Wikileaks Winkerdinks

About 5 years ago, the corporate overlords at my last job asked, me to look into a content management system for the information technology department to keep its documentation.

I proposed that we use a wiki.

The mahogany-row big-wigs laughed me out of their office, saying that “wiki” was a stupid name, that it sounded like “dickie,” and that nobody was going to ever use something with such a stupid name. Evidently, these guys had not yet heard of Wikipedia, despite their supposed “leadership” role in the information technology department of a fortune 500 company.

For the past several days, everyone in the news media has been falling all over themselves about the big wikileaks brouhaha.

I hear the word “wiki” mentioned on the radio, the TV news, and all over the Internet numerous times daily. Astonishingly, nobody seems to find the name all that silly, and none of the newscasters confuse wiki-style content management systems with male genitalia.

I would like to take this opportunity to point and laugh at my former bosses, extend a well-meaning middle finger, and shout “TOLD YOU SO!” at the top of my lungs.

In other news, tomorrow marks my four year anniversary with my current company, where I keep all the server and network documentation in MediaWiki, and nobody seems to find this strange or comical.

Musings on the New Kindle

So, there’s a new Kindle out, and there’s an interview with Jeff Bezos on USA Today:

Q: Why doesn’t Amazon support the popular “e-pub” standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

I call Shenanigans on this line of argument. Kindle supports PDF and plain text files, for heaven’s sake! Plain text files don’t have Whispersync either, but it’s still nice to have support for other formats.

It’s not as if adding ePub support would be hard, either.

Want to see how hard it is to support ePub? Follow along.

Go download the ePub version of this book. It’s a good one, trust me.
rename the file from .epub to .zip
Open the zip

See, ePub is just a zip file full of XHTML.

So what’s the deal, can the Kindle not render HTML?

Nope. The new Kindle comes with a webkit browser, so I’m pretty sure it can handle HTML rendering.

There’s really no excuse for the Kindle not to support ePub.

I still have an old-ass first generation Kindle, that won’t even read PDFs, let alone ePubs. I read a lot of PDFs for work, and the old Kindle isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Although Amazon added PDF support for Kindle a few months ago, they neglected to issue the update for Kindle 1, to my great consternation.

I suppose I could stomp out in a huff and buy a nook, but I already have something like 60 books in the Kindle format.

So, despite my sense of indignation at the lack of ePub support and general grumpiness at being overlooked for the PDF upgrade. I went ahead pre-ordered one of the shiny new Kindles.

Vendor lock-in is a bitch.

Poplar Forest in OSM

I have noisy coworkers, and so I listen to podcasts while I’m at work to help keep my sanity. Today, I was listening to old episodes of the the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

The episode I was listening to talked about Poplar Forest, which was Jefferson’s second home / retreat. Today it’s sort of a museum, and I noticed that it wasn’t yet added to OSM. The Yahoo images weren’t very good, but I could see the building, and I knew from the podcast that it was an octagon with a long rectangle sticking out the side.

So, I drew a crude octagon, then told JOSM to arrange the nodes in a circle. I think it came out pretty nicely.

Some time ago, I added a node for Monticello to the map, so now you can plan your Jeffersonian vacation with OSM.

I think Mr. Jefferson would like Openstreetmap. After all, he commissioned Louis and Clark expedition to map the American West.

I’m pretty sure he would have been in favor of share-alike licensing, too.

He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

No doubt if Alexander Hamilton were alive today, he’d own stock in Navteq, plan his travels on Bing, and call us all “intellectual voluptuaries.”

Alexander Hamilton loves Microsoft

Roadster in the Park

I had a silly idea to see what would happen if I jammed my tripod in the Carradice bag and tried to shoot some video.

You end up seeing more of my butt than you probably want to, but here is the result, anyway.

I’m trying to learn how to use PiTiVi to edit together a video, but my laptop is almost 5 years old, and it’s taking forever.

If it were Harrisburg

This is how big the BP oil disaster is. There’s a website where you can move the oil spill over a map of your city to give you a better sense of scale.

I own a car. This is my fault.

Michael Arrington on OpenStreetMap

The other day, one of my coworkers forwarded me a link to an article on TechCrunch about OpenStreetmap.

For a moment, I was exited to see OSM getting some press. My excitement faded rapidly, when I saw the article made a rather glaring factual error. It claimed that OSM is a product of Cloudmade.

Sloppy journalism is nothing new, and nothing to get overly excited about. In the comments, a few people tried to correct the mistake, pointing out that OSM is a project in it’s own right, and Cloudmade is a company that uses the OSM data.

Mr. Arrington replied to these comments that he “fully understand[s] the relationship between Cloudmade and openstreetmap.” Clearly he does not.

To say that Cloudmade is in charge of OSM is an error of the same magnitude as saying that Canonical is in charge of Debian. It’s totally ridiculous, and anyone who spends 10 minutes poking around the web could have figured this out.

Arrington then goes on to insult the entire readership of TechCrunch:

“for the vast majority of our readers [the relationship] just isn’t relevant.”

Evidently the difference between the actual facts and made-up malarkey is not relevant to the TechCrunch readership. Maybe TechCrunch is the high-tech equivalent of the Onion, I don’t know.

Not content to insult his own readers, he goes on to slag off the entire open source universe.

If even 1% of our readers gave a damn I’d write a post explaining how projects like these are able to stay on track, and why there is always just one for profit company guiding it.

Evidently he thinks that open projects alway have a for-profit company behind them. I’ve been an active contributer to OSM for over three years now, and I’ve never once been “guided” by Cloudmade in any way whatsoever. Does anyone know what for-profit concern is “guiding” Wikipedia or Mozilla? I sure don’t.

After several more comments tried to correct Arrington’s mistake, he decided that the OSM community is “nasty” and closed down the comments.

Well, sorry TechCrunch. We’re open source people. When we see a mistake, we file a bug. We tried to help you fix your buggy article. It’s what we do. You didn’t listen, and so your article is still broken, and you look like a fool.

Crash Analysis: Part 1

So, it’s been a full week since my bicycle accident. Now that I can’t ride for a while, I’m bored out of my skull, and thought I’d do a little over-analysis on how this whole thing happened.

I crashed, in large part, because of poor route selection for my commute. Route selection is a tricky thing sometimes. Here’s the basic overview of the routing challenges on my commute.

Notice that between my house in Marysville, and my job in Summerdale, there is a big honkin’ mountain in my way. I’m also penned in to the East my the great and mighty Susquehanna River. The river, in her infinite benevolence, has seen fit to carve me a nice, relatively flat floodplain through the mountain, in order to make it possible to cycle to work.

There are only two public rights-of-way along this floodplain. One of them is US 11/15 (a high-traffic, nasty highway), the other (Main Street) is a lovely, low-traffic road along the river, with scenic views of the river and the mountains.

Opencyclemap of the only two possible escape routes from Marysville

Naturally, I ride on Main Street. The problem is that there is only one way to get on Main St, which is through a tunnel under the railroad tracks at the north end of town. Getting from my house to that tunnel is where I ran into trouble.

The basic problem is that my house is separated from the tunnel by a nice big park. I have three options to get around the park.

King’s Highway (in blue) — A slow climb up a narrow, shoulder-less road
Park Drive to US 11/15 (in red) — Having to cross three lanes of rush-hour traffic twice within a half mile
Cut through the park (in yellow) — No traffic to deal with, and there are usually interesting waterfowl in the creek

Normally, I use option 3, and cut through the park, stopping to say hello to the Blue Herons and Egrets in the pond. But on the day of my crash, the footway through the park was covered with snow and ice, and so I decided to use option 2, mixing it up with the rush-hour traffic on the highway.

This turned out to be a mistake…

OpenStreetmap on the News

The Atlanta Citywide Mapathon made the news! Openstreetmap is now one step closer to world domination.

Lies about Kindle

I just saw this article from the Financial Times.

With the Kindle and its sizeable e-book store, Amazon has established itself as the early market leader in the digital reader industry. Yet, it keeps the Kindle system “closed” – it only works with e-books bought from Amazon, and those e-books cannot be read on other e-readers. (emphasis mine)

This is utterly, totally, false, and it’s a lie I see all over the internet whenever people are trash-talking the Kindle.

You can get books from Amazon, you can get books from manybooks or feedbooks. You can read any unencrypted MOBI files. There are all sorts of free utilities available so you can convert from unsupported formats into supported formats.

You can even email a PDF book to amazon, and they’ll send it back to you in Kindle format for free.

I have had my Kindle for about a year and half. I’ve read maybe 40-50 books on it. Less than half of those have come from Amazon. The idea that Amazon is the only place you can get books for Kindle is ridiculous. If the people at FT had spend 5 minutes on google, they could have spared themselves the embarrassment of publishing idiotic rubbish as news.

New BikePA Route: J2

I was driving around Lemoyne the other day, and I noticed that PennDot has put up signs for a new BikePA bicycling route.

So, I turned on the GPS and followed the signs to see where they went. The route goes almost the whole way to Gettysburg, connecting Route J with Route S.

PennDot hasn’t updated their maps in ages, but OpenCycleMap always delivers the goods.

Once you get out of Mechanicsburg, it’s a very scenic ride. It runs for about 30 miles through farms and apple orchards. There are a couple of enormous hills, so be sure to wear comfy shoes for pushing your bike uphill.

Here’s a GPX file of the route, in case you’d like to put it in your GPS or mapping software.

Adam's Blatherings

A never-ending brouhaha of nonsense and crap

Geekiness