Albin Larsson: Blog

Reading List Week 5/6 2015

Programming/Web Stuff

• Stack Exchange Raises $40m - What’s happening at Stack Exchange?
• Mapbox Open - How Mapbox do Open Source and Open Data, a must read, more companies should work against this!
• Desktop apps are back, thanks to the Web! - How packaged apps from Mozilla and Google together with solutions such as NW.js()node-webkit and Adobe Brackets-Shell brings web apps to the desktop.
• The many different kinds of time - working with parsing time/date data from different time zones, you hate time. Simply read more about it.
• C is Manly, Python is for “n00bs”: How False Stereotypes Turn Into Technical “Truths” - I can’t agree with the author, all “cool” startups is making languages such as Python and Ruby cooler then C. Who break/fix things fast in C?!

Maps

• TileStache, Generate Topo/GeoJSON Vector Tiles - Just what I was looking after for my latest project: Vector Map Time Slider.
• QGIS 2.6 på Svenska - It’s time for me to learn QGIS. Anyone knows a great updated book in English?

Watched

• MIT 9.00SC Introduction to Psychology, Spring 2011 - Has been watching this during travel since August. Now I have reached the end.
• Seminars from Wiki Loves Maps(yesterday) - History and maps fits my interests pretty well.

Reading List Week 3/4 2015

Orienteering

• Så här kan man sälja orienteringskartor - Using the “Hitta Orientering” project to sell orienteering maps(Swedish).
• Så använder man Karttapullautin - Karttapullautin one of the best tools to generate orienteering maps and a project that always is in need of more introduction(Swedish).

The Web

• Longdesc alternatives in HTML5 - As I have been saying before, I’m not a fan of the longdesc attribute.
• On Use of the Lang Attribute - How the lang attribute is used and how many that does so.
• Competing on “Chrome” - Is Spatran the final end to the spec browser wars?
• Booting to Node - a random vision - We got stuff like node-webkit/FirefoxOS(Boot2Geko)/Web OS… What about a OS running on Webkit/Node.js?

Other

• The History of Artificial Intelligence - 20 pages academic work, have fun!
• Developing AI - A study on self learning AI for games(Swedish/English).
• How to Write a Spelling Corrector - Why not? Could be a fun project.

Reading List Week 2 2015

I love reading other peoples reading lists, I think they are a great way for sharing content and finding new sources such as blogs. This is my first reading list I publishing so you will find some of 2014 best content as well.

Geo/Maps

• Sloving Earth Problems - a easy to read blog post about common algorithms in the spatial world.
• Turf: GIS For Web Maps - Small intro/showcase of the Turf JavaScript library.
• Tutorial: Upload Photos From Video - video to Mapillary.

Web Development/Programming

• On The Accessibility Of Web Components. Again - a must read for web developers looking into web components.
• Beginner’s Guide to R - Two years old getting started with R tutorial.
• Chartist.js, An Open-Source Library For Responsive Charts - When you are in need of responsive charts and don’t want to get your hands dirty with D3.
• Announcing Rust 1.0 Alpha - Rust 1.0 is coming.

Other Advanced, Cool Stuff

• Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions - This NN technology can help us slove the accessibility issue with user generated content!

The plan for today was MTB Orienteering, now the plan is skiing :-)

Holiday Project K-Samsök

My Christmas holiday started with me becoming sick, a terrible thing for the planned orienteering and workouts. So I decided to go for a little bigger holiday project the usually.

I have for a long time wanted to build something real with the K-samsök(SOCH) API, a API containing more then 5.6 million historical/archeology objects, including 2.3 million images and 1.6 million geo referenced objects.

Earlier last year I started working on a PHP library for the API, you will find the latest version at Github and Packagist. It’s written in PHP because I think more people will use it. You find some basic documentation in the README, some features such as object(), extending, and optional parameters is missing. I aim to publish 1.0 when the documentation is complete.

Until this holiday it has been very unstable and has been missing some key functionality. The best solution to make a library stable is to build something with it, so that’s what I have been doing.

169 000 of the images in K-Samsök are geo referenced the other ones is not. Many of the other images is photos. I have written a web app that allows you to search after photos thats isn’t geo referenced and simply geo reference using a location picker. A screenshot can be seen below.

The screenshot lies, it’s a week old but it’s still just as nice!

Most of the work is done, but some features is still missing:

• The own API for getting the user generated data.
• Scaling, the UI is powered by a lot of JS and its needs work.
• It should be more accessible to screen reader/keyboard users, the JS breaks it right now.

The aim was to “finish” it until the end of this holiday, but school begins tomorrow. The new aim is to finish it and 1.0 of K-samsök-PHP before the Wiki Loves Maps Hackathon in February!

Here is the source for the K-Samsök statics.