Archive for March, 2014

Reasonable Airport Travel. Weird.

Posted in Social on March 23rd, 2014 at 05:02:58

I’m flying out of Logan to SFO this morning, and I’m flying JetBlue through terminal C. Usually, Terminal C is a *mess*, but this morning, it wasn’t at all:

  • Usually, they have 1 or 2 stations checking IDs; this morning, they had 8
  • Usually, I’m used to the USian approach of “Take out all the things and off all the things”. Here, I didn’t even have to pull my laptop out of my bag.
  • Instead of the weird millimeter wave machine — they only had x-ray devices.

I did briefly have my bag pulled aside — since I’m flying with 3 heavy LiPo batteries, I wasn’t surprised — but as soon as they realized they were just batteries, and the one that they looked at was in a plastic bag, they let me go without a problem.

Brilliantly simple security. I wish I could have that more often. Of course, since I wasn’t expecting it, I’m now sitting at the gate 1.5 hours before I can even board…

OpenLayers: Still popular on YouTube, years later.

Posted in OpenLayers, YouTube on March 22nd, 2014 at 06:32:32

In 2007, I posted a video to YouTube; it was just a 5 minute, silent how-to video showing how to load data that you had in a shapefile, open it in QGIS, style it, export it to a mapfile, and load it into OpenLayers. I’ve given pretty much this exact presentation to groups around the world: from Cape Town, South Africa, to Osaka, Japan, but at the time it was just a quick demo I put together, related to a wiki page: Mapping Your Data, in the OpenLayers wiki.

I hadn’t paid attention to it in forever — I uploaded it to YouTube back in 2007, and I haven’t really thought about it since. So as I’m using YouTube a bit more recently, I actually looked at my analytics… and realized that this video still gets *400 views every month*, with an average of two minutes watched per view.

This means that 20 minutes gets wasted watching this video every day (on average); that is more time than I spend on YouTube in an average week. (Given my new employer, I can imagine that changing somewhat in the near future.)

Amusingly enough, for a long time this wasn’t my most popular video; the OpenLayers video is a bit long, and with no sound, can be a bit of a drag. (The pace of it, even 7 years on, still impresses me though; I spent a whole weekend just going through the motions to get the flow down. It really does work nicely.) My most popular video for a long time was an N95 Accelerometer Demo:

This demo showed the use of a Python script to use the accelerometer and simple 2d graphics to move a ball around the screen. (The Symbian Python APIs for interacting with 2d graphics were terrific, and I wish modern phones had something similarly easy.) In the week after that video launched, it had *1500* views; but it was a flash in the pan, and hasn’t maintained its popularity, getting only 2 watches in the last 30 days. (This video was popular enough that I was invited to join the YouTube monetization program, unlike the OpenLayers video, which was never ‘viral’ enough to get there.)

I’ve never been much of a video guy before — another thing I can see changing — but I’m now putting together some of the videos from my quadcopter flights. Last night, I published my bloopers from the first couple days of flying:

But I guess I can never expect, based on my current views, that anything I do on YouTube will be more popular than a silent video I published about OpenLayers back in 2007.

I guess this really just goes back to: OpenLayers was a unique experience, and is probably the most impressive thing I will actually work on for the benefit of the internet at large… ever.