12 Nov 2016
Of Commits and Cogs
The Cloud: For A Rainy Day Reason
So, when I came to an abode hit by a ‘forced entry’, my heart sank. Not only was my trusty HP 450 - i3 15.6 Notebook missing but the pending ‘commits’ to my github file and blog repository. Oh, the GeoHipster sticker, and only one, on the lappy was gone too. A week later I got a 1GB RAM Machine donation from a friend. Without giving it a thought, my way back up was via Portable QGIS for spatial data work. With fingers crossed, I should be able to set up my blogging environment again (Aha! I had documented the procedure as a blog post).
From this unfortunate encounter i learnt that
- The cloud is there for a reason. Stay in the cloud to avoid a rainy day.
- Commit often. It’s a great backup.
The loss of my machine was a major drawback to the blogging commitment I had made. In it all though, It dawned on me from a friend’s loss that
You can steal a man’s resource or equipment but they’ll always have the idea and dream with them.
So I continued to blog, albeit offline.
The takeaway from this post is: Commit Often, Backup Often, Avoid the umbrella.
Drive The Cogs
Recently, well 2015-2016, I got to sit in on a number of meetings at my day job. I enjoyed the conversations, dialogue rather but, it all got me thinking. My greatest contribution was to do with spatial, after the fact, at the back of my mind I would be thinking how can all this we are discussing about be made into some cool system?
People around the table were mostly planners, higher management decision makers. Technical details is not on their lips but, technical gets my endorphins going. Technical, systems, database …
I’m forced to take out the magnifying glass and inspect the path I am treading.
The short of it: I enjoy pushing and seeing the cogs turn!
04 Sep 2015
On The Heels of The Pioneer Corps
Mapping the footprints of the men who faced the thicket, built drifts
across rivers, played the debut soccer and rugby matches in a country.
Background
So, as I was working on some project and the corresponding write-up for
a blog post, I got a ‘technology’ interruption. The key data for the
project was ready now and the other processing was still ongoing
TileMill, GDAL, ASTER.. what not.
CartoDB was the interruption and particularly
Odyssey.js. My (initial)
intention was to make a pannable map with an ‘old’ theme. Since this was
going to be a spatio-temporal kind of a map I decided to give Odyssey.js
a go.
Tire-kicking
So in one afternoon I had a reasonable visualisation going! Having a
CartoDB account was one of the requirements for this exercise and I had
long back signed up for a free account when CartoDB came on to the
scene. I went with the Torque Template on
Odyssey.js. The point data I
uploaded to my CartoDB account, simply added a ‘integer’ field to
represent time. It wasn’t difficult to figure out how the story could be
put together using Markdown. And after two hours or so….voila!
The Map Story
#postscript
- The experience I had with Markdown helped me to quickly compile my
story.
- I used a great tool
by Ben Balter to upload a document of the narrative I used to plot
the points in the visualisation to my GitHub account via the
browser!
- Apart from the expediency with which one can make a animated
visualisation of one ’s data, there’s somewhat a restriction on the
cartography front. Thus I will still continue with my initial
intention on creating an old map.
- Take away from all this is that there are great tools out there to
help one do great things with minimal effort.
08 Jul 2015
Map-Teleportation
In a matter of minutes I was
‘cartoported’ from 2015
to circa 1980. It all started when I turned the Google Maps
Navigator on. In a matter of 10 minutes I was totally disoriented as
to where I was going. This was exacerbated by the season of the year.
Sunset quickly turned to night. I only wished it was summer time where
sunset can be experienced at 20:15 and not 17:58. The sacrifice I had
made for some costly mobile data was about
to count for nothing.
The first mistake
was over-reliance on the battery life of a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini. At
35% you’d think you still have some hours of ‘play-time’ with the
gadget. Two hours maybe, but that’s before you turn on GPS with
‘Locating method’ set to highest. Add to the mix a bumper-to-bumper
traffic jam, and the ETA starts to increase, the distance falling at a
snail’s pace.
I am one for no fiddling with a gadget while driving (#itcanwait), so I
ignored the thing and enjoyed the diversity of cars passing left and
right. The battery low warming was drowned by the engine sounds all
around. Even if I had heard it, it didn’t matter because I had no in-car
charger.
Stop and Look
5km or less after off-ramping from the busy national road into an
arterial road, the phone went dead. Disorientation quickly set in. The
comfort of just listening to “in 500 m take the left exit” was gone. I
tried to remember; What was that road again that I was supposed to
branch to? Was I to turn right or left after the third street? I
quickly realised I didn’t remember and the information boards were only
confirming what I already knew and not the finer detail I sought - when
am I supposed to make that left?
As it turned dark, I stopped at a Caltex fuel/ service station. After
strolling the place a bit, I found the favour of a petrol attendant whom
a later entrusted with my trusty Galaxy. Ten minutes was the most I was
gonna allow myself to remain ‘deaf’. I had already accumulated
considerable time since my battery had died.
Cartography By Hand 101
The 10 minutes recharge (with the wrong charger) got me 15% of charge. I
had pen and paper ready as I switched the phone on. I wrote down key
contacts, turned on Location, ran the Maps app, searched my address and
did my sketching. I think I did well. You be the judge… 
I got my confidence back. Drove slower to as to glance at the sketch now
and then.
In all this I learnt that one with a variety of tools in their toolbox
is at an advantage.
#postscript
- You probably have looked at the ‘survival’, must-haves for your car
but the pen and paper do come in handy. So does some Cartography
skills.
08 May 2015
I recollect a time, seven or
so years back, I was at a place where I celebrated the successful
download of a 10MB installation file. I would compress it
(WinRar), chop it up and then save it to several
1.44MB diskettes!
We have progressed well since that time but I still find myself using a
thin pipe to tape to the internet!
A Tinkeror’s Necessity
For any ‘Tinkeror’ internet access is an indespensable assay but, the
average Joe has to tinker more to get ahead. With the boom and
proliferation of FOSS tools, ability to download at will is largely a
given, the means, quite the contrary - for my part of the world. The
connections to the interweb are there and the speeds are reasonable. The
challenge is what you trade for to get your data chunk. Some great
geo-toys even assume you’re always connected to the internet. Well,
thanks to initiatives like the Smart
Cape,
I can budget the 500MB data allocation per month to download only
critical programs to my ‘workbench’ or trusty S4 Mini mobile phone. But
wait, I need to
to have my latest blog post published, and that requires some data
currency. Thanks to git, I don’t need to push a file horde, just a
simple markdown text file and a few pics. The 150MB/ month I get from my
Service Provider atomises within four days of
receiving it - provided I decide to be conservative about visiting
Facebook. Trouble starts when I need that 729MB Landsat 8
file to check out what is happening this
rainy season with the once disastarous Tokwe-Mukorsi
Dam.
I could download just the bands I need but, even that would deplete my
monthly quota by (~59MB x 3) 35% for a true colour band combination.
This is too much to sacrifice just for one project. Work arounds have to
be fathomed, working with a D-Link 3G 21Mbps, USB Modem and Mobile phone
(Mobile hotspot functionality).
# Wait For Night
I’m sure am not the only tinkeror who sacrifices sleep now and then.
Work all night, Sleep all day, Wake up at 8pm really confused
–
@lyzidiamond
At night, one can get a
bit of reasonably prized data. I ran a USSD request on my service
provider (07 May 2015) and got ‘Night Express’, 1GB for R10. Remember
this will be chowed by a single landsat scene multiband image and would
cost me a few hours of snooze.
An alternative service provider has a similar data deal:
But there is a catch, I get to sleep a bit later. Yay! 
# Sip or Chow & Work
There are 101 restaurants and Cafes with ‘Free-Wifi’ access. But having
to trade 50MB/ day for your phone number and email address is a bit too
much. Don’t even start on the idea of moving from Cafe to Cafe until a
project is done. Sipping on a cup of coffe for two hours! Really?
Google Search is like a pencil and scrap pad. I transfer mental notes to
there. More often than not I have typed Define:{Mind drift idea here}
in that nifty search box. The thought that my browser is connected to
the interweb never occurs in all of this.
# A Mesh Of All
Well, a 40Mbit/s ADSL line in the house, enabling one to read ‘Done!’
after a repository clone command simultaneously with the lifting of the
finger off the ‘Enter’ key would be ideal. Until then, patience and data
budgets remain the order of the day for the average Joe.
17 Mar 2015
Having a working Octopress install on Windows 7 was not straightforward
for me. This post outlines the steps I would recommend to have a working
environment.
Important: There are upcoming changes to the whole of the Octopress
‘platform’ so please readup, but while we wait
…
Step 0: Pre-Requisite:
To have the environment going, you’ll need to have
git up and running. But to save yourself the
tears setting up SSH and permission stuff, I recommend you download and
install Github for Windows. This will
provide you with a ‘reliable’ command line interface. The correct paths
for applications readily setup for you.
Step 1: Install Ruby
My working environment used the installer, Ruby
1.9.3-p194
(This might be an outdated version but it works well). Download and
install the package, be sure to tick the check-boxes as shown in the
image below (This will save you “command not found” errors later on)
Step 2: Install The Development Kit
Download
DevKit-tdm-32-4.5.2-20111229-1559-sfx
and extract this to C:/RubyDevKit.
Step 3: Create/ Choose Your Repositories Folder.
Create a folder, something like c:/github. In here we’ll store the files
and folders which make up our blog, configuration files, posts, images,
etc.
Step 4: Setting Up The Environment At The Command Line
Now, using the Git
Shell that was co-installed when you installed GitHub for Windows, run
the following command:
$ cd c:/RubyDevKit
$ ruby dk.rb init
$ ruby dk.rb install
Thats should have the Ruby environment setup for you. Now continue with:
$ cd ..
$ cd c:/github
$ git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git yourusername.github.io
This clones the octopress repository. Now open the folder you cloned
Octopress to, viz yourusername.github.io. Locate the Gemfile and
using a text editor (I use Notepad++), open the file, replacing
https with http. This is important!
Now do:
$ cd c:/github/yourusername.github.io
$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install
If, after everything is done the word error does not appear on the
command line, you’re good to go. Still on the command line, continue
with:
This installs the default Octopress theme. I wanted a different
theme,
Justin-Kelly-Theme in particular, so had to run:
$ git clone https://github.com/wallace/justin-kelly-theme.git ./themes/justin-kelly-theme
$ rake install['justin-kelly-theme']
Step 5: Setting Up A Repository on GitHub
You probably already have a GitHub account. Logon to GitHub and create a
repository yourusername.github.io. Never mind the must have README
suggestion by GitHub. Copy your SSH clone URL to a text editor or
clipboard. It is similar to
git@github.com:yourusername/youruserame.github.io.git and you can see
it when you visit your newly created repository. So you should now be
having
https://github.com/yourusername/yourusername.github.io
Go back to the command line and run:
$ rake setup_github_pages
You will be prompted for a url: type
git@github.com:yourusername/youruserame.github.io.git
You can then continue on the command line with:
$ rake generate
$ rake deploy
Opening http://youruserame.github.io in
your browser should land you at your sparkling new blog, albeit, without
content.
Now it’s time for some content creation.
The Octopress Website has excellent
documentation to get you started. So head over there and get blogging.
After several tweaks to my blogging environment, I added a sidebar
twitter widget, Comments via Disqus and Search(Currently in the
works), to have a more appealing blog. Tutorials to do this are
ubiquitous on the web and since i didn’t struggle setting them up I saw
no need to include the howto with this post. I Include references below
for quick access.
“ Parting Quote ”
@erickndava, March 2015
If the problem is IT related in whatever manner, and you can’t seem to
find the solution, it’s probably on the internet - you just have to
google harder for it.
#postscript
> Murky waters. (tl;dr)
After I had initially setup my environment according to the procedure
outlined above, at somepoint evrything just broke. (could have been
some Windows update)I lost my debut post. Tried to setup again using,
Jekyll on Windows. That too had me
in circles of troubleshoot. So I did the whole thing over, following the
procedure here and Voila! I’m back in business.
Why another guide?
I chose Octopress and blogging on GitHub over other ‘easier’ methods for
a few reasons:
- This becomes my gentle introduction to git and GitHub
- I like to be in ‘control’, viz I enjoy seeing cogs of a technology/
implementation moving.
