eBay Developers Conference 2008
June 20th, 2008
Last week I was off in Chicago to take in the eBay Developers Conference and a few hours of eBay Live! (and a wee bit of YAPC too).
The conference was a bit less technical than I had hoped, but the venue was excellent (brand new LEED-certified building), the food was fantastic, and I made a lot of great contacts within eBay to help keep our integration on track. I was very pleased to see that nearly all the conference slides were made available under a creative commons license (although strangely some eBay Live! sessions were completely locked down and no cameras were allowed).
We ended up staying in the Seneca Hotel, which is right next door to the John Hancock Centre. I had a pretty nice 15-minute walk down the magnificent mile each morning to catch the shuttle to the conference centre.
The amount of swag taken home from this conference was surprising; fortunately, the stylish conference bag was put to good use toting all that stuff home. The highlights were definitely the PayPal Slinkee and eBay universal power adapter. Worse swag ever goes to the Amazing Race DVD Board Game
I was a little put off by the flagrant self-promotion of salesforce.com, and the general irrelevance of some of the keynote speeches. Mind you, I ended up taking the 266-page salesforce platform guide home with me (which i'll likely read in a few months when i've forgotten about a certain keynote) -- so in the end, having 300 developers as a captive audience was a good investment. However, i'd still expect any speaker to be able to answer, without hesitation, "what the hell does this have to do with eBay?". There is of course, a bit of this at every conference one goes to, but most speakers are slightly more subtle.
Since a co-worker was a few blocks away at YAPC::NA 2008, I took in a little bit of that conference too. On Tuesday night I joined the "Conference Dinner and Auction", which was rather entertaining with Uri (the fat guy in a tye-dye t-shirt) making random, periodic, profane announcements into the bowling alley/pool hall/bar microphone; not for a second, was there any possibility of mixing up the perl and eBay conferences. On Wednesday afternoon, I snuck in (with permission) to the YAPC lightning talks and closing keynotes; a couple guys from Google (who i'd seen speak before) gave their canned "users" talk. The lightning talks were great as lightning talks usually are -- happy little brain dumps on things you may or may not care about -- and always entertaining.
It was an eventful week, and I picked up lots of random nuggets of information -- now I just need to be locked in a room for 3 weeks to work through the TODO list this week has created. For a random smattering of photos, see ebaydevcon08 and yapcna2008 on flickr.
2007 FOSS4G Conference
September 29th, 2007
This week I took a few days off to partake in the 2007 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference (FOSS4G2007) conference. Being a very mobile conference, I was quite fortunate to have it here in Victoria -- I simply couldn't pass it up (last year in Switzerland, next year in South Africa). Given that this is a hobby at the moment, I chose to volunteer; in retrospect, I regret this decision as I missed a number of presentations -- on the bright side, I did sit through some presentations which I would not have otherwise attended.
Rather than hypnotizing you with a well-crafted thesis, i'll leave you with various thoughts which were more representative of my experience -- inspired but convoluted.
Proj4js really caught me by surprise -- holy crap this is *fast*, but it should be given that it only has a few EPSG codes supported. In the web mapping sphere, there is some healthy competition; OpenLayers and MapGuide both have respective wrappers for ease of use: CartoWeb4 and Fusion. Both are projects I haven't had a chance to check out, but will. Fun public projects: SF Urban Forest, Victoria Green Map, Digitized Historical Maps.
Quotables:
Jo Walsh - "Once you realize you need an SDI, you don't need one any more".
Tim Bowden - "GIS is dead".
Mark Sondheim - "The OGC still has a little life left in it".
Random thought: Where the hell is Dave Blasby?
Thursday afternoon I sat down with a couple of Open Street Map proponents; my curiosities here were to figure out if this wealth of free data was useful and how I might become involved (or at the very least, to see if I could learn anything to pass on to the CivicAccess folks). I was startled to learn that these guys don't believe in spatial databases -- we'll see how things go as feature density increases. I'll also have to see how well one can extract OSM data into a local cache for manipulation.
Things to revisit: Geobase
Things to check out/play with: GeoKettle, OpenAerialMap, OSM, pgRouting, R (stats are fun)
Ideas:
- use pgRouting to perform routing for pedestrians and cyclists
- a geocoder in Canada one can actually *use*?
To-do list
- Hook-up ISF hotspots to HTV
- Research public geodata
- uDig as an Open Street Map editor
- SLD 1.1
[Pictures]
Victoria Rodent Data
July 29th, 2007
As a fun side project, i've been tinkering with the VIHA health inspections data for Victoria.
Essentially it's just roughly geocoded points based on an aggregated screen-scraping -- but it is fun to see which restaurants you've been to in the last while have had a rodent-related infraction.
Data is available here, in shapefile format. Above is a quick picture of all the places which deal with food in Victoria in green, and offenders in orange.
New Job!
July 18th, 2007
Yesterday was my last day at Refractions. I had some enjoyable projects and some not-so-enjoyable projects there, but it was a valuable use of the last two years.
Next week I start working at Abe Books, in the FillZ division. I've heard only good things about the company, and i'm looking forward to broadening my horizons. Sadly, I won't be part of Refractions when the FOSS 4G conference comes to town in September, but I do still plan to attend.
Kusam Klimb 2007
June 24th, 2007
Another magnificent race in Sayward: mountains, gatorade, and snowflakes.
Learning from the mistakes of last year, we left Victoria around 3:30 on Friday; Mark came with, despite his declaration that he would "never do that again". A respectable contingent attended from Victoria, the majority being Harriers.
Morning rolled around and we loitered at the start line, chatting with Sandy, Lara, and Randy. The race started out a few minutes late (7:04?), with the air seeming a bit chilly. The fastees darted out and were quickly out of sight -- I opted for a slow warm-up. A very large field this year -- close to 290 registered and the participant count was in the 260's!
This year I was better settled in with people of my own pace. During the unrelenting climb, only Jo, Lara, and a few others passed me on the way up; I felt a bit winded, but strong nonetheless. Just over Keta view rock it was snowing; there really isn't any worry about poor weather in this race -- at worst a shower becomes a light snow... A few minutes later patches of snow appeared, much like last year but in less quantity. The first ropes and slippery drops caught me off guard and slowed my descent. This wasn't bad, considering it was only a few minutes down to the frozen lake before we all climbed up the snowy slope to the saddle (aka Checkpoint 2).
At the lake some stood at the edge thinking "do we have to cross this?", while others spotted the left hook in the trail and snook past. The sparse flagging around the lake confused many, but there was a selection of footprints to choose from, all of which leading up. Soon I found myself at the saddle (nearly a 1500 meter climb) a full ten minutes earlier than last year (1:50 versus 2:00).
Things quickly became very interesting. The backside offered ropes weaving between the old growth and tree wells, when necessary. I got stuck behind a gentleman for a minute near the top, but hopped off the rope at the first opportunity and scrambled past. For whatever reason, I was feeling both confident and reckless and continued down without the rope for the bottom half. Soon I found myself weaving through the trees at top speed taking full strides -- barely under control. I saw Lara and a couple of others cautiously trotting down the snowbank; I let out a whoop and cruised past. The downhill was ABSOLUTELY AWESOME and definitely the highlight of the race. I had descended more than 700 meters in just 11 minutes!
Now my heels were chilled and legs muddy, but I was feeling quite exhilarated. My only complaint was that my wet shoes felt a little loose. This part of the race felt a lot quicker than last year, with more water in the creeks. I only saw Jo off in the distance and caught up 10 minutes later. Lots of up and down through ditches in the deactivated roads. The checkpoints looked attractive as usual, but I opted not to let these sirens lure me. I got ahead of Jo and Craig, but stopped to tie my shoe and never caught Craig again. After stopping again a few minutes later to tie the other shoe, they were out of sight. I did eventually get just ahead of Jo, but only because of a temporary cramp -- next time I won't be so lucky.
Soon the roads started getting "better" (depending on your perspective). With 2.5 km to go, we go from gravel to well-groomed gravel to pavement. I spot half-naked guy again (from last year), and realize he's probably the only guy in my age class in front of me. I pushed hard and passed him about 4 minutes from the finish line. It paid off, as I came 17th overall in 3:01:10 (versus 3:14:14 last year), and again came first in the 20-29 category.
Other results: Jo was only a minute or so behind (3:02?), Lara just after (3:11?). Most surprising was Mark, who trained hard and shaved off over 2:30 by switching from walking to running -- he was somewhere around 3:40. Shane did extremely well finishing in just 2:38 -- which is incredible, but actually within my reach. Next year I may have a train very seriously... the outcome could be a lot of fun. Exact results are still pending.
This year there was no banquet, but lots of nalgene prizes again. My loot was a pair of tech shirts. A get together was arranged at the Cypress Tree Inn, but the restaurants were ill-equipped for the influx of people. Waits of over an hour were commonplace, and orders often altered or completely wrong -- we were in no position to complain though, being so voraciously hungry. The only heartbreaking thing was the closing of the local rec centre -- we all _really_ wanted a soak in the hot tub!
Most headed to the Salmon River Inn for the dance/live music, and "free" drink. We stopped by, had our drink, a game of pool, and realized we were exhausted and snuck out.
All in all, another fantastic event! Next year registration will definitely be competitive, given that the 300 registrant cap will be hit. See you at the 2008 climb!
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