igorbrejc.net

These are my new delicious links for November 30th:

• DevShop: The Cool Game that Makes Development Look Fun
  
• Love the Dot: TaskManager – The Range Rover of the .Net 4 Parallel Extensions
  
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Woz says he’ll give me some of his Facebook shares
  
• OpenGeoData » OpenFloodMapping
  
• The Map Scroll: Nine Chinas
  

Some time ago I wrote about experimenting with Cairo drawing engine to render maps. The basic idea was to use Cairo to render SVG map files which can then be manually post-processed using some vector graphics editor like Inkscape.

Unfortunately I worked on lot of other stuff after that, so the experiment was put on hold. But a few weeks ago I started working on a new rendering rules engine for Kosmos and I wanted to write some unit tests to try it out – and the experimental map drawing code seemed a good fit.

The rules engine is far from complete, but I can already reveal a few details of its capabilities. First, you specify a set of features, for example a forest, a motorway, a town. In accordance to some common GIS concepts, there are three types of features: point, line and area feature.

Then you specify how each of these features should be rendered. This consists of a directed graph of commands which supports inheritance of rendering properties (something in the direction of MapCSS, but not as liberal).

I won’t bore you with the details (at least until a proper parser for these rendering rules is available), but I think this new system will be much more powerful than the existing “flat” Wiki table-based rules one. Also, I’ve been working on improving support for relations and multipolygons.

Anyway: back to Cairo: I’ve started implementing more detailed drawing logic and I had quite a few problems figuring out how to render text using Cairo. It turns out the API for drawing text in Cairo is pretty poor (it even crashes when trying to render non-ASCII chars), so the authors of Cairo recommend using Pango, a library for high-quality text rendering. Luckily, it has Mono wrappers and it wasn’t too difficult to make it write out texts on the bitmap.

I’ve written few unit tests for some simple OSM map rendering and here are the results (the left map is rendered using GDI+, the right one using Cairo):

I’ve used some simple rendering rules:

• texts come from OSM tags equipped with “name” tag
• lines come from any non-closed OSM ways
• orange-filled areas come from any areas (closed OSM ways).

As a special treat, I’ve also created a SVG file from the same map, you can download it from here: http://downloads.igorbrejc.net/osm/misc/map1.svg

These are my new delicious links for November 23rd:

• The Map Scroll: The Decline and Fall of Assorted Empires
  
• Why Leaves Really Fall Off Trees : NPR
  via The Endeavour
• Tragedy of the anti-commons — The Endeavour
  
• BBC News – YouTube introduces automatic captions for deaf viewers
  
• The HornGet Project: Bringing "apt-get install" to .NET Projects – Billy McCafferty – Devlicio.us – Just the Tasty Bits
  

These are my new delicious links for November 20th:

• Righthand’s blog – Want to try Parallel Extensions on .net 3.5?
  
• Protected Area Rendering – OpenStreetMap
  looks like Kosmos is helping our planet in a small way
• YouTube – Google Chrome OS Demo
  
• Welcome | dpBestflow
  
• The Map Room: Real-time Kinematic GPS
  

These are my new delicious links for November 17th:

• Everyman Offers New Directions in Online Maps – NYTimes.com
  
• MediaFire – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  
• Switzerland takes Google to court over StreetView
  
• http://www.mono-project.com/news/archive/2009/Nov-10.html
  
• 25+ Useful Infographics for Web Designers | Webdesigner Depot
  

These are my new delicious links for November 14th:

• OpenGeoData » OSM Continuous zoom video
  
• Developing and Debugging .NET applications on Android with Mono(Develop)
  
• Martian landscapes – The Big Picture – Boston.com
  
• iPhone or Android? – Stack Overflow
  
• Apple More Profitable Than Nokia in handset business
  

These are my new delicious links for November 14th:

• Lunascape6 Beta Download
  
• Observations: New micro-mapping software lets travelers plot points of interest while they walk
  
• Is 10/GUI the Future Replacement of the Mouse and Keyboard? | FlowingData
  via The Endeavour
• Assembly of the International Space Station
  via The Endeavour
• Amazon.com: Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software
  

These are my new delicious links for November 13th:

• Alternatives to Windows, Mac, Linux and online software – AlternativeTo.net
  
• Our Amazon Advertising Experiment – Blog – Stack Overflow
  
• I’m Feeling Unlucky
  
• zen-coding: turn those CSS selectors upside down
  
• Paint.NET » Blog Archive » Paint.NET v3.5 (Final) is now available!
  
• Music industry: How to sink pirates | The Economist
  The decline of music piracy holds lessons for other industries
• Paint.NET » Blog Archive » A new license for Paint.NET v3.5
  

These are my new delicious links for November 12th:

• The Map Room: ‘A Significant Step Down in Quality’
  
• Did they drop TeleAtlas too early « Steve’s Little world
  
• 423 – Flow-Charting the Ring Trilogy « Strange Maps
  
• Garmin ecoRoute ESP | GPS Tracklog
  
• Talking to DC « Adam Bosworth’s Weblog
  

Recently I’ve upgraded my home development machine to Windows 7. It is useful to do these cleanings from time to time, since it forces you to take a step back from your current configuration and think whether something new might be better.

So yesterday while I was preparing a new release of GroundTruth, I was missing my CruiseControl.NET server and started to reinstall it. After hitting a few snags I got bored with the whole idea: I constantly keep resolving the same issues with CC.NET installations (since I use it both at home and at work). Remembering I once played with Hudson and liked it, I decided to give it a serious try.

Setting Up Hudson

The installation was really easy – just download the .war file and run it using java. I did have to move the home directory from the default user’s profile directory to my data disk in order to make the whole installation more portable.

This is what I like about Hudson: no hassle with XML configuration files, you can configure it with a user-friendly Web GUI. Also, you don’t need IIS – the Hudson has its own integrated web server. And it even provides a button for installing Hudson as a Windows service!

The only real drawback with Hudson is that it’s a Java application and if you want to extend it with your own plug-ins, you need to write Java code. Which is fine, but not as accessible for .NET developers. But lately I’ve started using the build server just for building, labeling and packaging and I don’t really need any special plug-ins for that. Anyway, Hudson already has a lot of plug-ins, some of them even for .NET, so I don’t think I will need to write my own any time soon.

Good Bye Cruising

I’ve had quarrels with CC.NET before. Now I think of CC.NET as a nice introduction into CI world, but after a while you need something else. My view is that the .NET world needs a new open source CI project, which would build upon experience of CC.NET, both positive and negative. This is what I would like to see:

• No hassle: just copy a single executable and run it. No IIS setup, no nothing. Web server comes with the package. Windows service installation with a single mouse click.
• Portability: server configuration has to be separated from the server executables. If a new version of the build server arrives, the upgrade be as simple as overwriting a single executable file. No messing around with Web.configs, dashboard.configs etc.
• Web-based installation & upgrade: I like how WordPress is doing things: you can upgrade your WordPress installation using the Web dashboard. It would also be nice to be able to install plug-ins just by pointing to its home URL.
• Simple GUI: simple as in “Google search simple”. 95% of the time you only need a build radiator and nothing else. Everything else should be accessible, but not on the first page. And think simple permalinks. BTW: in my view, even Hudson’s GUI could be improved in this aspect.
• Interactive GUI: I want to see a live build log, without manual refreshing. More Ajax please.