Tag Archives: google

(in)dependency

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In times when independence is a deadly sin and in times of Google-like NDA-ization of nearly all professional activities of an individual…

…it’s quite extra-ordinary to have enough courage to shout out:

I don’t speak for my employer. For example, our site is one of those Flashy Internet dead-ends I’d never enter. See? I don’t speak for them.

or may be no courage is needed to criticize bad design ;-) BTW, it must be an old critique by Yossi. Now their website looks good.

Sanoodi plays OpenLayers

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Recently, I’ve been playing with Sanoodi – activity-based social networking website for participants in sports and leisure activities. The idea of Sanoodi is very similar to Sports Tracker by Nokia.

The Sanoodi version 1.1.0.0 is based on Google Maps API. It works well, rarely reporting errors. Today, I migrated my account to Sanoodi Beta available for mysterious Friday the 13th (month unspecified :-)). Besides new & ugly user interface, I’ve encountered that mapping capabilities in Beta are based on OpenLayers engine. Great choice, if my vote counts. The core of Sanoodi application is based on Django framework. Another good choice :-)

If you are doing any outdoor activities, Sanoodi is a nice gadget and worth to try. I recommend to use version 1.1.0.0 for regular diary. In my opinion, the Beta version is still unusable. It is throwing errors while saving preferences or uploading GPX file, Save button for new route sees to be not even linked, etc. BTW, I’ve reported all my problems to the Sanoodi Team. Hopefully, they will fix it soon.

goosh.org

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goosh.org is a new Web-based tool that has been warming up the wires for last hours. The idea is really cool, though it does not work in text lynx-like browsers, as one would expect.

Hmm, looks like the next (and obvious) step is to implement GDAL utilities plugin for goosh, so everyone can run:

guest@goosh.org:/gdal/> ogrinfo -ro PG:'host=gdal.org user=root dbname=cool'

Layer name: streets
   Geometry: Line String
   Feature Count: 13
   Extent: (-87.634943, 24.543945) - (-80.031369, 31.000975)
   Layer SRS WKT:
   GEOGCS["GCS_WGS_1984",
      DATUM["WGS_1984",
      SPHEROID["WGS_1984",6378137.0,298.257223563]],
      PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],
      UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]]
...
guest@goosh.org:/gdal/>

What about hackers/crackers? Don’t worry! This time, lucky works for Google:

I tried “rm -rf /”, but Google is still up.

;-)

Update: Stupid me! I really should not use the term hacker inappropriately above.

OSGeo archives inquisitor

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All OSGeo mailing lists are managed by GNU Mailman. Mailman is a great piece of software but it lacks of user friendly search engine. In order to search, for instance, gdal-dev archives I usually feed Google with a query like this:

+libtiff +crash site:http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev

It works well but requires me to know and input direct URL of archives I want to scan. There are nearly 100 OSGeo mailing lists and sometimes I need to juggle quite many of them. Not much fun. The Nabble comes in handy when I have to do many searches at the same time.

I have been using Safari as main Web browser since I moved to Mac OS X – it just runs faster on my PowerBook G4. Shortly, I discovered Inquisitor plugin for Safari and my lists searching practice have changed. Thanks to Inquisitor’s feature of additional search engines, I use it as an interface to the OSGeo mailing lists archives and OSGeo.org.

inquisitor-searching-osgeo-2

With a very little configuration, the Nabble and OSGeo.org search engines are accessible in the Safari search box and also using keyboard shortcuts.

Configuration steps:

  1. Install latest version of Inquisitor
  2. Go to Inquisitor pane in the Safari preferences dialog box and click Edit sites…
  3. Add OSGeo add-ins to the additional search engines (see screenshot below)
  4. Click on the plus button to Add new custom search shortcut… and input Site Name, search engine URL with query placeholder and optional Shortcut.

inquisitor-prefs-edit-sites-2

Here are texts I used to define the three search shortcuts:

Site Name: OSGeo.org
URL: http://www.osgeo.org/search/node/%@

Site Name: OSGeo Mailing Lists
URL: http://www.nabble.com/forum/Search.jtp?forum=18127&local=y&query=%@

Site Name: GDAL Mailing List
URL: http://www.nabble.com/forum/Search.jtp?forum=1192&local=y&query=%@

Notice the %@ part, it is a search query placeholder.

Use of the shortcuts is simple, issue Cmd + Option + F to jump to the Google search box in Safari, input a query and use custom keyboard shortcut of desired search engine, for instance I press Cmd + Shift + G to search gdal-dev list. Alternatively, while you type your query, the Inquisitor drops down Spotlight-like box and then use arrow keys to select one of listed search engines.