Live from Barcamp

Posted by Chris Ball Sat, 03 Jun 2006 17:06:00 GMT

I'll be blogging from Bar Camp Boston for the next day or so. So far I've heard Schuyler and friends talk about open-source Geo stuff -- they're working on a BSD licensed maps API called OpenLayers that sits at the layer above services like Google Maps and provides a consistent API to them; so, you can target your mapping app at OpenLayers and then back on to any data source that they have a plugin for. Interesting things:

Mapstraction
Boston Free Map
Openstreetmap
how incredible it is that we put up with governments using taxes to commission maps and then selling them for insane amounts of money.
it is amusing that Openstreetmap uses a Peter's projection while OpenLayers takes its data and makes a Mercator projection out of it. Go Cartographers for Social Equality!

I also saw Dan Kunkle give a talk on solving the Rubik's Cube; with 4.3 * 10^19 states, we couldn't even store a bit per state, but he's using some clever strategies to reduce the space into the double terabytes. He also solved the cube — "okay, now I don't need to look any more.. thirty seconds of fast flipping while he looks away and continues talking.. done" — for us. I bet solving Rubik's Cubes would improve my Go game.

They just brought out tens of pizza boxes, so sounds like time to eat. More later, with photos, which there's a Flickr group for.

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