Technical Ramblings

Author: crschmidt

  • Near term goals for TileCache

    • Fix threshhold bug, release 1.9, call it done
    • Refactor to make support for dynamic loading of layer types easier (a la FeatureServer)
    • Add ArcXML Layer (so that I can skip having to do it in OpenLayers)
    • Add KML Region support

  • FOSS4G2007: Two Presentations

    Just got notice that I’ll be giving two presentations at FOSS4G 2007:

    FeatureServer: A REST-based Server for Simple Features
    With the number of tools for creating vector data online growing rapidly over the past year, users have spent more and more of their time creating annotations of existing maps. Unfortunately, managing this user generated data in a web browser can be difficult: the existing tools for storing geographic data on the server are largely based around the WFS-T specification, which is not the most conducive to the browser environment. FeatureServer provides an alternative mechanism for fetching and storing geographic data, using a REST-based interface that is friendly to browsers and other clients alike.

    And with Howard Butler:

    The Gift Economy Ain’t Free: Getting Help with Open Source Software
    Have you ever been told to RTFM? STFW? Sent an email to a project’s maillist that languished for days without a response? This talk will give you ammo that you can use to bust out of the rut of frustration and non-response.

    Woot.

  • Povray Rendering: Reflection

    A long time ago, I played with Povray. Now, with a recent revamp of my website, I’ve decided to take another poke at playing with it. I’ll post my work here in the Povray category as I progress.

    My first piece is Reflection:

    Sphere over Checkboard

    A reflective sphere over a checkerboard sphere. I liked the look of the colored shadows — the mixing of the primary colors in each of the shadows resulted in the purple/orange/green shadows, even though the light sources are all primary colors. The sphere is white, with a high phong value (sheen) and relatively high reflectivity.

  • Honeymoon Time

    As of 5PM today, I will be unavailable on the web until July 9th. I’m going on a honeymoon, and I’m leaving my computer offline for the entire trip. (Yes, I am a workaholic. Heck, I committed to OpenLayers less than 2 hours before my wedding.) So, although I will be at home slightly more than that, you should not expect to hear from me until July 9th. If you have something that requires my urgent attention, please get it to me today 🙂

    My actual honeymoon will include a stay at the Mount Washington Hotel, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Not to pat myself on the back too much, but I think I’ve earned it 🙂

    Don’t break anything while I’m gone!

  • First Attempt at IronPython

    My first attempt to do something useful with IronPython:

    >>> import urllib
>>> urllib.urlopen("http://crschmidt.net/")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File httplib, line unknown, in getreply
  File httplib, line unknown, in getresponse
  File httplib, line unknown, in __init__
  File System, line unknown, in set_ReceiveBufferSize
  File System, line unknown, in SetSocketOption
WindowsError: Invalid arguments

    Note that I’m working on OS X, and my exception is a WindowsError. Fancy.

    (I was inspired by Bill Thorp’s efforts to get TileCache working on IronPython: Round 1, Round 2. However, I’m not all that inspired now.)

    Still, it is kind of cool that IronPython just ran — I didn’t expect that to work. Maybe there’s something to this mono business after all.

  • House Cleaning

    Did some website house cleaning today/yesterday. Realized that I haven’t done much that I’ve published on this website in the past year — most of my stuff has taken place under the guise of MetaCarta Labs or OpenLayers or other stuff like that. I should do something about that, but I’m not sure what. 🙂

    Anyway, I’ve cleaned up the homepage, and added a couple links to things that had been sitting around unlinked, as well as removed some links I haven’t updated in years. It’s hard to imagine that I’ve maintained crschmidt.net for as long as I have.

  • Wedding Complete, Other Geohacks

    I just wanted to thank all the well-wishers in comments on my previous post about the upcoming wedding. For some reason, I hadn’t actually gotten the comment notifications — or I just deleted them as noise — and so I’ve just gone back and approved the 5 comments I got. (And to Taral: the ‘highway’ called RED is actually the Red Line — a subway line. This is a case where local knowledge is assumed. :))

    The week post wedding has been relatively peaceful, though our last wedding guests didn’t leave until Thursday, so we’re finally getting a bit of alone time this weekend. Bio-dad has the kids, so I plan to spend the weekend chilling out.

    If you haven’t seen FlickrBrowse recently, you might want to check it out: It’s now using the new world wrapping support in OpenLayers, which is kind of nifty. I also added Twittervision support to FeatureServer a couple days ago — not the most useful thing in the world, since the only query type is ‘current location for $username’, but it was almost too easy *not* to do it: the code is only 12 lines.

  • Bluetooth Not Available — Fixed

    If you have a Macbook, and at some point, you get “Bluetooth not available” from your laptop, and “No information found” in your System Information app for Bluetooth, it might help if you try to reset the Macbook SMC, as described in Resetting MacBook and MacBook Pro System Management Controller (SMC). I had this problem for the past couple days, and doing this fixed it for me.

    (This article is largely published so that others searching for “Bluetooth Not Available” may be able to find it before taking their Mac into the shop.)

  • The story of a procession…

    Maps tell stories. They tell all sorts of stories, but one of the stories that they tell the best are processions: series of photos taken over a wide area over a period of time, but with the same principle actors.

    The most important procession to me right now is the one that I’ve been working up to for four years, as of tomorrow. At the church shown (using the Boston Freemap TileCache, FeatureServer for feature translation from the Flickr API, and OpenLayers, of course, as the map interface) on the map I put together, I’ll be getting married tomorrow to the lovely Jessica Allan.

    From Chicago to Champaign-Urbana to Manchester, NH to Cambridge, MA, with more late nights and late flights than I care to remember, more love and devotion than I can describe, and more acceptance of my tendencies to show utter obsession with anything I’m doing than I could possibly have expected, my relationship with Jess has flourished, and I couldn’t be happier to be tying the knot tomorrow.

    Okay, so the relation this has to mapping or technical ramblings is tentative at best, but I still think it’s cool. 🙂

  • Job Opening at MetaCarta

    New job posting at MetaCarta:

    MetaCarta Labs seeks an enthusiastic software engineer to join the team in developing new ideas and innovative products in both open source software and in MetaCarta’s applications, which connect documents to maps using geoparsing.

    Check the link for more info.

    Essentially, this will entail working on the stuff that you see coming out of MetaCarta Labs. Someone local is best. It should also afford you the oppourtunity to spend long hours working with me, for better or for worse. 🙂