Technical Ramblings

Seems like the Freenode IRC network may be under attack. Around 20 minutes ago, I got kicked off, and haven’t been able to get back in — manually connecting to different servers, it seems that about half of them are ‘Connection Refused’, half are not responding at all, and the one I could connect to is telling me that it’s all-full-up. Looking back in my status window, I see:

23:44:18 [freenode] -ratbert(i=ratbert@freenode/staff/pdpc.levin)- [Global notice] I am a fat asshole, who loves abuse, die
23:44:29 [freenode] -ratbert(i=ratbert@freenode/staff/pdpc.levin)- DCC SEND YOUAREALLJUDENLOL

Seems likely that someone got through to something they shouldn’t have… hopefully it doesn’t last too long, as a fair number of projects that I either participate in or maintain have their primary IRC channels there.

Luckily, Freenode actually has someone whose full time job is to make it run. I have no doubt that it will come back at some point, even if it is not quite as soon as I’d typically like.

I implemented WorldWind Tile Caching in OpenLayers tonight.

From the WorldWind docs:

“World Wind uses what is defined as “Level Zero Tile Size” to determine how
large (in decimal degrees) each tile is in width and height (all tiles are square). A
standardized level zero tile size is under consideration but is not yet implemented, but it
must divide into 180 evenly.”

ARGHIEHTIHA. Do you understand how much more difficult you just made my life? :p Essentially, given two WorldWind layers, unless the Level Zero Tile Size of each layer either 1. matches or 2. is altered by a factor of an exponent of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16), there’s no way in OpenLayers to use them on the same map.

And there’s no standard. So I’ve got half a dozen really cool WorldWind Tile Layers, and I can’t put them together, because they each need their own map resolution.

Granted, at some point in the near future OpenLayers will need to change its resolution depending on the active layer, but we’re not there yet, and even once we are, that will destroy a lot of the cool features that you can see when swapping quickly a layer on and off and being able to compare the images right on top of each other.

Still, WorldWind is now working in OpenLayers.

Whenever I’m about to do something with the Python Regular Expression module, I immediately google “amk python re”, which leads me to A.M. Kuchling’s RE HOWTO. I can’t think of anything that I would find useful with regular expressions that is not covered in this document, and I highly encourage you to use it as a reference when you think you might find it handy.

For those of you who saw my pledge to OpenStreetMap a couple weeks back… you might have noticed the deadline passed.

The OpenStreetMap project communicated via the mailing list that:

Requests for immediate and regular data dumps of all the data need to go to
the back of the request list right now. OSM still needs to focus on data propagation rather than data export.

No monthly data dump has yet been made for June, and no one has completed the technical changes neccesary to create a daily database dump. The timeframe for the pledge has passed.

Temporarily on the frontpage of Digg this morning, the Wired article now has 208 diggs. Pretty cool: I don’t think anything I’ve been this involved in has been dugg before. (Then again, maybe it has: I’m not much of a digg reader.)

A conference for “neogeographers,” — a generation of coders whose work is inspired by easily obtained map data, as well as the mashups made possible by Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.

read more | digg story

Thanks to Annalee Newitz, who was great to talk to, and put together an awesome overview of the technologies that I found the coolest at Where 2.0,in the Where 2.0 Wired Roundup. Note that one of those technologies was mine, as was another — GSMLoc, which my session was on, and OpenLayers, which is one of my tasks at MetaCarta.

Thanks Annalee, and to all the people at the Where 2.0 conference who were showing off cool shit. It was definitely a great conference to be at.

Today at Platial, we discovered that Yahoo now has Worldwide Road Maps. This isn’t as good as Google’s data in Europe, but it’s the best road data available (as far as I know) for large parts of the world, from Russia to Africa to China.

I don’t know when this came out — perhaps everyone already knew this — but it’s my first time seeing it. Pretty cool stuff.

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.