Tom Printy’s Blog

I just got back from the ignite talks. I enjoyed most of the talks, some weren’t too interesting to me. Here are my raw notes reactions from the talks.

The first talk was about Geocommons. This is a way for users to find and upload data and create heatmaps from said data. I really liked the way that you click to import the data. This is brain dead simple.

Next was metalens from National Geographic. The coolest part was the uploading of geotagged photos into a map viewer. They have built a map to data to map meta data manager and colaboration tool. Kinda cool.

Then was a presentation by Fatdoor. They want to build a social network around your neighborhood. They are still in beta and had a lot of slides but ran out of time. I already know my neighbors enough. I guess this depends on the community in which you live in. This will not fly in my neighborhood. If I were to do this I would be the only one one. Some social network. Is it in Spanish yet?100mil profiles? The CEO used to work for virtual earth. You can tag your interest and your neighborhood gets a tag cloud. It maps or realtes the nearest 20 neighbors.
You can also link freinds and thier profiles. They want to get people invoved in thier community. The more good social deeds you perform the more social capital. more you do more you get what do you get for the capital, deals will be worked out. They want to be the Wiki of the neighborhood. This will work in high tech neighborhoods but might not work in my NW suburban Chicago one.

Next there was a talk about map design. The person giving the speech runs a consulting company that helps people design better maps, so obviously they are broken. He seemed to favor relief maps over current offerings. I am not sure if the average person cares that there is a hill or mountain I think they just want to know when and where to turn. Looking nice takes the back seat to just getting there so I can do what I need to do.

hipoqih.com Share your location. From mobile to web. They have a website and a client for you phone (gps enabled mobile) . They want to THE provider for location
Follow me service their killer app. You can enbed the app in your own site.
They are using google maps. How is different that mologogo or dodgeball? How many apps are you going to make my poor little phone run.
Then there was something about mapping trees. I tuned out and tried to get the Wifi on my laptop to connect to the conference network. Unbuntu Fiesty Fawn was being a real bitch and I couldn’t get it to connect. I can connect to the hotel network but not the Where2o network. I wonder if Sean Reifshnieder was contacted since he did such a great job with Pycon’s wifi. Anyone else having network problems or can offer me some pointers?

The we had 30proof who is updating KML to support sounds on a map. Seems like and interesting fun project. Not sure what to do with it.

Next up was SAIC they are using LIDAR (think the things cops use) to generate images of building. Very neat. They drive around and map the buildings. Seems very expensive. Currently working with the government.

Then was twittervision. Twits on a map if you use the L: tag in the twit. I don’t have time to watch twitter. But it is neat to watch for a little bit.

Next up swivel. They can now do a clustr map like think based upon data that you provide.

dopplr. World travelers can share their iterariness with each other. I have a former boss who may like this a lot. He travels all kind of wierd places.

Next was UpNext. Wow!!! The 3d maps these guys had was really cool. This is a very cool app. It is javascript that you load in a browser and you can get info on buildings in Manhattan. They are using MSN Local and Upcomming to pull in data. Buildings can also be tagged and have their own wiki like page about the building where tenants can enter information about themselves. I really want to know how they did these maps very very cool.

Then there was tagzania, Mapicurious, and Where Camp. Tried to get my wireless working again. Getting frustrated……

Next up GEOJason geojason.org better way to represent Geo data. Alternative to XML. Are they part of openlayers? There is a Openlayers demo.

Lastly Lecturetools.com and climate.engin.umich.edu/toranopaths. the speaker was a prefessor at The University of Michigan. He is using some very cool tools in the classroom. The tornado paths application that he has built is really nice.

So that was a full two hours. I caught a glimpse of some interesting things and will have to watch some of these guys

I also caught up with the Urban mapping and Poly9 guys. It is going to be a action packed two days for sure……

Tommorrow I am off to Where2.0 in San Jose, Ca. This will be my first ever visit to the sate of Cali. Should be an interesting confrence, and I hope to meet some interesting people.
See you there!!!!

Melissadata is a data service provider that provides zip code data among other things. I recently had the opportunity to work with their ZIPdata. They provide thier data in downloadable .zip file. These files consist of (I assume) MSSQL dumps of thier database. Since work id not a Microsoft shop but rather and open source shop I had the pleasure of creating a Perl script that would take this data and make it appropriate to be loaded into a postres database. Now Melissadata was nice enough to separate the table creation from the data but in at least one instance the table create did not match the data. So I have some suggestions for the Melissadata team so they can offer everyone a better product

1. The *.sql files (the files with the create tables in them) should have at the minimum a standard SQL version that is appropriate for creating basic tables in MySQL PostgresSQL and Oracle.

2. The *.dat files should be exported in tab delimited format. This makes importation of this data into the chosen database really simple. This way I don’t have to parse each line based upon some string length to parse out the fields.

3. Double check that the fields that you are providing in the data files match the number of fields that are being created in the .sql file. (Hint the census.sql is missing the 62-64 age column). This broke my script because trusted that your .sql files were accurate and inline with your published users guide.

4. Your file names should match the names of the tables that the data or table create is associated with. Any standard dump (mysql_dump pg_dump) will do this for you.

Now that I have written this script I would be happy to write another one for Melissadata or anyone else who would like to import this data into their database. If you would like me to write you one let me know.