Technical Ramblings

MetaCarta Labs is looking for a new employee again.

MetaCarta Labs is a small team of enthusiastic, fast paced developers working directly under the CTO to develop prototypes and new products and facilitate developer outreach. MetaCarta Labs is taking a key role in geo-enabling the Web — helping existing content owners to add geographic information to their content — and has a long history of working with external developer communities through open source projects and conferences.

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Most people who’ve been long time readers know that I’ve been working at MetaCarta for two years, and I’ve really had a great time there. Some of the smartest people I know are my coworkers, and I’ve learned more working with them than I have anywhere else. I’ve travelled to conferences in other countries, met people from around the world, worked on several open source projects, and directly participated in a number of interesting revenue-building things within the company.

Interest in geo a must: experience in geo optional. We’re looking for a web hacker, primarily: interest and experience in HTML and JS is pretty much a prerequisite for what we’re looking for at the moment.

It’s a cool gig: if you know anyone who might be interested, feel free to send them my way, either directly (crschmidt@metacarta.com) or via the link above.

Chad writes:

I know their “motto” is “Don’t Be Evil” .. but I think it should be “Don’t Be Smart” instead.. this is some dumb thinking from Google. Trust me.. I know better than Google on how I want to download and install my software.

This is just the latest in a whole lot of similar statements I’ve seen from many people across the web in a variety of situations talking about how “I know how to manage my machine”, with the underlying meaning being something like “You should act as if people who are working with your software know how to work their computers.”

When I put it that way, does it really sound right? Is there anyone who thinks that the *majority* of users of Google Earth actually know how to run their machines? Is there anyone who thinks that it makes sense for Google to build and QA two different install mechanisms — one for technical users who know what they’re doing, and one for those who don’t?

Very few companies the size of Google do anything on a whim. I expect that some thought went into the development of the Google Earth downloader. The fact that the thinking is not centered around technically competent users is just evidence that Google doesn’t need to target the early adopters; it’s not a sign that what they are doing is ‘Bad’ or ‘Stupid’.

Technical users are few and far between in the mass market. Google Earth is targeted towards the mass market. Just like all software that is targeted towards a mass market, there is nothing ‘stupid’ about removing tools that the majority of users don’t need or care about: By doing so, you limit the number of people who are going to end up confused by your tool, and that’s not a bad thing when you care about the majority of people instead of a technical elite.

So, I’m going camping this week. While camping, I plan to be hiking the White Mountains relatively extensively, from my home base at Lafayette Campground in Franconia Notch.

One of the best part of planning hiking trips is maps. I love maps. I love looking at them, finding things, exploring things. I love having them handy to reference, I love browsing around them.

However, when you’re on a trail, looking at maps on a computer doesn’t work particularly well. As a result, I’m trying to print maps, and finding that it’s a somewhat difficult proposition.

I have DRGs from the libremaps project: These are great. I’m looking at o44071b5, o44071b6, and o44071a6, all downloaded from the Libre Map Project. Unfortunately, I then went to go open c6, only to find that… it’s not available. Argh! I know that it exists: I can check the features that should be on it in the Terraserver DRG WMS, but no Twin Mountain quad.

Oh well. Not a huge deal, just annoying; I’ve got other maps that cover the area. Now the problem is that I can’t figure out how to take a tiff like these and print them over multiple pages on a home printer. Anyone got any tips or tricks on that? Printing on one page is somewhat useful, but not nearly as much as I’d like; I also don’t want to spend all day cropping and fighting with tools. If I have to do that, I’ll just survive with what I’ve got.

I’m going to go out to the local map store and see if they have a nice Atlas for the Whites; if so, I’ll take it. It’s worth it to have a little bit of extra knowledge about a place — and who can’t use more maps?

Earlier today, a coworker was trying to work out a diagram for the models in the Django app that I’ve been working on internally, to visualize the relationships between them. I did a quick Google, and found a reference to DjangoGraphviz, a super-handy little chunk of code.

DjangoGraphviz did exactly what I needed it to, with no problems at all. (My only complaint is that it requires the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to be defined in order to get the –help output, somewhat unintuitive.) The software quickly generated a .dot file which I was able to turn into a lovely PDF, and print. I’ve now got a copy on the desk of each of the developers using the codebase, and I think it’ll prove a lovely piece of reference.

So, if you want a quick visualization of your Django models, and you can install graphviz, I highly recommend DjangoGraphviz to do it.

(Note that the wiki page itself recommends a couple other things more ‘built in’ to Django, which are new to me: I didn’t try these, I just stuck with DjangoGraphviz, which did what I wanted.)

From the GeoJSON mailing list:

The GeoJSON Authors are proud to announce the finalization of the GeoJSON 1.0 Specification.

Representing more than a year’s worth of community discussion and development, the GeoJSON specification describes an easy to use, extensible format for transferring geographic data over the web. With support in more than 20 different applications, GeoJSON is already quickly becoming a de facto standard for transferring geographic data in a JSON format. The finalization of the spec represents the final step in formalizing the GeoJSON format for encoding this data.

More information on GeoJSON can be found at http://geojson.org/ , or from the GeoJSON mailing list at http://lists.geojson.org/listinfo.cgi/geojson-geojson.org .

I made a post over on the MetaCarta Labs blog about doing geographic queries on App Engine:

???????? ????? ????????In this way, I was able to put together a geographic bounding box query, on top of Google App Engine, using a Geohash-like algorithm as a storage format, and use that query to power a FeatureServer Demo App Engine application, doing geographic queries of non-point features on top of App Engine/BigTable. Simply create a Geoindex object of the bounding box of your feature, and then use lower-left/upper-right points as bounds for your Geohash when querying.

— Geographic Queries on Google App Engine

Probably of interest to some of the people who read this.

Wherecamp is the closest thing to a perfect conference going experience I have had in my history of going to conferences. The organizers — Ryan and Anselm — did a great job of pulling everything together, but I think that the single entity most responsible for making this happen was Google, and their representatives on the ground, Nate and Dusty.

Key things to good unconferences:

• Constant stream of food. Geeks like to eat, and eating keeps us happy, healthy, and wise. Snacks are great, both healthy and unhealthy, and drinks and so on are also good. I think this, more than anything else, is the kind of thing that a well-funded social event should try to have. The meals at Google were also great, and having the space we did for serving was super useful for avoiding frustration at lines. In general, for the number of people who were present, Google’s facilties were significantly better prepared for serving people than my experience at Where 2.0 and FOSS4G events.
• Big open space for organization, small cozy meeting spaces for sessions. One thing that repeatedly came up was that the conference spaces we were in for sessions were full — and, believe it or not, I find sitting on a makeshift chair in the back of the room *great*. The participation in the sessions was better than at any other unconference I’ve been too, because of the close-knit situation. Occasionally things were a bit too small — the Processing talk was one example — but in general, it was a good thing to be in close quarters.
• Great wireless. Coverage of the entire space was perfect, including outside, and given that there were 300 people sitting around banging on it, that was far more impressive. I’ve seen networks fall apart under significantly less load, even at Barcamp Boston 2, at MIT.
• Open Space: The central auditorium and outdoor areas were great places to chill out and enjoy your time. Not having to be stuck in a hallway, or running back and forth between sessions, was a wonderful end result, and the tables/chairs/etc. setup was just great.

The last thing that can make or break any conference is the people, and I couldn’t have asked for any better. I met and hung out with a bunch of Python Geo hackers — more so than I ever have in the past. We stayed up late, hacked all night (in my case, literally) and resolved a ton of issues. I got to hang out with some of the people that I really enjoy spending time around, and meet some new ones.

Thanks to all of you who made this weekend totally worth the trip. Special thanks to the organizers, and Google for being such a great host.

Next up is FOSS4G, I hope; I hope that I can take what I learned here and make an effort to turn FOSS4G into (at least partially) the event that Wherecamp was so successfully.

Notes about Processing, from processing.org, and other related things.

“Drawing images is not about telling which pixels to turn on or off, it’s about telling to draw lines.”

In addition to processing being pretty, you can draw the entire map into any unit you want. Drew a bunch of lines out in state plane projected unit system, and then cropped image.

Drawing all of the streets in King County plus all of transit lines

4d expansion of transit data — time out of the map on photo

Processing is great at generating static images; looping over a dataset and drawing lines is what processing is for.

Demoing a bunch of demos of processing from Tom Carden; cabspotting, travel time tube map, etc. etc.

Processing.js: Processing in JS, by John Resig. Uses “Processing.js is like developing Processing on a 400mhz celeron”

Source code to London Tube Map is available; Processing makes source code available by default, Google for “powered by processing” for examples.

Stamen typically does Prototype in Processing, final client in Flash.

Processing is Java; it should be possible to pull in Java libraries; can import .jar files, can drag in data (images, etc.); loading data is a one liner.

NodeBox: “Processing in Python”

Obsessing.org: Processing.js GUI.

Same processing source code in browser and applet using Processing.js

Context Free Art: here

The default mode of processing is:
* Setup
* Draw function that’s called as much as possible

Going to publish cabspotting example to wherecamp wiki

Brandon demos OpenStreetMap data rendered on the fly with processing data.

NodeBox demo using a springgraph. Proxmiity fixes of local bluetooth data.

Processing is 4-5 years old now

Collaboration is typically “Copy an example, create your own, keep going”

Tonight, starting around 7:30, there is a plan to descend on The Dubliner, in Noe Valley, San Francisco, for beer and hackery. If the plan changes, I’ll update twitter. If you want to join us, please:

• Comment here
• Email me (crschmidt@crschmidt.net)
• or Text or call me (603.264.2294)

I’m off to Wherecamp tomorrow. I’ll be in town and have no plans yet as of Friday, and I’ll be at wherecamp all weekend, planning to spend the night hacking at the Googleplex.

Who’s going to be there? Anyone interested in meeting up on Friday, or doing any hacking ahead of time or during?