Technical Ramblings

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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. 🙂

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. 🙂