OSSMichigan.org - Not quite a planet but a state.

Microblogging on blogs

2008-11-21T21:19:17+00:00

Lately I've been spending more time microblogging on identi.ca.

One of my friend's does a weekly status of his twitter updates to his blog, but I am not convinced if that is useful for people or not.

So what does the interweb think about this?

Hassle the HOF

2008-11-21T05:31:28+00:00

Jono recently unveiled the Ubuntu Hall of Fame.

To sum it up: the community is full of great contributors from all around the world, and we want to showcase that, so check it out and thank someone.

Each box has a little (i) icon in it, which will take you to information about that part of Ubuntu if you want to get started and start your path to greatness. People have pointed out that it is missing some parts - I assure you that we are aware that things like the forums and Answers on lp are missing and they are on the TODO list.

The "Upstream Bug Rockstars" box is related to our upstream report, showing which projects have great bug linkages to upstream projects, so if you've been forwarding and linking bugs, thanks!

It takes time to make good stuff.

2008-11-20T08:31:37+00:00

Sometimes longer than we'd like. Over two years ago at a Boston GNOME Summit Aaron Bockover laid out some of his ideas about the future of Banshee. At the time Banshee wasn't very mature, it was in need of some love and new blood. In the room along with us was Gabriel Burt, Miguel de Icaza and his band of mono people, Mike Urbanski, Brandon Hale, and a few others.

Over the course of this session we discussed things like the much-needed play queue, the need to redo a bunch of the guts, better device support, and a myriad of other ideas and thoughts. At the time it seemed so impossible that Banshee would ever get there.

This week Aaron announced Banshee 1.4, and in my view this is the Banshee that we envisioned. Much has changed. Since then Gabriel has been working on Banshee at Novell for a year now, and the Banshee community has grown by leaps and bounds.

In many ways I feel like Banshee 1.4 is what 1.0 should have been. Hindsight is very 20/20, but looking back at the amount of work accomplished by the team (on top of their other work duties) and the solid base that is current Banshee, I think the decision to rework the guts and push through to what we have today has been worth it. I think that getting out 1.0 and 1.2 when they did come out was important, even though some things weren't finished.

So now that we're here ... aaaaahhhhhhhh.

So now what? Well, I for one have been looking forward to this day for a number of reasons. One, I feel that Banshee has now reached a point where it can be boring. By "boring" I mean mature. The big churn is over and now we can concentrate on the sexy little bits.

I myself have been lucky to watch the Ubuntu part of the Banshee community grow. We have hyperair maintaining the Banshee team PPA, which provides Ubuntu users top-notch binaries for running Banshee. Prior to hyperair, there was no one really working on delivering fresh-Banshee to Ubuntu users, so my thanks go out to him. I've literally forgotten how to build Banshee from source. :)

And clearly no one can ever forget Sebastian Dröge's work on not just Banshee, but the entire Mono stack in Ubuntu over the years. He's been off doing awesome things for Collabora, but his contributions to Ubuntu, Debian, and Banshee are very significant. And lastly, my personal bug hero, Andrew Conkling, who has been that "bridge" between Ubuntu and upstream; triaging bugs and ensuring that the right bugs get reported to the Banshee developers and generally kicking serious butt.

I'd also like to thank those of you out there who have reported bugs in Banshee, helped people in IRC, and done general support and advocacy. You're all full of awesome.

FortiusOne is hiring - help build GeoCommons

2008-11-18T21:05:22+00:00

Excited about the GeoWeb? Want to help build the next generation social mapping tools and work on some really awesome technology?

The GeoCommons team is expanding and we’re looking for some cutting-edge developers and designers to join us. We’re using a wide range of technologies to build an easy-to-use and incredibly powerful geodata sharing, visualization, and collaboration platform that is being used in organizations from the government, to enterprise, to international NGO’s, to local communities and groups.

With GeoCommons, we’re integrating Neogeography with GIS to provide powerful tools to users: if you can make it fun on the web where users aren’t required to stay, then customers will love you. And by integrating with other tools that each user is comfortable with, whether it is Excel, Notepad, GoogleEarth, or ArcGIS Desktop and QGIS; we help bring GeoCommons to them rather than making them come to GeoCommons. We’re also pushing the next generation of GeoWeb standards: KML, GeoRSS, GeoJSON, and making them more powerful and supported. These are ideas we started with Mapufacture and are quickly integrating with Finder!, Maker! and the rest of the GeoCommons suite.

As a part of our team, you would investigate large-scale data sharing and linking, geospatial and data visualization mechanisms and tool development, web native API integration and community building. We’re working with many other groups in the open-source as well as GIS communities to help integrate data and tools to broadly disseminate all this quality data that has otherwise been inaccessible and make it easy to visualize and use in decision-making.

We’re looking for developers with real programming chops - you should be comfortable considering Mongrel and Nginx versus Passenger, know when to use unobtrusive Javascript or call ActionScript Flash hooks, have played with ActiveMQ and Stomp, beanstalkd, Starling or other queueing systems, read technology news and blogs and preferably have a site yourself where you share your experiences and code with the world. We’re looking for community members and developers that like working in teams, attending programming groups, and are comfortable sharing their ideas. We encourage you to have hobbies and side projects - we’ve built quite a few ‘lab’ tools ourselves such as context-free music and touchscreen whiteboards. And you don’t have to be an Apple user, but it helps.

Welcome to Washington, DC

FortiusOne is located in Arlington, VA - directly above the Courthouse Metro on the Orange line into DC, and a short walk into the district directly. The DC area is on an incredible spike of growing technology community. Where else can you live in a “metro area” that encompasses at least 3 states, all of which are metro accessible? The area is also renowned for it’s bike accessibility. The recent election has cast a spotlight on the future of technology in the government with President-Elect Obama’s Change.gov initiative. The upcoming inauguration is sure to be an incredibly historic event and you could be here to help map it.

As for the community, there are at least three Ruby-specific groups, a NOVALang where learning new programming languages is the prime objective, RefreshDC, TwinTech, and one of the most open governments to geodata standards and sharing. We’re also quite big fans of the local beer selection and hard to beat the food variety.

Let us know

So if this sounds exciting to you, and you’re interested in joining the team - please let us know! You can also check out the formal listing.

Dear Red States

2008-11-18T14:55:52+00:00

I recived this in my inbox this morning and it made me laugh:

A Letter To The Red States

Dear Red States…

We’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us.

In case you aren’t aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood.

We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss. We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama.

We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we’re going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they’re apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don’t care if you
don’t show pictures of their children’s caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we’re not willing to spend our resources in Bush’s Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country’s fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation’s fresh fruit, 95 percent of America’s quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we’re discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy b*****ds believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

By the way, we’re taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.

Peace out,
Blue States

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2008-11-16

2008-11-17T03:59:59+00:00

My date this weekend lasted 30 hous, I think we hit it off #
At the MUG meeting and going to listen to Richard Johnson:
http://ping.fm/INHMP #
I think ‘iostat -cdmtx 10 999999′ is my favorite command to run on the database server. #
my Twitterank is 14.08! http://twitterank.com/?u=aaronthul #
Just purchased my plain ticket to SFO for FOSSCamp and UDS if my work schedule permits. #
Driving through Indiana on my way wo Wyndicon. #
On my way home from a great weekend in chicago. #

OpenWeek!

2008-11-12T18:24:41+00:00

I'd like to thank everyone who participated in Ubuntu Open Week this time around, especially our presenters. For many presenters this was their first Open Week so the variety of talks continues to grow! Some Ars coverage of Mark's talk is here. Logs are posted for your viewing pleasure on the Open Week page.

Special thanks go out to Dylan McCall for handling the calendar attachment so that people can subscribe to the schedule. Also a shout out to the IRC team for their always solid support. Excellent work!

Book meme

2008-11-12T14:36:28+00:00

Here is how the game is played, followed by my entry.

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

“Sometimes in his hands.” -Mainspring, Jay Lake

Apps for Democracy ending - need a quick mashup?

2008-11-10T18:06:41+00:00

The Apps for Democracy innovation content that I talked about previously is ending this week. There have been 15 submissions so far, with probably many more in the works - for a potential of 60 awards!

So with 4 days left to build your App submission, you may be in a scurry for inspiration or more data to mashup and visualize. How about over 40 additional datasets in GeoCommons Finder! specifically about Washington, DC (or more tagged District of Columbia) available as KML. Combine that with the DC CTO data and you have a good number of combinations.

Here are some potential examples:

Kid-friendly map of Public Libraries with Signed Bike Routes
A slightly-belated Halloween/Fright Application Cemetaries, Haunted Places, and poor Air Quality
Or driver-friendly Speed Detectors, Traffic patterns, morning departure times
and finally potentially a nice “day out” planning site with parks, farmers markets, local weather and Chowhound reviews of restaurants for dinner

So pull out your Mapstraction or OpenLayers examples, grab a template from CSS Blueprint or Open-Source Web Design, throw in some feeds and perhaps a geographic search from GeoNames.org and you’re well on your way to fame and glory in the District.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2008-11-09

2008-11-10T03:59:59+00:00

Watching a movie from NetFlix on my Mac under safari, I am glad NetFlix finally has this working. Join the beta now: http://ping.fm/aNnfJ #
Last night was truly outstanding, to bad I was way to tired to stay up for Obama’s speech. #
The DIA was fun, more fun was running into some other friends that happen to be there too. #

I Moved!

2008-11-10T00:42:25+00:00

This blog has moved to http://dropline.net.

Amazing vote reports

2008-11-05T04:00:49+00:00

Now that the day is wrapping up, offering a very small selection of some amazing reports of good and bad incidents on US Election day:

my designated voting location was closed for repairs with no signs…: Buffalo, NY (link)
police were waiting to ticket me and challenge my ability to vote due to incorrect license plates: Kings Beach, CA (link)
I was sworn at by a poll worker to stop “bitchin’ and complainin’”: Tulsa, OK (link)
…everyone was in a good spirit, and the electoral officials did a wonderful job handling such a large crowd. My hats off to them…: New York City, NY (link)
Very organized and quick. Fie on computer voting machines - paper works great!: South Lyon, MI (link)
My First day voting, and went very smoothly … I’ll remember this day for the rest of my life…: Irvington, NJ (link)

Thank you Team!

Election night at NPR

2008-11-05T02:02:27+00:00

I was lucky enough to be invited to enjoy the US 2008 election night at NPR main headquarters in Washington, DC.

Of course, within minutes of walking in I started getting feature requests from reporters and bloggers. One of these was the ability to easy page through reports by state (hint: http://votereport.us/?count=200&state=VA).

We did our best to get a quick web-based map visualization up that would be usable by a large number of people with basic browsers. This limited the number of markers to 200 (one reason we chose to use Flash for our current rendering tool). However, one way of addressing this was to offer a KML file that works very well in GoogleEarth for large sets of markers. Here are the 10,000 reports as of this evening.

Another feature we snuck in recently are some simple statistics on the number and time of reports today at http://votereport.us/reports/stats:

To close out this post - we searched the database to pull up this great audio report by keema: http://votereport.us/reports/9240 - I highly suggest you listen to it.

I Use Opera

2008-11-04T00:24:00+00:00

People make fun of me, but I don’t care. I use Opera. Its faster. I use javascript heavy sites like google mail and bloglines and in Firefox and Internet Explorer these sites are slow to load, slow to use, and make my browsers eat upward of 30% of the 2.5G of ram in my poor laptop.

I know the google lovers say “CHROME!” but after reading the privacy policy, I can’t handle it. Opera is years more refined and has the options I need. I do miss noscript, my favorite firefox plugin, but with the ability to enable or disable Java, JavaScript, plugins, cookies, sound, animated images, and even refers, just by pressing F12 and selecting one of these options, I’m fine with using Opera. Did I mention it is fast? I also love the saved session state.

Two things I missed when I moved from Firefox to Opera were the smart bookmarks which I had configured in Firefox to post to my delicious account and to subscribe to a feed using bloglines. It turns out Opera has custom buttons.

After finding the Del.Icio.Us custom buttons, I was able to make my own for bloglines.

s/bl <—drag this link to your Opera menu bar

Just drag this link into your menu. I like to name my s/bl for subscribe with bloglines. I like tiny abbreviations so that my menu doesn’t fill up.

... and we're off!

2008-11-03T22:50:46+00:00

Day 1 of Ubuntu OpenWeek is wrapping up.

Two minor changes to the schedule, we've added an Ubuntu training session with Billy Cina and Belinda Lopez on Wednesday and the fabulous Kurt Von Finck will be giving out recommendations and tips on "How to make smart buying decisions as a free software user" on Thursday.

Demand for slots has been high this time around so we're doing our best to jam as many topics in there. See you all bright and early tomorrow - Jono will be around to wrangle things as I will be taking a day off to go vote.

Which comes first, the linux penguin or the linux egg?

2008-11-03T12:44:44+00:00

I had a pretty depressing conversation on Halloween. I was at a part with the head of a local community college's computer dept. I guess they've integrated the IT/CS-ish sides of things. I had wanted to ask how one goes about teaching a class as it's something I've thought might be a fun/interesting side project to do at some point. I know a couple of topics well enough to teach these days.

I found out they only offer one Linux course in their whole program. Then we got talking back-end and she mentioned that they're moving off of Linux for computers/servers the college runs on. What?! Why in the world would you do that? She made the comment that they can't find/keep Linux admins. So it's easier for them to move things to Windows servers and have the people on hand to run them.

This leads me to the chicken and the egg thing though. I mean, if you offer one Linux course, how do you train Linux admins? I only had one/two in my degree days, but it was enough to make me follow through with learning a lot more on my own. With so little exposure, it's not surprising they can't find the people. It's also not like this school is in an area where a ton of professionals would pick to live. Flint, MI isn't exactly my first choice to be.

It's definitely sad to see that even somewhere you might consider a "linux friendly zone", the education world, is a place where it's not always welcome.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2008-11-02

2008-11-03T03:59:59+00:00

I swear I am not a caffeine addict but I just ordered over $100 in coffee. #
I just ate way to many chocolates, I will have to run a LOT at the gym tonight. #
Just updated the software on my BB, I wonder what new things it will do. #
At Black Lotus brew pub listening to a great band. #
I am very upset that an essential accessory to my Halloween costume will not make it due to the company screwing up. #
If you are going to Necto tonight raise your hand. #
Today has been a nice relaxing day at home after weekend full of Halloween parties. #
Just finished the book When you are Engulfed in Flames. What to read next??? #

Intrepid Release Party

2008-11-02T13:16:07+00:00

First cut of the pics from the release party.

Great turn out of old skins, and new users as well. Post pics of your party!

GTK# in Visual Studio 2008 on Vista x64

2008-11-02T00:02:00+00:00

Yes, I am crazy. Why would any programmer want this combination? I think it is a combination of wanting to work with the best tools, in this case Visual Studio 2008 and CodeRush and wanting to target Win32, OSX, and Linux all at once. The very nice part is that thanks to the hard work of other people, you don’t even have to run in Mono on Win32.

Install the GTK# SDK
You can get it from here: http://medsphere.org/projects/gtksharp/releases/2.10.4/gtksharp-sdk-2.10.4.msi
The project page is here:
http://medsphere.org/projects/gtksharp/
Thanks to the good folks at medsphere for maintaining this windows installer. Presumably they use this in their applications.
Create a new Windows Forms Project in Visual Studio.

Its fine to keep 3.5 framework selected. Mono supports the core parts of 3.5.
Remove the references to System.Windows.Forms.dll
Add reference to atk-sharp, glib-sharp and gtk-sharp in the following paths:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Medsphere\Gtk# Runtime\lib\gtk-sharp-2.0\atk\atk-sharp.dll
C:\Program Files (x86)\Medsphere\Gtk# Runtime\lib\gtk-sharp-2.0\glib\glib-sharp.dll
C:\Program Files (x86)\Medsphere\Gtk# Runtime\lib\gtk-sharp-2.0\gtk\gtk-sharp.dll
Change your Platform target to x86 from AnyCPU in the project properties.
Write some test code

[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
    Application.Init();
    Window myWin = new Window("My first GTK# Application! ");
    myWin.Resize(200, 200);
    myWin.Destroyed += new EventHandler(myWin_Destroyed);
    Label myLabel = new Label();
    myLabel.Text = "Hello World!!!!";
    myWin.Add(myLabel);
    myWin.ShowAll();
    Application.Run();
}
static void myWin_Destroyed(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Application.Quit();
}

Run the application

Enjoy your 3rd option for a pure .NET programming GUI Toolkit on Win32. Winforms and WPF are great, but GTK# does fill a certain niche.

VoteReport mapping and data feeds

2008-11-01T18:42:52+00:00

Over the past two weeks I’ve been working with a great team of people helping to build VoteReport - an open public reporting system to be used during the 2008 US Election to track the situation as citizens cast their ballots. The simple goal is to make it easy for anyone to send in a report describing the wait time, overall rating and any complications that are impairing their ability to participate in the election. For more information check out http://twittervotereport.com.

Dave Troy has put together a solid backend that is aggregating together Twitter, SMS, voice, iPhone and Android native applications, and even YouTube. Others have built the iPhone specific applications. I’ve been working on the mapping and data sharing side of the project. The first goal was to provide a number of mechanisms to share the data that we’re gathering with everyone. Additional mashups and visualizations are free to use the data streams to pull all the data that VoteReport itself has - so definitely go wild with your ideas. A quick breakdown of what’s available:

OpenSearch - http://votereport.us/opensearch.xml: This is the OpenSearch description document that outlines all of the feeds and various filters that you can use when getting to the data. Always check this as we’ll update it with new parameters or data streams. In addition, the various responses discussed below include OpenSearch styling pagination so you can walk through the entire database of reports without having to drink right from the firehose. This also includes the OpenSearch-Time extension.
KML - http://votereport.us/reports.kml: Getting the reports.kml will give a Network Link - this is useful for GoogleEarth and other KML clients to automatically update every 60 seconds with new reports. You can append live=1 to get the full KML document. I have included all the useful attributes in the ExtendedData element of all the Placemarks. Each Placemark also has an id for easy reference.
GeoRSS-Atom - http://votereport.us/reports.atom: Just want to subscribe to the feed in your RSS reader, this feed is useful for getting updates.
GeoJSON - http://votereport.us/reports.json: JSON is super nice for doing client-side mashups and visualization. This is what the VoteReport Map itself is using. It includes a lot of information for each report, including reporter, icon, location.

All of these feeds even can take a dtstart= with an ISO-8601 date for getting reports after a certain time (and optionally dtend= for getting time-bounds of reports). A useful geographic filter is to use state= with the capitalized two-letter state code to just get reports within a state. So for example http://votereport.us/reports.atom?state=VA is a GeoRSS feed of reports in Virginia. As I mentioned, I did build a quick map that you can view at http://votereport.us/reports/map.

We’re continuing to build it out with new features as more data comes in. You can easily embed the map in your site using (and optionally remove the state=):

<iframe src="http://votereport.us/reports/map?state=VA" frameborder="0" class="stream" width="535" height="500" scrolling="no" ></iframe>

The difficulty with creating more visualizations is the lack of pre-election data. This system has been built to primarily capture a huge amount of valuable information for one day. We’re not sure before hand what this data will look like, coverage or attributes. Typically visualizations are made by exploring and playing with the data to see what emerges. In this case, we’re making estimates (and guiding via the tutorials) on what data we’d like. Therefore, the map itself has simple mechanisms for styling markers based on the user-supplied report. But the data is far to dispersed so far for something like a heatmap.

Fortunately, the team consists of a large number of public advocates that are spreading the word which should encourage more citizens to use the system and contribute both good and bad reports. Andy Carvin of NPR put together this NPR coverage, and we’ve also received coverage from Time, Huffington Post, New York Times, TechCrunch and even Craig Newmark. Check out the TVR press page for more coverage links.

And if you would like to help contribute to the project, check out the VoteReport Wiki. I imagine there will also be a number of post-election visualizations and analysis to come out of the reports.

Happy Halloween...

2008-11-01T14:09:04+00:00

In hindsight maybe those webcam improvements in 2.6.27 weren't such a good idea. :D

This train stops for no one ...

2008-11-01T10:16:40+00:00

You'd think that we'd slow down now that Ubuntu 8.10 is out the door. But nope; if anything we push ourselves just a little bit harder...

Next week we kick off another week of workshops in IRC; Ubuntu OpenWeek.

This is the perfect chance to get involved in Ubuntu development, learn how to package, learn how to triage a bug, learn to contribute to documentation, and a bunch of other topics. I hope to see you all there!

Nota Bene: I could have said something like "This train of awesome stops for no one" or "All aboard the awesome train" or even "Train of Consequential Awesomeness". Just wanted to let everyone know that I am working on not overusing my crutch words. Sweet.

Ontario Linuxfest

2008-10-31T15:22:25+00:00

I had a great time at the Ontario Linuxfest. There's a great summary on Linux.com

I am going to get into OpenStreetMap because the talk was so good and funny that I just got to get into this community. Shouts out to the Ubuntu NY LoCo, the Fedora guys, and Mr. Bradley M. Kuhn and his handsome beard.

OpenStreetMap mapping party in Arlington - November 1 & 2

2008-10-31T13:24:04+00:00

It’s just about here - we’re hosting the first Washington, DC area mapping party this weekend at the FortiusOne office in Arlington. You can also meet the GeoCommons team!

If you haven’t been to a mapping party - essentially anyone can show up throughout the day, borrow a GPS unit (or bring your own), get a quick tutorial on how to collect data for OpenStreetMap and then head out for a gorgeous day around the town gathering tracks, points of interest, road data, bike trails, walking areas, etc. It’s a great way to explore the city and also make maps that are useful to you! While the OSM map for Arlington and DC “looks” fairly complete it’s missing a lot of useful information such as directions, metros and more - so it still needs a lot of TLC.

Once you get back with your data we can show you how to upload it to OpenStreetMap. Of course, there is also typically post-mapping socializing somewhere nearby. Overall the day is very free and you can come for as short as an hour or two - but I’ll warn you that it’s very addictive.

The event is listed for both Saturday and Sunday - but my recommendation is to come on Sunday. Saturday is SocialDevCamp East up in Baltimore, and also on Sunday Mikel will be in town to provide his mapping expertise to the party.

Here are the event details (in hCal of course).

OpenStreetMap mapping party - Washington, DC:
November 1 or 2, approximately 10-5PM at the FortiusOne Office

2200 Wilson Blvd.

Suite 307

Arlington, VA 22201

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Washington_DC

- We’re on the 3rd floor above BB&T - above the Courthouse metro. There is street parking as well. OSM of the area

MiDevelopers meeting for October

2008-10-31T03:02:42+00:00

We had another fun MiDevelopers meeting tonight. Our usual turnout of 7ish people. The new location worked pretty nicely, except that the wireless didn't work. Good food/drink though. It did allow me to test out the JoikuSpot application on my E71, which turns the phone into a wireless AP. It looks like Intrepid's version of Network Manager will do the ad-hoc connection ok now and a couple of guys were able to use my phone as an internet connection. Very cool to know.

I have to apologize for the iPhone hating all night. I tend to rant very well and had many opportunities to do so. When you feel strongly about something, can't help it right?

We had a nice influx of Ubuntu users so there was a mini-Intrepid release party going on. Half the group had upgraded and we were testing out/showing off some things. A couple of guys had never used Gnome Do so we had to set them straight.

On the programming side, we had a new developer show up. Matt joined us and was from the Farmington-ish area. Another PHP developer in the group, but also has aspirations of checking out this "Python" thing. We were all more than happy to explain to him how lovely life will be after giving some time to Python education.

Adam brought in his new netbook toy to show off. Very sharp looking Apire, I think it was. We also spent some time debating on how best to design a Tomboy replacement. Something that could exist on the web, on the desktop, and have access to via cell phone. The key though is to try to mimic the interaction and ease of use Gnome Do + Tomboy provided. A tough call. The conversation definitely has me itching to play with some code though. Some really good ideas tossed about.

Sorry for the late notice on this month's meeting. I think we'll hold the next one at the same location and bump up the date to be the Thurs before the holiday. So mark it on your calendars now. Have to block off that time to drink and talk code/linux.

Dr. Strange HoH: How I Learned To Love Perl and C#

2008-10-30T23:45:35+00:00

Its no secret that I came to C# after doing lots of Perl. I treasure my Perl experience. Many claim that Perl is unreadable, but I argue that the language is as good as the programmers using it. I’ve seen pages of equally unreadable PHP, VB, and yes, even C#. I’ve used Perl libraries as references for how things work. Many Perl libraries are examples of great highly readable code. Language doesn’t matter.

Perl’s documentation is a testament to open source languages. I learned Perl with perldoc installed an the perl man page. It taught me the Perl way of data structures and as I got more advanced I ran into Arrays of Arrays(AoA), Arrays of Hashes(AoH), Hashes of Arrays(HoA) and Hash of Hashes(HoH). These are all defined in the perllol perldoc.

Some of the most confusing Perl that I ever did read or write was confusing because instead of building explicitly named types, convention was relied on too much over configuration and everything was just a HoHoHoHoHoHoH. I think it was a joke about Santa Clause.

All that said, there are times when you really want a HoH or a HoHoH or a HoHoHoH. That is Dictionary<string,Dictionary<string,string>> or Dictionary<string,Dictionary<string,Dictionary<string,string>>> or Dictionary<string,Dictionary<string,Dictionary<string,Dictionary<string,string>>>> for you non perl types.

A little over a year ago, Eilon Lipton wrote a post on using anonymous types as Dictionaries. I rather liked it, but That was just a H (Dictionary<string,string>). I recently had the need for a HoHoA.

I’m not advocating using this code or ever writing code like this. In fact, I discourage it. If you can find a way to do the same thing but with compile time checks, please do that instead. The problem with using anonymous types as dictionary literals is that you won’t know until runtime that you have made a mistake. WRITE YOUR UNIT TESTS!

public static Dictionary<string, string> ToDictionary(this object source)
{
    var dict = new Dictionary<string, string>();
    var props = source.GetType().GetProperties();
    Array.ForEach(props, p => dict.Add(p.Name, (string)p.GetValue(source, null)));
    return dict;
}
public static Dictionary<string, IList<string>> ToDictionaryOfStrings(this object source)
{
    var dict = new Dictionary<string, IList<string>>();
    var props = source.GetType().GetProperties();
    Array.ForEach(props, p => dict.Add(p.Name, (IList<string>)p.GetValue(source, null)));
    return dict;
}
public static Dictionary<string, Dictionary<string,string>> ToDictionaryOfDictionaries(this object source)
{
    var dict = new Dictionary<string, Dictionary<string, string>>();
    var props = source.GetType().GetProperties();
    Array.ForEach(props, p => dict.Add(p.Name, (Dictionary<string,string>)p.GetValue(source,null).ToDictionary()));
    return dict;
}
public static Dictionary<string, Dictionary<string, IList<string>>> ToDictionaryOfDictionariesOfStrings(this object source)
{
    var dict = new Dictionary<string, Dictionary<string, IList<string>>>();
    var props = source.GetType().GetProperties();
    Array.ForEach(props, p => dict.Add(p.Name, (Dictionary<string, IList<string>>)p.GetValue(source, null).ToDictionaryOfStrings()));
    return dict;
}

Yes, you have to call the right method, it isn’t magic. Yes, these extension methods pollute all objects with their clutter. They do work when you need them though!

var things =
new
{
    Humans = new { Johny = new[] { "Guitar", "Docks" }, Gina = new[] { "Diner", "Pay" } },
    Dogs = new { Sparky = new[] { "beer", "baseball" }, Toto = new[] { "witch", "kansas" } },
    Marsians = new { Marvin = new[] { "death ray", "moon laser" }, Quato = new[] { "speech", "power" } }
}.ToDictionaryOfDictionariesOfStrings();

Assert.IsTrue(things.ContainsKey("Humans"));
Assert.IsTrue(things.ContainsKey("Dogs"));
Assert.IsTrue(things.ContainsKey("Marsians"));
var humans = things["Humans"];
Assert.IsTrue(humans.ContainsKey("Johny"));
Assert.IsTrue(humans.ContainsKey("Gina"));
var gina = humans["Gina"];
Assert.IsTrue(gina.Contains("Diner"));
Assert.IsTrue(gina.Contains("Pay"));
var dogs = things["Dogs"];
Assert.IsTrue(dogs.ContainsKey("Sparky"));
Assert.IsTrue(dogs.ContainsKey("Toto"));
var sparky = dogs["Sparky"];
Assert.IsTrue(sparky.Contains("beer"));
Assert.IsTrue(sparky.Contains("baseball"));

Good times.

Party on.

2008-10-28T14:55:16+00:00

It's not too late to have an Ubuntu Release Party! Check out the list here and plan your own!

On awesomeness...

2008-10-28T13:22:43+00:00

It has been brought to my attention that I use the word "awesome" too much, but I never let it get me down. I would like to share 2 wallpapers with everyone that I use to ensure I am always motivated and doing the right thing. Both apply to any situation:

I have no idea where I picked these wallpapers up or where proper attribution is due, but share the wealth. If it's any consolation, I picked up using "awesome" for everything from Brandon Hale, who at UDS in Sydney used the term "Piles of Awesome" to refer to something I can't even remember. True Story.

EDIT: not in the mood to wrestle with my thumbnails, big sizes here and here.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2008-10-26

2008-10-27T03:59:59+00:00

My Halloween costume arrived and it is from the same source as the Purple Power Ranger costume #
Many questions about the costume and I will post pictured once it debuts on the 31st. I love Halloween. #
On my way to David and Paul’s for dinner. Must I hit every red light? #
I think I am going to watch Dr. Horrible this weekend. #
Out having a drink at Pronto. The bar is pretty quiet for a friday. #
Was just at Masquerade on Elmwood, next stop is Drag Queen Massacre at the Mansion. I love this time of year! #
Massacre at the Mansion was an outstanding party. #

The legend grows...

2008-10-26T06:28:33+00:00

Finally met Emma Jane. Awesome.

More detailed post on Ontario Linuxfest to follow.

Ontario!

2008-10-24T14:07:55+00:00

I am leaving shortly for Toronto, Ontario, Canada to speak at the Ontario Linuxfest. I will be talking about bug reporting, specifically sharing tips I've gleaned from our QA masters over the past year and sharing them with the audience.

I get the wonderful opportunity to speak at 9 in the morning. Yay. Here's the schedule.

After such an awesome time at the Ohio Linuxfest (Yes, the other OLF), I look forward to this show. I'm so glad that the regional Linux shows are going on strong and staying community-focused.

One up!

2008-10-24T01:48:58+00:00

Palladia

2008-10-23T14:44:28+00:00

I just recently got an HDTV so I've never had this channel called Palladia until I discovered it a few weeks ago. It's basically live music, all the time. Shows like Unplugged and Storytellers, along with hourlong cuts of bands on tour, in nice, widescreen, HD glory.

So far we've watched AC/DC, Pearl Jam, Snoop Dogg, The Police(!), KT Tunstall, Sheryl Crow, Tom Petty, Bon Jovi (that one proved popular at the housewarming), Coldplay (meh), The Who, Genesis, Lenny Kravitz, Nine Inch Nails (Live Beside you in Time), and the Bangles.

That's right, the Bangles, as in Walk like an Egyptian. And I've only had the channel a month!

Just finishing up an hourlong set of the Chili Peppers (great solo in the middle by Flea). Someone even told me that the channel is run by MTV, which really made me laugh because there's music on it.

O’Reilly WebCast: Trends and Technologies in Where 2.0

2008-10-23T14:33:13+00:00

Tomorrow I’ll be giving a webcast presentation with O’Reilly: “Trends and Technologies in Where2.0″. It will be a short presentation - approximately 20 minutes - then with about 40 minutes for question and answer discussion.

So if you want to ask anything about new and upcoming GeoWeb technologies, communities using geospatial technology, or businesses that are growing in the various spaces of geodata, locative mobile, or even just cool hacks then definitely register!

My apologies to people in timezones that makes this occur on your Friday evening. Since it’s participate at home, you can enjoy it over a nice beverage or meal.

I Voted

2008-10-23T12:59:41+00:00

…and so should you. And why not take a photo to capture your exercising democratic choice. Make sure to check out and add your “ivoted” photo to the Flickr ivoted group.

If you’re not sure where to go, I posted a dataset in KML (and CSV and Shapefile) to Finder! of Early Voting Locations for the US so you can find your nearest polling location.

Consulting Experiment

2008-10-21T15:55:13+00:00

Compound Thinking is a Python Web development shop, and I’ve been spending some time recently thinking about how I can help our development team grow. One thing several people have expressed is a desire to work on some projects using newer stuff, like Pinax, or tg.ext.geo, we’ve also been doing quite a bit of dojo and some flex work, and would like to do more. And I know all of us are very interested in doing more Open Source work.

Compound Thinking has been able to provide affordable development prices by using a variety of high-talent developers in the US and around the world. And, I’d like to see if we can push forward some open source projects, while making our services even more affordable for customers who help us help the world.

So, here’s my proposed experiment:коли под наем

We will provide significant discounts for people with projects using the stuff the team wants to work on.
We will split the costs of any development work which is released under an OSI approved license, including parts of any project we do that can be refactored out into a reusable component.

In particular we want to:

we’ve got a lot of GIS/geo experience, and have done a lot of framework work in TurboGears to improve that story, but we need a larger TG+geo project that can showcase all this cool stuff.
After DjangoCon, I’m very interested in Pinax, and what all those reusable components bring to the table for Django, and so several of us are surprisingly eager to work on social networking style projects to explore that in more depth.
I’m interested in pushing TurboGears integration with javascript frameworks and dojo in particular, so heavily javascript oriented applications
I’m also interested in improving the e-commerce story for TurboGears and would love to open source some related tools. We’ve done this stuff a few times, and I’d love to do it one more time under an open source license so we can help future generations not to have to reinvent this particular wheel.

Beyond that, feel free to pitch us a project that has some open source components that we can release, and we’ll see if we can work up a deal to split the costs on those components.

If you’re interested in any of these ideas e-mail me (mark@compoundthinking.com) let me know. And more importantly if you’ve tried any of these things and had good or bad experiences drop a comment here, because I’m very interested in figuring out how other consultancies expand their technical repertoire and push forward the free software agenda.

REST is a design for the long run

2008-10-20T18:46:30+00:00

Found this quote in a recent discussion or REST.

REST is software design on the scale of decades: every detail is intended to promote software longevity and independent evolution. Many of the constraints are directly opposed to short-term efficiency.

The one technology every developer should learn!

2008-10-20T15:50:15+00:00

I recently wrote a little article for an O’reilly project, in which I argue that the single most important technology that Software Architects need to master is not at all new. And I don’t just mean that Fred Brooks already told us about it in the 70’s. It’s older than that, much older.

Software Architects and all Developers ultimately will succeed or fail based on their knowledge of one of the same technologies the architects of the pyramids used to get their jobs done — the conversation.

When something goes wrong, or when somebody just isn’t getting it, mastery of this simple technology makes a huge difference. A well placed, well handled conversation can change the course of a failing project, or transform something good enough into something great.

Sure conversation can’t solve every problem, but it’s a key enabler for every other solution, since it is the very thing that allows for exploring possible solutions as a group.

We all learned the basics of conversational technology as kids. But often that’s not enough, and we still have conversations that go horribly wrong. Fortunately conversation is not a stagnant technology, and we can learn more as adults.

I’ve read more books about “how to talk to people” than the average software guy, and I’m endlessly fascinated by the subject. I’ve recently been getting into the neuroscience side of the subject, and am endlessly fascinated by the complexities of brains.

But, if I had to recomend just one book for developers and architects to read to improve their “people skills,” it would be Crucial Conversations. It cuts through the complexity to offer a lot of really simple suggestions that actually work. There’s good science behind what’s suggested (even though it’s not always spelled out in scientific terms.

I know that I really need to write more about why this book is so good. But for now, let me say that it does a better job of outlining in a simple and easy to understand way exactly the tools that are needed to keep both parties in a conversation thinking. It’s easy to ignore the impact of fear and anger on our conversations, but to do so is to ignore the way our brains actually work.

Crucial Conversaitons outlines the steps necessary to create a safe place to think, and to actually turn that thinking into mutual decisions, and ultimately into actions that solve some of the most intractable problems in our projects. It certainly helped me.

If you’re just struggling to be understood this may not be the best book for you — because it does little to help people structure their thoughts in ways that others can understand. But if you’re struggling to break through on tough conversations, and have important issues where you or the other person are frustrated, defensive, and have been avoiding talking about emotionally charged subjects — this is the book for you.

I know it helped me to have productive conversations about difficult issues at work, and at home.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2008-10-19

2008-10-20T03:59:59+00:00

On my way to the airport to head home. DC was a blast! #
Just landed in detroit. I made a fool of my self laughing out lout to the newest David Sedaris book. #
Time for bed after a fun but sleep deprived weekend. #
At the gym after a few days off. #
Trying cultured soy for the first time and I am not sure if I like it. #
I really am in love with the itunes genius feature, it is helping me discover forgotten songs in my collection. #
At Necto showing the 19 year olds how it is done #
Up way to early for being up till 3am #
Two late nights in a row really have wore me out. Today I will relax and work in Penguicon registration items. #

BarCampDC2 - Open Government Data

2008-10-18T15:34:04+00:00

The very first session I attended was moderated by Peter Corbett from iStrategyLabs and Dmitry Kachaev of the Office of the CTO for DC talking about open data from the government.

The Princeton research paper “Government Data and the Invisible Hand” proclaims the need for government agencies to first and foremost share their data via open and broadly used standards (via Ars Technica).

The DC government is already sharing a large amount of data via a variety for formats: GeoRSS, KML, CSV, Shapefiles. Check it out at http://data.octo.dc.gov and also CapStat: Building a City That Works

Information. Knowledge. Progress. Welcome to CapStat, your resource as a District of Columbia resident to track how District Government is working for you. You can use these pages to track the performance of individual agencies, find neighborhood statistics and learn how your government is responding to the city’s most pressing challenges. As the District of Columbia works to become a world-class city, visit this page to follow its progress and find out how you can become part of the solution.

When the Office of the CTO for DC wanted to update their site and services they brainstormed how to do this - the typical method of hiring a very expensive contractor to build a complicated tool that would be poorly implemented - or open up the system for the community and see what emerges.

Fortunately they chose the latter and recently launched Apps for Democracy - a contest that anyone can submit an entry for a mashup or application using the DC data services.

Data stream of data

One comment that came up was the desire for a feed of the available data and updates. Right now there is a web page and some of the data is available as GeoRSS - so continually updated. However, what would really be great and facilitate federation would be a published GeoRSS feed of datasets that links to each of the available formats, updated times, filesizes, metadata, etc.

FOWA London - Beyond GoogleMaps

2008-10-17T12:50:09+00:00

Last week I was fortunate to speak at the much lauded Future of Web Apps London (FOWA). Ryan Carson and his team put on a well-crafted conference with a great line-up of speakers such as Blaine, Kevin, Matt and more.

I was the only geo related talk, with quite a broad title “Beyond GoogleMaps”. The space is quite broad and is evolving quickly. Especially coming from a series of conferences at Web2.0 Expo New York and FOSS4G in Cape Town, in addition to the work we’re doing on GeoCommons, there was a bevy of new concepts and technologies that we worth highlighting.

As for the title, I actually didn’t pick it (or at least don’t remember choosing it). In fact, I think Google has done tremendous strides in pushing web mapping through their own toolkits and applications. GoogleMaps has some advanced capabilities such as interface styling, alternate tilesets, encoded and simplified geometries, and flash interface. However, a strident claims gain interest and again the purpose was to engage developers to look beyond just slapping a map up on a site and calling it done. They really need to consider the usability, accessibility, and design of their cartographic interface as much as any other component.

My goal with the talk was to inspire developers and designers to play with new tools, and for managers to realize what is possible and appropriate and spur their teams into creating compelling applications with geospatial capabilities. The actual implementation of this desk was 201 slides in less than 40 minutes. One attendee commented afterwards that it was like “watching a del.icio.us stream.” The 178 slides in the uploaded deck have the “Nonline” and AtomPub slides removed. I did not give proper coverage of these major issues and in the end felt they were best left out of this deck.

I concur that overall the presentation is was quite fast. I hope it was inspiring and enjoyable and that people walked away eager to find out more about the possibilities of web mapping. Fortunately you can get the full video and highlights and watch at half or quarter speed. You can also get the slide deck.

I actually have some plans for this presentation to expand out into a better and discoverable walk-through of mapping technologies. Stay tuned. And thanks Carsonified and the FOWA team!

Ohio Linuxfest

2008-10-15T04:03:55+00:00

Thanks to everyone who attended Ohio Linuxfest, as always it was an excellent time with a bunch of excellent people.

When Jono asked the audience how many of you use Ubuntu the overwhelming response was just ... awesome.

Ubuntu and Banshee contributor Andrew Conkling. (Wishing he had a Banshee shirt, so he's sad)

"Wow, he sounds like Dethklok"

2008-10-14T23:14:11+00:00

That was @jill's reaction to Severed Fifth's Denied by Rain.

I think it's a great album, and I'm not just saying that because I work with Jono, I think people will like it. We've heard the Lugradio guys talking about the music industry and how the new economics change the game and asking the question if it's possible for someone to be successful in this new market. I guess we'll find out!

Incidentally, it releases on October 21st, one day after the release of AC/DC's new album, Black Ice.

It's been a pretty great year for metal ... what don't kill you make you more strong!

My name in print

2008-10-13T19:11:16+00:00

It's pretty sad that Jorge got it blogged out there first, but I finally have in my copy of my Intro to Bazaar article I wrote for Python Magazine. I started editing for them a while back and it's been a really fun experience. I learn a lot reviewing articles, it increases my time spend playing with Python, and every once in a while you get to do something like write an article. I'd like to thank 'lifeless' in irc for giving it a look over so I didn't make a fool of myself along with the Python Magazine team for letting me work on my path to those riches I keep hearing writers talk about.

Wait, that's a running author joke? Oops.

The follow up, coming out in the November edition, is one I'm a bit more proud of as it has a bit more information. Make sure you get your Python Magazine subscriptions in order. There are some great authors putting out some awesome material.