Technical Ramblings

One revelation I had yesterday, when participating at BarCamp is… I still actually care about maps.

Now, those people who observe me probably know this. Although I have moved out of the map creation business — my day job is no longer hacking on OpenLayers, though amusingly, I actually end up *using* OpenLayers more now than I did most of the time at MetaCarta — I still enjoy maps, and still work in a field where maps play a big role, for example. However, I’ve felt for a long time like I was burned out on maps: After 5-6 years of working on the same thing, I was tired of the same discussions over and over again.

Turns out — that probably isn’t the case. Instead, what I got bored of was dealing with questions about Javascript-based web mapping. I got tired of only existing as “The guy people ask OpenLayers questions to”; I got tired of being a one-trick wonder, even if that trick earned me the title, for a while, of “Boy Genius” (literally: it was on my business cards).

I ran into Bill Wendel at Barcamp Boston yesterday, and when I pulled out my array of phones (Nexus S, Nokia C7, Nokia N9, Lumia 710), he commented that he remembered me talking at Barcamp Boston last year about the need to constantly reinvent yourself: if you’re not learning something new, you’re falling behind. I kept one hat on for what was — for me! — quite a while: Web mapping technology was the core of my existence in a lot of my development for 5 years. (Also changed in those 5 years: Got married. Child moved from elementary school to applying to high schools. Moved to current apartment. etc.) 5 years is a long time. A really long time. Being “the OpenLayers guy” just isn’t cutting it anymore.

But the mapping world still interests me: even today, it seems I have a lot of information in my head that isn’t ‘common knowledge’ about the mapping industry. (For example: Yahoo’s mapping platform is almost entirely provided by Nokia these days; something that most people aren’t aware of.) Even if I’m no longer as actively interested in doing the software development side of things, I still love talking maps — I love sharing information about how the world used to be, and how we’re seeing it change.

To me, this is news. I know that this is probably a sign that I’m insufficiently good at self-examination, but I really just thought that I was ‘done’ with Maps: finding out that indeed, I’m not done with maps, but just with mapping software, is an interesting revelation. I’m looking forward to Bill reaching back out and helping build up a group of people in Boston interested in mapping again. Back in 2006, we used to meet up regularly — and this was the early days of OpenLayers, so the meetups were more informal, and less code. (This is before we were part of OSGeo, for example.) As I moved more into the software development side, so did the meetups — but I realize that in doing that, I missed a key factor: the software of maps isn’t the interesting part. The *stories* matter. Software is the boring part. Leaving out the users and targeting the developers was the wrong way to go, and I want to see if going back away from that opens more interesting doors… again.

These days, the things I do have changed pretty drastically from what they were a couple years back. Since I’m attending BarCampBoston this weekend, I figured I should make a So, here’s a collection of things I know and do:

• Django: I have worked with Django since long before 1.0, using it for many different projects. The longest running project type I have used it for is managing distribution of Mechanical Turk style annotation tasks among a large pool of annotators; At MetaCarta, this was ~10-15 people; at Nokia, it’s more than 140 part-time workers around the world, producing thousands of responses to task judgements each day.
• Data Analysis — At Nokia, I also help do analysis against logs for the Nokia Map Search service, analyzing client trends, usage, and extracting information from search and click logs to help improve the overall quality of Map Search
• Web Development — a bit part of what I do at Nokia, as it has been in every job, is the creation of web UIs to make information more easily accessible. Typically using simple, plain HTML + Javascript interfaces, I work to make it easier for other people to get their job done by presenting information in a more easily accessible form; this can include anything from basic data aggregation to more complex map related display interfaces.
• AWS — At Nokia and outside of Nokia, I have done a fair amount of work around Amazon Web Services, using everything from EC2 to Cloudwatch to SNS to run services at a larger scale than I have before. Using Amazon and other ‘cloud’ services has been a big step forward in my knowledge of software deployment and development.

At Nokia, I work primarily on improving Map Search. This runs the gamut from annotation data and measurement to deployment — if there’s a part of the Nokia Map Search backend that I don’t know at least a little bit about, I probably will soon. At home, I dabble in photography, phone geekery, and various random hacking projects. I’m no longer quite the Open Source GIS guru that I was once — I’m no longer the go-to guy on questions about OpenLayers, for example — but I can now tell you a lot more about AWS than I could in those days 🙂

So, if you meet me at BarCampBoston and get to my blog: now you know. I’m Christopher Schmidt, and I’m a web hacker.

My daughter was recently accepted to the Emma Willard School. I’m glad for her getting the opportunity to be in a welcoming, academically rigorous all-girls environment, with what seems to be a huge dedication to fine arts. I think that it will be an excellent environment for her, and I look forward to the opportunities this will afford her, now and later in life.

That said: holy crap, this kid is going to live in a *frickin’ castle with gargoyles*. I hope that she appreciates it!

One thing I never knew was different between the Midwest and the East Coast until I moved here: the slicing of hot dog buns.

Where I grew up, hot dogs had smooth sides — like the outside of a loaf of bread. The slice was cut in what I think of as the ‘top’ of the bun — the bun was rounded on three sides, and looked like a loaf, except on the bottom, which was white, bread-like material.

In the midwest, they’re sliced (or made entirely) a different way — the sides that you put your hand on are not smooth, outside-of-load like material, but instead bread-filler-like white material, with the loaf-like stuff on top — looking more like two pieces of bread.

The words for these appear to be “side-sliced” (which is what I grew up with):

and “top-sliced”:

I just never knew that hot dog buns could be sliced a different way.

Last night, at my weekly Drink With Geeks event at Grendel’s Den in Cambridge, I enjoyed the start of my birthday with a lively argument about whether the Open Source development model is fundamentally superior for most use cases to proprietary software. (I’d shorten it here, but I realize that it really deserves a full post.)

I finished it off with a free shot of the Bartender’s choice — which happened to be Jameson. So far, in my 28th year, I have learned one thing only: Holy crap do I not like Jameson. (But hey, gotta try new things!)

Happy Birthday to me!

Most of my reading on the internet is quick; 6 paragraph news articles, compressing down into something I can read in less than 5 minutes, because I seldom have the time to spend longer than that. I do read in my spare time, but it’s usually 1950s-1970s sci-fi — not non-fiction news articles.

This morning though, I was linked to this Slate article about some of the best stories about the early computer industry which led me to a 1983 Playboy interview with Steve Jobs — and I’m amazed at some of what is said there.

I wasn’t one of the mourners at Steve Jobs’ death — I just didn’t have a lot of interaction with Jobs as anything other than a marketing personality. I got into computers in the mid 90s — my first home computer was Christmas of ’93, and the Mac, although ever-present in my early educational career, was always a slightly dated concept at best. It was never a core part of my life, and although I’ve been using Apple for my laptop hardware for the past 7 years, I never really bought into the Cult of Mac the way some people did.

Reading the Playboy interview though, I was struck by how much, in 1983, Jobs’ role and interactions in Apple played out exactly as he thought they would. His idea that IBM PCs, if they succeeded, would limit innovation in hardware for a “Dark Age” of 20 years, though not exactly spot on, is probably something that he would say came true — and that Apple, with OS X and later with the iPhone/iPad revolution, was really exactly the kind of thing I can see as being a fulfilled vision there.

To the rest of the world, the hardware revolution stopped mattering for a long time in personal computing — or at least, I think of it that way. Comparing the computers of today to the computers of 2000 — hell, even the computers of 1995 — didn’t innovate very much in changing user interactions. The “smartphone” started to make that change in early 2000s, a bit, but I think that the iPhone and iPad have really changed computing in a fundamental way for a lot of people. (Out of that has come other technology — like the Kindle — that is also changing the way that people interact with computers, in my mind.)

There were also a number of other things he talked about — like weaving in and out of Apple as he continued his life, or like predicting the death of what I guess were the other significant computer manufacturers then (Radio Shack, Wang, TI, Xerox, etc.) — a fact which shocked the interviewer.

It really changes my perspective on Jobs, and to a lesser extent, on Apple as a whole, to see that 30 years ago, Jobs could see pretty much exactly the way things worked out. It’s a pretty weird thing to read to me.

ХудожникI don’t know why it is, but man, do I love Discovery Channel’s (and History Channel’s) “reality” TV. Storage Wars, Pawn Stars, Ice Road Truckers, etc.

This weekend’s guilty pleasure is “Gold Rush: Alaska”; I started yesterday night, and I’m now partway through Season 2.

I expect most people wouldn’t like it, but I certainly do, and I don’t even really know why.

MetaCarta used Kerberos for single-sign-on support company wide.

Now, given that MetaCarta was a bunch of MIT hackers, this shouldn’t be particularly shocking. 🙂 It was generally a very nice thing to have — although it got me used to the idea that I *shouldn’t* type my password 20 times per day, a notion that Nokia has tried very hard to dissuade me from.

However, Kerberos support in Safari never worked for MetaCarta’s web services. It was never clear to me why, it was just clear that it didn’t work. Googling showed me many people saying it did work, and no people saying it didn’t, so I figured it was some quirk of my system and didn’t bother to fix it.

Now, at Nokia, I’m in the same boat: for services run by the Group Formerly Known as MetaCarta, we use Kerberos for everything. The difference is, falling back to Basic auth — which was fine in MetaCarta times — is a Very Expensive path to take in the new world; our auth services are slow Microsoft AD services hosted thousands of miles away on the other side of multiple high-latency firewalls, so when Kerberos doesn’t work — it hurts.

So, after getting fed up with this behavior yesterday, I started digging in. I didn’t make a lot of progress last night, but this morning, I stumbled across a post documenting that Safari does not work with hosts that are CNAMEs. With that one small pointer, I found other evidence of people running into this, and an option to reproduce the Safari-like behavior in chrome: “–disable-auth-negotiate-cname-lookup”. (The option documentation points to HttpAuthHandlerNegotiate::CreateSPN in http auth handler for more details.)

This bad behavior isn’t limited to Safari though: different versions of IE and the .Net framework also fail in similar ways at times. (The article in question says “Do not use CNAME dns records and non default web ports when using Kerberos!” — and given the multitude of clients and differing bugs in implementation, I’d say that seems like about the right approach.)

This seems to be a bug in Safari; it isn’t clear to me if it’s also a bug in WebKit. A brief (30 minutes) search through webkit and related postings seems to indicate that the higher level authentication handlers — like the one linked above in Chrome — are implemented at the application level, not the library level. (The library provides the hooks, but wouldn’t have anything more complex like Kerberos — which isn’t surprising.) I think that would mean this is a bug in the Safari implementation — the closed source side that I can’t touch — rather than in the open source WebKit base, so I can’t just ‘fix it myself’ (other than writing my own application layer — or more realistically, switching away from Safari to Chrome).

Anyway, if you’re having an issue with Negotiate auth not working in Safari, when you think it should — check if the server you’re trying to talk to is using a CNAME. If the answer is yes, it seems you’ve run into a known limitation: Safari Just Doesn’t Do That.

A friend of mine posted on his LiveJournal:

“maeiusophilia”
There aren’t many English words with four vowels in a row.

Of course, geek that I am, I thought ‘hm, that sounds like a challenge.’

Using egrep and /usr/share/dict/words, I came up with the following:

In my /usr/share/dict/words, it looks like:
4: 159
5: 3 (cadiueio, Chaouia, Guauaenok)
6: 1 (euouae)

Excluding proper nouns (or at least, things capitalized in the first letter), we get 110, 1, 1. Of the four-vowel words, 7 have only 5 letters; another 6 have only 6 letters.

An arbitrary selection of 4-vowel words: homoeoarchy, obsequiousness, palaeoencephalon, queue, lieue, rhythmopoeia, exsanguious.

(Normally, I’d have done a random selection instead of an arbitrary selection, but `sort` on OS X doesn’t have the -R option, sadly, and I didn’t happen to have an ssh connection to elsewhere open at that particular second.)

This feels like the kind of question I’d love to use as a job interview question someday.

Sometimes, I wish that I could talk more about work openly.

I do a fair amount of what I consider somewhat cool stuff at work — as is evidenced by my somewhat lower work in open source these days. (Since I find my work more interesting, I spend fewer of my off hours invested in ‘more interesting’ projects than I used to.) Of course, in reality, I expect that most people would still find what I do completely boring, but to me, it’s exciting.

In the past, when I worked for MetaCarta, there were only 20-30 people who would be in a position to be upset by what I would talk about — if I wanted to chat in public about something, I could usually chat with everyone who might care about it in an afternoon, and get a go/no-go from them.

But now, I work for a much larger company, and speaking out of turn could have much larger consequences. (Not the least is the fact that the company is publicly traded — so anything I say has the potential to actually shift a public stock price.) The group that I work in is significantly larger than MetaCarta’s core of engineers, and the number of levels between me and the top is comparatively larger.

So now, when I’m working on things that I consider cool, or want to share — I typically have to just keep my mouth shut.

Recently, one of my coworkers was trying to encourage someone from our team to present at the Berlin Buzzwords conference — talking about how good it would be to present some of what we do at the conference to get feedback from others working on the same problem. I couldn’t help but think, at the time: What exactly do you think that we could share at this conference?

Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but I feel a bit stymied by this regularly — even inside the organization, sharing data we’ve gathered becomes a political, rather than a technical, decision. Oversharing without consideration for how other teams will see the data is something that can have significant negative impacts on our interactions with other teams, because it’s very easy to step on toes.

I realize that this is all part of working in a large organization. Overall, there are a lot of positive benefits — in fact, much of the reason that I have more data that I’d like to share now is because we have a larger set of resources than we had available at MetaCarta, where many of the projects I worked on were just me hacking along on them alone. It doesn’t make it less frustrating, but it does swing both ways.

But sometimes I still just wish I could blab about what hack I spent my weekend on. Or open source another small project. And it’s a shame that I can’t.