Unterbahn

Halcyon Actionscript 3 renderer/editor for OpenStreetMap, by Richard Fairhurst et al. Part of Potlatch.

Playing with Map Warper (see recent post) and trying to rectify drawn maps for inclusion in Cartagen. Doesn’t work that well… the warper assumes smooth distortions, not ones based on people’s semantic and decidedly qualitative understanding of space. An alternative stretching algorithm might be interesting… regardless Map Warper should work well with balloon photography. More soon.
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Papercraft Self Portrait (2009) (thanks Andy!)

Also:

Life-sized Link

RAGI, a Ruby interface for Asterisk, allows you to handle phone calls with a Ruby on Rails application. The config/environment.rb entry has to be modified a bit for a modern Rails, since many online tutorials/resources were written in the Rails ~1.2 era, and assume WEBrick as the server.

The offending line is this:

class SimpleThreadServer < WEBrick::SimpleServer

Which can be modified to:

class SimpleThreadServer < Mongrel::HttpHandler

The complete configuration you'll need to add inside your Rails::Initializer.run do |config| block is:

  # The following code tells Rails to start a Ragi server
  # as a separate thread.
  ActiveSupport::Dependencies.mechanism = :require
  # Include your application configuration below
  # Simple server that spawns a new thread for the server
  class SimpleThreadServer < Mongrel::HttpHandler
    def SimpleThreadServer.start(&block)
      Thread.new do block.call
      end
    end
  end
  require 'ragi/call_server'
  RAGI::CallServer.new( :ServerType => SimpleThreadServer )

There was a Boston OSGeo meetup last night at the Media Lab, and Shekhar Krishnan, Tim “Chippy” Waters, and Schuyler Erle showed some of their fantastic work on the New York Public Library Map Rectifier, which should be public sometime soon. Until then, you can use Map Warper, which Chippy is running as a separate site for anyone to upload and rectify maps on. We’re going to try it soon with some weather balloon photography; I ordered balloons yesterday.

http://warper.geothings.net

This is not simply a map of the colors on the ground, which you can get from an aerial photo or systematic documentation like Google Street View, but rather a map of the colors that people on the ground are looking at.
. . . .
Quite simply, I’ve grabbed about 2,000 photos in each location from Flickr, determined the dominant color in each, mapped those colors, and interpolated liberally.

Cartogrammar.com

fresnobirds.org – Density

via usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz, thanks JB!

Note the advisory to connect only under 35km – the limit of Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA).

OneSwarm’s wiki (link) covers some easy steps for installing Java 1.4 on Snow Leopard. I needed it to get the MPowerPlayer SDK running so I could compile some code for Java-enabled mobile phones. Thanks to wheremydogs.at for pointing out that MPowerPlayer relies on some Java 1.4 classes.

cd /tmp/
wget http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/isdal/snow_leopard_workaround/java.1.4.2-leopard.tar.gz
tar -xvzf java.1.4.2-leopard.tar.gz
sudo mv 1.4.2 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.4.2-leopard
cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/
sudo ln -s 1.4.2-leopard 1.4
open "/Applications/Utilities/Java Preferences.app"

For those of you also working with MPowerPlayer, the error I was getting is:

  $ ant
  Buildfile: build.xml

  compile:

  preverify:
       [exec] Error preverifying class java.lang.Class
       [exec]     VERIFIER ERROR java/lang/Class.newInstance0()Ljava/lang/Object;:
       [exec] Illegal type in constant pool
       [exec] Result: 1

  package:

  BUILD SUCCESSFUL
  Total time: 1 second

But now that I have Java 1.4, it’s compiling fine.