Thanks in advance.

I haven’t been keeping up with the Fire Eagle badge ever since I got my iPhone. There’s no ZoneTag for the iPhone and the Fire Eagle iPhone apps that are available just aren’t a compelling use case for my daily interactions. They feel forced. But i’ve been getting a lot of interesting emails from people using the badge and I just checked my access log. There are tons of people using the Badge. Very exciting. Here’s a great user story that reflects exactly why I put the badge together in the first place:

> I just wanted to thank you for the Fire Eagle Badge and let you know that I
> have what I think is a pretty interesting use case. My parents are sailing
> from their normal berth in Annapolis, MD to Florida and then on to the
> Bahamas this winter. I have been maintaining a blog for them with a map
> showing their whereabouts – updated in real time with their GPS coordinates
> via a cellular data connection. When they go offshore they will not have a
> data connection so they purchased a SPOT satellite messenger-
> www.findmespot.com – primarily for safety, but also for tracking. SPOT
> offers a proprietary shared map page, but nothing I could put on their
> blog. They do integrate with Fire Eagle, however, so I linked them to a FE
> account and put your badge on their blog so they can be tracked offshore as
> well.
>
> Anyways, thanks again. I’ll probably be tweaking the layout of the map in
> the coming days. I’ll be sure to let you knmow if I find anything
> interesting while playing.
>
> Sam
>

Thanks Sam!

You can see the blog here.

Sometimes you stumble across a piece of software that just changes the whole nature of the game. This is one of them. I’ve been dealing with Rails memory leaks for weeks now. Granted part of my problem is that I don’t have the time to devote to being a full time administrator, i’m too busy writing the code, but either way these leaks have been driving me crazy. I went so far as to install this blasphemous piece of software but outside of the unfortunate name and the innumerable puns it creates (let g-d control you deamons), cycling mongrel instances when memory usage peaks is no way to run a website.

I got so irritated that I rewrote the site in PHP. Yes, I did that. Looking at PHP code makes me tense up but PHP has very tight coupling with Apache and I can’t remember the last time anything I wrote in PHP ran out of memory. The process was made slightly more palatable by using CakePHP, which is a sad, sad MVC Rails-like framework in PHP. For every line of Rails I am used to writing, I write 12 lines of CakePHP. Shoot me now. But CakePHP never crashed with the same load and back end data store so I resigned myself to putting stability over my own happiness. PHP it would be.

Then, ok get this, THEN I find mod_rails! And it works, and it does exactly what it says it will do and it is such a cinch to install. It’s a tighter coupling with Apache and my site hasn’t crashed in a long, long time. And my site is fast. And I don’t have 16 little mongrel instances running for which I have to figure out memory allocation and it knows about Rails caching implicitly, I could go on and on. This module is the best.

The past week i’ve been working with the Plodt team as part of the the Twitter Vote Report project. Lots of buzz words in the previous sentence. I’m pretty excited about it. On election day, people will be able to send in their voting experience via SMS, Twitter, iPhone, Android and voice. Good coverage. We in turn will localize and visualize the data showing polling place wait times, issues with voting machines as well as positive/negative experiences with the whole voting process.

Also this past Tuesday I was a guest critic in Family Feud Dennis’ Designing Around Place class at ITP. Lots of great projects and always nice to come back. Dovetailing with the Twitter Vote Report, check out one of the projects from that class, The New Vote with fancy custom mapping tiles.

The FireEagle badge has been up for a week and I have users checking in from Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Moscow and Isle of Man. Oh also Iowa. Very cool.

I’ve been using ZoneTag to update my personal FireEagle location, which I figured out has a ‘continuous upload’ mode, so I don’t have to take an unnecessary picture to report my location. This has the unintended effect of making my badge perpetually current. This would be very eerie if I was updating my exact, instead of approximate location. I’d try updating exact location but the GPS kills my phone — plus it’s not so hot in the city.

On the accuracy end of things, my location badge is only as accurate as the service writing to FireEagle. In the case of ZoneTag, although I am Brooklyn Zonetag insists on putting me in “New York, NY”. Passing that information to Yahoo maps gives me a map of the Upper West Side. That still shows that I am in the five Burroughs area and not Iowa but I don’t like the misleading implication of the pinpoint map. One way around this may be to implement the “i’m in this general vicinity” map overlay box like on the FireEagle website.

Finally, i’ve always been interested in passively recording location so without any extra effort I can see all the places i’ve been the past year. I could do this with my badge except that it runs on a pull from the FireEagle API. It only requests my location if someone loads the page where the badge is embedded. So a log entry is inserted only when the badge is loaded. If I have changed my location ten times in the past day but my badge (embedded in my blog) has not been visited even once, those locations will be lost. To that end i’ve written a cron that periodically loads up my blog every once in a while so I don’t loose any locations. Now I can generate a dynamic places i’ve slept map.

Recently I ran into some XSS (Cross Site Scripting) restrictions:

Security Error: Content at http://foo/bar may not load data from http://bar/foo
Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Access to restricted URI
denied" code: "1012" nsresult: "0x805303f4 (NS_ERROR_DOM_BAD_URI)"
location: "http://bar/foo Line: 47"]

Javascript on host B was running from host A and doing an XHTTPRequest request to host B. So what to do? Well I found this article on using JSON to do cross domain scripting (and here is even more background) but it didn’t seem like the best solution since it wasn’t clear how cross browser compatible the solution was.

Then I realized that I could just have one Javascript embed and no remote code if I generate the Javascript on the fly using PHP (conceptually this is very similar to the JSON call). Doing

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://foo/bar.php"></script>

is totally valid. Embedded JS doesn’t have to have .js extension. XSS problem solved and cross browser compatibility retained.

After my unpleasant experience hacking up a WordPress plugin to display location within my blog, I decided to write my own Fire Eagle badge that isn’t associated with any particular service or CMS. Here is how it works: You authenticate against Fire Eagle, I give you a few lines of HTML, you insert the code anywhere you want. If you know what you are doing you can even hack it up. The map is optional. Four lines with the map, two without.

There’s no login on my end, I have no idea who you are. If you lose your badge, just make a new one.

Try it here. If it works for you (or doesn’t), let me know.

Update: I had to take the badge service down temporarily because of cross site scripting restrictions but I think those are resolved. If you’ve made a badge you’ll have to generate yourself a new one. Sorry about that. On the up side it takes a few seconds to do. thanks

Badge spotted in the wild:

I take a photo and my location is updated on my blog. This will really motivate me to take even more photos as I am getting a tangible added value from photo documentation.

This would be nice to have embedded in Facebook, as an iGoogle widget or possibly something much more lightweight that you could embed with javascript anywhere.

Also, unrelated — Jake at Local Projects has launched his City of Memory project, curated stories from the five boroughs. I had a small hand in this project a few years back, well worth checking out.

Is now on my blog (look to the right), in (mostly) real time. For real. I’ve actually incorporated Fire Eagle into my daily activity. A while ago I wiped out my N95 and decided that the extra hoops ZoneTag wants me to jump through to upload my images to Flickr weren’t really worth it. It was much simpler for me to use the native photo app and send MMS photos to Flickr.

Well I was right, without ZoneTag my photo uploading interaction was simplified, but I really missed having a photo’s location on Flickr. And I would get ‘where are you?’ comments on my photos, so my friends must have gotten used to ZoneTag too. Today I reinstalled ZoneTag and noticed the Fire Eagle integration. Well since i’m uploading photos w/location info on a daily basis, why not keep my location current? All I have to do to get that working is authenticate ZoneTag against Fire Eagle. No problem.

So far so good, but then how do I display my location? The Fire Eagle application gallery has a number of integration points (Loki, Dopplr, Outside.in) but all I wanted to do was display my location on a blog, not have to deal with yet another service. There is no Wordpress integration in the Fire Eagle application gallery, but I did track down a Wordpress widget Klaus Komenda wrote appropriately titled ‘I am Here’. After hacking at it for a bit (incorrect paths, outdated versions of the Fire Eagle libraries, adding support for older wordpress versions, etc.) I got it to work with my blog.

My integration is still a little busted up, the map isn’t showing just yet, but it’s a great start. Now all I have to do is go somewhere else, take a photo and see if my location badge updates. If anyone is interested in how I got this thing going, let me know. Maybe i’ll even write up a WordPress plugin of my own.

A couple of new code related developments this week. First off, now that we have the open net, walled gardens are discouraged and APIs/syndication is everywhere, it’s been a long time since I had to scrape anything. What’s more I always thought of scraping sites as a one off hack, I never considered that it could be a viable business model. But recently I had to write a tool that would programatically pull content from Kodak Gallery, a popular photo sharing site with no API whatsoever. To get the job done I used mechanize, which in turn uses hpricot and finally I used firebug for debugging. The whole process was surprisingly pleasant consider i’m picking apart html bits. I’ve always been cautious about relying on scraping but I suppose if you do it to a popular site they’re in turn cautious about changing their code.

In other exciting news, a few months ago I put my name on the SimpleDB beta list and I got an invitation on Friday. There have been a lot of great projects for ruby/rails in the space and even a toolkit from the New York Times. I’m really eager to integrate SimpleDB and figure out if it’s mature enough to roll into production.