Next up is the ever-popular ESRI Deprecation Plan (PDF). Every time ESRI does a major platform releases, it reassesses its software stack and targets the losers for termination. There were no big surprises here, but you can go ahead and give a parting smooch to the following: VBA, Arcinfo Workstation, ArcIMS, the Web ADFs, MXD’s in AGS, ArcGIS Image Server, AGS on 32bit platforms, and just about everything that was running on Solaris.

Canvasdemos, a site dedicated to showing demos of the HTML5 canvas element in action, has a World Map Quiz that’s pretty cool. The author has offered it to the Khan Academy. Also in the HTML5 demo camp is this site created by Google.

While I’m on the subject, as much as saying this makes my head hurt, Internet Explorer 9 is looking pretty good. The latest preview sports an Acid3 score of 95/100, which will go a long ways toward patching up Microsoft’s relationship with web developers. They’re slightly ahead of schedule, with the beta due out in a month or so. The big selling point of IE 9 is hardware (GPU) acceleration, and on that front things aren’t looking so good for Microsoft. Firefox 4 will have hardware acceleration, and the latest Chromium build also has hardware acceleration baked in (need to set –enable-accelerated-compositing flag). By the time IE 9 rolls out, hardware acceleration in browsers may be commonplace.

Via Slashdot:

A drunken mortgage worker at RANLife Home Loans decided for unknown reasons to take out the company’s $100,000 server with a .45-caliber automatic, blaming the damage on an imagined assailant who: mugged him, assaulted him with his own weapon, drugged him, and then broke into his office to shoot said server.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, I’m not saying he did the right thing there. But I understand.

And now for some random bits:

• Google Earth Blog has a nice write up on the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Archive, which attempts to capture first-hand stories of the event. It’s a really cool use of Google Earth.
• Via everywhere, Google Wave is dead. Part of the failure was one of implementation – how do you use a social site when the beta is closed and none of your friends is on it? But even with that set aside, I think it was a product without a market. The technology was good though, and parts of Wave will live in a lot of other projects.
• MPEG LA decided rather belatedly that H.264 will be free forever, with WebM being the reason. I think that ship has sailed, and Google is driving the ship – whatever YouTube does will be the standard.
• Via the All Points Blog, Ushahidi now has a hosted service called Crowdmap. Ushahidi is a platform originally developed to collect and map crisis information, but can be used for all kinds of stuff. The software is free and open source.
• And finally, via Slashdot, the Austrian town of Frauenkirchen has received a patent on being at the geographic center of Europe. Yes, a patent. I think I’m going to apply for a patent on stupid patents and retire.

#!/usr/bin/perl -W
use IO::Socket;
srand;
sleep(rand()*600);
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>'api.foursquare.com', PeerPort=>80,
Proto =>'tcp', Type=>SOCK_STREAM) or die;
$ARGV[1] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005;
$ARGV[2] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005;
my $str = "vid=$ARGV[0]&private=0&geolat=$ARGV[1]&geolong=$ARGV[2]";
print $sock "POST /v1/checkin HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: api.foursquare.com\r\nUser-Agent:"
." Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ "
."(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C10 Safari/419.3\r\nContent"
."-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\nAuthorization: Basic "
."XXXXXX\r\nContent-length: ", length($str)+2, "\r\n\r\n$str\r\n";
$_=<$sock>;

With XXXXXX being a Base64 encoding of your foursquare email/phone:password. The author makes a convincing case that it would be extremely hard to protect against checking in spoofed locations, and that similar services could be spoofed in much the same way.

We have been looking at smart phone apps of late, and our conclusion is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to write native apps for these devices in almost all use cases. It isn’t cost effective to write an application  once for Android in Java (or cross compiled to Java), again in Objective C and pray it makes it through the fickle Apple app store review, and again for the web, since as a government entity we shouldn’t make apps that only “rich” smart phone owners can take advantage of. That’s three different code bases and 3x the support costs. 4 if you want to toss in Blackberry (ew), 5 if the Windows phone platform coming out later this year isn’t utter drek. We couldn’t afford that even when we had money.

But what we can do is create web apps with an alternate style sheet for mobile browsers and be able to hit almost everything from one code base. So I’m planning on pouring over this excellent Six Revisions article on Mobile Web Design Best Practices. It goes over different platforms, layout options, design – it’s very, very good. When you’re ready for geolocation and coding for mobile platforms, check out this series of articles by IBM.

Nettuts+ had a very thorough article on mastering the 960 grid system. The 960 grid system is a CSS grid designed to make page layout a lot easier. CSS frameworks aren’t for everybody. I know I’ve tried this and Blueprint.css and neither one has stuck with me. After working through this tutorial I may try 960 with the next project I have needing a complex layout.

If you’re into graphic design, the Libre Graphics Meeting was held in May and videos are now online. The talks are extremely diverse, but if graphic design peaks your interest even slightly you’ll find something here worth watching.

Finally, Lifehacker has a great post on where to get the best free education. It’s a good resource roundup and includes a couple of sites I haven’t checked out yet.

Apparently somebody likes Ayn Rand so much he stuck a GPS unit in his car and drove 12,328 miles to “draw” Read Ayn Rand. You might have to drive 12,328 miles to get through the audiobook version of Atlas Shrugged. You can press on each letter on the web site to get more information about Objectivism and the trip.

Whatever you think of the content (Rand has always been controversial), you have to admire the tenacity and dedication involved. Speaking of the content…

I didn’t read all of Atlas Shrugged – I think I stopped around page 7,351 (Chapter 2) and decided reading the Wikipedia article would be more…ah, efficient.  I would recommend it only to masochists; putting the length and philosophy aside, the writing would make a high school English teacher jump in front of a truck.

Objectivism itself is wrong in the more ordinary sense. At its core is a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates people (in all fairness Rand wrote this before ~40 years of science on the matter and was reacting to fears of communism at the time). It also has no concept of “commons” or “tragedy of” or any combination of those terms. But at least it is wrong briefly.

I have a wiki page where I put a lot of tutorial videos for our division. Some are hosted on YouTube because they are about something general or about something related to one of our open source projects. But some are just for the locals and I don’t want them to live on YouTube for various reasons. I’ve been wanting to try a little HTML5 video, and this seemed like a good opportunity.

I hunted through the MediaWiki extensions, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I looked through the MediaWiki extension docs and made a quick and dirty HTML5 video extension.

<?php
# Credits
$wgExtensionCredits['parserhook'][] = array(
    'path'        => __FILE__,
    'name'        => 'HTML5 Video',
    'author'      => array('Tobin Bradley'),
    'url'         => 'http://fuzzytolerance.info/',
    'description' => 'Create HTML5 Video Tags',
    'version'     => '1.0'
);

$wgHooks['ParserFirstCallInit'][] = 'html5vidinit';

function html5vidinit( &$parser ) {
	$parser->setHook( 'video', 'html5vidrender' );
	return true;
}

function html5vidrender( $input, $args, $parser, $frame ) {
	$output = '<video width="100%"  autobuffer controls>' .
            '<source src="videos/' . $input . '.MP4" type="video/mp4" />' .
			 '<source src="videos/' . $input . '.ogv" type="video/ogg" />' .
			  '<object width="640" height="384" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="videos/player.SWF">' .
			'<param name="movie" value="videos/player.SWF" />' .
			'<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /> ' .
			'<param name="flashvars" value="autostart=false&file=' . $input . '.mp4" />' .
			'</object>' .
            '</video>' .
            '<p><a href="videos/' . $input . '.MP4" >Download Video</a></p>' ;

	return  $output ;
?>

Nothing magical here:

• I put a videos folder in my mediawiki directory and put videos in ogv and mp4 formats there (same video name for both, different extensions). There’s lots of stuff you can use to convert video files. I used Transmageddon on linux, but you can always just use ffmpeg.
• Toss a flash video player in that folder as well for IE users. I used JW Player.
• Make a folder called html5vid in your MediaWiki extensions folder. Save the above code in that folder as html5vid.php.
• Add the line require_once(‘extensions/html5vid/html5vid.php’); to your LocalSettings.php file to enable the extension.
• In a wiki entry, drop in <video>YourVideoName</video>. Just the video file name without extensions.

Note the code is very primitive – the path to the videos, the video types, the video size, the path to the flash engine, etc. – all hard coded. It outputs the video tag, tries the MP4 file, if that’s no good it tries the OGV file, and if that doesn’t work it loads the Flash player. At the end it puts a link to download the MP4.

Writing extensions for MediaWiki is really easy. Especially if they’re fairly lousy and bereft of features like this one . One thing to note – Firefox will not stream video if the MIME type from the server is incorrect. For Apache, drop this in your config file:

AddType video/ogg .ogv
AddType video/mp4 .mp4
AddType video/webm .webm

Thanks to this site for saving me a few hours of skull-to-desk.

NASA Earth Observatory

The Google Earth blog posted a link to Network for Good if you want to donate to the relief effort.

Basically we’re talking a key value store, ala localStorage.setItem(“myvar”, “myvalue”), stored by the browser. Browser support for web storage is solid: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and IE (v8) support web storage. You wouldn’t want make-or-break stuff on your app using HTML5 storage for those folks still puttering along with old IE releases, but for extra or optional features it works great.

On one of my sites I decided to use HTML5 storage to store the most recently selected address, so when a user comes back to the site it’ll start right back where they left off. What could have been an exercise in cookie setting and maintenance took about 5 minutes.

First, I went to the function that’s setting the selected address (item.row.objectid is the unique address key) and dropped this in:

// Set local storage
if (window.localStorage) {
     localStorage.setItem('gp_lastSelected', item.row.objectid);
}

The first line confirms the browser supports HTML5 storage. If it’s supported, I set a local storage item called gp_lastSelected with my key value. Now whenever an address is selected, that key value is set.

To finish, I went to my onLoad event and tossed this in:

// Process local storage
if (window.localStorage) {
	if (localStorage.getItem('gp_lastSelected')) {
                    locationFinder("Address", 'master_address_table', 'objectid', localStorage.getItem('gp_lastSelected'));
        }
 }

I confirm HTML5 storage support, then I check to see if I have a gp_lastSelected value set, and if I do I process my function to select that address, which zooms to the location and makes it the active record for the data reports. That easy.

You could also use cookies for something like this, but cookies have quite a few disadvantages when compared to HTML5 storage:

• They get sent back and fourth between the browser and server every time a request is make, slowing things down.
• You have to do the cookie expiry date dance.
• They don’t hold a lot (~4k I think).
• Cookies are site specific, while localStorage is domain specific. With localStorage you can access a key-value from any site on the domain, so you can share data across sites.
• Unlike cookies, HTML5 storage can do session storage as well, using sessionStorage in the exact same manner as localStorage.

HTML5 storage is where things are headed, with every major browser supporting the new spec, and its ready to use now. As you can see, using it couldn’t be easier.

First they added OSM as a map layer, which you can see here. They took the OSM data, created tiles to fit their tiling scheme, and dropped in on Azure. It’s fast and it looks great. Unfortunately this seems to be a Silverlight-only feature. I’ve harped enough on the proprietary plugins breaking my Internets bit, so I’ll just summarize: DO NOT WANT.

Microsoft has a King of Bing Maps competition going on, and one of the entrants calculates taxi fare in major metropolitan areas. You can get to it here. The Ars reviewer found it to be spot-on.

The coolest thing they’ve talked about lately, however, isn’t out yet, and that’s Street Slide.

It’s basically a photosynthy-looking, kinda panoramic…well, just watch the video. It’s the most intuitive way to deliver street view type functionality I’ve seen yet (potential for motion sickness aside). Unfortunately this is still in the lab – you can’t try it out yourself yet, and they only did a small area in Seattle. Still, very cool stuff. It’ll probably be another Silverlight thing and hence go to the cool-but-not-very-useful bin I stick things like automatic corkscrews and 24-hour news channels in, but cool nonetheless.

• My personal favorite is the AGS REST interface is being published as an open standard. Pending more details, that is awesome. My only concern is rather than releasing things like an open API for the file geodatabase, they’ll say you can have to buy AGS and use the REST services for that. Still, awesome.
• The Web ADF was slated for execution deprecation. This doesn’t affect me personally, but it does touch people I could hit from my office with a well-aimed brick. This is just one of those things Esri does. With a new server product they throw clients against the wall like spaghetti noodles, and over time noodles hit the floor. I personally like this decision. The Web ADF is awful.
• Esri likes crowd sourced/user generated/volunteered data (now). They released an open source extension for editing OSM maps right in ArcMap. Nice!
• ArcGIS for iOS4 (iPhone/iPad). Since Android recently whizzed past iOS to become the second most popular smart phone OS (behind Blackberry), I imagine somebody at Esri is putting in late nights getting a client for it ready.
• There’s an ArcCatalog pane in ArcMap now. I’ve  tried it, and it’s wonderful. It’s so wonderful I’m not going to waggle my finger and point out it should have always been there.

There were some rollout problems (when I first saw their online distribution/validation plan I thought bittorrent or dead), but everything seems pretty smooth now. After playing around with the desktop clients, it looks like a very good release. With one notable exception.

ArcGIS 9.3 clients can’t talk to SDE 10.

Which means I’m not going to SDE 10 until SDE 11 comes out. I don’t think Esri realizes how much this screws their customers. I’ve got SDE clients I have no control over whatsoever. I’ve got vendor provided clients, clients in other departments, clients in entirely other organizations. If SDE has to cater to the lowest common release number, I’m up the creek. This is a brain dead business practice. If Microsoft released Office 2010 and said no earlier releases of Office will be able to open the new documents, there would be IT execs brandishing flaming pocket protectors in front of Microsoft’s headquarters. I thought Esri figured this out with 9.2 SP5 allowing direct connects to SDE 9.3. That would be a no.

The US Department of Labor has released a Geospatial Technology Competency Model, probably because the Department of Labor Statistics report found geospatial technology the #3 fastest growing technology profession. From the press release:

The model will serve as a resource for career guidance, curriculum development and evaluation, career pathway development, recruitment and hiring, continuing professional development, certification and assessment development, apprenticeship program development and outreach efforts to promote geospatial technology careers.

I’m not sure what this does to GISCI, though I think they’re reevaluating their criteria as a result. I’m not a certification fan for GIS; the field is so broad as to make certification meaningless, and certs like this are often more about protecting markets (i.e. by statute you’ll need a certified surveyor, a certified property mapper, and a certified GISP for that project), which I find irritating on principle. But a model to serve as a general resource doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all, although looking at the 9 stage, 29-part pastel pyramid made me go blind for 30 seconds.

There’s a visual development tool for Android out called App Inventor for Android. It reminds me a bit of Scratch, dragging pieces around and linking them together to form an app, “no programming knowledge” required. App Inventor includes access to the phone’s GPS sensor, so you can build apps with location features, and there are some sample apps to get you started. You can deploy your apps right to your Android phone. It looks awfully cool, and it’s available for Windows, Linux, and OS X.

And now for some quick hitters:

• OpenStreetMap is now being used by MapQuest in the UK at MapQuest Open.
• In what probably only interests me, Brazil has come up with one of the most intelligent copyright reform proposals I’ve seen. The safe harbor laws lets the accused party respond before a takedown, and there are penalties and sanctions for hindering fair use. Your DRM protection scheme has to expire when the copyright does. The US has also gotten good news on this front recently, with the Library of Congress and a federal appeals court ruling you can break DRM if the underlying intent does not break copyright, and that you can root your own phone without breaking the law.
• Between the Poles has a good post out on quantifying the business benefits of open geospatial standards.
• The Data.gov GEO Viewer is out. Meh.