Planet SoC

One of the questions in the student evaluation of the Google Summer of Code reads:
If there was one thing you wish you had known before getting started in Summer of Code, what would it be?
It is a very typical evaluation question and we all sortof know what it means and how to answer it. However, if you insist on thinking about it - and this is very acceptable behavior in some circles - it is actually a very difficult question.
I tend to read this question as follows: if you could meet yourself in the past, what would you tell your past self?
Well, I would probably give myself the final git repository, plus an external hard disk with as much of the interesting new information on the present day Internet as possible.

Although there are still a couple of days left until the official Pencils Down date of the Summer of Code, I am now officially putting my pencil down because I need to catch a train to Adelaide tomorrow morning.
I guess this really marks the end of my student period; even though I graduated in June, this project allowed me to feel like a student just a little longer. Sniff, now I really have to enter the big scary adult world.
But first I will go on a trip for two weeks to see Adelaide, the Ghan train, Darwin and Kakadu National park. It will be a very culturally diverse trip; from what I have  heard, Adelaide and Darwin are pretty much as different as it gets here in Australia.

It’s a bit of a boring title, but it actually has been an interesting week.  Although I found myself highly distracted by some unrelated but fascinating things, I still managed to get quite a bit done.
The script that I used to download the SRTM data set and import it into a Postgres database can now deal with all continents and supports uploading a subset of a continent by means of a bounding box. I also put the md5 check sum of every tile in the source code.

I have recently started following Umar Haque’s blog.
Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab, a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs, and firms experiment with, craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation.
He’s written a manifesto for the next industrial revolution and vouched to provide free consulting to five web 2.0 start ups that actually do something useful for a change (i.e. change the world).

API
Not much has changed on the outside, but a lot has changed on the inside. Most importantly you can now get the altitude profile through a RESTful API. My mentor Artem Dudarev built a nice Google Maps demo that uses this API. A more formal demonstration can be found here (source code).

API
Not much has changed on the outside, but a lot has changed on the inside. Most importantly you can now get the altitude profile through a RESTful API. My mentor Artem Dudarev built a nice Google Maps demo that uses this API. A more formal demonstration can be found here (source code).

API
Not much has changed on the outside, but a lot has changed on the inside. Most importantly you can now get the altitude profile through a RESTful API. My mentor Artem Dudarev built a nice Google Maps demo that uses this API. A more formal demonstration can be found here (source code).

Update 17-7-2008 : “Formal” demo server now runs on apache2-mod-python
API
Not much has changed on the outside, but a lot has changed on the inside. Most importantly you can now get the altitude profile through a RESTful API. My mentor Artem Dudarev built a nice Google Maps demo that uses this API. A more formal demonstration can be found here (source code).

For those of you who have been sleeping for the past couple of hours, Google just released a map making application. Now everyone can add streets to Google maps. It is currently only available for a couple of countries where Google has very little map data, but I’m sure they will scale it up in the future. Many people, including me, will probably wonder what that will mean for the OpenStreetMap project.
There is a blog post on BlinkGeo about this:
Will Google play nice and make the crowd-sourced data available for use in applications other than Google Maps and in some common format (hint hint, KML)? Who ultimately should own the data?

For those of you who have been sleeping for the past couple of hours, Google just released a map making application. Now everyone can add streets to Google maps. It is currently only available for a couple of countries where Google has very little map data, but I’m sure they will scale it up in the future. Many people, including me, will probably wonder what that will mean for the OpenStreetMap project.
There is a blog post on BlinkGeo about this:
Will Google play nice and make the crowd-sourced data available for use in applications other than Google Maps and in some common format (hint hint, KML)? Who ultimately should own the data?

Update 1-7 : New evidence blows my best-case scenario out of the water, but no worries (see below)

For those of you who have been sleeping for the past couple of hours, Google just released a map making application. Now everyone can add streets to Google maps. It is currently only available for a couple of countries where Google has very little map data, but I’m sure they will scale it up in the future. Many people, including me, will probably wonder what that will mean for the OpenStreetMap project.
There is a blog post on BlinkGeo about this:

Update 1-7 : New evidence blows my best-case scenario out of the water, but no worries (see below)
Update 1-7, on hour later : Or perhaps it does not, just keep the popcorn close
For those of you who have been sleeping for the past couple of hours, Google just released a map making application. Now everyone can add streets to Google maps. It is currently only available for a couple of countries where Google has very little map data, but I’m sure they will scale it up in the future. Many people, including me, will probably wonder what that will mean for the OpenStreetMap project.
There is a blog post on BlinkGeo about this:

“The Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications”, says Google. Sounds like that could come in handy for my route altitude profile. The NASA SRTM dataset has 1.5 billion data points just for Australia and I have no idea how many people will use my application.
In the last couple of days, I’ve worked through the tutorial and some of the documentation and have taken the first steps (on a separate git branch) in making my application run on the App Engine.

I built a simple website that displays the altitude profile for four different example routes. But you can already get the altitude profile for any route in Australia through an XML-RPC request to:
http://bak.sprovoost.nl:8000/
And then call one of the following two functions:
altitude_profile(route) : returns an xml document

I built a simple website that displays the altitude profile for four different example routes. But you can already get the altitude profile for any route in Australia through an XML-RPC request to:
http://bak.sprovoost.nl:8000/
And then call one of the following two functions:
altitude_profile(route) : returns an xml document

This is the second time that I am living in another country for a while and once again I have stumbled into a huge problem that I believe is massively under appreciated by many. I need the internet, but it’s not as ubiquitous as you’d think.
Has anyone seen the South Park episode about this? The entire United States flees to refugee camps on the west coast where there is still a bit of Internet. People wait in a cue all day for only 40 seconds of Internet. Does that sound a bit ridiculous? Well if you are a homeless person without a laptop (and except Japan probably, most homeless people do not have one) and want to use the Internet, you’ll have to cue up at the State Library in Melbourne for 15 minutes of Internet (it takes about 1 minute to load gmail, so do the math…). And that is the best deal in town as far as I know.

The first official week of my ’summer’ of code was a succes. I managed to import the NASA SRTM3 data into Postgres. That is, the import is running at about 1 tile per minute while I am writing this. The result is available through Subversion and Git.
I think I am getting the hang of Test Driven Development. It would be great if someone can point me to a Postgres Python test tool. For now, I created a test database and wrote my own functions to populate it with test data for each test and clean up afterwards. In a month I will attend the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference in Melbourne (an OpenSpace event).

Last week I learned more about Postgres and I think I will like that better than MySQL once I have completely figured it out. I also looked at the GIS extension PostGIS and in particular how I can access it through Python. I considered Django and some other options, but this part is still a bit vague to me. I’ll fgure that out later.
In my previous post I mentioned that I will be using Git for my project. Of course, I will also keep my repository synchronized with the OpenStreetMap subversion repository (through git-svn). I already ran into my first Git nuiscence: Git doesn’t like empty directories.

G’Day all,
It’s been a quiet week for me on the Summer of Code front and far from quiet on the travelling front. I spent a week in Bangkok and arrived in Melbourne two days ago. Still I managed to get some things done.
After trying several options, I decided to use Github to host my Git repositories. For the time being, I will split my code in two parts. The first part will import the SRTM data into Postgres and the second part will do the actual altitude profile generation work. I figured that it makes sense to split them up, because the first part could be useful for other projects too and the second part can run from just a database dump.

Every year Google pays students to do work for several open source software organizations. They call it the Summer of Code, although for people like me it will be the Winter of Code; see my previous post (English translation).