Blog What I Made

Quite a varied week this week, though as the title suggests, it did involve some nightmares, and as the map should suggest it involved a bit of travel.

Supposedly my main focus was to get the web based admin interfaces for the revision apps sorted out. As I mentioned last week I found I was using the wrong version of a plugin so I tried using the right one and it worked better. As it happened I still wasn’t entirely happy with the interface offered so I’ve kept using my own form fields for some parts and used the defaults elsewhere. By the end of Monday I’d got enough of the admin interfaces done to declare them “finished” and then moved onto the next task. That task is to allow uploading of three large blocks of text and have the code parse the text to work out what the questions should be. This is to allow the teacher I’m working with to use his existing word documents to upload questions without having to make any changes. I got that nearly finished this week but got a bit sidetracked on a few other issues. I’m hoping to have that finished today and get a few other bits done so that I can have the whole first milestone finished this weekend.

On Tuesday I took a trip down to London. The main reason I was going was to meet the people at 7digital. The iPhone app I was working on earlier this year was for them so we decided that I should go to visit them and finally meet them in person. The meeting was fairly short but went well and we discussed a few of the features they’d like to get into the next version. The first version of the app is actually still in the review process for the app store (as far as I know) but hopefully it’ll get through soon.

While in London I also met up with the guy that I’ve been working on a chess app with. We discussed some of the features in the current version of the app and highlighted a few hopefully fairly simple steps that we can take to get the app to version 1.0 and ideally get me paid!

While on the trip to London I also had a play with Twitter’s OAuth support. Twitter have decided that Basic Auth is too insecure and leads to leakage of password and so everyone needs to use OAuth in the future. This is definitely a good idea but meant that I needed to change the way I was accessing Twitter with mapme.at. I found a fork of the main twitter4r library with OAuth support and managed to get it working quite easily in a small standalone script. When it came to incorporating this into mapme.at though I came across some issues. The first, very basic, script I modified worked fine but the next one gave me errors. After trying to find the problem over the course of a few days (while trying to do other work) I finally found the issue. The fireeagle library that I was using was “monkey patching” the OAuth library. Basically all it was doing was wrapping one method call so that it could change a few properties on the object that was returned. Unfortunately the fireeagle changes were based on an old version of the OAuth library and so ended up breaking the main OAuth library. Once I’d fixed that I had a few more issues as I remembered I had in the past made a few changes of my own to the twitter library, both by modifying the library in place and by monkey patching it in my own code. I ended up creating my own branch on github that has fixes in for broken friendship methods, an extra friendship method and a few other small fixes.

So I managed to miss last week’s week notes out. I’m not really sure why that was, I think because over the weekend I sometimes feel I don’t want to do “work”, i.e. the weeknotes, but then during weekdays I want to do proper work, not weeknotes. Oh well, here I am now so I might as well get on with it.

Week 107 was actually pretty good, fairly relaxed but quite productive too. I finally started work on the new version of my GCSE & A-Level revision iPhone apps. I spent the whole of the Monday brainstorming the feature-set that I’m aiming for and then building this into a list of Milestones and breaking down the first few milestones into more detail. Once I’d done that I entered all the information into the Trac setup that I’ve previously mentioned. I quite like how Trac is all set up for handling milestones and versions of apps as it has worked out really well for managing this project.

Although these are iPhone apps the first thing I needed to do was to create a web app for managing the questions. So far I’ve just been taking the questions from the teacher as a collection of word documents and then in a part-manual, part-automated process turned these into XML files for the iPhone app to read. I wanted to make a web-based system that the teacher could use himself to upload questions so that he can sort everything to do with the questions out, taking up less of my time. Along with properly planning this project out and setting milestones I also decided I really needed to try building this project using “Test Driven Development”, i.e. writing a set of automated tests for functionality and then building out the functionality until the tests pass. This is actually the first time I’ve tried doing this for a whole project and it’s been an interesting ride so far. I’ve found that it’s really slowed me down, partly just from having to learn about the various Ruby modules and Rails plugins and getting myself up to speed with them, but I do think I’m getting better quality code and structure as a result so I’m going to continue doing it.

The first features I completed were the ability to import the existing XML files into the database and then export “test modules” from the database into the same XML format. This is about making sure we can manage questions from the database in the future and that, if necessary, I can continue to use the existing iPhone code to launch apps. I then started work on the admin interfaces. I’ve done so many admin interfaces over the years, especially back when I was doing PHP. I was hoping the state of things had changed so that it would be nice and easy to set something up to do all the work for me, especially considering rails has scaffolding which I haven’t used before but have read about and is supposed to do this sort of thing. I happened to find out about the Ruby Toolbox that week and that had an Admin Interfaces section which suggested active_scaffold was the most popular plugin to use.

I started playing with active_scaffold this week with mixed results. It was really simple to get set up but then some of the features didn’t seem to work. I managed to work out eventually that I needed another plugin to support it – recordselect. I got that installed but then it didn’t seem to work right, the ajaxy bits just didn’t do what they were supposed to and I was getting nowhere. I ended up dropping the ajaxy bits but did post a message to the active_scaffold mailing list. I’ve now had a response telling me that I need to use a different fork of the recordselect plugin, the main version only supports Rails 3 whereas I’m still using Rails 2. Hopefully once I do that things will go better.

I got sidetracked on Thursday this week by having a look at a few bugs in the chess app I’ve been working on. It seems I’d missed out some functionality of the PGN format and it was tripping up when trying to read some more complicated files. I spent all day Thursday and some of Friday on this but finally got it sorted on Saturday morning. I’ve now sent a new version over to the client and I’ll find out what they think when I meet them on Tuesday.

Other interesting things that happened in the past two weeks… in week 107 I had feedback for mapme.at requesting support for xAuth in the API and XML output. On Saturday morning I had some time so I had a look into it. The XML output turned out to be trivial. The JSON output is quite simple, I construct native datastructures like arrays and hashes and then call .to_json on the resulting object. Turns out if I call .to_xml on the same object I get perfectly reasonable XML out. The xAuth support was a little more tricky. xAuth is a mechanism whereby mobile and desktop apps can take a username and password from a user and then make a call to a server to exchange this for a token that can be used to make requests. This is better because the app then doesn’t need to store the username and password and they’re also not being passed over the network repeatedly. It also means that you don’t have to go through the convoluted OAuth process of app -> web browser -> app. I managed to get both these features out on Saturday morning and the person who had requested them was quite surprised and happy. Hopefully he’ll be using them in a Windows Mobile 6.5 twitter app soon. One other thing I tried to do was to convert mapme.at from using Basic Auth with Twitter to using OAuth instead, Twitter are turning off Basic Auth support at the end of the month and so I really need to switch soon. Unfortunately it looked like the twitter4r library that I use doesn’t yet support OAuth so I decided to postpone the change, I’m really going to have to do something this week, either find an OAuth compatible version of twitter4r or use an alternative library.

When looking back at my previous post I noticed that a good chunk of it was about how the mapme.at server went down and took ages to come back up. Yesterday I upgraded some packages on the server again and rebooted it, happy in the knowledge that the disk check completed last time and so that should’ve found whatever the problems were. Unfortunately at 12:30 this morning (just before going to bed) I got a tweet, an SMS and an email from pingdom telling me that mapme.at was down. I looked into it and saw that yet again it had mounted the disk as read only. I began a disk check and went back to bed. It’s still running now but hopefully will be done in the next two hours. I’m going to have to get in touch with Hetzner and demand that they give me new drives I think as I can’t have this going down for so long so often.

Again to finish on some good news, I have an office! You can see it in the photo above, and Adrian McEwen practicing his DJing (or perhaps pretending to sit at a desk). A bunch of us freelancers in Liverpool have been umming and ahhing over getting one for months now. Hakim happened to be walking past an office building on Duke Street with a sign mentioning office space to let. We had a look at a selection of the offices they had available and settled on one with enough room for four of us with plenty of natural light (though hopefully not too much so we can still see our screens). We received the keys on Thursday and most of us moved in properly on Friday. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes for me, I’ve predominantly worked from home for the past 5 years so I’m not sure how I’ll find working in an office again. Right now it’s looking like being a lot of fun and good to see people every day but considering none of us really got much work done on Friday we’re going to have to be more careful in the future. I’m sure as things calm down and we get used to it we’ll be really productive, and hopefully able to make use of each other’s slightly differing talents.

I’ll be dropping some stuff off in the office today and then heading to How? Why? DIY! to see what it’s all about. If you’re in Liverpool you should come along!

Well, as you may have noticed I missed last week’s notes. I’ve had a pretty harried few weeks trying to close out the two iPhone projects I’ve been working on. Mainly this was simply because I’d finished the time that I’d assigned to the projects and so any further work was not making me any money, but also July is the end of my financial year and I really wanted to get this work invoiced for so that I could include it in this year’s earnings (the second year for my company). Not only was I trying to get these two client projects finished but I also wanted to make some progress on the chess app that has remained untouched for a few months now.

It’s difficult to say for sure but it looks like the two client projects are just about finished. One has zero live bugs and the other just has a few with questions attached which I’m hoping should result in no more work. One thing I’m finding though is that I’m definitely getting my time estimates for projects wrong. These two client projects I originally estimated as 5 and 10 days respectively. The 10 day project was eventually increased to 13 days (I submitted a “complete” app only to be sent wireframes for how the app should work, not sure if there was a communication issue here) but all in all I’ve probably spent at least 50% more time again on each one. I suppose what I’ve been doing is thinking of the time it’ll take for me to get an app together that fits the spec without considering time for the client testing and for the client to make the various modifications they’re likely to request. I’m definitely going to be more careful about any estimates I submit in the future.

I did spend some time getting a “full game view” working on the chess app. This view is intended to show the complete description of a chess game including all commentary and variations. As the game is progressed using the controls the current move should be highlighted and if any move is clicked then the visible game should be altered to show that move. I actually managed to get this pretty much done and working in half a day last week with another half day spent on some other tweaks. I sent it off to the guy I’m working with on this and he tried it out. There did seem to be a couple of issues with handling of incompatible file types (it was crashing rather than giving an error message) and a few issues with handling very large files but in general it seems to be working. I now need to experiment a bit with the placement of the full game view and then I think we’ll just be working out what other tweaks we need to do to it before we can release it.

Last week I also spent an interesting two days with Dave Verwer of Shiny Development. He’s asked me to help him out with some iPhone training so we spent the two days going through his materials and making sure I understood everything and was clear on how he presented it. Dave has been developing in Objective C for many years, initially for the Mac but with the iPhone SDK since it was released, so it was really good just spending the time with him and learning even more about the iPhone SDK from him. I’m basically going to act as the overflow taking on any courses when Dave is already booked up, the first course is booked in for October so it’s going to be really interesting to see how that goes. If you’re interested in getting trained up in Objective C and the iPhone SDK then you should definitely give Dave a call. Whether you want in-house training for a company or you’re an individual who wants to join one of the public training sessions you’ll have a great experience and be building iPhone apps in no time.

Final thing to mention is something I finally got set up today. I’ve been using SVN for a long time for various personal projects including mapme.at but I’ve also more recently been using Git. Git is great as a distributed VCS giving me the ability to check-in code on the train and branch projects with ease, but the lack of an enforced server-side component has led to me being a bit sloppy about how often my code gets backed up to a server. Today I finally worked out how to properly host git modules on a server. I’m actually doing it over SSH so it’s fairly simple, I just need to create a “bare” repository on the server:

mkdir foo.git
cd foo.git
git --bare init

Then the following commands link my local repository to the remote one and pushes all my changes up:

git remote add origin ssh://git.example.com/path_to_repository/foo.git
git push origin master

I think when I’d tried this previously I was using an old version of Git that didn’t properly support --bare so I’m glad that everything worked easily this time. I then took this one step further by setting up trac as a bug tracking system. It wasn’t too hard to set up on ubuntu using these instructions they’re a bit out of date though so once I’d setup mod_python I then found I needed to do that bit again and use WSGI instead using these instructions. I’ve also installed the Git plugin so that I can browse my Git repository from within trac and also most importantly I can resolve and update bugs from my commit messages using the post-receive script on that page (which must be named post-receive and put in the repository.git/hooks/ folder).

So a busy few weeks. As I’m coming to the end of projects I’m getting to the post-project comedown that I tend to have after being so busy and then becoming quiet again. I’ll still need to finish off any final bugs on these two client projects and get this chess app more complete. I also have emails from clients with various bits and pieces that need doing but I should finally be able to get started on some new projects, I just have to work out which ones!

Quite often when people ask me about new features on mapme.at they get what is becoming a stock answer of “it’s on the list”. In most cases this really is true, the problem is that the list is very very long and I’m getting very little time to work on it. I’ve decided that I need to sort this out and the way I’m going to do this is by recruiting some help. In a previous job in Manchester we worked with the University of Manchester to recruit their second year students on summer internships, and in later years even full sandwich year placements. This was a great experience for both the students and for us who had to train them and work with them. I’m looking to this as a possible solution to my problem on mapme.at.

Firstly – the unpaid bit – at the moment mapme.at is not generating any revenue. I’m fine with that and am fully intending to take my own sweet time to push it in that direction. That does mean that any money spent on it comes out of my own pocket. I think that working on mapme.at could be a great opportunity for someone beginning a career in software development. They would be working on a popular site getting plenty of traffic and API usage. They would also get the opportunity to work with me, a software developer and entrepreneur who has worked on leading websites in a career spanning over ten years.

What would you be working on? Well mapme.at is a popular and successful location based social networking site. The site started in June 2007 and since then has added many users who make use of the various functionality offered. The site interacts with many other services including Twitter, Foursquare and Google Latitude to give a single central store for users’ location history. It offers users the ability to restrict what level of detail they show to different contacts and also gives interesting and useful visualisations of their data. The API allows anyone to build an app that interacts with the data, querying or even updating many aspects of a user’s data, with their permission of course.

So what am I looking for? When I’ve done this before I’ve worked with 2nd year Computer Science students giving them an opportunity to work during the summer holiday. This is the type of person that I’m expecting to hear from. It’s quite possible that people in different stages of their career will be interested, perhaps a school leaver that’s not looking to go to University or someone who’s already been working in the field and is looking for a change. Recent graduates would also be likely candidates. I really need someone who has experience working with software development and can demonstrate an aptitude for it. They don’t necessarily have to have used Ruby on Rails before but some experience of web based development and use of relational databases would be expected. I will expect to provide some basic training and support, though I’d also hope that they will be the type of person to pick up new technologies quickly.

As I’ve mentioned the ideal would be for someone to come in and work for me unpaid over the summer for a few months. They will gain some great experience in working on a web startup and I’ll get some development done on mapme.at. I definitely wouldn’t want to leave anyone out of pocket though. I’d certainly be willing to pay someone’s expenses if they’re going to have to travel to get to Liverpool each day, though I wouldn’t go so far as to pay for someone’s accommodation so they’re definitely going to need to live somewhere nearby. I should also mention now that I will be expecting this person to work with me on-site in an office in central Liverpool so I’m not looking to work with anyone remotely.

So, are you interested or do you know anyone who might be? If so get in touch by emailing me at my first name “at” my second name dot net, or just by leaving a comment on this posting.

So, a much quicker update after last week’s delayed entry. This past week I’ve been working on a project for Clear Digital. A relatively simple project that required setting up a WordPress blog and re-skinning it to match the client’s requirements. I hadn’t played with WordPress so much in quite a while so it was an interesting experience. Turned out not to be too difficult, making use of plenty of existing plugins to extend functionality. On a recommendation from Dave Coveney I used the Thematic theme. This is more of a tool than an actual theme itself. The theme you get is very simple but it allows lots of hooks to extend the theme and customise it how you like. I think there’s lots of themes that are based off this but I chose to create a new theme building on top of the very basics that Thematic provides, the better to match the client’s requirements. WordPress provides “widgets” which are small UI elements that you can drop onto the page in various places. Things like tag clouds, a calendar of your blog posts, a list of Categories, and lots of others. Thematic provides quite a few different places that you can drop Widgets making it even easier to customise your blog.

In case it helps someone else, here’s a complete list of the plugins I used:

• Category Posts Widget – allows me to show a few specific posts at the top of the homepage.
• Flexi Pages Widget – This and the following plugin helped with showing groups of links to internal pages
• Multi Pages Widget
• Like – For showing the new Facebook “Like” buttons
• Tweetmeme Retweet Button – For showing a “Retweet” button and count
• WP Google-buzz – a “Buzz” button, and count
• MM Forms – For displaying contact forms
• Regenerate Thumbnails – we’re displaying thumbnails on the homepage and this plugin was handy when I was playing around with the size
• Twitter Tools – to display the latest tweet from the client
• WordPress Popular Posts – for showing a simple “most popular in the last 30 days” widget.

As well as this project, I also started out on a new personal project last Sunday. I intended it to be just a quick thing to try something out but it’s started taking a lot more time and resources than I expected. As you may know I have quite a few iPhone apps in the app store. Right now I’ve got 22 live on my own account and another that I did for a client under their account. Though Apple provide perfectly good sales statistics they don’t give any indication of how well you’re doing in their “Top 100″ charts. Though much of the desire to know your position is due to vanity there are some uses to knowing, you can use it for marketing and if you reach the top 20 it’s a good reassurance that you’re going to make a reasonable sum of money from sales.

Apple don’t provide this information but a number of other people do. APPlyzer offer access to some of the data for free and require you to pay for more. An iPhone app called “PositionApp” also gives you some information and allows you to select favourite apps but still didn’t give me the information in a way that I liked, so I decided to write my own.

I had already found a perl script that would download the information for the Top 100s and would give me information for a specific app, category and country if I wanted. I was originally running this twice a day but unfortunately I hadn’t updated it to list some of my latest apps so when I found that two of my apps were in the Top 100 in the UK Education category I decided I needed a better option. If I was going to download the Top 100s I really ought to be putting them in a database them so that I could do more with them in the future.

I started by writing a script that would do the basic download of the XML and for some reason decided to throw the XML in the database for later parsing. Actually a large part of my reasoning behind this was having minimal time but wanting to leave something downloading data as I went off to OGGCamp. As it turned out storing the XML in the database was an incredibly bad idea, after a short while I had thousands of entries with 600KB of data in each meaning that an SQL query to request the latest download to check if it had changed took 15 seconds!

So, version two, parse the data straight away. The data was in XML so obviously the safest way to parse it was to use a proper XML parser. Because the file was pretty big I decided to go with a SAX style parser. After spending a while doing this and getting a completed parser going, I found that my XML parsing was taking over a minute! I’d already noticed that sometimes the HTTP request from Apple could take up 15 seconds and doing that 5000 times (for all the categories and countries) was going to take a long time, so an additional minute was terrible news!

Next day I decided to skip the “proper XML parsing” and go with a regex. After half an hour of coding I had something that would parse the entire 600KB file in less than a second, much better.

I’ve now been running this script four times a day for nearly a week. I’ve downloaded approximately 20 batches of data in that time. Each batch is pretty big as I’m querying 40 categories in 62 countries for two types of app (free and paid), which comes to 4960 requests four times a day! Each of those requests then generates 100 positions entries meaning I now have over 10 million position entries in my database. This quantity of data has been causing its own problems but so far I’m keeping on top of them. Yesterday I added a few more indexes to the tables and converted the tables from InnoDB to MyISAM. This gave much better results. The 6pm batch yesterday took 5 hours to run whereas the midnight batch took 1 hour 45 minutes and the 6am batch took just an hour to run. I’m also coincidentally hoping to move to a more powerful server this weekend so that should help too.

So, future plans for this data? Well basically I’m not sure how much effort I’m willing to put into it. The main thing that I want to get out of it is positions for all of my apps on some sort of regular basis, and the ability to query history for apps even if I haven’t specifically remembered to add them to my list. Other people might have other ideas of things to do though so I’m intending to dump the data out into some basic form, CSV most likely, and make it available to download. Hopefully I’ll get around to putting a web interface on this to allow people to look for information on their own apps or even register to get emailed position updates but any of that will be time permitting, and I’ve got lots of work to keep me busy!

If you’re interested to know though, Basic Sat Nav is continuing to do well in the UK Navigation category, hovering around the number 10 mark and hovering around the 60 mark in Ireland. My GCSE and A-Level revision apps are doing nicely in the run up to the exams, none of them getting particularly high in the Top 100 but most of them making appearances in various positions. Even iFreeThePostcode is sitting at number 60 in the UK Free Navigation category.

I’ll be talking about this project a little at NSManchester on Monday night so go along to that if you’re interested to know more.

Just got back from a three week holiday to Australia and Singapore (well, in fact I still haven’t actually made it back, I’m on the train home from London after WhereCampEU!) Most of this was written on the train to Heathrow on the 19th February, unfortunately I didn’t really get time or sufficient internets to post it sooner. Hopefully next week’s will be up faster!

Another busy week as I prepared for my holiday which I’m now on! As mentioned last week my focus was supposed to be finishing off the mapme.at features while also mopping up the scraps from the client work I’ve done recently. I also ended up with a new day’s worth of client work which I’d quoted for a few weeks ago but forgotten about. I had finished the bulk of the client work that I’d been planning by Tuesday lunchtime but annoyingly I did find it kept springing back as my numerous related tweets will show. I had hoped that with all this “just one more thing” that someone might have paid me before I left, but alas no.

But enough about client work. The “place based check-ins” for mapme.at that I mentioned last week came along really well and I managed to get the code live on Wednesday (17th February). Since then there’s been a few tweaks here and there but as far as I can tell it all went out without any major problems. I put a blog post up about the changes so take a look at that for more information on those.

Something I forgot to mention from lunch last Friday was that Adrian McEwen asked me if I would like him to take my Weasley Clock to Maker Faire UK. Adrian was there last year and his famous Bubblino was filmed by the BBC. Maker Faire is all about interesting hardware hacks and so my clock should definitely be welcome there. Unfortunately it’s on the same weekend as WhereCampEU so it’s a good thing that Adrian offered to take the clock for me. I’ve wanted to come up with something better for it to show than my location as, even with my current travels, it tends not to change much over the course of a few hours. Something more interesting would allow me to demonstrate the clock more actively at conferences. Adrian suggested we use the mapme.at accounts for the Mersey Ferries so I made a few changes and got the clock showing that.

There’s three ferries but usually only one or two of them are active so the 2 hands of the clock can be utilised. When on their standard route the ferries travel between 3 ports – Liverpool, Seaforth and Woodchurch. Other than that they tend to either be in open water or moored in the docks. Using the new place-based functionality I was able to make sure that all the ports and mooring points were in as favourited places with labels for all the accounts. I then updated the clock’s Arduino code so that it could handle 6 different locations (instead of the existing 4). It seems to be working ok but unfortunately before I handed the clock over to Adrian the ferries didn’t seem to go anywhere. I’ve only described 5 of the 6 “places” so far… I took the opportunity with the redesign of the clock face to add a “Mortal Peril” option which should now occur when the ferries are doing tours down the Manchester Ship Canal!

Now I’m back from my holiday I’m sure I’ll have to spend some time over the next few weeks sorting out client requests that have come in while I’ve been away but I’m really hoping to get some more time to work on even more mapme.at features. I’m speaking at Where 2.0 in two weeks and so need to get a talk written with some good visualisations, and want to have a few products I can announce too.

I tend to ignore blogging trends, in fact I wouldn’t really go as far as to call myself a blogger, but this “Week Notes” trend could help me to work better and more efficiently so I thought I’d give it a go. The week numbers run from the time at which the company was incorporated and MKE Computing Ltd, the limited company I set up to handle my freelancing work, was setup on the 30th July 2008, hence week 81.

This could actually be the worst time for me to start something regular considering I’m actually going on holiday at the end of this week, but what the heck, it’s some content for my blog if nothing else!

So this week has been pretty busy, largely as I’m trying to wind things down for my holiday. Monday and Thursday afternoon I was in the offices of Moneyextra.com where I regularly do a few days work. My work there is generally PHP though has ranged from Perl through VB.net through to an iPhone app in the past. At the moment I’m working on a PHP-based back-office system that they’re doing for Carphone Warehouse. It’s actually based on OSCommerce which I think was last developed in 1973 (honestly, it feels that way) so is really outdated and can be a pain to extend.

My main focus this week and next was actually supposed to be to get lots of work done on my “start up” website mapme.at. I’m giving a talk at the end of March at the Where 2.0 conference and I’m really hoping to have some interesting things to talk about. The main things I was supposed to be doing is developing two iPhone apps to work with the site. One is focused around putting data in, the other more focussed on pulling it out in a unique and fun way. I’ve been having issues decided how to handle authentication though. If I put an app on the app store it’s quite likely that most people who download it have never heard of the site and won’t have an account. I’d like to do something really simple to handle creating an app, potentially even doing it silently in the background. I already use OAuth for the API and it would be possible to handle a signup step as part of that but the OAuth process is quite jarring to many users (the app has to quit, Safari launches and then you have to be sure to reload the app when the signup/login and authorisation has finished). One option would be to use Facebook Connect and automatically create a user linked to their Facebook credentials, this could also be confusing to many users and would require me to integrate facebook connect into mapme.at in general. I think I’ve decided to just stick to the OAuth method for now and to look at improving it once I’ve got an app that I can demo.

As part of looking at authentication though I decided to improve my existing OpenID support. My initial implementation was done in such a way that you could attach the same OpenID credentials to multiple accounts. I guess I thought that might be a useful feature but I think most people found it annoying as it meant that to log in, you had to enter your OpenID and your username, as mapme.at wasn’t using the OpenID as a unique identifier. I’ve now fixed this which should hopefully make things simpler. I’m also intending to reduce the number of fields you need to enter to create an account, but again I think I’ll wait until I’ve got some iPhone apps I can demo.

Something else that I’ve been considering for mapme.at and decided to implement this week is “place based check-ins”. Currently on mapme.at you either map yourself at an arbitrary latitude and longitude, or you create a “favourite” location and map yourself there. There was a few “global” favourites which I had added myself but generally you had to create a favourite manually or use some sort of logging app or API to log your location arbitrarilly. The new functionality means that mapme.at will give users access to a big database of existing shared places. This database, and improved UI on the site, will make it much easier to say “I’m in the supermarket” rather than “I’m at 53.415812,-2.921977″. I decided that having that functionality in place would vastly improve one of the iPhone apps so I decided to start working on it. It’s coming along really well, there’s still work to do but I think I’ll have it out in just a few more days.

On Friday I met up with some old friends, and met some new ones, for lunch. I had a good time and it was good to catch up and find out what others are up to in Liverpool but it did cut into my dev time on the new functionality.

Next week I’m hoping to spend at least another two days working on mapme.at. I’ve got some functionality to finish off for another client on Monday but apart from that it should be mapme.at until I got on holiday to Australia at the end of the week!

Ok, so I’m still not blogging about future and past conferences but I had to post about this one as I’ve just wasted an hour trying to fix it.

I’ve used the YUI Uploader a few times now as a handy way to upload multiple files. In my current project I’m using it mainly as an Ajax uploader, I need to upload multiple files and create a variety of DB records in a few Ajax requests so I thought this would be a good way. Initially I had a few errors because I was getting a 401 – the flash doesn’t pass the cookies through. I sorted this out by passing them in the URL (and modifying the PHP to read $_REQUEST as well as $_COOKIE). I then tried in Safari and found the flash element had zero height so wasn’t accessible. Played around with the CSS and got it working. It was successfully uploading the file but for some reason not calling my JavaScript function callbacks. Oh well, bit odd, let’s try Firefox again. Tried it and Firefox crashed! I then spent an hour trying to figure out why Firefox was crashing.

One thing to mention before I tell you why. The YUI Flash uploader has to get around a limit in Flash 10. The actual process of launching the “Select Files” dialog must come from within the flash. To achieve this you either give the flash the URL of an image or you position the flash on top of some HTML, I was going with the latter, hence my problems when the flash had zero height.

Because my save process involves the flash file uploading and a few ajax requests I had decided to hide the flash during this process, to make sure that during the ajax requests a user couldn’t try adding new files in. I did this by adding “display: none” via a CSS class. This is what was causing the crash in Firefox. It seems that giving the flash “display: none” was detaching it from the page (or something), Firefox didn’t handle this well and so crashed out completely. Safari handled it a bit better, it didn’t crash but my function callbacks were no longer attached.

So, moral of this story, don’t “display: none” your YUI uploader flash. I’ve tried setting “visibility: hidden” and that works equally well, without causing a crash. After spending an hour fixing this I decided I had to post something to try to save someone else that pain, I didn’t see anything similar in my googles of “flash YUI crash firefox”.

I need to blog more, like seriously, for now though… I use Google Reader to read everyone elses blogs. I use it a lot so I was very interested to read on twitter and lifehacker about an extension thingy to allow you to view a nicely restyled version of Google Reader that uses the Helvetica font to give a much nicer experience, Helvetireader. The only ways to use it though is using a userscript that requires Greasemonkey or Greasekit, or a user CSS if your browser supports it. I generally use Safari and don’t have Greasekit installed so didn’t have an option to quickly try it out, so I knocked up a bookmarklet. Add the following link to your bookmarks (I generally put these in my toolbar/”Bookmarks Bar”), then when you’re in Google Reader click on the link and it’ll switch you to Helvetireader. If you don’t like it just refresh the page, if you do then you can look into one of the other options, or just keep using the bookmarklet.

Helvetireader

I promise I’ll blog more soon, I’ve got two past conferences and two future ones to tell you all about!

If you’ve been following my Twitters you’ll be well aware that I’ve just spent the past week in San Francisco. I came here to attend, and speak at, the launch event for CloudMade’s new APIs for location based services. CloudMade is a company that was launched around 18 months ago by Steve Coast, the founder of the OpenStreetMap project, and Nick Black, a core member of the OSM project. The aim of their company is to bring the power of crowd sourced data, specifically OSM data, to more developers and to commercial companies around the world. The first step of this was of course to develop some products to make this possible and to make them available to the world, hence this event.

The event was split into four main sections. Steve started by giving an overview of the OSM project, its history and some glimpses of what’s likely to happen in the future. Nick then came on stage to explain their ideas behind forming CloudMade and what they’re doing to get OSM data into the hands of more people. After this I and four other developers who have been working with CloudMade’s APIs got on stage to give 5 minute presentations about our experiences developing with the new APIs.

Andrew Turner, CTO of GeoCommons, explained how they have integrated CloudMade’s tiles into their Maker application and talked about how the new Style Editor enables great looking mashups. Jaak Laineste of Nutiteq told us how they’ve been integrating CloudMade’s tile, geocoding and routing services into their Mobile map libraries. I talked about my experiences working with the new APIs, though I won’t go into too much detail here as I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise for Thursday. Andre, of Advanced Flash Components, then showed us a live demo of CloudMade’s APIs being used in a flash application and showed the speedy responses that the API gave.

Cragg Nilson then talked more about the specific products that CloudMade are making available and how people can get access to them. Finally a Q&A session allowed some light interrogation of the CloudMade team before we moved into another room for demo sessions. Jaak, Andre and I all had a plasma screen each that we used to demo what we’d discussed in our talks. The CloudMade team also demoed various other applications that were using their services, centred around a large range of mobile devices that are able to access the APIs using various applications.

I’ve been really impressed by what CloudMade are offering considering they are still a young company. While a large reason for the quality of their offerings is down to the great team they’ve built up, they do also have an advantage in that the data they’re using, and the license it’s built upon, allow them to offer so much more to the developers using their products. The OSM dataset is incredibly rich and can cover a wide range of features that often don’t get much coverage from standard data providers. Also because the data is free CloudMade can make all of it available in their APIs without having to worry about extra charges such as you might get if you wanted to return vectors from existing data providers.

Now the good news, if you’re reading this thinking “I wish I could’ve gone to San Francisco and seen these great talks”, you need not fret. The whole event is being repeated in London on Thursday 12th. It’s currently oversubscribed but if you are interested in going I believe they’ve managed to arrange extra room so there shouldn’t be a problem with more people going. This page should give more details about the CloudMade launch event in London.

Oh yes, and as a hint to what I’ll be talking about on Thursday, take a look at the new logo for one of my existing mapping sites: