It's taken a while but I just did this ...
$ rsync --recursive --verbose --exclude '.git' \* ~/Projects/svn/wp-biographia/trunk/ $ svn up $ svn stat $ svn ci -m 'Updating with v3.0 changes from master on github' $ svn cp trunk tags/3.0 $ svn ci -m 'Tagging v3.0'
... and after much coding, rewriting, testing and documenting, v3.0 of WP Biographia has finally made it off of the starting blocks.
And so, as Where 2012 draws to a close and the lobby of the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco fills with a slew of geo'd-out delegates waiting to check out, it's time for the traditional post conference retrospective writeup. If you were at Where this year or in previous years you'll probably want to skip ahead to the next paragraph, right now. Where, previously called Where 2.0, is one of the annual maps, geo, location conferences. Though it's very Californian and eye wateringly expensive, it's still the place to go to talk, listen and announce anything related to the nebulous industry we call Geo.
After skipping Where 2.0 last year, this year I returned as part of the Nokia contingent and found out that some things had changed.
The contents of the Biography Box that the WP Biographia WordPress plugin produces are easily customisable through the plugin's settings and options. The upcoming new version of the plugin will add to this, allowing almost limitless options for adding to the Biography Box though cunning use of the WordPress filter mechanism. But what if you're happy with the content of the Biography Box, but want to change the way in which the Biography Box looks? This is easily achievable with a little bit of CSS know-how.
After a year's break, I'm back at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, now rebranded as simply the Where Conference. This year, the conference has slipped north from its Valley roots and taken up residence in the Marriott Marquis hotel in the heart of downtown San Francisco. The view from the window of my room on the hotel's 25th. floor is simply ...
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... geographically stunning.
More on Where, plus a write up of my session's talk in a later post.
When you release some code you've written under one of the many open source licenses that exist today, if you're lucky then you can expect to get asked for help using that code. Note that I say if you're lucky. Some people I know view giving help and support as, frankly, a pain; it gets in the way and stops them thinking about a new feature or the next big thing. I take the opposite view though, I see being asked for help as a compliment; it means someone has found the code I've written and actually thinks it might, maybe, be useful, so they're using it and need a bit of support in getting it to do what they want it to do.
So if getting asked questions about code I've written isn't a problem for me, then why am I writing this? It's not the being asked as much as it is what is being asked. Support questions such as ...
It's Friday, December 9th 2011 and I'm in the TSA security line at San Francisco International Airport. Shoes off. Belt off. Watch off. Laptop, iPad and Kindle out of my bag and into the trays.
TSA guard: "New rules. You don't need to take your Kindle out anymore. It's small enough for us to see it on the X-Ray machine in your bag"
Me: "That's good; one less thing to have to take out of my bag"
With the benefit of hindsight, it was probably inevitable but 5 years after the location based, check in social network we know as Gowalla launched and 3 months after they were acquired by Facebook, Gowalla is no more.
Despite launching in 2007, 2 years prior to Foursquare, Gowalla never seemed to be able to capture attention from either users or from the media in quite the same way as Foursquare. The similarities were many; both social networks used location as a key facet, allowed users to check in to locations they were at or near and to share those locations with other users and other social networks. But while Foursquare's game mechanics of badges and Mayors seemed to hit the right note with users, Gowalla's ill explained and ever morphing system of virtual items, spots and trips never seemed to make sense. No-one I've ever spoken to could explain exactly what the point of Gowalla was, whilst Foursquare's mechanics were simplistic and easy to grasp.
After loosing ground to Foursquare, Gowalla tried to act less as a sole source of checkins and more as a central aggregator of the disparate checkins from itself, Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter, amongst others, but this move did little to slow Foursquare's ascendancy.
Judging by comments to this blog post, on Twitter and on Google Plus, the consensus seems to be that yes, Apple is using OSM data from 2010 outside of the US; inside of the US it's (probably) TIGER data and no, there doesn't seem to be attribution and Apple may well be getting a communiqué from OSM to that effect. Other sources of information on this include * The iPhoto for iOS Not Using Google Maps thread on the OSM-Talk mailing list * Iván Sánchez Ortega has put up a nice map comparison between OSM and iPhoto's map tiles. * There's also another comparison between Apple's, OSM's and Google's map tiles. * Jonas. K has put up a blog post which comes right out and says that iPhoto is using OSM and other public domain mapping sources. * Finally, as a nice touch, this post seems to have made it into OSM Community Blogs.
In web and location circles, much has been made of Foursquare's recent "little announcement" of the location based, check-in, company's decision to oust Google Maps and instead to go with OpenStreetMap data, by way of MapBox.
From reading a lot of the coverage you'd be forgiven for thinking that Foursquare has completely severed ties with Google's mapping APIs, but this isn't quite the story. As ReadWriteWeb notes in the last paragraph of its coverage, "Foursquare's iPhone and Android apps won't be affected" as the move is for Foursquare's home on the web, foursquare.com, only.
On Tuesday 24th. January 2012 both vicchi.org and garygale.com went down. Then again, last night, both sites went down again.
The first of these outages was entirely intentional; like many other sites on the web from the huge to the tiny, I blacked out my web presence in protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act which was being voted on in the US Senate on that day. I did this for two reasons. Firstly the internet is a global network and the SOPA legislation, as worded, would have had a massive impact on the global internet and negligible impact on online piracy. Secondly, whilst I live in the UK and SOPA is a piece of US legislaton, past experience shows that the UK government have a rather good history of importing UK versions of poor US legislation. Here's a helpful infographic which speaks more about SOPA that I ever could.
