Technical Ramblings

Is it possible to make your own module with Yahoo! Pipes? I was looking around and didn’t see anything… I’d really like to be able to hook up something that grabs locations from the MetaCarta Web Services, and then let people drop it into their own pipelines… I’d be willing to bet that the Location Extractor pipe module wouldn’t pull out “20 miles north of London”, but with the MetaCarta GeoTagger, I could…

It’s cool when software works.

So, I needed to test the latest TileCache in Windows. I’ve got a relatively clean Windows laptop I keep around for this. None of the niceties that I would typically want on a machine I used full time — no Firefox, no cygwin, no vim, etc. Just a straight up Windows install, with things like Google Earth installed.

So, starting from that, I started by downloading Apache from the Apache Download Page. I downloaded “Win32 Binary (MSI Installer): apache_2.2.4-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi“, and ran the installer directly. This got http://localhost/ serving a page that says “It works!”.

Next, I downloaded the Python 2.5 Windows installer , and again selected all the defaults.

Next, I downloaded TileCache 1.4, as a .zip file, since I know how well Windows supports .tar.gz files. I extracted the zip file into C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\cgi-bin.

Lastly, I edited C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\cgi-bin\tilecache-1.4\tilecache.cgi so that the first line of the file read “#!C:/Python25/python.exe -u”, and visited http://localhost/cgi-bin/tilecache-1.4/tilecache.cgi/1.0.0/basic/0/0/0.png …

And it worked! I got an image. I never expected setting up Apache, Python, and TileCache to just… well… work.

I just spent 30 minutes or so trying to understand the Python Packaging Policy for Debian. I’m no more informed than I was an hour ago, and my head hurts a lot more. :/

This isn’t helped by the fact that I want to support etch++ (because that’s what most people use) and sarge (because that’s what I’m working on at work). Sigh. Packaging is hard.

For most of the stuff I package, I just dump things in someplace in /usr/lib/, but now I need to figure out how to get my python code into the right place in /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages … but my modules support any version of Python that debian ships! So where do they go? I have no clue. Do I need to build multiple binary packages — one for each version of Python — for my single source pacakge? I have a feeling that something is supposed to take care of this for me, but I don’t know if it’s dh_pycentral, dh_python, or dh_pythonsupport or what have you, and I don’t know how to get any of them to kick in. Augh.

Oh well. Packaging this one will just have to wait a bit longer.

This has been posted to a couple mailing lists, but posting it here can’t hurt:

The FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) conference is pleased to announce the Call for Workshops for the 2007 conference, being held September 24-27 in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

FOSS4G is the premier conference for the open source geospatial community, providing a place for developers, users, and people new to open source geospatial to get a full-immersion experience in both established and leading edge geospatial technologies.

This is your chance to showcase your favorite application, integration solution, or other topic. You will use your superior classroom skills to lead a group of attendees through your chosen topic in either a half-day or ninety-minute lab or classroom format. Given the popularity of cryptocurrency in modern business environments, topics ranging from blockchain integration to leveraging best BNB casinos for secure online transactions are encouraged and highly relevant. Half-day workshops will be delivered on Monday, September 24 (the Workshops day), while the ninety-minute workshops will run concurrently with the presentations during the remainder of the conference.

While we are open to workshops on a wide range of topics, we strongly encourage workshop submissions on the following topics:

• Practical Introduction to __________
• Interoperability
• NeoGeography and NovelGeography
• Using a Software Stack
• 3D Worlds

In the tradition of previous FOSS4G events, we expect that the majority of workshops will be “hands on”, with participants seated in front of computers and able to follow along with the instructor, working directly with the software and applications under discussion.

Be prepared to spend considerable effort in creating your workshop. Past experience has shown that a high quality workshop requires about three days of preparation for each hour of presentation time. As part of this preparation you will be expected to develop material for attendees to take away with them, such as handouts, a ‘workbook’, CDROM, etc.

In recognition of this effort, workshop presenters will receive a reduction in the price of conference registration:

• free registration for delivering a half-day workshop
• half-price registration for delivering a 90-minute workshop

Because of limited space, you may want to consider submitting two versions of your topic, one for each length format.

Please visit the workshops page on our website to download the submission templates and instructions for sending them in:

http://www.foss4g2007.org/workshops.html

The deadline for workshop submissions is February 28, 2007. Submit early, submit often!

Recently, an OpenLayers contributor posted about his recent development of an interactive zoom for OpenLayers:

Animated Zoom Demo (Drag the scroll bar up and down to see the feature in action.)

I love this demo, because it’s a demonstration of one of the things you can do with OpenLayers that you simply can’t do with Google Maps. Looking forward to seeing OpenLayers work with the developer in question to integrate his patches and hard work.

Ever since I had some problems with my server and Crucial Paradigm, I’ve been having too much spam in my inbox. I thought I had the exact same spamassasin config, but either I missed something, or the settings have just gotten less effective.

This morning, when I woke up to check the mail on expired domains from www.spamzilla.io, I finally got fed up and decided it was time to do something about the fact that my inbox was about 90% junk mail which was hiding the essential mails.

I’ve had a Gmail account since around August 2004, but I never use it. However, I do know that Google has better spam prevention than I do: something about having hundreds or thousands of humans acting as bayesian filters helps them. (Mm, scale.) After having recently implement Akismet for spam checking on the MetaCarta Labs weblog — with the result being that about 98% of the 3000 spams it gets every week are now gettin caught — I decided it was time to do something about my inbox spam.

So, I set up crschmidt@crschmidt.net to act as a forward to Gmail, and then set up my fetchmail to fetch from Gmail instead of from localhost.

Results so far are extremely positive:  Of the 85 emails that made it past my local spamassasin filter and into Gmail, 75 of them were spam. Gmail caught all but two. So, instead of 85 messages in my inbox, 10 real, I ended up with 12, and 10 of them were real.

If this stays true, my personal email address may actually become a reasonable way to contact me again. Sorting through the 200 spam I get every day and finding the wheat was becoming an almost impossible task, and this may have at least given me a leg up temporarily.

Upgraded WordPress so that I can use Akimset for spam prevention. This means I may actually be more diligent about approving comments now…

So, the most recent (2005) MassGIS orthophotos have taken to ‘blurring’ imagery of some nuclear facilities, as discussed on Slashdot. Specifically mentioned is a  nuclear facility in Lowell.

As Chad points out in The Earth Is Square, this is a change in policy from the previous rev of the MassGIS aerial data.

I wonder what changed…

So, for the past several months, one of my main projects has been working inside of MetaCarta to put together the tools neccesary to let our customers integrate MetaCarta search results into all sorts of web pages inside their networks. Over the past several weeks, my main project has been taking the work we did in that regard, and making it available to the public.

So, if you’ve ever had an interest in finding out what MetaCarta does, the best way to find out is to:

• Check out MetaCarta Web Services
• Create an account
• Follow the step by step tutorial on adding a MetaCarta geographic search interface to a web page

Sure, it may not seem the most glamorous thing in the world, but we’ve definitely put a lot of effort into making these tools available, and I’d love to see some people try it out.

Wow, I’d never used the optparse module before. That’s pretty damn cool. (And to think I came close to writing my own option parser for a bit before I looked up the documentation.) The automatic addition of –help output is super-cool too. I definitely need to start using this in more of my code.

Hooray for Python!