Chris Ball

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.