"google maps" entries

Four short links: 10 April 2013

Four short links: 10 April 2013

Street View Tiles Hacks, Policy Simulation, Map Tile Toolbox, and Connected Sensor Device HowTo

  1. HyperLapse — this won the Internet for April. Everyone else can go home. Check out this unbelievable video and source is available.
  2. Housing Simulator — NZ’s largest city is consulting on its growth plan, and includes a simulator so you can decide where the growth to house the hundreds of thousands of predicted residents will come from. Reminds me of NPR’s Budget Hero. Notice that none of the levers control immigration or city taxes to make different cities attractive or unattractive. Growth is a given and you’re left trying to figure out which green fields to pave.
  3. Converting To and From Google Map Tile Coordinates in PostGIS (Pete Warden) — Google Maps’ system of power-of-two tiles has become a defacto standard, widely used by all sorts of web mapping software. I’ve found it handy to use as a caching scheme for our data, but the PostGIS calls to use it were getting pretty messy, so I wrapped them up in a few functions. Code on github.
  4. So You Want to Build A Connected Sensor Device? (Google Doc) — The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of infrastructure, options, and tradeoffs for the parts of the data ecosystem that deal with generating, storing, transmitting, and sharing data. In addition to providing an overview, the goal is to learn what the pain points are, so we can address them. This is a collaborative document drafted for the purpose of discussion and contribution at Sensored Meetup #10. (via Rachel Kalmar)
Four short links: 23 October 2012

Four short links: 23 October 2012

Software-Defined Radio, Google Mapping, Windows Exploits, and Firesheep Moments

  1. Getting Started with Software-Defined Radio (ThePowerBase) — Now, anyone with about $20 USD to spare can tune into everything from police and fire transmissions to the International Space Station. We were talking about this on the Radar mailing list, and Mike Loukides offered these pithy words of wisdom: antennas only get complicated if you’re transmitting. If you’re transmitting, you run a real possibility of letting the magic smoke out if something’s wrong with the antenna. But with receivers, there’s very little that more wire won’t fix. And at TV frequencies, you don’t even need that much wire. (via Jim Stogdill)
  2. How Google Builds Its Maps (The Atlantic) — fascinating look into Google’s project Ground Truth. [T]he maps team, largely driven by Street View, is publishing more imagery data every two weeks than Google possessed total in 2006. The analysis of human-powered software is great: Google’s map offerings build in the human intelligence on the front end, and that’s what allows its computers to tell you the best route from San Francisco to Boston.
  3. USB Stick of Death — very detailed internals walkthrough of how to simply insert a USB stick, have it automatically mounted by the operating system and immediately compromise it by triggering a vulnerability in ntfs.sys.
  4. BasecampA Firesheep Moment for PLCs. I love the idea of Firesheep moments: when the obscurity is removed by making the flaw so easy to exploit that nobody can deny the problem exists. (via Jim Stogdill)

Top Stories: March 19-23, 2012

Google Maps alternatives, inside Dart, and the upside of offline.

This week on O'Reilly: StreetEasy's Sebastian Delmont explained why his team left Google Maps behind, we looked at the ins and outs of the Dart programming platform, and Jim Stogdill considered the alternatives to always-on living.

Four short links: 11 April 2011

Four short links: 11 April 2011

Facebook for Non-Profits, Groklaw is Goneburger, Map Ads Mandatory, and Corruption Fought

  1. Fundraising on Facebookonly 7% [of companies surveyed] cited social networking as one of their most effective sources for customer acquisition […] only 2.4% of non-profits were able to raise over 10k through Facebook in 2010. (via Chris Brogan)
  2. Groklaw ClosesThere will be other battles, and there already are, because the same people that propped SCO up are still going to try to destroy Linux, but the battlefield has shifted, and I don’t feel Groklaw is needed in the new battlefield the way it was in the SCO v. Linux wars. PJ did a wonderful thing and we’ll miss both her and GrokLaw. (via Don Christie)
  3. Google Maps ToC Changeswe now require that any new Maps API applications going forward display any advertising delivered in the maps imagery, unless the site concerned has a Google Maps API Premier license. (via Flowing Data)
  4. Root Strikers — Lessig’s new project. Thoreau wrote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” The root of our political evils is money. Our goal is to build a network of rootstrikers—to talk about this issue, clearly identify the problem, and work together towards practical reforms. At the moment it’s “post and comment” site, a forum, but I hope he’s building an army to channel to other acts. Check out his splendid talk on the subject.
Four short links: 12 July 2010

Four short links: 12 July 2010

Machine Learning Toolkit, Map Politics, Borg Newspaper, and Ambient Displays

  1. Shogun: A Large Scale Machine Learning Toolbox — open source (GPL v3), C++ with interfaces to MatLab, R, Octave, and Python. Emphasis for this toolkit is on SVM and “large scale kernel methods”.
  2. The Agnostic Cartographer (Washington Monthly) — land and sea are easy to measure compared to the trouble you get into when you put names on them. The end of the colonial period, hastened by World War II, ushered in a broad crisis in geographical data collection. “The modern era collapsed under its own weight,” says Michael Frank Goodchild, a British American geographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “By the 1970s it was apparent that it was no longer going to be sustainable to have a world in which national governments sustained geographic information.”
  3. Niu Personalized Newspaper to Launch — sign up, select news sources, and every day you get a personalized 24-page print newspaper on your doorstep. They’re not attached to print, but print is the delivery mechanism their customers preferred.
  4. Ambient Devices — amazing lineup of products that ambiently reflect data (mostly weather). I love the umbrella whose handle glows if you should take it today. (via data4all on Twitter)
Four short links: 25 February 2010

Four short links: 25 February 2010

Rap Python, Being Believed, Hot Maps, and Old School Secrets

  1. like python — lets you write Python in Valleygirl, LOLCAT, fratboy, and rap. Still not a handle on writing Perl in Latin. (via Hacker News)
  2. Belief In Climate Change Hinges On Worldview (NPR) — applicable beyond climate change. Whether you get what you want depends on how it’s framed and how it’s delivered. The paper cited is available for PDF download.
  3. gheat — add a heatmap layer to a Google Map. For more on its design and implementation, read Chad Whitacre’s blog.
  4. TrueType VT220 Font — turns out it’s not as simple as a straight bitmap. This article explains how scanline gaps and a dot-stretching circuit create the look we old-timers remember. (via rgs on Delicious)
Four short links: 18 November 2009

Four short links: 18 November 2009

Web Time Travel, UK Map Data Liberation, Streetview Mashups, 3D Retail

  1. Memento: Time Travel for the Web — clever versioning hack that uses HTTP’s content negotiation to negotiate about the date!
  2. Ordnance Survey Maps to Go OnlineThe prime minister said that by April he hoped a consultation would be completed on the free provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000, (not the scale of a typical Landranger map set at 1:25,000). The online maps would be free to all, including commercial users who, previously, had to acquire expensive and restrictive licences at £5,000 per usage, a fee many entrepreneurs felt was too high. No word yet on license. (more details here)
  3. Mapsicle — open source Javascript library to create mashups and application on Google Streetview, from NZ developers Project X. It has been released by Google as part of the Maps Utility library.
  4. Freedom of Creation Shop — online store for 3D-printed objects. (via Makezine).
Four short links: 2 November 2009

Four short links: 2 November 2009

Inside Botnets, Creating Choropleths, Privacy Simplified, Massively Machiavellian Online Social Gaming

  1. Your Botnet is My Botnet (PDF) — 2008 USENIX Security paper analysing >70G of data gathered when security researchers hijacked the Torpig botnet. A major limitation of analyzing a botnet from the inside is the limited view. Most current botnets use stripped-down IRC or HTTP servers as their command and control channels, and it is not possible to make reliable statements about other bots. In particular, it is difficult to determine the size of the botnet or the amount and nature of the sensitive data that is stolen. One way to overcome this limitation is to “hijack” the entire botnet, typically by seizing control of the C&C channel. […] As a result, whenever a bot resolves a domain (or URL) to connect to its C&C server, the connection is redirected or sinkholed. This provides the defender with a complete view of all IPs that attempt to connect to the C&C server as well as interesting information that the bots might send..
  2. cartographer.js — build thematic maps using Google Maps. To be precise, you can build a choropleth, which is my word of the day. (via Simon Willison)
  3. Making Privacy Policies Not Suck (Aza Raskin) — interested in developing a standard set of privacy policy components the way that Creative Commons has created a standard set of copyright license components.
  4. Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell (TechCrunch) — many of those games on Facebook that your friends play are evil. To get in-game money or objects, they’ll let you take a survey but at the end you’re signed up for crap you never wanted. Related: this article on monetizing social networks which talks about social gaming’s business model.

Playnice: The Unofficial Latitude for the iPhone

Last week Google launched Latitude for the iPhone as a web app. They were held back from releasing a native app by Apple’s overbearing application approval process. However, this doesn’t matter that much as all location apps are currently hamstrung by Apple’s lack of background location updates. Luckily for iPhone customers there are developers out there trying to solve this problem.

Four short links: 27 July 2009

Four short links: 27 July 2009

  1. Ignite OSCON — 56m of video from Ignite OSCON. They’re all great, but Dan Meyer remains the highlight for me.
  2. gheat — a maptile server in Python, delivering heatmaps to be superimposed on Google Maps. Handy for visualization fiends.
  3. CaDNAnoopen source software for design of 3-dimensional DNA origami. One of George Church’s projects. I love the combination of math, biology, and whimsy in open-source giftwrap. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
  4. CommentPressan open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. I’m taking a greater interest in tools that channel and focus participation rather than simply providing “edit this page”. (via gov2.net.au’s issues paper)