Blog

Night Hawk Recap

16th August 2014

First blog post from my new apartment, moved in earlier today!

So what happened to my “most awesome idea in the history of ice cream!”?

To make the story short, my GPS watch didn’t arrive in time, so it didn’t work at all. It’s sad but the race didn’t go to well for me anyway.

Positive Thinking!

Okey, I got some new friends which is always nice! It was a great and social event(whichin this case means “lakanskräck”). I’m coming back next year and probably I will also go to another event(three days) in Oslo during 2015. I got my new GPS watch now ;-)

The full moon at Holmenkollen.

The men's night mass start.

A picture from the forest during the night relay.

A picture picturing lot's of people eating strawberries.

Can you find me in the fourth picture?

All above photos by Aapo Laiho.

Norway Open data and Night Hawk

23rd June 2014

I’m just about to order a Forerunner 210 GPS watch because I have lost my best running watch and I’m in need of one for the orienteering. In august I’m going to Holmenkollen in Norway to participate in the orienteering relay Night Hawk and last year the Norwegian government decided to release tons of Geo data under CC BY 3.0 ,this data includes height data(DMT) for a major part of Norway (Source (in Norwegian)).

I think you know where I’m heading!

Just think about the amazing visualization I will be available to render! First the DMT rendered with WebGl in 3D, then the orienteering map as a layer on top of that and then the GPS track on top of that(Probably I need to write some custom GeoJSON solution) with the possibility to watch my lap! I can find some “How to write” issues in my idea right now but I leave them for later.

To make it even more cool I will try to lend a GoPro Hero so I can sync a video from the forest with the 3D map(The Headlight is a issue there but it’s a small issue).

Get it, It’s the best most awesome idea in the history of ice cream!

OMapMapper Plans

30th May 2014

If you have been reading my blog time to time you know about OMapMaper, my project with the goal to in one week develop a fully working web app. OMapMapper ended up being a app for browsing your orienteering maps by location and sharing them online. It's not to simple to setup and it should not be used on a shared server. When the project week was over I had no intention to do any major improvements to the app, but things changes and now I got new ideas and feature concepts.

The new concept is about making OMapMapper just as simple to setup and use as Wordpress. Right now OMapMapper has some major issues.

Security

It does not have any "public/shared view" and have no restrictions such as accounts.
The admin interface is the only interface and no password is required.

Usability

Not responsive(at all).
The export feature allows you to embed locations/maps, but requires that you update your embedded map each time to keep it up to date.
Does not support more then one user and if you tries to setup more then one copy of OMapMapper on one server you will probably be forced to modify the source.
It's "hard" to setup, you will need some knowledge about Databases and SQL.

The new concept introduces support for multiply users/accounts so that people can share server/web host. It will be responsive! It will have a full featured GeoJSON API so that you can embed the maps with no need to update anything. It will be simple to setup(just as Wordpress).

I don't know when I will do this, I have tons of plans this summer, I'm going to do orienteering in at least three countries, I will hopefully launch a private web service and I'm moving from home to study technics and orienteering. But I will get the time because this time my goal is to get the project done in three days not seven as last time.

The AWW Library

7th May 2014

I’m not a big fan of jQuery, but I do many AJAX calls. Most time I just write the AJAX calls straight into my code, it works fine! :-) Some days ago I did some work with WebWorkers(Get it, it’s good stuff), as in many of my tests I’m adding jQuery to do things just a bit faster(by that I mean my coding speed). I ran into the issue that I can’t use jQuery in a WebWorker, and writing it the XMLHttpRequest way for all my future WebWorker tests? No thanks.

You already know what I did next.

I do now that there is tons of small AJAX libraries in the wild, but not to many that’s below two kb in size, works with WebWorkers and most important made by me ;-)

AWW

Minimal AJAX requests for WebWorker usage.

<2kb compressed
IE 7+
Can’t be more simple
Made by some weird human :-)
Open source

Say hello to AWW.ajax(), AWW.get() and AWW.post().

Simple example:

AWW.ajax({
  url: "http://filltext.com/?rows=10&business={business}&location={city}&pretty=true",
  success: function(data) {
    document.getElementById('results').innerHTML = data;
  }
});

WebWorker example:

importScripts('../../aww.js');

getData();
setInterval(getData, 1000);

function getData() {
  AWW.ajax({
    url: "http://filltext.com/?rows=10&business={business}&location={city}&pretty=true",
    success: function(data) {
      postMessage(data);
    }
  });
}

For the full working examples see the “tests”(NOTE: You will need a web server to run the WebWorker example).

It’s very easy to learn just by reading the code.

If you would like to explore AWW a bit deeper check it out on Github.