When both sides are equally right (or wrong), seeking compromise may be both appropriate and effective. But when one side is in the right - in this case, that of the courageous Arab protesters fighting for their freedom - the middle ground can be a dangerous place to be.
In May, Shanghai announced that a team of 4,000 monitor its surveillance feeds to ensure round-the-clock coverage. The south-western municipality of Chongqing has announced plans to add 200,000 cameras by 2014 because “310,000 digital eyes are not enough”.
Urumqi, which saw vicious ethnic violence in 2009, installed 17,000 high-definition, riot-proof cameras last year to ensure “seamless” surveillance. Fast-developing Inner Mongolia plans to have 400,000 units by 2012. In the city of Changsha, the Furong district alone reportedly has 40,000 – one for every 10 inhabitants.
They observed that residents of the compound burned their trash, instead of putting it out for collection, and concluded that the compound lacked a phone or an Internet connection. Kuwaiti and his brother came and went, but another man, living on the third floor, never left. When this third individual did venture outside, he stayed behind the compound’s walls. Some analysts speculated that the third man was bin Laden, and the agency dubbed him the Pacer.
The story is riveting, even if some of it may be speculative.
Operation Neptune’s Spear, as dramatic, effective, and incredible as the whole story is, was just one of thousands of operations run by US Special Forces every year — most of which are never reported.
This sums up why Obama & co. went with such a bold plan:
“Special operations is about doing what’s not expected, and probably the least expected thing here was that a helicopter would come in, drop guys on the roof, and land in the yard.”
“India has world-class information technology exporters, but imports lots of fridges; it has 15 time more phone subscribers than taxpayers; and in the coming years most Indians are likelier to be connected to a national, biometric, electronic identity-system than to a sewer.”
Here are the slides from my talk at the first ever Ignite Tampa Bay. It was a blast to watch all the great talks from such a varied set of interests and passions. Great turnout, too — we drew a sellout crowd out to watch.
As difficult as it is to prepare for Ignite (20 slides, 15 seconds each, autoadvancing), I would do it again in a heartbeat. I’ve essentially done zero public speaking, so it’s nerve-wracking for me to stand up in front of 100+ people and talk at all — but it’s something I’ve always wanted to get better at, so I just jumped in. Now that’s it’s all over, I’m glad I did! So when the videos are edited and live, I’ll post that, too.
Thanks to all the organizers and presenters for a smashing first Ignite!
“I don’t care who you work for, stop thinking of them as a boss or a company. Think of them as a client. Think of yourself as a business. And start thinking like that right now.
“One day—maybe soon—your client will tell you they no longer need your services. When that happens, the business of you had better be ready. Businesses usually need more than one client in their lifetimes after all.”
The commandos found Bin Laden on the third floor, wearing the local loose-fitting tunic and pants known as a shalwar kameez, and officials said he resisted before he was shot above the left eye near the end of the 40-minute raid. The American government gave few details about his final moments. “Whether or not he got off any rounds, I frankly don’t know,” said Mr. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief. But a senior Pentagon official, briefing on the condition of anonymity, said it was clear Bin Laden “was killed by U.S. bullets.”
“My biggest challenge isn’t winning over converts from my competitors: it’s explaining what Instapaper does and convincing people that they actually need it. Once they “get it”, they love it, but explaining its value in one quick, easy-to-understand, general-audience sentence is more difficult than you might imagine.”
Marco Arment on Safari’s “Reading List” feature, and what it means for Instapaper.
The folks over at Development Seed have been building awesome open source tools for mapping and GIS for a couple of years now. Their bread and butter products are really their Drupal tools and extensions, but the stuff I get the most out of, personally, are the mapping toolkits produced under the Mapbox brand: Maps on a Stick, MBTiles, and of particular note, TileMill.
If you’ve ever explored how Google Maps is put together, you’ll have noticed that it combines a Javascript map viewer (the “slippy map”) with static PNG image files it serves up to the browser as you slide around on the map. Creating tiles from GIS vector data — be it street lines, boundaries, lake polygons, or points representing cities — is a challenging task, but a surmountable one with the toolsets developed and nurtured by the OpenStreetMap community over the last few years. Mapnik (the renderer ultimately responsible for the pretty tile images) is fantastic for distilling vector and raster data into images — the downside being the learning curve to putting together style templates to define the layers, colors, line styles, and label typefaces for your maps, not to mention the difficulty of configuring the software and tweaking its performance.
This is where TileMill comes in to save your bacon.
Cartography made easy(er)
Trying to design Mapnik XML style templates by hand is totally insane. Especially for a cartographer-type just trying to make good looking graphics. Catch this snippet of the raw Mapnik style it parses to build the tiles:
Yuck. Logical, yet totally overkill for someone just trying to “make that highway dark blue.”
Full of nasty tag duplication and anti-DRY machine language. Editing this stuff is made better by using Michal Migurski’s cascadenik, a CSS preprocessor that turns a CSS-like language into that XML format, but it’s still tedious. You have to make your changes, run a tile server somewhere, setup an OpenLayers viewer, and wait for it to re-render your samples each time you iterate style changes.
TileMill combines all these tools into a map design suite. Extremely easy to use (with a rudimentary knowledge of CSS and spatial data formats), and so fast. Much faster than I ever had Mapnik and Postgres working together for rendering OSM data.
They’ve stitched together an array of open source components to build an incredibly useful tool for putting together great-looking interactive maps. I’ve even been using it as a replacement for making static map graphics; what used to be fodder for the very-frustrating-to-use ArcGIS Desktop. I essentially have no need of ArcGIS for data display, it’s only got the handcuffs on me for analysis work (but this is quickly disappearing day-by-day, too).
Smart storage formats
Another huge complementary feature/tool is the MBTiles format for exporting tilesets. I can build a map quickly, export the zoom levels I want to MBTiles, and view them in OpenLayers on a webpage. All tile images are encapsulated in a compressed SQLite database, so therefore very interoperable. Our iPhone “geo data app”, Maptual, now has support for viewing MBTiles datasets (but it’s not yet on the App Store). So this is fantastic for developing gorgeous, offline maps that can be used on iOS.
You can also read in GeoJSON, KML, and GeoTIFFs — smarter formats that I hope start to trump things like shapefiles and coverages in the future.
Hats off to the Dev Seed guys (and others) for building a great tool for us geographers. Stuff like this is making our jobs more interesting every day.
If you’ve ever explored how Google Maps is put together, you’ll have noticed that it combines a Javascript map viewer (the “slippy map”) with static PNG image files it serves up to the browser as you slide around on the map. Creating tiles from GIS vector data — be it street lines, boundaries, lake polygons, or points representing cities — is a challenging task, but a surmountable one with the toolsets developed and nurtured by the 
