Engineering a New World

I just ran across an awesome article while browsing ScientologyToday, an article in the Maritime Reporter & Engineering News which goes over the complete refit and restoration of the Scientology Motor Vessel Freewinds. 

From their pull quote:

In today’s “I need it yesterday” world, emphasis on quantity often overpowers quality, while the quick fix can supercede the correct one.  Step back, take a deep breath and enjoy the fruits of a tremendous labor, a labor of love that resulted in the top-to-bottom renovation of a storied ship with a unique owner.  — Greg Trauthwein, Editor

The article then goes on at quite some length about the amazing attention to detail that was paid to every last piece of the restoration of the Freewinds, including before-and-after photos of a number of sections of the ship (something I had never even seen before).

In elucidating the incredible attention to detail demanded by the project managers and the Captain of the Freewinds, the editor of this article was also floored with the amount of responsibility the ship’s own crew was taking in the renovations project. 

Making the scope of the renovation all the more amazing: while the organization brought on a bevy of contractors to fulfill much of the heavy-duty fabrication and construction, it was the crew who was responsible for the intricate and laborious renewal and renovation, including a meticulous cleaning and rejuvenation of the engine room, the engine control room and the bridge (including the machining of the new stainless steel parts, overhauling the equipment, painting and polishing), all while the ship stayed in operation.

And I don’t doubt it.  The crew of the Freewinds are some of the most amazing people I have ever met.

This is a shorty for an ill-defined subject that I recently ran into when making a recent Bing Maps KML implementation.

When dealing with KML styles, the KML color space is defined differently than most web developers are used to.  Instead of being defined in normal RGB hex, they are ARGB, or RGB with Alpha Channel. 

In normal HTML color, one is used to hex representations like:

AABBCC

In KML, the first two octets are used to define the transparency or alpha channel, and then the next 6 are RGB in reverse order. 

So, if you’ve got a KML color of

50AABBCC

This would then translate to CCAABB in HTML.

Just a note, in case any one else has been infuriated or confused by such.

I was just doing some reading up & testing on the Google Maps API, and zoomed in to streetview only to find myself in the middle of a lillypad or a dirty fishbowl or something:

Supposedly, this is Missoula, Montana – though I think the locals would disagree with me.

Here’s the embedded version, which right now looks the same:

View Larger Map

Right now, if I use the UI to navigate out of it, I can re-enter the real world, but then I can’t go back to the “green fungus reality” unless I refresh the page.

Any ideas?

Youtube is down for maintenance?  Seems pretty unlikely that the world’s largest video platform, encompassing 20% of the world’s total Internet traffic, would just “go down for maintenance” in the middle of a Saturday. 

Is this the next in Google’s IT uptime issues?

When I was working on my last Bing Maps project for Webworld Technologies, my Microsoft rep told me, “…and as soon as you’re ready, let me know and I’ll give you a hack to disable that f’n birds-eye popup”.   I didn’t know that was the official inside term for it, but like so many internal naming conventions that stick with you, I felt it was appropriately named.  I think the Bing bird’s eye view is a fantastic way to visualize maps too, but the little “VIEW THIS IN THE COOL BIRDS EYE VIEW” popup that comes up every time you refresh the map is a bit far into the “annoying UI element” department.

To disable it, just do the following:  right after invoke your map.LoadMap, hide the popup element as follows:

   map.LoadMap(new VELatLong(38.865326, -77.074930), 12 ,’h’ ,false);
                // Suppress popup saying Bird’s Eye available
   document.getElementById("MSVE_obliqueNotification").style.visibility = "hidden";

That will get rid of that popup any time the map loads.

When watching a recent webcast on social media measurement, I got re-introduced to a nifty tool called Yahoo Pipes.   When the tool first came out, I thought it was semi-interesting, but didn’t know what the real-world use of it was.  Well, now I’m starting to see one.

Pipes is a tool that lets you take any number of different inputs (HTML, XML, RSS, CSV, etc) and then perform a set of dynamic transformations on the data, and then have it spit out whatever data you want in whatever format you want, on the fly.

If you’re trying to perform a task like measure social media response to a campaign you’re doing, you’ll sometimes want to be grabbing hold of a number of RSS feeds, and create a custom RSS feed that you can track on Google Reader or some other RSS reader that just shows you mentions of your recent campaign or keywords.

As an example of how this works, I took an example of something simple that I wanted an RSS feed for:  I’m listening to lectures by L. Ron Hubbard, and wanted to create a little RSS widget to show the most recent tracks on last.fm that I’ve marked as “loved tracks”, so that I can keep track of them.   But I only want the tracks by L. Ron Hubbard to appear in the RSS feed.  There is no such RSS feed on the site, so I used Yahoo Pipes to create one:

The UI to create such a feed really couldn’t be any easier to use.  You just specify an RSS source, then add a filter on the RSS source to filter by one specific RSS element, and create an RSS pipe output that contains that data.

I can then just link to an real-time RSS feed of such, and throw that onto my blog.

It’s a simple, simple example, but if, for example, you were trying to find a way around paying for a big-time social media measurement solution like Radian6 or WebTrends, you can do a little work in Pipes and build yourself a pretty neat dashboard of the data you want.

China is more Gov 2.0 than we are?

Astute readers may notice that the above Google Maps image is not actually Washington, D.C. but instead is Metro Shanghai in China.   To me, it’s an ideal picture of the irony that surrounds the fact that the Chinese government has a reputation for being one of the most data-opaque in history, with mystery shrouding its every move, and the world’s most massive Internet filters placed at its every data egress point.  However, in bizarre form, Shanghai’s new and state-of-the-art metro transit system (including an amazing 270mph mag-lev train to the airport) has been exposed in full to Google Transit, allowing anyone with an iPhone to easily navigate their way around the city. 

In stark contrast, Washington D.C., supposedly the very beacon of data transparency and the source of the Gov 2.0 movement, is really resembling another sort of “movement” altogether with respect to Metro system data transparency.   I first noted this a few months back in another blog post, when I tried to use my iPhone to show me how to get downtown from my new house.   Though I’m right down the street from a DC Metro station, the lack of data exposed to Google Transit made Google Maps send me nearly halfway across the state, so as to use a small commuter transit system that was exposed. 

I originally thought this was Google’s fault, claiming they had Google Transit in DC when in fact they didn’t.  However, this turned out to be the result of a disagreement WMATA had with releasing their transit information to Google.  Did they fear some sort of security concern?  Actually, no.  The problem was that they had just invested a bunch of money in their own wmata.com website, and didn’t want Google transit to draw attention away from their big investment.   The alleged quote is,

“…forming a partnership with Google was not in our best interest from a business perspective.” (ref)

Apparently DC isn’t alone in this bizarre blindness to Gov 2.0 principles, as Los Angeles’ Metro system is likewise not on Google Transit for the same reason.  And unfortunately, L.A. is a much more difficult city to get around than DC, if you don’t have a car – a place where an iPhone-friendly platform for public transit system navigation would be even more useful.

[also note that DC and LA are the two cities that constantly vie for the worst automobile traffic in North America.]

Gov 2.0 – How to Do it Right

Now, I recently had the privilege of attending the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C. as a representative of Webworld Technologies.  This Expo was a fascinating showcase of applications from all different angles of Government/Citizen participation – from Open311 services that basically act as a “BugZilla” for potholes, to services that allow you to use your iPhone as a crime-reporting device, or the promise of augmented reality (AR) for tourism. 

But pertinent to this discussion was the “Government as a Partner” section of the conference, where the architect of the bart.gov site in San Francisco showed how true data transparency and Gov 2.0 principles can be used to foster an immense amount of creativity and problem-solving that benefits both the people and the organization at large.

See, instead of pursuing a strategy like DC or LA, where you close up the data and keep it for yourself, and hope that everyone will love your website, they instead focused on making their data broadly available, and fostered a community where people could make their own applications that then use this data.

Coming out from this was a community-created BART iPhone app, which took no internal development time or public moneys, and which BART then promoted for others to use.  Just look at the heading of that bart.gov page:  “See what others are creating with BART’s public data”.  That says it all, really.

One could argue that SF is the home of Silicon Valley, and that they are uniquely poised to take advantage of such transparent data.  However, that gets shot down pretty fast when you look at the fact that DC Metro is the biggest center for IT employment in the world, and is second only to silicon valley in terms of concentration of programmers. 

So, there’s no excuse!  

Whoa!  4:30pm EST on 1 Sept.  Are aliens landing?  If they were, I wouldn’t know – because both Twitter and Gmail are down at the same time!

Gmail gives me a 502 server error, then offers this as to the status:

Tried to then tweet about it, but then saw that tweets on the subject of “gmail” were coming in at a rate of approximately 4500 every 30 seconds.  Then, when I tried to tweet on it, Twitter keeled on me too:

Thank goodness Facebook was still working….or are they next?

I wasn’t about to write a blog post tonight, so I’m going to keep this short.  But in my little Flock homepage, I saw this little headline story about the Pirate Party getting a seat in European parliament. 

I really, honestly, am pretty disgusted by this.

First off, while I usually have some sympathy for embattled little technology people who get embroiled in legal battles, as they’re generally good people.  However, after reading this page on their site, I lost any sympathy I ever had for them.  My opinion is these Pirate Bay principals have zero cognitive idea of the concept of exchange — meaning someone skilled creates something, and provides it in exchange for something valuable back.  For example, if many, many talented programmers work for a long time on a video game, and they finally finish it, and it’s great, then they then sell it and if you like it you buy it from them.  That way they get money, and can afford to keep making neat video games. 

They just seem to be interested in being “pirates” in the truest sense of the word — where you take things that rightfully belong to others, with no exchange, and without their permission.

Now, we have a political party that has, as it’s goal, abolishing the copyright system, abolishing the trademark system, and convincing people that, and I quote from Rick Falkvinge, the leader and founder of the party, “…that the government is not always good.”

OK, I’m not a politician or a copyright lawyer, but I am someone who has benefitted from the inventions and industriousness of others who invent and thereby commercialize things they have created, based on their own ingenuity and resourcefullness.

Would someone please enlighten me as to what possible good would come about through abolishing copyrights and patents?  The only thing I can see is negative effects, quashing people who normally would try to come up with great stuff and sell it — driving them into apathy. 

As a Scientologist, I definitely understand the role of trademarks and copyright law, as without such someone could publish books on my religion where people did voodoo dances, and then say it’s “Scientology”.    So, the continued existance of my religion depends on such laws being in place.  All other religions and organizations also depend on the same — it’s a basic agreement that helps hold the world together. 

So, I reiterate:  what possible good could a political party aiming to obliterate copyright law ever come to?

Don't try to use big photos as your contact pictures

Well, I’ve just found a sure-fire, always-works way to crash an iPhone 3G:  use a picture for a contact that’s taken at a higher resolution than the iPhone 3G’s internal 2-megapixel camera.

Seemed like innocent entertainment for me when I used a picture of my 7-month-pregnant wife which I had taken on a recent cross-country trip as the contact image for her in my iPhone 3G.   The image was a 4-megapixel image taken with my Minolta DiMage Z2, and I selected it as her contact photo in Windows Contacts, which are synchronized to my iPhone.

Then, the next time my wife called me, my phone refused to pick up, and locked up when trying to answer.  I rebooted it.

Then, she called again, and my phone immediately locked up.  I rebooted it.

Then, after leaving me voicemail, she called again, and the phone sloowwwwwly allowed me to slide and unlock it, but wouldn’t answer.  I had to reboot it again.

I finally realized it was the fact that it was trying to pull up a 4-megapixel image as the contact photo when answering it, and that was what was crashing the phone.  Switching to a small image handled the problem.

So, if any of you run into the same thing, there’s your lame answer.  :)  Sounds like my little iPhone needs some more RAM!