Hofmockel.org

PHP, Social Media, and iPhone Development This Week in Washington, DC

It’s hard to believe it’s the last week in July already. Well, until you walk outside into the humid weather we had been lucky to avoid for most of the summer so far. Things are starting to slow down in the city, but there are some interesting technology events happening in Washington, DC this week. Below are a few that caught our eye, and you can find a full list of the week’s events at DC Tech Events.

Also, while it’s not happening in DC, there’s a great event for Drupal developers this week. DrupalCamp is going to Philadelphia on Friday – just a two hour train ride away!

Tuesday, July 28

6:00 – 8:00 pm

DCPHP Beverage Subgroup: If you’re a PHP developer, this one is for you. Come out for this meetup to get to know other PHP developers and talk about code over a couple cold beers.

Online Videos, Mapping DC, and the Agile Development This Week in Washington, DC

We’re beyond the midway point in July already, which is pretty hard to believe. Things continue to jam here in Washington, DC, with unseasonably nice weather (but with some more humidity rolling in this week, unfortunately) and a lot of tech events taking place. This week there are meetups from two brand new groups – MappingDC and Agile DC-MD-VA – as well as some other interesting ones. Below are the events that caught our attention, and you can find a full listing of the week’s tech events here. Have a great week!

Tuesday, July 21

7:00 pm

NetSquared Summer Video Night: It’s movie night at NetSquared this month with a showing of great online advocacy videos, followed by a discussion on what makes them great. Popcorn, beer, and the entertainment will be provided (and you can add your favorite videos to the mix too).

Wednesday, July 22

6:30 – 8:00 pm

DC Media Makers: Allyson Kapin – the founder of WomenWhoTech and a tech blogger – will talk about online media at this month’s Media Makers meetup. Come out to hear some of her tricks and to share your own with the group.

We launched translate.openatrium.com earlier this week to support translating Open Atrium into more than a dozen languages. It currently ships out of the box in English, Spanish, and Arabic, but we want to grow this. To do this we built a localization server that provides downloadable, up-to-date translations that are automatically repackaged every few hours and that allows people to post their own translations and fixes to the server while they’re doing them on their own sites.

The tools that make this possible have been in the works for some time now. The localization client allows for on page translations of UI strings, and the localization server lets you keep a centralized translations repository for all modules, versions, and languages. We’ve had the tools for awhile, however, in order to realize just how hard it is to actually do and maintain translations in Drupal, you need to try it.

In the case of Open Atrium, we’re not talking about a Drupal module or a single site. Open Atrium is a full featured Drupal intranet distribution that uses Drupal core, some contributed modules, and some custom specific ones, and all of this this is deployed to many sites. This is one of those times when it feels like you have all the pieces to do what you want to do, but it’s still hard to figure out how to make everything work together in a human friendly way to get the job done.

So for Open Atrium, we want to:

• Provide a downloadable package for a simple installation in any of the supported languages.
• Set up some channel to allow people to easily contribute and improve translations.
• Keep everything up-to-date with our release schedule and the quickly moving codebase.
• Allow Open Atrium users to easily keep their translations up to date with the latest version.

Improving Maps for the Federal Education Budget Project

We just overhauled the maps for the Federal Education Budget Project with new custom slippy maps, using TIGER Census data along with OpenStreetMap data. The new mapping stack lets users browse all the nation’s school districts much faster, with dots sized to indicate reading achievement and other variables.

Here’s a look at the new maps:

This is a big change from the first version of the site that utilized static maps, since the map can be panned across the entire country. To make this possible, district information is only loaded when it comes into view – a feature of the OpenLayers Javascript library.

For the Federal Education Budget Project, custom maps were essential because, rather than mapping points relative to transportation or town boundaries commonly found on maps, the site’s maps portray school district boundaries. As tools like Mapnik and TileCache have approached maturity, it has become possible to make maps that are both custom and rich in interaction. So now on the site you’ll see beautiful maps of school districts, with specific highways and county boundaries added for context.

This Thursday, July 16th, the DC Geo group will hold it’s first meetup from 6:00 to 9:00 pm at Fortius One’s offices in Arlington.

It’s shaping up to be a great event. Our friend Dmitry Kachaev will be there representing the DC Government’s OCTO Labs and will talk about the Circulator API, which releases real time data for the city’s public transit system. Tom MacWright will give a presentation on some of the work we’ve been doing with Drupal, OpenLayers, and Amazon S3 services. We’ll also hear from a new group called MappingDC that’s working on open data initiatives in the DC area.

This will be a great opportunity to get involved with an exciting new group that brings together the people who are doing some of the best mapping work in Washington, DC, and to share knowledge with them, brainstorm, and network. The Fortius One offices are located at 2200 Wilson Blvd, Suite 307 in Arlington, a short walk from the Court House metro stop. You can RSVP and get more information here, and follow DC Geo on Twitter for news and updates.

Beta Release of Open Source Intranet in a Box

Open Atrium’s code is now in open beta! You can download the code from www.openatrium.com, learn more about its features, read why we open sourced it, and the check out the roadmap for the next release. What we’re most excited about now is getting feedback from you all and growing the developer base over on github.

Open Atrium is a light package that’s extensible, both in terms of features and look. We’ve posted documentation on how to build new features for it and how to change the skin, and and we’re currently documenting other commonly asked questions. As of now, out of the box Open Atrium is available in English, Spanish, and Arabic, with good progress made on German and Hungarian, and it’s being translated into a dozen other languages. We’ll blog more about the translation service and how you can get involved soon.

To follow up on Jeff’s post from last night I want to thank all of the alpha testers who have helped make this release possible. We look forward to working together on github to keep making Open Atrium better.

It has been a great couple of months working with all of the alpha testers on Open Atrium. People took a lot of time to make this project better, and we thank you for that. Everyone is going to benefit from this when you see the code this week. We hope that this will set the tone for a great open source community moving forward.

Tonight most of Development Seed will be heading out for the July Drupal meetup in Washington, DC. Meetups are a great chance to catch up with other local developers, hear what everyone is working on, and share tricks with each other. We haven’t signed up to give a specific lightening talk yet, but we’ll probably spill some details about Open Atrium, which we’ll be releasing the beta of this week.

We’ll meet at Stetson’s at 7:00 pm at the upstairs bar. For more details, to rsvp, and to volunteer to give a lightening talk, head over to the announcement in the DC Drupal group. Hope to see you there!

Drupal, Mapping, Games, and Beer this Week in Washington, DC

UPDATED: Turns out that July 16th is a Thursday. In the original post all the events happening on the 16th were listed as happening on Wednesday. The correct day and date are below. Sorry!

Summer is definitely here in Washington, DC, with temperatures inching up this week and the streets considerably more deserted than usual. Although things may be slowing down elsewhere in the city, there are still quite a few interesting technology events happening this week. Below is a look at the events that caught our eye. You can find a full listing of events at DC Tech Events.

Monday, July 13

7:00 – 9:00 pm

DC Drupal Meetup: Are you a Drupal developer or just curious as to why it’s a leading open source content management system? Come out to this month’s meetup to learn more about Drupal, meet other developers, and talk code. Most of us will be here – come by and say hi!

7:15 pm

Fort Reno Concert: It’s not a technology event, but it is one of the nice summer institutions in Washington, DC. Tonight three bands will take the stage as part of Fort Reno’s free, outdoor summer concert series.

Yesterday’s meeting at the White House on H1N1 preparedness focused heavily on openness and information sharing. Officials and experts talked about how policy impacts the ability to share information and how it can be modified to better facilitate it, how engagement at all levels of the government and with the private sector will improve access to needed information, and how new surveillance techniques can be used to help thwart a pandemic.

Dr. Mike McDonald talking at the meeting.

The group identified its main goals, beginning with the short term goal of developing a set of anonymous data points that can be used to monitor cases of H1N1 flu publicly, followed by developing tools to effectively communicate this information. Their last – and main – goal is to get this information to the government and other agencies helping to treat flu cases and possible infection points as well as with the public at large.

Also discussed at the meeting was the “Race to Resilience: Pandemic Information Sharing Initiative,” which aims to improve preparedness through information sharing and collaboration between the private sector and all levels of government. Chris Allen, a CTO of the Department of Homeland Security, spoke about the initiative and of the findings of several groups looking at how to best address these two approaches. It was also announced that the initiative will deliver a plan to Aneesh Chopra, the federal CTO, on September 1 laying out a plan on how to achieve, part of which includes how an open source framework can facilitate the collaboration.

I’ll write more on the pandemic preparedness happening at the White House next week, as it’s clear that a lot is moving there.

In the last couple months we’ve been driving efforts to bring Drupal’s core aggregator up to speed so that we could use it to replace FeedAPI in Drupal 7. After trying to pull through some of the more extensive changes, I have to recognize that in this case the advantages of Drupal core work are not enough to outweigh the disadvantages.

A year ago when we decided to help improve Drupal’s core aggregator to a point where it could replace FeedAPI, my assumption was that the additional effort of working in core would be more than compensated by the important reviews and input we would get from the Drupal community.

Indeed, we’ve received some great help and I’d like to thank everybody involved. But it became very obvious that we could not gain the momentum I was hoping for. Patches like #303930: pluggable architecture and #293318: feeds as nodes, which I consider central to the effort, were only reviewed in depth by a few and overall the patches moved slowly.

I don’t think this lack of support can be blamed on anybody in particular, but I do think it shows that there is some discrepancy between what we are trying to do with aggregation in Drupal – namely building a flexible, extensible aggregation API – and what is reasonably possible within Drupal core.

At the same time we started investing in core aggregator, our demands in aggregation escalated. With every new client project we undertook, we contributed critical changes to FeedAPI and launched many new plugins for it. These contributions made the existing deficiencies of FeedAPI clearer and the gap that needed to be closed with its successor – Drupal 7’s aggregator – wider. We are now at a point where we cannot guarantee anymore that the slow moving and remote solution of a “Great New Aggregator for Drupal 7” will address our needs. Piling on extensive changes without simultaneous use or proper review is not the recipe for a solid module.

Therefore, we need to adjust our goals. Instead of replacing FeedAPI with Aggregator in Drupal 7, we will aim to develop a successor for FeedAPI in contrib. This approach will give us a chance to let the base of the FeedAPI module mature and give us more leeway for new features and adjustments.

Yesterday President Obama spoke about preparing for another potential outbreak of the H1N1 flu this fall H1N1 Influenza Preparedness Summit, a follow up to the workshop Eric attended two weeks ago at NIH about information sharing around swine flu. Obama said that the government is working to avert a crisis in two ways – through good communication and vaccinations. The full text of Obama’s speech is here, and below is a look at the main points he emphasized.

With the second wave of H1N1 likely to hit and peak before most people can be immunized, communications are even more important. Using decentralized communications tool to prepare for a possible H1N1 pandemic were a big emphasis at the meeting two weeks ago, with Chris Allen suggesting some brilliant ideas on creating effective, replicable, open source tools that can go on to be used wherever they’re needed. The Health and Human Services agency is already testing out decentralized communications efforts, such as with it’s YouTube contest to create PSAs about swine flu.

This weekend I’m headed to State of the Map 2009 , the 3rd Annual International Open Street Map conference in Amsterdam to present on the recent import of over one hundred thousand miles of United Nations road data in Africa, part of the work done by Development Seed's Spring 2009 GIS for Humanitarian Relief Team.

The talk has three main goals. First, I want to talk about why open GIS data is so important to us at Development Seed. Second, I want to provide a status update on the data import for roads in Africa that we did this spring. Finally, I’m most excited to talk about next steps we’ll be taking with this project.

We’ve been using maps for years now to tell compelling stories, visualize data, and help organizations better coordinate their work. In every mapping project we work on, the quality and range of data available has the potential to make or break the outcome.

Too often we run into problems where good data is squirreled away on someone’s hard drive, baked into a pdf, or released with licenses restrictive enough to make it unusable. In most of these cases, data silos waste the time and money of both the organization that creates them and the end user. By starting to break down these silos, Open Street Map reduces operational inefficiencies and makes the organizations we work and partner with more effective.

Now that the first six countries we worked on are more or less complete, it’s a good time to talk about what we’ve learned and some of the mistakes we made along the way. We spent a lot of time looking at screens like the one below, fingers crossed, hoping our data would be successfully imported. With more experience under our belts, I think we can help others avoid some of the problems we ran into.

Ahead of next week’s Open Atrium release and to highlight some DrupalCon Paris sessions about Open Atrium and Aegir, I put together a screencast that demonstrates how you can use Aegir to rapidly deploy Atrium sites. Check it out:

Also, here are the DrupalCon Paris sessions related to Open Atrium and Aegir, in case you’re interested:

• Automate your site maintenance troubles away with the Aegir hosting system with Adrian Rossouw
• Aegir: Build Once, Deploy often. Real life use-cases with Roel De Meester
• Open Atrium; Building a product with Drupal and the Power of Decentralized Features with Jeff Miccolis

Anyone who has developed a relatively complex Drupal site will be able to vouch that, while launching a new site is relatively simple, continuous integration becomes very tricky once the site has actually gone live. This problem becomes especially pronounced when there is more than one developer on a project, and when the project is being built using proper development methodology.

The following example will illustrate this problem more clearly, as well as explain the use case of the Context / Features / Spaces module stack that we are writing here at Development Seed.

This is a story of how Zak, Sara, and Ben are about to get screwed on a site build. But don’t worry, they find the Kool-Aid at the end. It’s called features.

Zak (a web developer) and Sara (a designer) are building a community site for their favorite indie artist (let’s call him Ben). Their original project plan dictates that the site will have a blog, a forum, and an image gallery. Zak has experience developing websites in Drupal, so they choose to use Drupal as the platform for their site. They set up a development server to allow them to collaborate and decide on subversion as a mechanism to store their changes.

To build their site, they:

1. Assemble a collection of contributed modules, namely views, cck, and some other lesser known ones.
2. Design and create a custom theme for the site.
3. Create a number of views and content types to handle the site content using the Drupal user interface.

This Friday, July 10th, development and technology folks will be getting together to talk about how international aid can become more transparent, open, and collaborative at Open Development Camp. At the event, people will be discussing initiatives already underway to make development work more transparent, as well as some of the larger topics behind it like data standards, data accessibility, data visualization and collaboration tools, and what this all means for the field.

It’s great to see this event happening and for it to be pushed forward by large development agencies like the World Bank, Development Gateway, and USAID itself through the Global Development Commons. From our team, Eric, Will, and Alex will be there to share some of our thoughts and experiences about opening up data and working with data from aid agencies.

The event is sold out, but you can follow what’s happening on twitter at #opendevcamp. Also, we’ll be tweeting about it from @developmentseed and there’s a Ning community set up where you can get involved. Lastly, there’s a happy hour before the event on Thursday if you want to get a sneak peak and meet some of the people involved in this.

More information on Open Development Camp is available here.

Happy fourth of July! We hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend, celebrate Independence Day well, and is well rested and ready to start another week. There are several fun technology events happening this week in Washington, DC. Here’s a look at the events that caught our eye this week.

All day, Ongoing

Maps in Our Lives: The Library of Congress is hosting an exhibit this summer of its collection of historic maps and those from the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping. One intriguing aspect – part of the exhibit will show historic maps overlaid with new GIS data to show how things have shifted (or not shifted) over time. The exhibit will be up for most of the summer, and it certainly sounds like one to catch.

Tuesday, July 7

7:00 pm

Washington DC Python July Meetup: If you’re a Python developer, or think you want to be, come out to this meetup to chat with others who use Python, get coding tips, and see some examples of what’s being done with the it.

When you’re keeping tabs on an event like the upcoming election in Afghanistan, a basic street map that plots news stories is quite useful. But what could you do with a map that plots those news stories over voting regions that are shaded by poverty rate, literacy rate, or another human development indicator? The effectiveness of a map increases drastically when you add specialized data to the base layer. In this case, not only would you see the hot spots of activity, you could identify possible explanations for the activity.

The maps we’re familiar with are powered by tile sets – collections containing hundreds of thousands of individually rendered images that stitch together to form a larger map view. Tile sets are useful because they allow users to pan and zoom around a map with a web browser, but creating and maintaining a tile set is challenging. Tile generation demands a considerable amount of computing power and can take days depending on the size of the region being rendered. Finished tile sets occupy many gigabytes of disk space, making storage and distribution difficult.

With the help of Amazon Web Services, we’re building an infrastructure capable of generating beautiful interactive maps quickly. We’re using four Amazon services in this workflow: SQS (job queuing), EC2 (tile generation), S3 (storage), and CloudFront (distribution). The figure below illustrates the design.

This week is a short one for most with Independence Day giving many of us in the United States a three day weekend. Typically for the 4th of July in Washington, DC you see a lot of people leave town to celebrate, while the tourists flood in to do the same. But if you are in town this week and weekend, there are some fun things happening with Artomatic celebrating its last week of exhibits and shows, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival going on for a second week on the Mall, and of course the fireworks on the 4th.

In addition to being a short week, it’s also a quiet one in technology. There are just a couple events on our radar this week, which you can see below. For a full list, check out DC Tech Events. Have a great week, and enjoy the holiday weekend!

Tuesday, June 30

7:00 pm

Online News Association Meetup: This month’s meetup for online media folks will feature a panel on government 2.0 where people working in this area will discuss what’s being proposed and acted on, and will showcase some of the apps, ideas, and technology being developed to improve government transparency and collaboration.

Wednesday, July 1

6:30 – 9:30 pm

Northern VA Drupal Meetup: If you’re a Drupal developer, wannabe Drupal developer, or just want to learn more, check out this meetup. It’s a great chance to get to know people working with Drupal, see what’s possible with the platform, and get answers to your questions. The floor will be open for short presentations, so consider talking about the latest Drupal project you’re working on.

Recently FeedAPI 1.7beta2 was released, and this new release has Drush support. Drush, in a nutshell, lets you handle your Drupal instance with standard unix command line tools (DRUpal SHell), and with Drush support now in FeedAPI, you can better control your feeds. In this post, I'll introduce you to a way to refresh your feeds faster and more efficiently.

This method is only useful when your Drupal site runs on a VPS or a dedicated box, otherwise you cannot really use Drush at all. The script uses multiprocessing and starts refreshing four feeds at once. However, it's not a true parallel since the next four feeds will only start refreshing after all of the four previous feeds are finished. You can also adjust the number of feeds that you'd like to start in a round. The script is basically an infinite loop, but don't worry, it won't eat up all your server resources. If all of your feeds can be refreshed in a short period of time (900 seconds, configurable), the script will wait a bit before it starts from the beginning again.

Imagine a similar solution in pure PHP. It would have to be really hackish because of the lack of parelell/multithreaded constructs in PHP. And needless to say, with this script you don't have to worry about memory limits and timeouts (you can have a separate php conf for the command line environment).

Here is the script: