Nexus One

Oh glorious day, the Nexus One is now available for purchase in Canada!

I’ve been feeling less and less enthusiastic about the iPhone lately, in particular after the ridiculous lawsuit against HTC. It’s no secret that we at Navarra have been doing quite a bit of work on that platform, as have my associates at Mindsea. As long as there’s demand from our clients, that won’t change, but as an individual I’m feeling less and less enthusiastic about supporting a company that (through its actions) demonstrates hostility to the ideals of autonomy and innovation that I hold dear. Now that an attractive alternative is available on reasonable terms, I’m seriously considering switching horses in the not-too-distant future.

Syndicated 2010-03-17 01:42:28 from Ginger Tea and Channa Masala

Adventures in processing with prender

First, I’m overdue in announcing Transit to Go a.k.a. “the iPhone transit map that’s demonstrably more useful than a paper schedule” a.k.a. “your bus departure in 15 seconds or less, no matter where you are”. I wrote up a blog post about it for Mindsea’s site, if you’re interested in finding out more.

Second, all this transit excitement has made me start thinking about better routing and geometry algorithms again. I’ve been experimenting a bit with Brandon Martin Anderson’s prender framework, used by the infamous Graphserver, and have been pretty happy with the results. It basically lets you do processing visualizations in python (i.e. no Java coding required). Here’s a quick picture of it in action, rendering the Nova Scotian road network, as distributed by geobase.

The neat thing about this framework is that you can render quickly to an arbitrary level of detail, which should prove very useful when troubleshooting the behavior of some of the code I’m working on. If anyone is interested in running the framework on MacOS X (like I was), my fork of the project has the appropriate patches.

Syndicated 2010-03-08 01:30:40 from Ginger Tea and Channa Masala

It’s alive!


>>> import neocoder
>>> g = neocoder.GeoCoder("greater-hrm2.db")
>>> g.get_latlng("14 Johnson, North Preston")
SQL: select firstHouseNumber, lastHouseNumber, length, coords from road where name like 'Johnson' and firstHouseNumber <= '14' and lastHouseNumber >= '14' and placeName like 'North Preston' limit 1
(44.73895263671875, -63.464725494384766)


Syndicated 2010-02-12 02:02:10 from Ginger Tea and Channa Masala

Projects for 2010

Hurrah, 2010 is upon us!

One new years resolution I have set for myself is to blog more about what I’m working on. I’ve learned over the last year that the audience of people who care about your projects in development is vanishingly small. Thus, the need for secrecy in order to make a “PR splash” is rather small– announce far and wide when you have something that people can use by all means, but don’t worry too much about talking about what you’re working on with the internets.

In this spirit, some projects I’m 99% certain I’ll be releasing publicly in 2010:

• neocoder A lightweight geocoding library, with wrapper libraries for your language of choice. Written in C++ using SQLite and boost regular expressions. Will support both OpenStreetMap and GeoBase GML as input. Currently in development on github, hoping to release with routez (as its geocoding component).
• routez A generic travel planning web service, written in python using the django framework and the libroutez libraries. This is basically the software behind hbus.ca… the goal for 2010 is to clean it up and make it generic by clearing out the Halifax-specific stuff (mostly just the geocoding and site theme stuff at this point), then release it to the public under the Affero GPL License (was originally going to with GPL, but Simon Law convinced me otherwise… more on that in a future post).
• Transit To Go A dedicated iPhone client for the routez software, developed in collaboration with Dmitri Dolguikh and Bill Wilson, two talent developers from Halifax. Has some innovative (in my opinion, anyway) details on how things will be viewed. This one’s going to be proprietary, but will be affordable and awesome.

Besides this, I have a few more irons in the fire… however, I’m hesistant to talk about them just yet. Just getting the above done in the midst of my work with Navarra (to say nothing of having a life in there somewhere) is going to be challenging.

Thoughts? Would be particularly interested in hearing from people working on similar projects to neocoder and routez. Despite how it may some times appear, I don’t have a NotInventedHere mentality: I’ve done as an exhaustive survey of the field as I could before deciding to work on my own projects, and what I’ve found just hasn’t been the right fit for what I’m trying to accomplish. However, the world’s gotten so damn big that I’m not sure if I’m missing something…

Syndicated 2010-01-03 03:22:41 from Ginger Tea and Channa Masala

Changes

Near a client’s office in beautiful old Montreal.

Originally uploaded by William Lachance

So I haven’t been blogging much lately. Story of my life, I’ll try to be a bit more active in the new year.

I’m now back living in Montréal, which has been great. Very sad to leave Halifax and all the goings on, but I’ll be back to visit. And I’m not done with disruptive transit-related apps for that city. Au contraire. More news on that soon.

Syndicated 2009-12-15 07:04:27 from Ginger Tea and Channa Masala