Mapbuzz has better on-screen editing than MyMaps, and the mash-up is already done for you to use all sorts of great social networking features.
Here is my ride from yesterday –> http://www.mapbuzz.com/viewer/319
(Chris, notice that RESTful URL? 
)
I haven’t written about the latest interesting development in the Operating Systems realm yet, but I think I should explain this a bit, mostly for the benefit of my non-technical audience. The following opinons will almost certainly bother some folks, which is alright, I’m just saying up front that I hear ya.
Microsoft recently entered into an agreement with Novell (vendor of SuSE Linux), whereby Novell and Microsoft will create a Linux compatibility laboratory for Windows. This was annouced with much of the usual MSFT fanfare and bluster. The Open Source community instantly smelled a rat and waited to see how Microsoft was to turn this into the next attack on Free Software and Linux in general.
Let’s go back in time a bit to Microsoft’s last big try at taking down Linux. The short version of the story is Microsoft funded a small company called SCO, which bought up some remnants of old UNIX intellectual property and then proceeded to sue the pants off of IBM, Auto Zone, and whomever it thought it accuse of putting their newly acquired UNIX code into the Linux kernel. Over five years later, the IBM case still drags on and SCO hasn’t shown any offending code. There never was any. Along the way, SCO tried to cash in by selling licenses to use Linux “the clean official version” as it were, that had been approved by SCO. No one bought. SCO is in ruins and everyone now knows the ploy failed, embarrasingly badly at that. SCO is now an industry joke. Microsoft funded the whole stinkin thing, denied it, then was outed and forced to admit it, embarrasingly, at that.
Now, let’s return to modern day. Now, Microsoft and Novell are going to sell you a ‘legit’ Linux operability kit. Microsoft is trying to control the linux market now, by choosing a favored vendor/partner and forcing everyone to play by their rules. Because, now, Microsoft says it has patents to the stuff inside Linux, and well, you’re going to have to get indemnity by using the Microsoft/Novell linux stuff or they’ll sue the pants off of you. Same game, different name. The problem is, the general public doesn’t know about the GPL license that the Linux work is released under. The upshot is that Microsoft can’t make that stuff their property and sell it to you like Windows, it’s illegal. Now there is likely to be another dragged out court challenge to all this. Microsoft says they found a legal loophole in GPL. We’ll see.
Why should you care? Because if Microsoft gains this kind of legal control over Linux, then all of our computing environments will be toast. Microsoft’s products are already of dangerously poor quality and security. They’d get worse and worse without the stiff competiton of the Open Source world. Your choice of computing environments would be gone, and you’d be stuck with whatever crap MSFT rolled out. This could be compared to everyone being forced to drive a Buick because Buick somehow claimed to have the patent to internal combustion. The only cars would be Buicks, which would suck really bad, except, well, most folks would really just be happy with _any_ car, as long as it worked most of the time. That’s more or less what we’re facing here. Look, if Microsoft executives had their way, every UNIX and Linux server in the world would be replaced with a Windows OS. That would be utterly horrible and lame for reasons I don’t have space to indulge here. Why would you ever trust something as essential as the world’s computing platform to a private company that has demonstrably practiced every evil business practice in the books and invented a whole new class of evil business practices to meet the changing technological landscape? Uh, I don’t think so.
The good news: It won’t work. Firstly, the GPL is pretty explicit. Whether MSFT claims to have found a legal loophole (as they claim) or not, it has stood the test in the courts every time, and let’s remember it can also be modified very quickly. The F/OSS community is not about to let Microsoft steal or kill the fruits of their decades of labor, all of which was perfomed under unceasing assault by Microsoft itself. Ridiculous. The only way this even begins to work is if the public is too lethargic or stupid to care. If the public buys into the Microsoft fear campaign, then it could be more difficult for the truth to come out in the end. But, really, even the biggest luddite knows that Microsoft and Linux aren’t the same thing, and I just don’t think that this latest Microsoft play to kill off Linux will work. Linux is just too resilient and now it’s too well established. It won’t be taken out by some mere trick of corporate law or ‘gamesmanship’. Perhaps the best testimony to the success of the GNU/Linux Operating System is how hard Microsoft is still trying to find a way to kill it off. Don’t think that others haven’t noticed. Sun Solaris used to be an extremely expensive UNIX Operating System. Now, it’s totally free and open source. Sun knew that it needed to be released ‘into the wild’ to survive, and smartly decided to let it go. Linux proved that Open Source community property works and even Microsoft , with all of its resources and evil tactics can’t stop it. But I wish they’d stop making it so difficult.
Having an extremely wide range of skills and experience should be an advantage and a differentiator in the employment marketplace. But, much to the contrary, it’s making it much more difficult to find good fits in the employment arena.
It seems like I would be having much more success if I had only focused on one technology stack during my career. All of the recruiters and job descriptions have become keyword driven. So, basically having experience in many different languages, operating systems, programming environments and problem domains _hurts_ your chances of getting the interview. Because they’ll go for the guy that can say he spent the last five years only doing J2EE every single time.
I would assert that being so poorly rounded would be a disadvantage in the marketplace, as almost no job is really that focused. Developers need to be adaptable and quick to learn new technologies, be able to recognize he value in them, and adapt to new problem spaces and toolkits. If you’ve spent the last five years ignoring everything but J2EE or C#.NET, you probably aren’t the adaptable type. You probably cling to your one skillset with an iron grip. That’s not they type of developer I’d want to add to my team.
During the last five years, I’ve delivered code in a dozen languages, on Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Macintosh platforms. I’ve built and maintained computer hardware and done systems administration. I’ve designed, built and administrated SQL databases in several RDBMS systems, commercial and otherwise. I’ve built custom continuous integration and deployment systems. I’ve built a software test lab from scratch. I’ve integrated tools in various languages that most wouldn’t have thought would work together. I’ve solved tricky problems that most single-stack developers couldn’t fix. I’ve delivered solutions in a wide variety of problem domains from simple Employee Time Tracking ware to detailed Remote Sensing software, to RF Engineering visualizations. It’s frustrating when a potential employer calls up and simply asks “How many years of J2EE have you done?” So, I honestly answer, “Well, one, but…..”, and they instantly pass on you. This just keeps on happenning, and honestly, I don’t understand how some of these people so easily write you off.
I’m glad I’ve taken the path that I have. I know now that I can tackle almost any technical domain and acheive success. But, how on earth do you convince a potential employer that it’s true? It’s becoming fairly frustrating to see how my breadth of experience seems to be a hinderance in the job market, when really, it’s my chief strength. It’s something employers should value, but they just don’t seem to.
So, we’ve all heard about the recent phenomenon of ‘digital dirt’. That is, some folks found it expedient at some point over the last few years or so to post unflattering content about themselves on the internet. Potential employers Google your name (every single one of them does this as far as I can tell), and pop! there you are, shirtless, drunk as piss and vomiting underneath the “Psi Alpha Psi” fraternity sign at Kent State or some other foolish thing. As your resume hits the trash can, the hiring manager thinks “What a jackass!” Usually, this takes one of two forms: 1- the compromising photo/youtube clip/myspace profile and 2- the unsavory rant.
Now, I can guarantee you there are no incredibly compromising photos of myself on the internet, and I made sure to register an empty profile under my name on myspace (so no other donald marino puts embarrasing crap there - I want a monopoly on ruining that name), but I have ranted a bit here and there. Now, my stuff’s really very mild, I usually am whining about how mainstream technologies suck or some other annoyance of a developer’s life. Real ‘digital dirt’ would be someone’s racist tirade or childish insult stream or just plain dumb-as-hell statements. You won’t ever find me being racist, but I do say dumb things from time-to-time. Not as dumb as Virginia Sen. George Allen (at least learn how to pronounce ‘macaque’ before using it as a racial slur, you f*%&$g boob), but that’s setting the bar pretty high.
I do have to say I’ve found it amusing on a few occasions to have a hiring manager blurt out “I read your blog!” with a flourish and a twinkle, as if they were the only one who ever googled my name and put 1 and 1 together to make two. (Hello, potential future employers! I know you all are reading this. I’m really a nice guy and a hard worker :-))
So, the question is: do you speak your mind online ever, or do you milquetoast it? Do you just give up and say nothing? Anyone that knows me personally knows I have strong opinions and that I like to speak my mind. Most see this as a positive, some cannot stand it. I appreceiate a direct style and a well-defended position, many feel threatened by that. A blog is somewhat different, though. First of all it never goes away (thanks to the internet wayback machine), second - it’s quite voluntary. No one makes you blog. No one asked your opinion, you just decided to post it up for the world’s edu-tainment. I hope that people read this blog and at least think that I have some critical thinking skills and can express myself reasonably well. Some people will not, though, I am sure. I personally think it’s a mistake to read too much into someone’s blog posts, but people will hold you to every word you say in your blog as if it were a court deposition. Which, really, is a shame. Because it’s fun to rant in your blog. It’s fun to say something incindiary once in a while. It’s fun to say what you think and see people react, especially if you have a strong or unusual opinion. But now that we will seemingly be harshly judged for anything edgy we say, perhaps this medium is dying faster than we think. Or maybe, you can feel free to say what you want still, as long as you don’t need to find a job soon.
I’m not sure. But I did delete every one of my technology posts. I won’t write about work here again. I need to maintain a professionally neutral web presence until I have a secure job again (pause as we note the new more conservative stylesheet). I love working and I love to argue the merits of different technologies, designs, and approaches. I’ll have to resign myself to doing this in person from now on, since it’s so much harder to be misunderstood in person. This blog is now merely here to illustrate that I love motorcycles, the NY Jets, baseball and my girlfriend, and that I make fairly bad sounding amateur music from time-to-time. Nice and low-calorie, a light snack of a blog as it were. Use the wayback machine if you really need to see me at my internet worst. Or just come ask me my opinion about the state of “Enterprise Development” 
Well, here are the only four books that have been on my desk for a long time now.
Ruby - In A Nutshell by Yukihiro Matsumoto. 2002, O’Reilly
Agile Web Development With Rails by Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson, others. 2005, Pragmatic Bookshelf
PostgreSQL Essential Reference by Barry Stinson. 2001, New Riders Publishing
Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide (2nd Ed.). by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt. 2005 Pragmatic Bookshelf
Not too exciting I guess. Unless you consider that I’m looking across at my bookshelf where I have no less than 18 Java oriented books. A couple years ago, I’d have had no less than eight or ten of those Java books on my desk in a stack at all times. So, use Ruby because you’ll have 6 less books on your desk
I like window managers. I just think that’s a cool piece of software. I’ve been a UNIX & Gnu/Linux user for about six years now. One of the first things that helped me understand what was different about unix-like operating systems was the window manager.
A window manager, as it’s name indicates, is a piece of software that helps your programs’ GUI displays to appear on the screen. On unix-like systems, this can often be a program running on another machine. The window manager provides the familiar titlebar on all of your windows, the resize tabs, the little ‘x’ button that closes the window, and other common windowing functions on a graphical desktop. It is generally used in concert with other programs to create a desktop environment, but many WM’s stand on thier own as a desktop system as well. Anyone who has used Microsoft Windows knows all about these things, we all take them for granted anymore. Well, in UNIX-land, you can use a different window manager if you’d like to switch it out. In a unix-like system, the window manager is just another program thats running. When I discovered this out on my old RedHat 6 machine, I tried a few different window managers out at xwinman.org, and found the differences between them fascinating. There are so many things beyond what Microsoft Windows provides that people can really use in their computing, most notably the Virtual Desktop, which extends your desktop past the visible space on your screen.
After a while of using VTWM, I settled on FVWM2. This is one of my all-time favorite pieces of software. I’ve been using it regularly since 2001 or so. I still use it every day on a variety of computers and Operating Systems. I use it on all my Gnu/Linux machines, and I use it in my X/Darwin server on the macs. I’ve even run it on Windows using Cygwin/X and Hummingbird.
FVWM has some nice features. It is pretty small and light. It doesn’t launch a bunch of persistent processes that hang around your system sucking resources. FVWM2 is extremely configurable. People have made it emulate a full Windows desktop environment (screenshot) as well as OS X (screenshot), SGI IRIX (screenshot), and others. Try that with most Desktop systems, let alone window managers. FVWM2 also integrates with Gnome, KDE, and XFCE, three excellent desktop systems. FWVM2 also has a kick-ass manual (try ‘man fvwm2′ or go here). FVWM2 is configured unix-style via a dotfile, or configuration file in your home directory. I keep that file available online, so any machine with fvwm2 installed and an internet connection, I can have my entire custom environment in seconds. Very convenient.
If you’re one of those folks who have a utilitarian attitude about your machines, and never so much as change the default background, screensaver and color scheme, FVWM is probably not for you. On the other hand, if you’re like me and enjoy tinkering and customizing your desktop environment, FVWM2 will give you more than you could ever use in terms of flexibility and points of customization. Or it can work right out of the box, your choice. A great piece of software, and worth a test run if you want high performance, a small footprint, or heavy customization.
I have been screwing around with locators lately a.k.a geocoders. If you are not familiar, a geocoder is a tool that takes an address or placename and returns a geographic coordinate - a location. What a useful and interesting tool. Geocoding used to be a very difficult and expensive proposition not so long ago. Now, you can choose from numerous free services to use that are uncannily accurate. The bottom line: it’s easy to find stuff you need to find.
In 1999, I was a mapping specialist at an enormous commercial real estate brokerage. We cranked out tons of cartographic products every day. We had a large budget for GIS data and aerial images each year. One of our chief products was basically a map of a list of properties. We made billions of these suckers. We didn’t have a geocoder until about a week before I left the company, and that thing was no great help as it was. We used the Pierson Graphics Map Books and basically memorized a vast portion of the street map for the 7 county metro Denver area and hand geocoded many of the addresses, creating our own buildings database as we went. Back then I swear you could say a business address and could just point to it on the map. An believe me I’m no savant trickster like the zip code guy in Boulder. (go here, scroll down to Z) You do it over and over, you’ll remember them too. We all did. Scary.
Now, take your pick. Google’s mapping API (here, docs ), Yahoo! Maps API (here), MapQuest OpenAPI (here), and others all provide quite robust mapping services including geocoding and are quite easy to use. There’s a free perl module that uses USGS TIGER data out there (well, here). There all pretty darn accurate too. I’ve been using both Google and Yahoo!’s geocoders lately and I’ve been impressed so far at their ability to find random things, such as:
“Hollywood Sign” –> Google Maps found it, Yahoo didn’t.
“Central Park New York” –> Both found
“winsconsin” Note misspelled –> Google maps found Winsconsin College of cosmetology 2960 Allied St, Green Bay, WI, but to be fair, would prompt you in real life that it was misspelled.
Yahoo finds Wisconsin, which I thought was cool.
But anyway, it’s amazing to me that this is a free service. It’s expensive to do geocoding well for most people. You need top quality mapping data. It has to be complete, new and accurate. That costs tons of money. Now that all these data indexing giants have been competing in the GIS/RS data and tools arena, they’re putting the power of these huge data libraries to good use.
If only I’d had that in 1999-2000. We’re lucky these days.
