the Google Earth downloader. The fact that the thinking is not centered around technically competent users is just evidence that Google doesn’t need to target the early adopters; it’s not a sign that what they are doing is ‘Bad’ or ‘Stupid’.

Technical users are few and far between in the mass market. Google Earth is targeted towards the mass market. Just like all software that is targeted towards a mass market, there is nothing ’stupid’ about removing tools that the majority of users don’t need or care about: By doing so, you limit the number of people who are going to end up confused by your tool, and that’s not a bad thing when you care about the majority of people instead of a technical elite.

One of the best part of planning hiking trips is maps. I love maps. I love looking at them, finding things, exploring things. I love having them handy to reference, I love browsing around them.

However, when you’re on a trail, looking at maps on a computer doesn’t work particularly well. As a result, I’m trying to print maps, and finding that it’s a somewhat difficult proposition.

I have DRGs from the libremaps project: These are great. I’m looking at o44071b5, o44071b6, and o44071a6, all downloaded from the Libre Map Project. Unfortunately, I then went to go open c6, only to find that… it’s not available. Argh! I know that it exists: I can check the features that should be on it in the Terraserver DRG WMS, but no Twin Mountain quad.

Oh well. Not a huge deal, just annoying; I’ve got other maps that cover the area. Now the problem is that I can’t figure out how to take a tiff like these and print them over multiple pages on a home printer. Anyone got any tips or tricks on that? Printing on one page is somewhat useful, but not nearly as much as I’d like; I also don’t want to spend all day cropping and fighting with tools. If I have to do that, I’ll just survive with what I’ve got.

I’m going to go out to the local map store and see if they have a nice Atlas for the Whites; if so, I’ll take it. It’s worth it to have a little bit of extra knowledge about a place — and who can’t use more maps?

DjangoGraphviz did exactly what I needed it to, with no problems at all. (My only complaint is that it requires the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to be defined in order to get the –help output, somewhat unintuitive.) The software quickly generated a .dot file which I was able to turn into a lovely PDF, and print. I’ve now got a copy on the desk of each of the developers using the codebase, and I think it’ll prove a lovely piece of reference.

So, if you want a quick visualization of your Django models, and you can install graphviz, I highly recommend DjangoGraphviz to do it.

(Note that the wiki page itself recommends a couple other things more ‘built in’ to Django, which are new to me: I didn’t try these, I just stuck with DjangoGraphviz, which did what I wanted.)

The GeoJSON Authors are proud to announce the finalization of the GeoJSON 1.0 Specification.

Representing more than a year’s worth of community discussion and development, the GeoJSON specification describes an easy to use, extensible format for transferring geographic data over the web. With support in more than 20 different applications, GeoJSON is already quickly becoming a de facto standard for transferring geographic data in a JSON format. The finalization of the spec represents the final step in formalizing the GeoJSON format for encoding this data.

More information on GeoJSON can be found at http://geojson.org/ , or from the GeoJSON mailing list at http://lists.geojson.org/listinfo.cgi/geojson-geojson.org .

???????? ????? ????????In this way, I was able to put together a geographic bounding box query, on top of Google App Engine, using a Geohash-like algorithm as a storage format, and use that query to power a FeatureServer Demo App Engine application, doing geographic queries of non-point features on top of App Engine/BigTable. Simply create a Geoindex object of the bounding box of your feature, and then use lower-left/upper-right points as bounds for your Geohash when querying.

– Geographic Queries on Google App Engine

Probably of interest to some of the people who read this.

Key things to good unconferences:

• Constant stream of food. Geeks like to eat, and eating keeps us happy, healthy, and wise. Snacks are great, both healthy and unhealthy, and drinks and so on are also good. I think this, more than anything else, is the kind of thing that a well-funded social event should try to have. The meals at Google were also great, and having the space we did for serving was super useful for avoiding frustration at lines. In general, for the number of people who were present, Google’s facilties were significantly better prepared for serving people than my experience at Where 2.0 and FOSS4G events.
• Big open space for organization, small cozy meeting spaces for sessions. One thing that repeatedly came up was that the conference spaces we were in for sessions were full — and, believe it or not, I find sitting on a makeshift chair in the back of the room *great*. The participation in the sessions was better than at any other unconference I’ve been too, because of the close-knit situation. Occasionally things were a bit too small — the Processing talk was one example — but in general, it was a good thing to be in close quarters.
• Great wireless. Coverage of the entire space was perfect, including outside, and given that there were 300 people sitting around banging on it, that was far more impressive. I’ve seen networks fall apart under significantly less load, even at Barcamp Boston 2, at MIT.
• Open Space: The central auditorium and outdoor areas were great places to chill out and enjoy your time. Not having to be stuck in a hallway, or running back and forth between sessions, was a wonderful end result, and the tables/chairs/etc. setup was just great.

The last thing that can make or break any conference is the people, and I couldn’t have asked for any better. I met and hung out with a bunch of Python Geo hackers — more so than I ever have in the past. We stayed up late, hacked all night (in my case, literally) and resolved a ton of issues. I got to hang out with some of the people that I really enjoy spending time around, and meet some new ones.

Thanks to all of you who made this weekend totally worth the trip. Special thanks to the organizers, and Google for being such a great host.

Next up is FOSS4G, I hope; I hope that I can take what I learned here and make an effort to turn FOSS4G into (at least partially) the event that Wherecamp was so successfully.

“Drawing images is not about telling which pixels to turn on or off, it’s about telling to draw lines.”

In addition to processing being pretty, you can draw the entire map into any unit you want. Drew a bunch of lines out in state plane projected unit system, and then cropped image.

Drawing all of the streets in King County plus all of transit lines

4d expansion of transit data — time out of the map on photo

Processing is great at generating static images; looping over a dataset and drawing lines is what processing is for.

Demoing a bunch of demos of processing from Tom Carden; cabspotting, travel time tube map, etc. etc.

Processing.js: Processing in JS, by John Resig. Uses “Processing.js is like developing Processing on a 400mhz celeron”

Source code to London Tube Map is available; Processing makes source code available by default, Google for “powered by processing” for examples.

Stamen typically does Prototype in Processing, final client in Flash.

Processing is Java; it should be possible to pull in Java libraries; can import .jar files, can drag in data (images, etc.); loading data is a one liner.

NodeBox: “Processing in Python”

Obsessing.org: Processing.js GUI.

Same processing source code in browser and applet using Processing.js

Context Free Art: here

The default mode of processing is:
* Setup
* Draw function that’s called as much as possible

Going to publish cabspotting example to wherecamp wiki

Brandon demos OpenStreetMap data rendered on the fly with processing data.

NodeBox demo using a springgraph. Proxmiity fixes of local bluetooth data.

Processing is 4-5 years old now

Collaboration is typically “Copy an example, create your own, keep going”

• Comment here
• Email me (crschmidt@crschmidt.net)
• or Text or call me (603.264.2294)

Who’s going to be there? Anyone interested in meeting up on Friday, or doing any hacking ahead of time or during?

On Wednesday, I received an email from “Google Search Quality”:

We recently discovered that some of your pages can cause users to be infected with malicious software. We have begun showing a warning page to users who visit these pages by clicking a search result on Google.com.

I looked through, and sure enough, the links they offered were indeed ‘infected’: I’ve always used Wordpress despite my knowledge of the fact that it has security exploits more often than I get around to fixing them (though I do try to keep up). They had has a small iframe included, which claimed to be ’stats tracking’: Instead, there was Javascript included which, presumably, was malicious.

To the best of my knowledge, I solved this problem on Wednesday night, by removing the mal-links that were pointed out, and patching the security holes I could find fixes to in Wordpress. (I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5; In the past, upgrading has been painful, but it wasn’t so bad this time, and there are not yet any known security holes for 2.5 that I’m aware of.)

All in all, not a bad thing: Google emailed me, I fixed the problem, everyone wins. Except…

Following Google’s FAQs, I went to Webmaster Tools, signed up, verified my site, went to their tools…

And in the site management tools, found no such link as they described. Great.

At the time, I assumed only Google was using stopbadware: I’ve since discovered that other things are using it, so I’ve requested reconsideration there.

Still, Google now tells users that my site may be dangerous, despite the fact that it no longer is, and there appears to be no tool in the website management ‘tools’ panel to have them check it out again. Stretches the definition of ‘Do No Evil’ a bit… (Edit: Okay, not really, but it always works when you really want to get a response out of Google to just tell them they’re being evil: People get defensive and help you out ;))

In any case, my web site should be safe. Sorry that people have been confused by the problem.

Edit: JohnMu in comments pointed out why I was having a problem: Since crschmidt.net/blog/ was the only thing listed as ‘infected’, I had to sign up and verify for crschmidt.net/blog/ *seperately* from crschmidt.net. Certainly not exactly intuitive, but doing so allowed me to request a review of my site, so hopefully soon people will be able to view my site again in FF3, and won’t be caught out by Google’s warning (assuming I got all my malware off).