I’ve experimented with PostGIS some, so I’m interested to see what’s going on. Here in Asheville, we apparently observe GIS Day on the 9th, with some stuff going on at AB-Tech.

There’s a talk on open-source GIS, so I’m curious to see if GeoTools or uDig are mentioned, being some of the open-source GIS projects at the Codehaus.

Google Maps has shown us how everything goes better with some visual representation. I think GIS will only grow in importance, and tooling like PostGIS makes it fairly easy.

For example, I’ve been trying to spruce up the overgrown, dreary and downright treacherous shrubs, bushes and vines littering my yard. Using the pick-axe to uproot shrubbery is fun and easy, sure, but then there’s a gaping hole, a void, a cavity of hope waiting to be filled. Plant guidebooks seem to either be jinormous compendiums of every plant, fungus or moss known in existence, or else they trot out the same few dozen marigolds, impatiens and dogwoods.

Designing a garden around the house requires a knowledge of the space, sunlight, water, drainage and soil. Without an eye towards color, blooming and size, the results may possibly be healthy, but boring and mundane.

I know my yard. This area is sunny. That area is shady. The dogs poop in that corner. And in that other one, too. This bed doesn’t get much rain.

Knowing my constraints, now I must fill the emptiness. With color. That blooms at the appropriate time. Joy! Even more constraints.

Enter the USDA. Established in 1839 as the Agriculture Division, it’s been collecting data ever since.

Their soldiers on the ground, in the fields and forests, steadfastly recording the plants they witness everywhere, have compiled a database of over 89,000 plants seen in the United States. While a nice online search form is available, results can be delivered not only in HTML, but also as slightly-ugly yet still useful comma-separated values.

The data includes what you’d expect, including the entire chain of Latin words to precisely describe the plant, along with its common name, of course. The data also includes, for some of the plants, information that is immediately useful to someone attempting to populate his yard. Commercial availability, US nativity and invasive status, the season and color of bloom. All categorized by the states in which the plants can be found.

Download the 17mb CSV results from a rather large query, slice, load into a database, swizzle and serve over ice.

Living in North Carolina and finding a purple flower that blooms in the spring for my partial-shade bed just got a whole lot simpler.

The reason behind Skype’s downtime this week looks somewhat like this image of a malicious DDoS attack, no?

Attacker: Microsoft

Handlers: Windows Upgrade Servers

Zombies: Windows users!

Victim: Skype

Just sayin’.

This made me ponder my own abode, and went surfing around. My little village here has nicely digitized quite a bit of their real-estate records, and made them easily searchable. I was able to come up with the original plat describing my street and lot, as envisioned in 1914.

Click images to enlarge.

I also came up with the deed, and description of the property. It almost reads like an obituary. Or a soap-opera.

I think that’s awesome. Alas, the “park” denoted on the original plat a few doors down seems to have been annexed by a neighbor.

But these two guys will definitely get one.

The lucky First Guy In Line is Greg Mayer from Charlotte Street Computers here in town.

I’ll take them some sausage, egg and cheese biscuits in the morning, unless the coyotes have already eaten these guys in the night.

To be honest, I’m not that much of a Smashing Pumpkins fan, but I think it’s cool that they’re breaking out of the normal box, and doing a rather odd tour this year. They’ve picked 2 cities to have a “residency” at. One of them is my town, Asheville, North Carolina.

9 shows between 23-June and 5-July at The Orange Peel.

They aren’t just rolling into town, playing a show, and retreating to the next stop under the cover of darkness.

It’s a freakin’ 13 day event.

Of course, events mean people. And people mean social networks. I guess.

Nonetheless, once again Ning pops up as the implementation behind Smasheville.com.  Go Ning go!

In the grand scheme of things, does your average app ever truly identify the user? About the best we do is identify an email address that can be used to reach the user today. There is virtually no positive identification going on. On the internet, your identity is simple who you claim to be.

Unless you’re a bank or someone with an out-of-band real-world tie to your customer, really, what are your use-cases for “identity?”

For things I’ve worked with, they seem to be primarily the following

1. Keeping “my” stuff separate from “your” stuff. Identity isn’t overly important here. Knowing who “you” are isn’t as important as knowing that “you” simply are different than “me” and “you” should keep the heck away from my things.
2. Being able to contact users who don’t necessarily visit the site or use the app often. This normally means a verified email address. Once again, identity isn’t as important as simply being able to contact the owner of some bundle of stuff, whoever he may be.

From my point of view, OpenID satisfies the first case easily enough, assuming the OpenID server is implemented honestly. And if it isn’t, then that’s ultimately the user’s problem for selecting a crappy identity provider.

OpenID does have a conduit for delivering a user’s email address, using the Simple Registration extension. I would not trust that address, so OpenID does not solve my 2nd use-case. But then again, neither does simply collecting an email address at sign-up on my own site. People change jobs, ISPs, universities and spouses. An email address isn’t a permanent definite thing. Even if I collect email addresses, I need to periodically verify they are still valid, and have a strategy for dealing with those that aren’t. If out-of-band communication is even honestly necessary.

Taking this view of email addresses, it would appear they make poor identities for users, since they could so easily be stripped of it. I like the LinkedIn method of managing user accounts and email addresses, though. I can associate multiple email addresses for my account. And I can login with any of them. I can remove them. My account does not have to be tied to a single non-changing email address.

Given all of this, I think OpenID helps with use-case #1, and no centralized standard will help with use-case #2.

They were for my wife. Damn!

Then he came back! And brought a box for me. Inside the box there was some flavorless edible packing peanuts (they dissolved amazingly quickly in your mouth) protecting a Silent Paint Remover.

This thing rocks!

I live in an 82-year-old house, which means it’s seen 82-years worth of styles come and go. That’s a lot of paint. Our shoe molding is all rounded over due to the many layers of lead, latex and who knows what else.

Point it at the shoe molding for 60 seconds and then give a good scrape. Truly amazing.

While the heating device itself is silent, the squeals coming from the scraper as 82 years of sea-foam green, buttermilk, white and teal come peeling off the wall are reminiscent of dragging a pair of cats across a chalkboard.

From reading online, the amazingness of the product made me suspect there was a high probability it could be a RonCo-esque product and a waste of money. Though, it probably can be used to cook a turkey nicely.

But then I found this guy, who explained the science and even provided a how-to about making one for yourself. I promptly set out to find the required space-heater of the appropriate type.

I quickly learned that asking the Helpful Friendly People at Lowe’s and Home Depot for space-heaters while you are wearing shorts and a t-shirt is a fantastic way to survey how different people express “what kind of nut are you?” with only their eyebrows.

Apparently space-heaters are a seasonal item, and April isn’t the season for them.

Due to the lack of parts to build my own, I punted and just bought the pre-made version. Tonight, with minimal effort, I stripped 8′ of base boards in about a half hour. Without any chemical burns or heavy metal poisoning.

I’d consider that a success.

Without you having to say “hey dad, look at this”.

I’ve personally never crossed this point with my own father. He has a rough idea of what I do, in general terms, maybe, kinda, sorta. But my work has never directly impacted his life in the least.

Anyhow, I’m a listener of Neal Boortz, a syndicated libertarian radio talk-show host. I also read his daily news page. Today he announced BoortzSpace, his online community type of thing. Hosted at boortz.ning.com. This is the sort of thing my own father probably noticed and might actually participate in.

I offer congratulations to Brian “Ning” McCallister and the other guys over there at Ning for hitting the beginnings of a possible mass adoption. They’ve taken this Web 2.0 thing and seem to have created something broadly useful with it.

I’ve spent the cost of a nice meal across 4 airport encounters for probably a sum total of 45 minutes online. Austin’s WayPort network is at least cheaper than a day-pass on T-Mobile’s in Dallas. Though, a single T-Mobile day-pass should in theory work in multiple airports over a single day, assuming they all have T-Mobile.

Once I finally got home, I discovered my wifi wasn’t connecting. “Oh yeah,” says the wife, “the internet’s down.”

Of course it is!

After a few reboots of the router, I notice that way too many lights are blinking. Not a good sign.

I think my house was built upon an ancient router burial ground. The router gods are angry at us for desecrating the 7 layers of buried networking equipment. I’ve somehow burned through no less than 5 routers in the past 18 months. The most recent D-Link has definitely been heartier than the previous four steaming piles bearing the Cisco name. But even it met its demise in a little less than 6 months.

A little creative re-cabling later, the MacBook is jacked straight into the DSL thing-a-ma-bob flinging PPPoE. And boy does it feel naked to not have a firewall between me and the interwebs. Thank jebus I’m on a Mac.

Firing up the Cisco VPN software exposes a fancy OSX/Intel/PPP bug with this specific version of the client. And Cisco, in its infinite wisdom, puts updates of the client software behind a password-protected site.

Cisco is not my favorite company today.

I finally have to head upstairs to basically climb the radio tower and see if a neighbor’s WAP is visible. Alas, I’m now blazing along with 1 bar (27% signal), but at least the VPN works. If you’re on a Mac, I can highly recommend iStumbler for locating connection opportunities.

Tomorrow, I’ll be off to the store to buy another router to sacrifice to the networking gods. This one, perhaps I’ll plug into the UPS.

But, throw a Bridge Day, and the community becomes visible.

With online communities, this is quite evident. Some communities are purely based around the tools that support them, but many communities have no centralized place to congregate in the virtual world.

The community is happening everywhere. And luckily we have this whole web 2.0 thing happening now, with mashups and remixes. Fantastic.

Mashups allow us to go find the community, where ever it may be, and make it visible and apparent. With appropriate use of RSS, del.icio.us, Flickr or other services, the implicit community occurring across the net gets to have a virtual Bridge Day.

But are folks missing half of the equation? Sure, the phone is next to our head, but it’s also being held by our hands. And kids these days are sometimes holding the phone with both hands while texting, keeping their noggins safe from the brain-warming effects of radiation.

Who is studying the potential link between cellphone usage and hand cancer?

Mostly, I just liked this image.

No intermediaries.

But how does he find those blogs? Technorati? Google? Somehow simply searching for information sources by keyword will cause relevant and worthy blogs to appear? I personally haven’t had a lot of success with that.

There are super aggregators, like Javablogs or Ruby Corner, but these aggregate on a very broad topic (ie, Java or Ruby), from anyone who wants to be a part of it. And many times the aggregees don’t even bother filtering their feed to assure that Javablogs only gets Java posts and Ruby Corner only gets Ruby posts.

The result? A lot of junk (via javablogs).

Perhaps cutting out the middleman isn’t quite so great. The middleman also acts as a voice of authority, helping you to find your way. While technologies may enable populist, expertise is not. Some sites, such as Squidoo encourage these voices of authority. Unfortunately, Squidoo only allows a single authority for each topic.

Maybe the newspaper model isn’t so bad.

Editors act as authorities and give personality to the paper. Or at least before the day of the Associated Press, they did.

My corner market has at least 6 different local papers, from the daily paper to the various free weeklies. Every point of view can be expressed on the topic of “the news.” Nothing forces a single authority. You can pick your middleman to match your own view.

Growing up, we had “the newspaper” which had a morning and an afternoon edition. With different names. But the same publisher. The morning paper’s editorial page contained a conservative slant, while the afternoon paper’s editorials were decidedly liberal. You could subscribe to the paper that was more aligned to your liking.

On the web, though, there is no concept of “the newspaper” beyond what traditional newspapers put on the web. Blogs enable anyone to be a columnist. How do these two meet?

Through aggregation.

Individual bloggers continue to blog on their own, but a 3rd party (the hated middleman) optionally gathers up some select subset of blogs on a topic and republishes (syndicates) them in a more cohesive form.

Lazy (or busy) readers can find these aggregations and feel confident that if they trust the editor, they will receive a lot of good posts from a variety of sources.

Why not simply do a group blog, with multiple authors? For one, there’s the logistics of setting up a multi-user blog system, authors keeping up with credentials, etc. Secondly, blogging is personal. Even if it’s shared and aggregated, the posts are still hand-crafted by the bloggers and they feel a certain attachment to their work.

Personally, I like to keep my work on my own blog.

Keeping up with regular blogging can be difficult. Often bloggers think to themselves “jeez, it’s been 2 weeks since I’ve written anything.” If they go write something for a group blog, their own soapbox doesn’t show evidence of the effort. If authors truly syndicate themselves to these middleman aggregators, they get to participate in a larger publication while still winning personal blog karma by being active on their own blog. Plus, they can use the tooling they’re happy with, and let RSS sort out the differences.

I ultimately feel that the columnist model works. But a columnist without columns to fill is just a blogger on a soapbox. It takes the middleman to bring many columnists together to weave a larger context.

Update: No, not a new feature.  A quick googling resulted in at least a sighting back in April.  This seems to be a feature specific to medical terms.

The downside of working in Java is the 100% Pure Java(tm) mentality. In the search for a clean and cohesive system, we take the attitude that if it’s not pure Java, it’s crap. In Java, if we need something to happen periodically, we might examine TimerTask, decide it’s insufficient and move on to Quartz. So we add it to our build, figure out the API, realize it conflicts with some other dependency. Well, damn.

With Ruby, it’s scripty enough to not feel the need to have a 100% Pure Ruby(tm) mentality. A Ruby system needs something to occur periodically, we just open a pipe to crontab and hand that bit off to cron.

“But Windows doesn’t have cron!”

Too bad.

Use a better operating system.

The majority of systems deploy to Linux or some other Unix-alike. Developing on a Unix-ish system only makes sense. You wouldn’t prepare to drive an RV by tooling around in a Kia Sportage, now would you?

When you break free of the JVM mentality and assume a sensible host operating system, you realize that the OS itself is your virtual machine to play in. If it’s in your $PATH and can be expected to behave reasonably well on any sane Unix-like OS, by all means, use it.

Back to the premise… Since Ruby is indeed “scripty” you can accomplish a crapload just using a pair of backticks, effectively not even using Ruby at  all.

And you can do it without guilt or complication. Completely unlike punting to Runtime.exec(…). That always makes you feel dirty.

Perhaps Groovy and JRuby will help break the never-escape-the-JVM attitude. Give a developer backticks and easy pipes to subprocesses, and no telling what sort of nefarious things he might could do.

I’m finally home after a trip to San Francisco to meet my co-workers. It truly was surreal, in that I’ve been working for The Job for about a year, and had never met a co-worker, aside from Pete. When I joined, the team was 3 other people, and we were all in different states. New York. North Carolina. Michigan, California.

Now we are 18.

This is the first funded startup I’ve been a part of, and it’s been fun to watch the growth of a company. I think we’ve assembled an excellent team of talented individuals. It certainly is a rather eclectic group (no, the children are not employees).

It is somewhat strange being the odd-man-out, clear across the country. This trip through, to finally meet everyone, helped solidify the realness of it all. When everyone is in different states, you’ve got a hip distributed team. When there’s just one guy in the hills near the moonshine shack, he’s just a remote worker. Ultimately, I wouldn’t trade my grits and banjos for the world, and am grateful that an organization such as Radar is jiggy enough to keep a hillbilly round. But while proximity doesn’t matter to Subversion or Jabber, we are all humans, and faces do matter.

I’d like to travel out there more often, and I aim to finally locate and hook up the iSight.

The point to this post? Technology allows you to never actually meet humans, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Tonight, the wife and I sat down to enjoy some wholesome television, including Moral Orel and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. We quickly learned that our child, currently fast asleep, had set a parental control code and limited us to TV-13 or somesuch. I was unable to guess what the boy might’ve used for a code, so I turned to the interwebs.

After some Googling around, I learn that the only solution is to call TiVo customer support.

First, you get dumped into an IVR system that attempts to have a conversation with you. Instead of the obnoxious “press 1 if you are having trouble with…”, you simply must speak your troubles into the phone, and it’ll route your call accordingly. In theory. Instead, you get to have a conversation with a rude, dim, and deaf IVR system.

I was taught, as a child, not to interrupt when someone else is speaking. But the IVR never stopped talking. It’d tell me to state my problem, and then just keep yammering away about other options I might have, or that I could try using tivo.com, or perhaps I would like to answer a survey. Being a parent, I’m aware that if someone is talking, they certainly are not listening.

The IVR had difficulting understanding the word “no” even. Just like a child.

Ultimately, after enough cursing, I got bumped to the queue to speak to a live human… if I wished to wait an estimated 15 minutes.

After 40 minutes, I do finally get to speak to a human. During the 40 minute wait, I was reminded a dozen times that I could use tivo.com to solve my problem. Of course, tivo.com is what ultimately told me I had to use the phone.

Once I had Dusty (a very helpful and friendly support person, I must admit) on the line, I gained some insight into the workings of the TiVo parental control system. He provided me with a 4-digit code that would work until 4pm tomorrow. This was without contacting my device or having it dial in for an update. It would seem that in addition to the user-set parental control code, there is a secondary code that can be derived from a combination of the device service number and the date.

Considering the annoyance of the faulty voice-recognition IVR and the long wait times, I fully expected TiVo to have to send me a piece of physical postal mail with the code printed on a piece of paper in 4-to-6 weeks. I was pleasantly surprised.

Of course, no matter how annoying or evil TiVo gets, I’ll remain loyal. We tried the ReplayTV and returned it within a day. Anything through the cable provider is bound to be even worse, both in terms of technology and service.

I’m arriving around lunchtime on Wednesday, and departing at the break of day on Friday. I think I’m going to the Jive Software party. Henri Yandell has suggested a haus party on Wednesday night, but we’ll see how things pan out. I can be SMS’d on my shoephone, which can be found on my contact page.

Digital isn’t always better. Sometimes a big-ass knob on a distinct device is functionally better than a whizzy-bang brushed metal UI without a dedicated knob.

Yes, I know the iPod doesn’t have a knob. It has an iKnob (aka, the clickwheel with the nipple in the middle).  But it’s knobesque nonetheless.  And the screen is always visible.  No repeated command-tab to find it.  It’s just right there.  On the desk.

So, if you’ve got the price of a pair of lattes, and the need for some information you probably won’t find in a dead-tree book, surf on over to O’Reilly’s new PDF library and take a gander.

Of course, I still print stuff out so I can read it while lounging where-ever I care to lounge.

We’ve got all project mail flowing again, with a new web-based management piece for subscribing and unsubscribing. While the downtime sucked more than most things can suck, we’re coming back with better tooling and infrastructure. This is mostly the result of not being willing to reconfigure all of our projects by hand. So we’ve scripted the heck out of things.

We’re still working on personal and project webspace. Previous sites should be up, except those using plain HTML. Any Confluence-backed site is good to go. All projects are currently restricted from producing new distributions on dist.codehaus.org, but we’re quickly working towards a solution for that. Pretty soon the front codehaus.org page will return to its normally scheduled programming.

Plus, we’ve got a new logo. Everything goes better with a new logo.

We’re continuing to work to get CVS, mail, and read/write access to Subversion back as soon as possible.

We truly appreciate all of the efforts to help, and your patience has been outstanding. We realize how painful downtime is.

The Cingular 8125, though, has Bluetooth, wifi, GPRS/EDGE and voice talents, all in a package ultimately not much larger than the Nokia 6620 it replaces. Though, it’s certainly no RAZR, and has quite a bit of heft to it. Being that I’m Gigantor-sized, it fits quite well in my pocket. The keyboard is quite usable for my big honkin’ thumbs, even.

Along with the device, I signed up for Cingular’s PDA plan, so I can use the GPRS/EDGE connection all willy-nilly unlimitedly. My Sunday was spent playing with Procmail recipes trying to filter and route the appropriate set of emails to the pocket machine.

It’s 3am, and you decide you want a web-stats package installed on your server? By 3:15am, it’s completed. It’s always business hours at Contegix, and I can’t remember the last time any request too more than 15 minutes from my initial email to having it completed. I’m a customer 3-times-over with Contegix, between the Codehaus, Radar Networks, and my own personal machinations.
One day I’ll make it to St. Louis to have beers with Matthew, Craig, Joe, Tony and the other folks there who keep my servers alive and sane.

Yes, that’s Arkansas. Turns out that Wal-Mart is has the same influence (or more?) as some small countries.

My evil plan came together tonight as I sat idly on the couch flipping through an eWeek, while my wife gave tech-support to her father. I love it when a plan comes together.

(The photo on the right is George Peppard, who played Hannibal Smith on the A-Team)

On the surface, after reading 177 pages, you could easily think that there was nothing concretely useful in the book. You could, but that’d be silly. The whole book enforces a different attitude. It’s about agility, not only in development or management, but in the vision of the product you’re producing. The best quote, I think is

Stick to what’s truly essential. Good ideas can be tabled. Take whatever you think your product should be and cut it in half. Pare features down until you’re left with only the most essential ones. Then do it again.

Ultimately, stop thinking about producing, and simply go produce. As my dad says, “the enemy of ‘good’ is ‘better.’” The essence of your product is probably good (or you can hope). Alas, the desire to make it better can work against you, creating feature overload, delayed schedules, and a lack of focus in the vision. Get on with it already.

I really need server-side spam nuking… 3 days offline, 1414 new messages, 98% of which are spam.

It seems to always be the case that right after you make a purchase, something better comes along. Yay capitalism, I guess. Now, if only someone would merge the I-Sight with a Jabra, and perhaps mix in some wireless audio from my iPod, I’d be set.