Mark Torrance.com

Google Maps API and Greasemap

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 21:08:27 -0800

The Where 2.0 conference I've just been at was quite fun, and inspirational. Among other announcements, Google introduced their new Google Maps APIs. This, plus all the "mashups" that showed hacked versions of Google Maps used in conjunction with other sites, and Tim O'Reilly speaking about "Web 2.0" involving users using open web technologies to "remix" other sites, inspired me to create Greasemap.

Technorati Tags: greasemap, where_20, geolocation, geospatial, maps, googlemaphacks, googlemapapi, googlemap

Greasemap is a Greasemonkey-based plugin for Firefox that automatically adds maps to the top of pages containing either geotags (GeoURL or other standards), or regex-recognizable addresses. It works by parsing each page you visit, from Javascript, looking for addresses or other patterns that correspond to locations. If it finds any, it embeds in the page a new toplevel IFRAME at the top, which loads content from www.vinq.com after sending the addresses. This "greasemap.html" web service on Vinq.com attempts to geocode the addresses, then combines them with any lat+long coordinates provided in the page, and embeds one or two Google Maps using the Vinq.com Google Maps API Key (since the iframe comes from Vinq).

I did this more as a proof of concept than anything, though I have already found it useful on sites such as switchboard.com, whitepages.com, and www.apple.com/retail . If a page includes just one address, currently Greasemap shows 2 maps -- a width-limited one at left that is more zoomed out, to show context, and a wider zoomed in one at right.

The Greasemap page lists some of the improvements I plan to make to it, but I also welcome your feedback and suggestions at info@vinq.com

Printed Photo Album with Apple Pages

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 23:49:57 -0800

My father-in-law has impressed our whole family recently with beautifully printed photo album pages he produces on his home color printer. These include attractive captions, background colors + patterns, frames around each photo, and often large page captions or titles. He's producing them on a PC; I'll find out what he's using and add that as an update to this article.

I'm a longtime Mac user, and I find Apple iPhoto to be great for just about everything else about photo management, but for printing these multi-picture-per-page albums, it doesn't really offer a solution. They have a great system for printing books, but require you to pay Apple for the binding and printing.

Technorati Tags: iPhoto,, apple, pages,, photo, album

Store Wars

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 20:10:35 -0800

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away... I had to blog about this, though I know it's already spread far and wide on the Internet at this point. Store Wars is a hilarious send up of Star Wars, but with the theme of organic vegetables vs. the "empire" of irradiated, chemically enhanced, and factory-processed foods. A great movie with a great message; what more could we want for free? View Store Wars

Technorati Tags: StoreWars

On Intelligence

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 12:08:26 -0800

I read Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence during December 2004, and haven't stopped thinking about it. It really reawakened in me a longstanding goal I've had to understand more about how intelligence works, how the human mind achieves intelligence, and ultimately to attempt to build intelligent agents.

I did my undergraduate work at Stanford in Symbolic Systems, working with Nils Nilsson, Yoav Shoham and Matt Ginsberg. I studied in the Ph.D. program at the MIT AI Lab with Lynn Stein and Rod Brooks, where I wrote my Master's thesis on a simple autonomous robot system with a basic natural language interface: Natural Communication with Mobile Robots.

I think intelligence needs to be embodied. I think many of the lowest level ideas we take for granted are metaphors which are grounded in our perceived interactions with the physical world, as in Metaphors We Live By. Hawkins' observation that much sensory input to the brain is converted into similar temporal sequences of cortical firings, and his theory that our brain incorporates pattern-recognition capabilities which can work across many different kinds of sensory input and patterns in similar ways, helps to reinforce this idea. It might be possible to build an agent which grounds its concepts in other ways (Cyc?), but I think building an embodied intelligence is more likely to result in a conversant intelligence that works more like the way humans do.

I recently attended a discussion held by SD Forum where Barney Pell, Steve Jurvetson and Konstantin Guericke spoke on a panel about the book On Intelligence. It was a lively and interesting discussion, covering topics from the originality of Hawkins' theories to the value of basic science research to the possible sources of funding for this new generation of mind-simulation research.

Technorati Tags: on_intelligence, ai

Performance Measurement

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 14:48:55 -0800

Since 1993, I've built a fair number of interactive web applications. One of the most important areas where my company Vinq differentiates our work is by delivering truly stellar performance and interactivity. This article will cover a few of the techniques we use to evaluate and improve the performance of applications we build.

Later I'll follow this up with another article about some of the specific bottlenecks we've found, how we diagnosed them, and how we set out to improve them.

Technorati Tags: perl, mason, performance tuning

Dotproject

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 11:39:15 -0800

We spend a lot of time managing the projects we implement for our clients. We find ourselves managing tasks, tracking bugs, planning releases, setting priorities, and needing overall reporting. We have as many as 8 developers + 2 QA testers/engineers working on these projects, and 3-4 external customer-employees + our internal project/product manager; coordinating their efforts on a list that has included over 1600 individual tasks over the past year has been a challenge.

We searched for a tool that would let us manage this work with a useful level of detail and process flow. We wanted all of these features:

Project level reporting with deadlines and priorities
Tasks and assignments
Reporting for customers and for product/project managers
Time logging for billing
Bug tracking with CVS integration
Release management
Monitor external customer feedback

Welcome to MarkTorrance.com

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 11:01:01 -0800

Hi! After a healthy dose of nudging from Barney Pell, I finally decided to start writing a weblog.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm an entrepreneur, company-builder and serious Perl/Web hacker. I'm currently the founder and Principal of VINQ, a consulting company focusing on the creation of large-scale interactive web-based applications such as KnowledgePlex.org and DataPlace.org. Both of these applications were designed and built by Vinq (and our subcontractors Placebase and onlinefocus) for our customer, Fannie Mae Foundation. I was previously the founder of StockMaster.com, the first financial service on the web, which we sold to Red Herring Magazine in March, 2000.

I plan to write about both business and technical issues, and hopefully to help some readers imagine new possibilities in the creation of their own large-scale web projects. I'll start later today with a technical article about the performance tuning I'm currently working on for our new version of DataPlace.