Surface glitches
We’ve got the surface for a while now and have written our first real application. It is based on BruTile and allows you to show various maps, zoom and pan. We created a short movie to show it:
WFS 1.1.0, GML 3.1.1 and OpenLayers
In the INSPIRE framework we are working on the ESDIN project and are using the EuroGeoNames (EGN) project as an implementation of ESDIN. INSPIRE is a big thing within the GIS world in Europe and loads of documents have been written so far.
We’re involved in both ESDIN and EGN and we decided to use the latter as a trial for the first. Together with our partners we’ve setup a series of servers to fulfill the needs of the projects. The main standard used is the latest WFS and GML versions, which have the annoying disadvantage that there are few clients available.
Working Microsoft Surface
Happy as we were with our new Surface we forgot the basic rule of Windows related problems; reboot if in trouble.
We spend quite some time calibrating, recalibrating and reading documentation from the invite only Microsoft site without any effect. In the end Vista asked us to install an update and to reboot the Surface. When it was rebooted we ran the ‘Surface Shell’ application from the Desktop and suddenly it worked!!
The Surface, or at least our version, comes with a set of code examples. We tried several to see how well it works and found out that especially the Grand Piano demo is a crowd drawer (mainly due to the sound probably). The Piano is a limited set of piano keys in perspective view. ‘Pressing’ a key results in a tone, just like a real piano 
Playing piano on a Surface
Microsoft Surface
Today the Microsoft Surface arrived, finally. They arrived in big boxes suggesting big tables, but alas they are actually pretty small. Microsoft envisages them as lounge table, as such they are very low, too low to sit comfortably on a normal chair. Being used to the Circle12 DiamondTouch, the Surface is both small and heavy. Weighing about 80kg it is difficult to move it and the actual display area is about half the size of the DiamondTouch.
We were supposed to have two normal and one developer edition but it wasn’t very clear which one was which so we picked one and carried it to our office. This turned out to quite tricky, this thing is heavy and doesn’t have any clear handles. In the end we carried it by holding the projection-surface …
Once setup we had to fiddle a bit to get the powercable connected and find the proper (two) powerswitches. Once it booted it prompted us an EULA we had to accept. However the Surface is designed to be a standalone machine completely controlled by touch but before the touch was working we had to accept the EULA, which was only accessible by touch … hm
You need to accept to start touch, and you need touch to accept
State of the Map
My friend and colleague New Folder is organizing the State of the Map conference this year. He asked me to design a banner for the official site. The conference is, apart from the usual OSM gathering, also focusing on businesses/governments and how they can use OSM data in their line of work. So I decided to create a banner which reflects the transistion OSM has been through. It started with a single idea and a few people collecting GPS tracks. Slowly from these tracks roads could be destinguished. Different types of roads where classified and more and more data was included and suddenly you got a map which at some points was more detailed than a ‘commercial’ map.
First draft SoftM'09 banner
OSGeo dances the Tango
I finally did the right thing and emailed OSGeo that I’ve stopped coding and would like to use my designer skills instead. I was pointed to this wiki which pointed me to the site of Robert Szczepanek. He had created an entire iconset for QGIS inspired by the tango rules. I contacted him and he was very much interested to extend his work for a broader iconset for the OSGeo community. So where I expected to start from scratch I’m kickstarted to the point that I have to think of secondlevel issues like hosting, naming-schemes etc.
Still I’m very much excited by the prospect of creating beautiful GIS applications and so far I’ve had enthousiast reactions from developers as well.
TileCache in the cloud
Since cloud is the buzzword of the month I decided to have a look at TileCache‘s support for Amazons cloud storage S3. Since TileCache version 2 the whole architecture is much more modular. It is easy to write new backends for different kind of caches. One of those backends is AWSS3 (Amazons S3 storage service).
For EduGIS we figured that it might be easier and more scalable to serve all tiles from S3, using the bandwidth and storage space of amazon, instead of buying more servers and bandwidth ourselves. Already we use tilecache in a test setup and the initial idea was to replace the diskcache for an AWSS3 cache. This was we could tap into the vast storage space of amazon, however, since every request had to be forwarded to S3 and back, the bandwidth-load was doubled. So instead of hosting the TileCache on our server we moved the TileCache instance to a virtual computer on Amazons EC2 platform.
To do this, I picked a sample machine-image of a small, headless, ubuntu 8.10 setup. Installed tilecache (apt-get install tilecache 
) and changed it to use mod_python instead of the default cgi in apache. Since this means that the machine-image is changed, you need to bundle it into a new machine image and register it with amazon. this way you can easily create multiple instances, also if you powerdown your machine it gets destroyed so you loose all your changes.
So once I mastered the art of cloud-herding I pointed our test environment to TileCache in the cloud to see if it would work at all and how quick the bill would increase. After a few days and some seedings I noticed that the AWSS3 backend uses a simple dump in a single folder backend. This quickly produces insane amounts of files and it becomes impossible to have a quick look at the status of your cache with tools like S3fox. So I wrote a patch for the AWSS3 cache module to store the tiles in a TMS style folder structure.
Now all we need to do is to create a tilecache.cfg with all 200+ layers we have and start seeding.
Showing private data on a public touch table
Designing interfaces for multi-touch tabletop computers;
Basic animation of hiding a card from view
Cape Town day2
My lightning talk yesterday went pretty well, there is a flickr photo of me stating “Steven gave a great lightning talk obituary for MapBuilder at the Plenary session.” There was a wonderful talk by Schuyler, which fortunately is videotaped, but due to the insane slow internet I haven’t seen yet. Also fun was the talk by Ed Parsons from google. He talked (amongst others) about Map Maker and a fairly though discussion resulted about OSM, map maker and data sharing. The interesting bit is that they’re not against sharing their data, it is just that they don’t have a proper license to do so (nor does OSM for that matter). It will be interesting to see what is going to happen in this space. Apparently the lawyers think that it is all public domain and don’t fancy writing a proper CC/FOSS-style license for geodatasets. They state that geodata are facts and facts are not copyrightable.
Unfortunately today was slightly less successful, apparently quite some presenters couldn’t make it after all and three of the talks I was looking forward to weren’t there. SO hopefully the BOF on openlayers and extjs will be better. Interesting projects to look into at home so far are: QGIS-mapserver and Mapfaces.
Foss4g 2008; Cape Town
I’ve arrived in Cape Town to attend the foss4g conference which is taking place there. I’m supposed to give a lighting talk on the closure of Mapbuilder development. But it is not entirly clear where and when this will happen. All in good time I guess So far I’ve registered and are now waiting for my first workshop on Geonetworks.