Technical Ramblings

Tag: foss4g2008

  • OL Sessions at FOSS4G

    Just watched Bart’s presentation on his employer’s use of OL + ExtJS: to see a map customized so thoroughly that I can no longer recognize it as OL is kinda neat.

    Now watching Tim Schaub explain Vector Styling; “So new many developers don’t even know how to use it.” I’ll state that I think this is equal parts ‘new’ and ‘lack of effort into documentation’ 🙂 Showing a *really* cool styling demo tool, which lets you put in code, run it, and executes the JS and creates a map. Totally need to get that into the website.

    Showing the addUniqueStyleRules stuff; just keeps reminding me we really need graduated symbolizer convenience methods. Maybe I can convince him to do that at the code sprint this weekend.

    We need to get these style rules in SVN somewhere; Tim’s clearly done a lot of work very recently on this, and getting this into the documentation and website sounds like a great thing to me.

  • Arrival, FOSS4G2008

    Have arrived in Cape Town in preparation for FOSS4G. And the most important part of the trip — the drinking of the beers — is already in full force.

    Tim, Fountains Hotel

    I’m staying in the Fountains Hotel; apparently a good choice, given the number of random FOSS4G passerby we’ve had so far.

    18 hours of flying is a long time, but didn’t go poorly, though I am lacking any clothes until Monday afternoon (so I’ll be kind of stinky for my workshop with Josh on GeoDjango on Monday). Made it to the hotel, then headed out to Dinner at Cape To Cuba. Was good environment and tasty, for not a bad price. We then went back to the Fountains Hotel and had a couple drinks at the hotel bar.

    I’ve uploaded pictures — they’re tagged by day and foss4g2008, so you should be able to see daily shots as I continue to upload them. (I’ve also got a FOSS4G 2008 set.) Today we’re doing a trip up Table Mountain — taking the cable car — leaving from Fountains Hotel around 10AM (breakfast at 9:15).

    PSA: If you’re at all interested in GeoDjango, and have more than a passing knowledge of Python, I highly recommend coming to our GeoDjango workshop (and bringing a laptop). It’s gonna be great.

    PSA2: If you’re staying at Fountains, and don’t want to go down to the desk to get an internet voucher, you can still ssh. Just join the wireless network, and ‘ssh $ipaddress’. (If you don’t know your IP address, you can look it up by using ‘dig @72.232.176.58 yourdomain.example.com’.) If you need to get to the web, you can add “-D 4000” to your ssh command — ‘ssh -D 4000 crschmidt.net’ — to set up a SOCKS proxy. Then, in Firefox Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Connection, do manual Proxy configuration, and enter ‘localhost’, ‘4000’ as a “SOCKS Host”.

  • FOSS4G 2008

    About to head out to FOSS4G 2008. Leaving from Boston this morning, New York this afternoon, arriving at Cape Town around 4pm with a refuel-only stop in Dakar.

    I’m staying at the Fountains Hotel, and will try to spend most of my time in the lobby. (If you see a guy with a Macbook sitting around there, there’s a fair chance he’s me.)

    I’m presenting Collaborative Mapmaking with GeoDjango, which should be great for anyone who has worked with Django but not GeoDjango, and even people who haven’t used Django can probably play along.

    OpenLayers users should be interested in Tim’s excellent summary of the OpenLayers-related sessions; as he mentions though, there are *36* sessions that mention OL, so it seems likely that no matter what track you follow, you’ll see *some* OpenLayers mentioned.

    After the conference, a couple of OL developers are doing a trip around the Cape; on Monday morning, I fly out to Kruger National Park for a 3 day whirlwind tour. I’ve rented the car, but I’m still keeping an eye out for anyone who wants to room with me: I can take at least one more person (and if we get two more, we can rent a bigger car :)). If you’re interested and fly out Friday or later, let me know!

    I’ll be trying to keep Twitter updated with my whereabouts; if you’re interested in tracking me, you can follow me, though I expect I’ll be less prolific than usual, since I won’t have cheap text messaging access.

    If you’re at FOSS4G, look me up!