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Catchup - Week 118
Wow, it’s been a while hasn’t it? I’ve been working hard the whole time so just not had time. Thought I should get a quick update out as some interesting things are happening.
The app I worked on back in July was for 7digital, a leading online media and music store. They’ve been talking about the app recently and announcing their mobile strategy. Unfortunately Apple have not allowed it into the store but we’re hopeful that it will get in eventually.The revision apps I’ve been working on in the past few months are changing… I’m now working with ExamsTutor to build a bigger suite of apps selling to schools and individuals. This is great as it saves me a lot of work on the server side (even if it does mean my existing server-side stuff is now redundant) and also means I’ll have an established conduit to schools.
The chess app I was working on way-back-when is nearing completion and may be out by Christmas!
I’ve also been working on a project to rebuild a really simple PHP app with Ruby on Rails. The original system was very simple, essentially giving an admin interface to 4 tables, but was so badly written that adding any features was a complete pain. The migration to Rails hasn’t taken too long (though slightly longer than I expected really) and is now complete meaning I can begin adding some new features to the system.
I’ve started working with someone on a new location start-up, can’t say too much but hoping it’s going to be big and will be a good reintroduction into the geo-world for me.
We’re also still enjoying the office and have now achieved a full 6 days since the last explosion!
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Quick notes for Week 113
Just a quick one so that I’m not missing a week out. Last week I finally started developing the new iPhone revision apps. Development went well and progressed really quickly.
I also started planning for Howduino which is going to be returning to Liverpool (at long last!) on the 20th and 21st November. Howduino is a hardware hacking event inspired by the Arduino platform but encapsulating many other aspects of hardware hacking and “Internet of Things”.
I have a few ideas for what I want to work on, I’d like to do a new more capable version of my clock - ideally with more hands that are individually controllable. I’m also hoping to have a look at building a laser projector. Potentially for both ideas I’m going to need stepper motors so I put a request out on Freecycle/Freegle Liverpool requesting “broken printers”. I ended up getting 5 in the end. “Unfortunately” two of them seem to work fine so we’ve adopted them as office printers but the others will be taken apart for parts, I also managed to find an old SCSI scanner of my own to disassemble too as you can see in the photo above!
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Weeknotes Week 112
A pretty uneventful week this week. I’ve been away for the previous two weeks so this week was about settling back into work. Fortunately while I was away I had access to email so didn’t have the usual half day spent catching up on email (that was spent in the hotel bar when the midday sun was just that little bit too hot).
My main focus (again, see the previous week notes) was to get the admin interfaces for the revision app finished. I didn’t quite get them done before I went away but did manage to get them finished off by Tuesday. I also had to port the existing web site from PHP to Ruby. Not a particularly big job as the existing web site only consisted of two pages but I still wanted to make sure I got it right, part of the existing site was the redirects to iTunes which supposedly earn an extra few percent of any sales so they needed to work. Once I’d got these bits done and properly tested I had the big “go live” on Wednesday. As seems to be fairly usual with a rails project I found that when I went to put it live on my server, the server’s version of rails didn’t match my laptop’s. After plenty of faffing though I managed to get the new www.reviseapps.com live and make sure the existing two rails sites (OpenStreetView and my app store positions app) continued to work.
Thursday and Friday were spent designing the new iPhone app. I managed to get a good way through this and have documented what is going into this Milestone 2. I’ve even got the iPhone app project created and added to git so hopefully I’ll be able to hit the ground running with some coding next week. I’ve actually given myself a deadline for Milestone 2 (which is iPhone app v2) of next Friday. I did this with the previous milestone which ended up taking 3 weeks instead of 3 days too so we’ll see how well that works but I’m hoping things will go a bit faster this time.
Next week will therefore be mainly spent trying to get this iPhone app built and hopefully sourcing some new equipment for the new office!
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OAuth Nightmares, Week 109
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.
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Busy again? Week 107 & 108
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!
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A more relaxed week - Week 106
Not quite so stressful a week this week though it did have its moments. I spent Monday morning catching up on some much delayed tasks. Nothing particularly interesting just bits and pieces like polishing off the print styles for case studies on the Marketing PRojects website and adding a blog feed to the homepage.
A new bug was reported on the music iPhone app though which caused some consternation. The app allows you to log into a site and download the information about music that you’ve previously bought. It seemed though that for some users it would display nothing even though the information was being downloaded. It didn’t take me too long to track it down to something relating to an SQLite database I was using. I would parse the reponse from the server and then add all the information to the database. I would then close the database in one function and then reopen it in another function and read it back in. For some reason though when I tried to read the information back in it was finding no rows in the database. The bug seemed only to occur on iPhone OS 3 and only for certain users. In the end I couldn’t track down the actual cause and had to just save the information to the database but then ignore the database and just use the information from memory. It’s obviously a more efficient way of doing things, there’s not really much point reading the information back from the database when you already have it in memory. I guess I was doing it that way to make sure that I always read the current data from the database to make sure it was always in the same format. Now the database is only used when you first load the app and everything works nicely. Annoyingly though I wasted a day trying to sort that out.
I also worked on adding some features to a property management database that I wrote last year for The Restaurant Group. This is a site built using the Zend Framework to give a fairly lightweight API onto a database and then a rich JavaScript interface built with JQuery and the Multimap API. Most of the features were fairly simple and were sorted within a day. The most troublesome one though was to add the ability to log into the system by entering a username and password from a Microsoft Active Directory system. I managed to get the authentication step working without too much difficulty using the Zend LDAP Authentication class but I also needed to check the groups that the user was in to determine whether they were allowed to make changes to the system or were only allowed to view the information. After a few hours of getting nowhere we eventually decided to try using an alternative library. adLDAP is an LDAP wrapping library specifically tailored to accessing Active Directory systems. I used this and again managed to get the authentication working easily but the groups still caused some issues. In the end we found that the AD system I was testing against was set up in a non-standard way. After a few tests against the real live system we found that the library was working fine and I eventually managed to get it all working.
I also managed to spend a little time on the chess app, didn’t make too much progress but I’ve managed to get the full moves view to slide in from the side and slide out again when you’ve selected a new move to go to (or clicked the “X” in the corner).
The final thing that caused issues this week was the mapme.at server. On Thursday morning I decided to upgrade the kernel as ubuntu was telling me there was a new one available with some security fixes. The upgrade went fine and I carefully made sure that all the services were running and that nothing had been broken by the upgrade. A few hours later I just happened to go to the site only to find I was getting errors. I logged in to try to track down what was happening, at first this was difficult because oddly I was getting no errors in the log file. It was only when I realised that the filesystem had mounted itself as read only that I realised something fairly major was wrong. This has happened once before and at the time I just rebooted the system and it came back fine, I rebooted now though and it didn’t come back. I was hoping it was doing a disk check so I left it for a few minutes before eventually requesting console access from my hosting provider hetzner.de. When that came through I found the system was complaining that it couldn’t find the superblock, or the disk or something along those lines which was when I realised something was quite wrong. I put in a support request for them to take a look and waited for them to get back to me. After an hour or so of no response I sent them another email, two and a half hours after the original request I was told it was just a filesystem error and that they had booted into the rescue system to run a disk check. After over 12 hours of waiting for more information I emailed them again to be told that the disk check was waiting for input and that I should just run it myself, so it had essentially been doing nothing for all that time! I logged into the rescue system and ran the check myself. It took nearly two hours but finally after that I got the machine back up and running. I realise now that I should really have been able to handle most of the “repair” myself but I’m still very disappointed with Hetzner’s feedback. Taking hours to give any response and then failing to anticipate that the disk check would need user input (“fsck -y” would have fixed this) are pretty crap. At least now I’m more prepared if anything similar happens in the future. Not only am I more confident about how to fix the problem (though I’m still not 100% sure how to get into the “rescue system”) but I’ve now also invested in the services of Pingdom. When mapme.at went down it actually took me a few hours to notice but now that I have Pingdom set up it should alert me ASAP if there’s any further problems.
To end on a positive note, I went to the third Ignite Liverpool on Thursday night. We had another really fun night with talk subjects ranging from cows to cannibilism, and had Batman talking about using the “Systems Failures Approach” to analyse why his arch enemies were so unsuccessful (see photo above). Social events in Liverpool are just getting better and better these days. At the end of this month we’ve got the second Social Media Cafe Liverpool and Jelly Liverpool to look forward to (both on the open labs calendar). There’s also How? Why? DIY! which is not, as it may sound, going to consist of a Sunday afternoon putting up shelves but will offer a day of interesting sessions aimed at helping people use the full potential of the technology, community and social media facilities available to them. Take a look at the link for that one as there’s some interesting sessions planned and I’ll be going along to try to get people interested in mapping too!
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Finishing Projects - Week Notes 104 & 105
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 initThen 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 masterI think when I’d tried this previously I was using an old version of Git that didn’t properly support
--bareso 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 namedpost-receiveand put in therepository.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!
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Week Notes Week 103
Just a short week this week so a short blog post too I think. Fixed plenty of bugs in the two client iPhone apps I’m doing at the moment and got new versions over to the clients for testing. One of the apps seems to be running a bit slow but I think this is just an issue with how I’m keeping the UI up to date which should be quite fixable. They seem happy with the UI now which means that they’re happy with the functionality so hopefully it’s just some final bug fixing and polish left to do. I haven’t heard anything back about the other app so I’m hoping they’re happy with that one now too.
I finished off the week by attending the Hacks & Hackers event organised by ScraperWiki and OpenLabs Liverpool. The idea of the event was to bring together Journalists (hacks) and software developers/hardware hackers/general web people (hackers) and see what they could come up with by working together. We began the event by introducing ourselves and those with a specific interest in a topic declared this interest. We then had 10 minutes to meet each other and form groups around the various topics and then had 6-7 hours to get building something.
I ended up in a group who wanted to look at the social legacy left by the World Cup in Africa. Not something that specifically relates to me but I thought it might be interesting to see what we could produce. After an hour or so of looking for data sources we ended up realising that there really wasn’t much out there. We had tried looking for data on the social implications of the World Cup, looking at how previous similar events had affected developing countries and tried comparing aspects of this World Cup to England’s bid for the 2018 tournament. In the end we decided to bring together 11 facts about the South Africa tournament and 11 facts about England’s bid and display them like player lineups.
Trying to find 22 statistics proved fairly difficult, unfortunately we couldn’t find a single source to use for all of them so there was no opportunity for me to automate the process, which also meant I didn’t get to try out ScraperWiki. It did have one benefit though as the journalists could all spend the afternoon researching while I and the other developer, Francis Fish, could be working on the presentation mechanism.
We decided the best way to get the player lineups to display would be to use a HTML page styled up to look correct and then use CSS & JavaScript to present the statistics when the shirts were clicked on. Some of the CSS got quite tricky, and is still not perfect, but the JS wasn’t too bad just using jQuery to animate between properties. I thought having the numbers appear on their own on the shirts and then having any extra descriptive prefix and postfix fade in would look pretty good. A small description of each stat also appears below. I also tried out a jQuery plugin that allows fading between colours including alpha channels. This gives some nice effects allowing you to fade a colour background in by increasing its opacity without having to change the opacity of elements within the element. In the end though I found I didn’t need this but I may use it in the future.
If you’re interested in seeing what we created here’s a link to it, The other World Cup. (Now updated with the correct link)
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Week Notes Week 102
So a very busy week as I had various projects to try to finish off and plenty to do to prepare for my State of the Map talk. Also kittens!
It might seem a bit odd to mention kittens on a blog post about my work week. It’s actually quite sensible though, these fluffy critters took up a sizable amount of time in my week!
But apart from that. Most of my time last week was spent trying to tie up loose ends and get the iPhone apps I’ve been doing ready for testing. I discussed the changes in functionality needed for one of the apps and the client has agreed to pay for some more of my time to get those bits added, so that’s great. I spent some time getting the most important changes done but will do most of that extra work this week and will hopefully get that app finished soon.
The smaller app that I was waiting for sign-off on I finished on Monday and sent that off to Testing first thing Tuesday. I was quite happy with it and felt it was working well. I heard from the client on Friday but haven’t yet had time to look at how many bugs they’ve found, hopefully not too many!
I began some work on new functionality for mapme.at to allow users to consolidate their favourites. Part of this work is to allow user’s to take their old favourites and merge them with places that mapme.at has found in the OSM database. The other part is to allow users to manually match OSM places on to Foursquare venues that perhaps have slightly different names or for other reasons the automated matching hasn’t been able to manage. I was hoping to have this ready by the time of State of the Map so I could announce this great effort to come up with a repository of ID mappings but unfortunately with kittens and finishing client work I didn’t manage it. In fact I didn’t even manage to finish my presentation until I was on the train to Girona and finally had an hour to sit in front of my laptop with no distractions and no interruptions. My talk on Friday seemed to be well received. People were interested in some of the applications and uses of the site and there was definite interest in the ID mapping data that I explained would be available in the future.
I described the site as a “Social Location Experimentation Platform”. I had come up with this term a few days previous, I think trying to channel some of the excitement that BERG find with their name (based on British Experimental Rocketry Group). Though I came up with it after the description I think my explanation was valid. I pointed out that the mapme.at platform allows experimentation not just by developers who can come up with some interesting and fun apps (like Adrian McEwen’s ferry trackers or my “Weasley” clock) but also by users who are able to experiment with mapme.at and with other location tracking applications like Foursquare and Google Latitude and can do it knowing that even if they only play with a service for a week and then stop using it, they won’t have wasted that week of data collection because mapme.at will do the job of storing up all their history in one place that they can access at any time and from any other compatible service.
If you’re interested in reading through my talk you can find the slides here.
As I spent most of yesterday travelling I now have a very short week this week (and hence this blog post being very late). I’m probably also going to the Hacks and Hackers event on Friday which will also restrict the time I have to spend on client work. Hopefully there’ll be less interruptions from kittens too (though this blog post has already been interrupted by them once!) On that note I better get started, see you next week!
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Week Notes Week 101
Monday last week was spent making some final changes to the app I’ve been working on for the last few weeks. I’d originally quoted 10 days on that app so Monday was the last of the days I’d allocated on it. I wanted to make sure I got all the functionality in place so that in theory the only thing left was to add some polish to better meet the client’s branding and just make sure the app was easier to use. I delivered that last thing on Monday and arranged a call to discuss it with the client on Thursday. The call was preceded by an email with a mock-up of the app showing some slight new functionality. In the call they then went on to describe more of this and how they would send through some more mock-ups. These came through on Friday and showed various other new functionality. I had already mentioned that I’d finished the allotted time for the project and the client did seem amenable to the idea of paying for some more so I now need to go over the new documents, work out exactly what is new and how much time it’s going to take. Hopefully we’ll get that sorted and they’ll agree to pay for what should only be a few more days.
The rest of the week I spent finishing off the other iPhone app I started a few weeks ago but had to pause while we waited for sign-off. This has been coming along quite nicely, I got much of the functionality done by Wednesday and went in to visit the client and talk through the look and feel. They showed me some changes I’d need to do and also got the rest of the graphics to me by Friday so this app is nearly complete, just some visual changes that I’ll need to finish off today.
I was trying to keep this coming week free because Friday is the first day of the OpenStreetMap “State of the Map” conference. I’m really looking forward to this as it’s always so interesting and it’s great to catch up with some friends I see all too infrequently. I have a speaking slot which was actually recently moved so that I’m second up! I’ll be talking about how I’ve used OpenStreetMap to develop a “location-based social network” - i.e. mapme.at. I’m hoping it will go well and shouldn’t be too hard to prepare or give the talk as it’s always easier talking about something you’re heavily involved in. I do want to get time this week to work on some new functionality for the site though so that I’ve got something to announce! All that needs to be done by the end of Wednesday as Thursday will be spent getting to Girona via Barcelona.
So a fun and, as ever, busy week ahead. Better get started!
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