Technical Ramblings

So, calling T-Mobile via Skype is an excercise in futility. After 7 calls, I did eventually get their voice prompting system to not immediately kick me out, and got through to a representative, but man, what a pain in the ass.

However, that does mean that international calling should be set up on my phone in the relatively near future. Not that I’ll use it for anything… but I can cellstumble with it 🙂

They also apologized for not setting it up when I called to ask about rates.

All in all, once you get to talk to a person, calling T-Mobile has been a very successful experience for me.

Data rates here are 1.5 cents/kb — that’s not nearly as bad as I would have expected, although it’s too expensive to make it generally useful. (If only the web weren’t so laden with heavy bandwidth crap. I blame DSL.)

This is my first trip over the Atlantic — I’m flying Northwest/KLM both ways, which is also a first for me. It was my first time in an Airbus 330 — I’ve almost never flown something with three sets of seats, other than on the round-trip to Washington DC, and that was 8 years ago. The flight east was uneventful: I did my best to sleep, and seem to have gotten about 4 hours. You might get redirected here to any other destination, in case you changed your original plan. Despite the fact that it’s apparently 3AM on my body clock, I don’t feel more than a little bit sleepy… yet. I’m sure it’ll catch up with me before I want to be asleep tonight.

My phone apparently isn’t working at all here: despite there being a recognized ‘T-mobile’ network, the phone just says “Access Denied” when the phone tries to join. Hopefully I can get that cleared up in Switzerland so that I can do some GSMLoc recording. There’s also no wireless here that I can find — there is an ad-hoc network here called “Free Public Wi-Fi”, but it doesn’t seem to respond to DHCP requests, so I don’t know what’s up with that. This is leaving me woefully underconnected — something I’m horribly unused to. In the US, I can *always* hop online, even if it’s slow, with putty on my phone, or connecting via Bluetooth to the laptop. Losing that ability is a strange feeling.

As far as Schipol airport goes, there are a couple things here that surprised me:
* How big it is. The D terminal has *87 gates* — and gate D6 (the one I’m at) has A-M subgates, which makes me think that there may be significantly more than that in total. How the heck that works, I don’t know, but it just seems big to me. Not to mention that there are 4 other terminals.
* Long taxiways! I think we were taxiing for about 15 minutes at full steam: we went from where we landed, in the middle of a bunch of fields, into what felt much more like a city. I’m used to taxiways being about hte same length as runways, so this was definitely a new one to me.
* Security-at-the-gate: Apparently, security here is specific to the gate, rather than to a wing of the airport. (Or maybe it’s both — I didn’t actually walk out.) Seems like a massive repitition of resources: I’ve never felt that Security for the terminal was a poor way of doing it: it seems like no matter what, one side is clean, and the other side is dirty: increasing the dirty area and decreasing the clean area does not seem to me like it would be important. (Granted, the dirty and clean sides don’t always stay that way, vis terror attacks that have happened or other incidents where security risks have gotten through — but that’s an issue of missed screening, not one where someone actually didn’t *get* screened.)
* Smoking in the building. I don’t think I’ll ever like this, given my significant difficulty breathing in smoking areas. I like Massachusetts and its “no smoking in bars” laws, thanks.

I’m also slightly amused by the airport warnings for late passengers: “You are delaying the flight. Immediate boarding please! We will proceed to offload your luggage.” Although Jess says that my argumentative, regimented, and strict behavior is ‘German’, I think that it has definitely bled over into Amsterdam as well. I wonder if that is true of more areas of Europe?

Altogether, other than the languages, flying here isn’t much different than flying to any other big airport. Then again, I haven’t gotten to my final destination yet 🙂 More reports as more things happen — for now, signing off, from Schipol-Amsterdam airport.

(This post was written at 2:39AM Eastern Time, 8:39AM localtime.)

At times, this weblog has been the source of information about Symbian-Python hacking, RDF hacking, and geohacking. This week is going to be a lot of the latter, as I’m travelling to Lausanne, Switzerland to attend and present at the Free Open Source Software for GeoInformatics conference, FOSS4G.

I’m typing this from gate D6M of Schipol-Amsterdam airport, as I wait for the connector flight from here to Geneva, Switzerland, where I will meet up with my coworker, Schuyler Erle, and we will take the train from there to Lausanne. This afternoon, we’ll be attending the open portion of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation face to face meeting. Tuesday and Wednesday are workshop days, during which we will probably recruit available OpenLayers hackers — Tuesday night there is a dinner gathering for OpenLayers users, developers, etc., although I don’t know that we’ve been real clear on where that is yet 🙂

My participation in this conference is being graciously sponsored by my employer, MetaCarta. MetaCarta has supported the development of OpenLayers, one of the up-and-coming tools used in the Open Source world as an alternative to the Google Maps API. OpenLayers is a stable and well-developed API, released under the BSD license, and originally developed by MetaCarta for business reasons, but was released to the public as it was obvious there was a need for such a tool in the open source world. The OpenLayers presentation will cover some basic history of the project, what it currently supports with demos and code examples, where the project is heading, and hopefully time for people to bring up questions about OpenLayers. This presentation will be at 8:30 on Friday morning, in Auditorium C.

I’ll also be talking a little bit about the MetaCarta Labs GeoParser API. The GeoParser API is a publicly available interface which demonstrates the functionality which MetaCarta tools can provide: namely, the ability to extract from documents the geographic locations referenced within them. This functionality is used in Gutenkarte, an application which allows you to browse books while referencing their locations to a map. The presentation for Gutenkarte and the GeoParser API is at 11:00 on Friday morning, in Auditorium C.

At the same time, we will be working with many of the people that we often work with, but in person, rather than online: this will be my first chance to make face to face contact with a number of important members of the geospatial community, and to repeat contact with some who I knew and met at Where, but didn’t understand the significance of. 🙂

If you’re interested in learning more about OpenLayers, Gutenkarte, for the GeoParser API, or would like something specific covered in a talk, please drop a line to labs@metacarta.com. MetaCarta Labs is the public R&D face to MetaCarta, and we would love to use tools which MetaCarta has to make more useful public APIs available. The only way to improve things is to receive feedback. What services would you like to build on top of the GeoParser API? What more could it do to make your life easier? MetaCarta is devoted to expanding the information available via public APIs, and helping open source users to build new cool tools on top of its APIs. If there is some limitation that is causing you to be unable to implement a service, we’d love to hear about it. MetaCarta is extremely supportive of Open Source projects, and the Labs branch of MetaCarta is the place to bring any ideas for what should be changed, or what new features could be added that would cause the services offered to be more useful.

Schuyler and I are attending this conference not only to present, but to converse: to find out what kind of tools MetaCarta can share that will benefit the community at large. We’d love to hear from anyone who wants to use these tools about how they can be made easier to use — and how you’re using them already.

You can find us in the FOSS4G IRC channel, at #foss4g2006, on irc.freenode.net, or email labs@metacarta.com. This is your chance to make yourself heard. We encourage you to take advantage of it.

Free the Maps!

Currently, there are probably dozens of people who have paid for these maps. Instead of individual people each buying the same maps from the USGS over and over, someone bought the whole set, and wants to make the money back so that he can hand them over to the Internet Archive for redistribution.

If you’ve got cash to throw at something, throw it at this. Easily achievable goal to help bring more map data to the masses. USGS Topo Quads are one of the great things that the US government has put together: getting these publicly accessible would be a great thing for everyone.

Lately, I’ve been spending my blog-post writing time on learning tips and tricks related to cartographic and geographic mapping.

The Boston Free Map is now operating under a new, more familiar looking style. It also sports the ability to click on roads and see information about them.

The CIA World Factbook in Map Form is another click-to-query map, based on the public domain CIA World Factbook.

The New York City Map is not cartographically impressive, but offers hydro, openspace, parks and road centerlines in a nice interface. No query features.

The July OpenStreetMap dump is a Mercator-projected satellite background, plus a click-to query + Edit interface linking directly to OSM data. I’m going to be working with the OpenStreetMap project to make this their default homepage — using ka-Map and Mapserver against daily generated shapefiles rather than pulling from the live database for all data.

In all of this, ka-Map has become a very useful tool to me, so thanks to Paul Spencer and DM Solutions for his work on that.

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.

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.