Django People Map

By Simon Willison: Django People. Using GeoDjango, maybe? I'm tempted to smash together a Grok version.

Comments

Re: Django People Map

Author: James Fee

Have you been working with Django Sean?

Re: Django People Map

Author: Sean

I've dabbled, nothing in production. Blogged about it in 2005, for what it's worth: http://zcologia.com/news/69/django-and-mapserver/.

Re: Django People Map

Author: Andrew Turner

no syndication via GeoRSS or KML. :p

Re: Django People Map

Author: Sean

Could be that the Django People community doesn't need them quite yet, or at least not as much as they need other features. I'd like to see them choose the GML profile over the Simple one when the time comes.

This Blog is for the Birds

Oh yeah, we get White-crowned Sparrows too, for a week or two later in the Spring.

I want to reassure Paul that I am in fact feeding seeds to the little birds, so here is a picture of McNutty the Red-breasted Nuthatch, which I took just a few minutes ago with my little PowerShot. He's giving me that annoyed look because he spent the night outside at -5F and I'm sticking the camera right in his face. 4 inches away (or approximately 20 centimeters according to my NASA Mars Mission unit conversion table). These little birds are fearless. If I had their agility I probably would be too. Nevermind Spiderman: Nuthatchman could easily kick his creepy arachnoid ass.

http://sgillies.net/images/mcnutty.jpg

Comments

Re: This Blog is for the Birds

Author: Jason Birch

Mars Mission unit conversion? I watched Roving Mars with my family at the IMAX in Victoria last weekend. http://disney.go.com/disneyvideos/liveaction/rovingmars/ Much better than Titanica :) I was interested that all of the speeds and distances that they were calling out during one of the launch sequences were in miles. No conversion required for those missions apparently... except for those darn foreign audiences. -J

Feeding Birds and Feeding Birds

Update (2008-01-25): the link immediately below is broken. Fake James was just a candle in the wind, I guess.

Is Steve Citron-Pousty right? Is there nothing I like? I'm sure he never could guess how much I like feeding the birds in my neighborhood. There's a gang of 5 Black-capped Chickadees (which sing an extra third song here in the Fort, bet you didn't know that either), a pair of Mountain Chickadees, 3 Red-breasted Nuthatches (back, plus one, after shunning us last year), a White-breasted Nuthatch (my favorite), pairs of Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, every variation of Junco, Goldfinches, Blue Jays, House Finches, Sparrows, Mourning Doves, and Flickers. The Flicker is a pigeon-sized woodpecker that thrives in this town. We have about 9 regulars ... minus one.

Returning home for lunch today, we found a Cooper's Hawk standing on, and tearing at, an unlucky Flicker directly underneath our feeder. My daughter was fascinated, no squeamishness at all. We were able to observe it feed for about 5 minutes before it hauled its prey off to a more private spot. Sadly, I'd removed my camera from our backpack just this morning or I would have been able to get a awesome wildlife action photo on my doorstep.

Comments

Re: Feeding Birds and Feeding Birds

Author: steven Citron-Pousty

Hey Sean: Sorry but I am not Fake James Fee and perhaps you are accusing me to throw people off your trail. Or perhaps it is even James or the person who wrote all those nasty things about ESRI a while ago and then had that picture of the bridge going into the ocean. I am an avid birder as well. Went hiking this weekend and saw a kestrel, some nuthatches, chickadees, white crowned sparrows, Ravens, white-tailed kites, titmice, mergansers, solitary thrush, and some little brown jobbies. Never seen a accipter take a bird but I would love to get the chance some day. We have a peregrine hanging out on the building across from ours which makes for entertaining meetings...

Re: Feeding Birds and Feeding Birds

Author: Sean

Whatever you say, Fake James.

Re: Feeding Birds and Feeding Birds

Author: Paul Ramsey

Most people feed the birds bird-seed, Sean, not other birds! Did you do the James Earl Jones circle of life speech for your daughter? "Yes, Simba, but let me explain. When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life."

Re: Feeding Birds and Feeding Birds

Author: Fantom Planet

I think James Fee is the Fake James Fee. Wouldn't make sense otherwise. BTW. Flicker's are huge. I hadn't realized it until I saw them up close on my parent's feeder this Christmas.

Re: Feeding Birds and Feeding Birds

Author: Fantom Planet

BTW: I think the Fake James Fee is a Fake-Fake James Fee. If it was the Real-Fake James Fee he'd be crappin' himself with MapObjects and "how they can do no wrong."

OSM Outshining GDAL and MapServer?

I meant to write this last week, but ran out of time. Stefano Mazzocchi writes:

My holy grail hiking/exploring map should have points of interests, morphology (contours/rivers/lakes), access roads and trails ... in that order of importance.

The best way, of course, would be to build your own and I did research a bit into ways to do that, but I had to give up pretty early on: there is a lot of software on how to get data in and out of your Garmin but not a lot of freely available mapping data and, worst, there was no community where people would get together and share experience and tools.

Until OpenStreetMap came along, that is.

Actually, the GDAL and MapServer communities were doing this kind of stuff well before OSM started, but it's interesting that a technically savvy person starting from scratch today might find the OSM community first and completely overlook the old timers.

Comments

Re: OSM Outshining GDAL and MapServer?

Author: Kristian

I don't think it's that exceptional. GDAL and MapServer are software-oriented communities with map-related software. OSM is a map-oriented community with some software on the side. It stands to reason that they are more active on the mapping front, especially as getting OSM maps onto Garmin units is a core skill for many OSM mappers. There must be lots of people in the GDAL/MapServer community for which this has only tangential interest.

Re: OSM Outshining GDAL and MapServer?

Author: Dylan Beaudette

Not sure if this is a good comparison - GDAL / Mapserver are tools, OSM is more about the data. The first thing that came to mind after reading your headline was GMT (http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/) - however that would be more useful at making paper maps. Then again, I want paper maps when hiking / exploring as the screen on a GPS is too small for any real planning, and you are at the mercy of the batteries.

Re: OSM Outshining GDAL and MapServer?

Author: Artem Pavlenko

re :GDAL and MapServer are software-oriented communities with map-related software. Kristian, I don't think you're right here, Yes, there are developers (specially GDAL) but statistically Mapserver is a user driven community. There aren't many developers, innit ? There ain't no innovation there either. OSM community is by far more diverse/exciting space. Join in, have fun :)

Re: OSM Outshining GDAL and MapServer?

Author: Artem Pavlenko

re: Not sure if this is a good comparison - GDAL / Mapserver are tools, OSM is more about the data. Dylan, you're right OSM is all about data, but we also have tools associated which might surprise you ;)

Re: OSM Outshining GDAL and MapServer?

Author: Sean

LOLCODE - LOL = MAPFILE That cracked me up, Artem.

Careful With That Pendulum, Steve

Stick your head in there and you might get clocked. Seriously: REST and web frameworks aren't mutually exclusive at all. Rails prides itself on being RESTful. There's Restlet and others. You don't think that the Google web apps are developed without some framework, do you?

Comments

Re: Careful With That Pendulum, Steve

Author: Steven Citron-Pousty

With a team the size and caliber of googles they write their own frameworks - Guice, GWT... Notice though that google went and invented their own frameworks rather than something out of the box. I wasn't try to claim they were inherently mutually exclusive but in practice they tend to be. Finally, that post was more of a trying to get a sense from the community of a conflict I had noticed. Eelco's post did a nice job refuting a bunch of my stuff. This one was more about the conversation than proving a point...

Re: Careful With That Pendulum, Steve

Author: Sean

The older frameworks are seeming older, for sure, but there's no conflict in general between emerging architectural styles and the concept of a framework for implementations.

Data vs API

Brady Forrest nearly equates Zillow's free (as in speech) neighborhood boundary data with Urban Mapping's free (as in beer, while supplies last, domestic only -- hey, no sharing) neighborhood ID API. I'm not calling on anybody to give away their proprietary data, just pointing out that, in fact, these things are only equivalent if you have no other application than answering simple questions like: "what neighborhoods contain (long, lat)?" There are many interesting questions that you can only ask with the boundary data itself, or only by hammering the Urban Mapping services Monte Carlo style.

Comments

Re: Data vs API

Author: josh l

Actually, 'syncing' the boundaries as Brady mentions in his post, or trying to analyze the underlying geographic boundaries via monte-carlo (or other methods) isn't legal for anyone to attempt, other than the Urban Mapping folks. Their TOS says, amongst other things, that "Subscribers are expressly forbidden from reverse engineering any code or software licensed hereby or otherwise determining geographic coordinates via this service" So, looks like I'll be using Zillow.

Re: Data vs API

Author: Sean

Right. To clarify: I'm not advocating abuse of their service or terms.

Re: Data vs API

Author: Darrin Clement

While Zillow is allowing people to use their data at no charge, it's not really free either. "Free" would mean you own it, but they are careful in their statement that you can use it but if you update (correct) it, then you have to share your work. Or am I misunderstanding something? Still a good deal, but their data quality doesn't come even close to being as good as Urban Mapping's or other commercial providers'. I guess that's why they want other people to update it for them?

Re: Data vs API

Author: Sean

Darrin, I only disagree with you when you say freedom == ownership. They are 2 different things. By license, the Zillow data is as free as Java, Linux, or MySQL (free as in freedom of speech). Zillow will almost certainly work to maintain ownership of the data in the copyright sense. If they own it all, they are free to relicense it (including updates) anyway they want, whereas the community can only distribute it under the original share-alike license. See http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/137/ for more about unlocking share-alike licenses (the GPL in particular).

Re: Data vs API

Author: Darrin Clement

Thanks - just for the record, I was only commenting on the literal word "free" not the conceptual extension to "freedom". No doubt, free and freedom are not equal.

Shapely 1.0 Final Release

The Friday before a 3 day weekend may not be the best time to release, but it's done and I'm ready to move ahead. Share and enjoy: Shapely 1.0 (RIP, Douglas Adams).

I had fun working on this project. I had fun picking the name. I even enjoyed writing the manual. Major portions of this work were supported by a grant (to Pleiades) from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (http://www.neh.gov). It was part of my day job and I think that goes as well for the other contributors, but I also did some after hours volunteer work to keep it real. I'd also like to thank Yo la Tengo, Sonny Rollins, my family, and the letters G, E, O, and S.

Comments

Re: Shapely 1.0 Final Release

Author: Paul Smith

Kudos! A terrific and useful library.

Gdawg Mercurial Repo

I've been hearing great things about Mercurial (for a while. At the Pythoneers meeting I attended last spring, IPython developer Fernando Perez attested to its usefulness in a code sprint: programmers can pull changesets from each other with no need for a central server. It's written in Python, free (as in speech), backed by the Software Freedom Conservancy, and has a great tutorial. For what it's worth, Linus Torvalds says Mercurial is no git but doesn't suck like Subversion. The interface is similar in many ways to cvs or svn, but with no central repository getting started is trivial:

$ apt-get install mercurial
$ cd /tmp
$ hg init foo-project

There's your first repository. I set up a publicly readable repo on my server (using the Hg CGI) and pushed my local Gdawg repo to it using ssh. Voila: http://sgillies.net/sgillies/hg. Clone Gdawg (think checkout) to your own computer like this:

$ hg clone http://sgillies.net/sgillies/hg/gdawg my-gdawg

Comments

Re: Gdawg Mercurial Repo

Author: Justin Bronn

I've only been using Mercurial for a few months, yet I cannot imagine how I lived without it. Another big backer is Sun -- they now use it for both OpenSolaris and Java. For those wanting to learn more, I recommend watching Bryan O'Sullivan's overview (despite being over a year old it's a good introduction to the concepts). An indispensable accessory for Mercurial is hg-svn; it allows you to pull changesets from SVN into your private repository.

Open Source CS-Map?

That Autodesk had acquired CS-Map and was going to donate it to us open source orphans was pretty much the only thing the average GIS person heard from the media in regards to the 2007 FOSS4G conference. Any news? Is it waiting on a MapGuide release or what?

Comments

Re: Open Source CS-Map?

Author: Jason Birch

Last I heard (a few weeks back) it was still coming. Not waiting on a MapGuide release for sure; the 2.0 release (going to RC shortly) is still based on PROJ.4, with Mentor support slated for 2.1.