[Maps] The Polygon Masking Wizard

I’ve long been a fan of Vasile Cotovanu’s polygon masking effect that allows you to highlight a particular area on Google Maps. Vasile has now released a wizard app that can quickly create the GeoJSON, KML, or Google Maps API polygon code needed to create your own polygon mask.

Geomask allows you to simply draw around an area on Google Maps and just press a button to generate the polygon to create this neat masking effect. You aren’t even restricted to one area and you can highlight as many areas as you want on the map.

The tool is really easy to use. I created a polygon mask to highlight the London Olympic Park and then created a map with the mask in under two minutes using Geomask (you can see the result in the screenshot at the top of the post).

Using a polygon mask is a very effective way to highlight a specific area on a Google Map. Here are a couple of Google Maps applications that have used a similar polygon masking effect to highlight regions on the map.


Der Bayerischer Wald is a great Google Maps guide to hiking routes, accommodation and events in the Bavarian Forest region in Germany.


Ourense en Verde is using the Google Maps API to map the natural beauty of the Ourense region in Galicia, Spain.
Author: Keir Clarke
Source: www.mapsmaniac.com

[Solved] How to use qemu-img to convert disk raw vmdk

Author: Admin
Source: fosshelp.blogspot.com

[Solved] How to Convert vmdk disk to qcow2 disk

Author: Admin
Source: fosshelp.blogspot.com

[Solved] How to Convert raw disk to vmdk disk

Author: Admin
Source: fosshelp.blogspot.com

[Solved] How to Convert qcow2 disk to vmdk disk

Author: Admin
Source: fosshelp.blogspot.com

[Solved] How to Convert vmdk disk to raw disk

Author: Admin
Source: fosshelp.blogspot.com

[Developer] The intriguing theory of Expert Beginners

I’ve been enjoying Erik Dietrich’s series of articles on the Daedtech blog about a phenomenon he calls the “Expert Beginner”.

Dietrich’s observation is that, while learning a new skill (such as computer programming, say), you might accidentally think that you had become an expert when in fact you were actually doing it all wrong. You just hadn’t noticed that you were doing it wrong, and nobody was around to point that out to you.

For whatever reason, software appears to be a field that is particularly prone to this sort of Expert Beginner situation, perhaps because we software types are often learning things on our own, rather than having the opportunity to be taught from an established body of knowledge.

Not only is the Expert Beginner full of bad habits, but even worse: should he at some point encounter somebody who has greater expertise, and can help educate the Expert Beginner toward improvement, this assistance is likely to be met by resistance, as the Expert Beginner will have to start by un-learning all of his bad habits, which he is naturally reluctant to do (since they have served him well so far).

Dietrich is an entertaining writer and I recommend the essays:

• How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner

  The Expert Beginner has nowhere to go because progression requires an understanding that he has a lot of work to do, and that is not a readily available conclusion. You’ll notice that the Expert Beginner is positioned slightly above Advanced Beginner but not on the level of Competence. This is because he is not competent enough to grasp the big picture and recognize the irony of his situation, but he is slightly more competent than the Advanced Beginner due mainly to, well, extensive practice being a Beginner.

• How Software Groups Rot: Legacy of the Expert Beginner

  Perhaps it’s a lack of automated testing. Giant methods/classes. Lots of copy and paste coding. Use of outdated or poor tooling. Process. It can be any number of things, but the common thread is that you have a person or people in positions of authority that have the culturally lethal combination of not knowing much, not knowing what they don’t know, and assuming that, due to their own expertise, anything they don’t know isn’t worth knowing. This is a toxic professional culture in that it will force talented or ambitious people either to leave or to conform to mediocrity.

• How Stagnation is Justified: Language of the Expert Beginner

  The Expert Beginner believes that he and his ‘fellow’ Expert have a simple difference of opinion among ‘peers.’ While it may be true that one Expert speaks at conferences about source control best practices and the other one runs the IT for Bill’s Bait Shop and has never used source control, either opinion is just as valid.

• Up or Not: Ambition of the Expert Beginner

  An Expert Beginner’s entire career is built on a foundation of cognitive dissonance. Specifically, they believe that they are experts while outside observers (or empirical evidence) demonstrate that they are not. So an Expert Beginner is sentenced to a life of believing himself to be an expert while all evidence points to the contrary, punctuated by frequent and extremely unwelcome intrusions of that reality.

• Self-Correcting Organizations: Fall of the Expert Beginner

  Following the career arc of Expert Beginners is really quite sad. In the early stages, one feels annoyed and a little indignant at advancement by luck instead of competence. As things progress, real damage is caused by poor implementation and wrong-headed approaches, resulting for a lot of people in stress, frustration, failure, and at times even lost jobs and failed ventures. And, in the end, the fate of the one that caused these things is probably poetically just, but hard to find happiness in. A person ill-suited for a role assumed it, caused problems, and then suffered personal hardship. It’s not a great story.

To my mind, what this boils down to, for a person who’s concerned with continuing to develop their own skills indefinitely, is: in order to improve my skills, I need to find somebody who can coach me.

You can always get better; you can always learn more. It’s just a matter of finding somebody who can help you improve, and putting in the effort to learn from that person.

Just don’t get stuck being an Expert Beginner.
Author: Bryan Pendleton
Source: bryanpendleton.blogspot.com

[Maps] Finding Food Trucks with Google Maps

Street Food App is a desktop, iOS and Android app for finding food trucks in a number of US and Canadian cities.

Currently the Street Food App can help you find nearby food trucks in Boston, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Columbus and Victoria. Each city includes an option to view the current location of the food trucks on a Google Map.

Each truck is displayed on the map with a green or red map marker, green markers indicate the trucks currently open for businesses and the red markers indicate that they are currently closed. Users can click on each food truck on the map to view a small review and the truck’s hours of business.

Also See

Tweat It - Google Map of food vendors in New York
Food Truck Maps - tracking food trucks in Los Angeles
truXmap - real-time location map of food trucks in Los Angeles
Author: Keir Clarke
Source: www.mapsmaniac.com

[Google] YouTube Search Experiments

YouTube experiments with some new search features. When you click a video from the list of YouTube search results, there’s a red progress bar displayed at the top of the page until the video page loads. The search box still includes your query when you watch the video. Here’s the new feature in action:

Another experimental feature shows a list of search suggestions when you watch a video and click the search box. The list of suggestions is probably generated based on the video’s title.


Click the homepage search box and YouTube shows a list of recent searches.

Here’s how you can try the new features (the red progress bar seems to be Chrome-only). If you use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+:

1. open youtube.com in a new tab

2. load your browser’s developer console:

Chrome - press Ctrl+Shift+J for Windows/Linux/ChromeOS or Command-Option-J for Mac

Firefox - press Ctrl+Shift+K for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-K for Mac

Opera - press Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-I for Mac, then click “Console”

Safari - check this article

* Internet Explorer - press F12 and select the “Console” tab.

3. paste the following code which changes a YouTube cookie:

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=jyDR-4Ljl_I; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

4. press Enter and close the console.

{ Thanks, Yu-Hsuan Lin. }
Author: Alex Chitu
Source: googlesystem.blogspot.com

[Google] Congratulations to the 2013 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholars

Dr. Anita Borg revolutionized the way we think about technology and worked to dismantle the barriers that keep women and minorities from entering the computing and technology fields. In her lifetime, Anita founded the Institute for Women and Technology (now The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology), began an online community called Systers for technical women, and co-founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. We’re proud to honor her memory through the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, established in 2004.

Today we’d like to recognize and congratulate the 30 Google Anita Borg Memorial scholars and the 30 Google Anita Borg Memorial finalists for 2013. The scholars, who attend universities in the United States and Canada, will join the annual Google Scholars’ Retreat this summer in New York City, where they will have the opportunity to attend tech talks on Google products, network with other scholars and Googlers, participate in developmental activities and sessions, and attend social activities. This year, the scholars will also have the opportunity to participate in a scholars’ edition of 24HoursOfGood, a hackathon in partnership with local non-profit organizations who work on education and STEM initiatives to make progress against a technical problem that is critical to their organization’s success.

Find out more (PDF) about our winners, including the institutions they attend. Soon we’ll select the Anita Borg scholars from our programs around the world. For more information on all our scholarships, visit the Google Scholarships site.

Posted by Azusa Liu, Student Development Programs Specialist

Author: Emily Wood
Source: googleblog.blogspot.com

[Google] Create Google Now Reminders in Google Search

Reminders are a new feature in the latest version of the Google Search app for Android. You can create reminders using voice search and Google Now will show notifications.

Now you can also create reminders from the desktop Google Search when you search for events. Use queries like [when is bonnaroo 2013?], [when is the first day of summer?], [halloween day] and Google shows a link that says: “Remind me on Google Now”.

Click the link and “Google Now will remind you 1 week before.” For now, notifications are only available if you use the Google Search app for Android, which also lets you manage reminders (delete reminders and set new ones).


{ via Search Engine Roundtable }
Author: Alex Chitu
Source: googlesystem.blogspot.com

[Google] Google Cross-Language Search, No Longer Available

Google removed yet another advanced search tool: cross-language search. It was available in the “Search tools” menu as “translated foreign pages” and it allowed you to find pages written in other languages.

Google automatically suggested a few languages for your query, but you could manually add other languages. Your query was translated into all these languages, Google performed multiple searches for the translations, compiled a list of results and translated titles and snippets into your language.

Here’s a screenshot from 2009, when Google Search added this feature:


“If you’re traveling and want to find hotels, restaurants, activities or reviews written from a local perspective, or if you’re just curious to find what’s being written about a company, product or topic in another language, give Translated search in the Search Options panel a try,” suggested Google at that time.

The feature was first available in 2007 as part of Google Translate, but the initial version supported a single destination language. “Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). If you’re looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type ‘wine tasting events in Bordeaux’ into the search box on the ‘Search results’ tab on Google Translate. You’ll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English,” informed Google.

It’s sad to see this feature disappear because it was very powerful and difficult to replace. It integrated Google Translate and Google Search, so Google performed multiple translations and searches just to shows you 10 cross-language search results.

Why was it removed? “The translate foreign pages feature is no longer offered. Removing features always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. You can still translate entire pages in Chrome. Streamlining enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people’s lives,” explained Google. Most likely, not many people used this feature.

I assume that most “search tools” features are rarely used and the same thing is true for other features for power users: advanced search, operators. They’re not obvious, they’re difficult to use and few people need them. As Google focuses more on answering questions, I expect to see fewer and fewer advanced search features and that’s disappointing.
Author: Alex Chitu
Source: googlesystem.blogspot.com

[Maps] 20 More Museums Added to Google Art

The Google Art Project is an amazing collection of museums, art galleries and works of art that can all be viewed with Google Maps Street View.

Today Google has added 20 more museums, 1,500 new high-resolution artworks and 16 Gigapixel images to the project. The Gigapixel images include “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. The new museums include the Fondation Beyeler Museum in Switzerland and the Monastery of St. John the Theologian on the Greek island of Patmos
Author: Keir Clarke
Source: www.mapsmaniac.com

[Developer] Some benchmarking principles

Here’s a nice slide deck on general benchmarking principles that I came across recently: Tokutek benchmarking principles

For hard-core perf types, there’s not much new here, but I thought it was worth passing along in case some found it interesting.

Among my favorite observationss from the slide deck:

• benchmark frequently, to catch performance regressions soon after they occur
• keep a benchmark history, for analysis of data over time
• use graphs and plots to help with data interpretation
• share benchmarking data widely (“developers love data”)

At various companies, at various times, I’ve worked with benchmarking teams, and it’s nice to see the slow-but-steady “systematization of knowledge” going on here, since some of these are hard lessons and it’s worth your time not to re-learn them yourself.
Author: Bryan Pendleton
Source: bryanpendleton.blogspot.com

[python] PyPy 2.0.2 - Fermi Panini

We’re pleased to announce PyPy 2.0.2. This is a stable bugfix release over 2.0 and 2.0.1. You can download it here:

http://pypy.org/download.html

It fixes a crash in the JIT when calling external C functions (with ctypes/cffi) in a multithreaded context.

Author: Armin Rigo
Source: morepypy.blogspot.com

[Maps] The Many Faces of Google Maps

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon that leads us to see familiar objects in random patterns. For example, when we look at aerial imagery of the Earth we might think we recognise faces in the topography.

onformative has created a computer program, called GoogleFaces, that scans Google Maps satellite imagery looking for patterns that humans might believe are human faces. GoogleFaces scans through one satellite image after another on Google Maps, sequentially along the latitude and longitude of the globe. After scanning around the world it then switches to the next zoom level and starts all over again.

As it scans each satellite imagery the GoogleFaces face detection algorithm records the latitude and longitude of any ‘faces’ it finds. The onformative website has a few examples of the faces already found on Google Maps, including the one above, found in the satellite imagery of Russia.
Author: Keir Clarke
Source: www.mapsmaniac.com

[Google] Google Checkout Discontinued

Google likes to discontinue products without waiting until it launches some proper replacements. Lately, Google closed products that were used by millions of people. There’s a race to destroy everything that was built by the old Google and build new products that are aligned with the most important features of the new Google: social and mobile.

Google Checkout is one of those old products. It was launched in 2006 as an effort to improve online shopping and to offer more value to AdWords advertisers. “One cool feature of Google Checkout is that you can buy from stores with a single Google login – no more entering the same info each time you buy, and no more having to remember different usernames and passwords for each store. To help you find places to shop, you’ll see a little icon on the Google.com ads of stores offering Google Checkout,” explained Google at that time. Google Checkout was free for merchants until 2008, then Google started to increase fees until it moved to PayPal’s tiered pricing. Then Google Checkout became less attractive.

Back in 2011, Google launched Wallet, a new product focused on mobile payments. It started as an Android app available for Sprint Nexus S phones that used the NFC chip to make credit card payments at physical stores in the US. Since then, the app started to support a few other phones, mostly from Sprint. Google Checkout merged with Google Wallet, but it still remained a distinct product focused on online shopping and available internationally.

Now Google announces that Checkout will be discontinued. “Merchants can continue to accept payments using Google Checkout until November 20, 2013. If you don’t have your own payment processing, you will need to transition to a different solution within six months. To make things easier, we’ve partnered with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to offer you discounted migration options. If you are a U.S. merchant that does have payment processing, you can apply for Google Wallet Instant Buy, which offers a fast buying experience to Google Wallet shoppers.”

Instant Buy is a simplified version of Google Checkout that has no fees because Google no longer processes payments. Instead, Google “passes a Virtual OneTime Card, a MasterCard-branded virtual prepaid debit card product that can only be used for the specific purchase for which it was issued. Using this card, merchants can process payments with their existing payment processor.” Instant Buy is tied to Google Accounts and it’s faster to use than the regular checkout experience, especially on mobile devices. Right now, Instant Buy is only available in the US.


Since Google Wallet is mostly a US-only service, users outside US will be limited to Google Play, other Google services and some web apps. Google has recently announced that Gmail users in the US will be able to send money using a new button from the Gmail interface. There’s also Wallet for Digital Goods, an API for in-app payments limited to web apps, and it works outside US.

For now, Wallet remains a product with limited availability and many disjointed features. The virtual wallet that stores information about your credit cards, coupons, loyalty cards, gift cards, tickets and makes payments frictionless is still a work in progress. Google has a huge opportunity to create a successful product for payments: it owns Google Play, it can integrate it with Android and Chrome, not to mention Google Shopping and Google+. Google now has the most popular search engine, online video service, ad network, analytics service, webmail site, the most popular browser and the #1 mobile operating system.
Author: Alex Chitu
Source: googlesystem.blogspot.com

[Maps] Tech Maps Around the World

Companies Near Me is a Google Map of tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The map includes options to filter the companies displayed on the map by location and by sector. The map is primarily focused on the San Francisco Bay Area but the developers say that they have plans to expand the site to include other tech hubs such as New York, Los Angeles and Boston.


Made in NI is a Google Map of Northern Ireland’s start-up’s, tech companies and co-working spaces.

Tech maps for individual cities are now being created for many locations around the world. However we don’t often see attempts to map entire countries / provinces. Made in NI is a nice attempt to map all of Northern Ireland’s burgeoning technology companies.

As well as mapping individual companies, Made in NI also maps wi-fi spots, code clubs and learning spaces.

Also See

Represent Map - a map of tech maps created around the world using the RepresentMap platform

Made in NY  - New York’s digital industry mapped
Represent.la - a Google Map of the burgeoning tech scene in Los Angeles

Tech Britain - UK tech map
Tech City Map - map of the technology companies and startups in east London
Cambridge Cluster Map - Cambridge’s high-tech sector

Madri+d Mapa del Conocimiento - a Google Map of Madrid’s research, technology and science companies.
Author: Keir Clarke
Source: www.mapsmaniac.com

[NoSQL] New Geo Features in MongoDB 2.4

Motivation

Geometric processing as a field of study has many applications, and has resulted in lots of research, and powerful tools. Many modern web applications have location based components, and require a data storage engines capable of managing geometric information. Typically this requires the introduction of an additional storage engine into your infrastructure, which can be a time consuming and expensive operation.

MongoDB has a set of geometric storage and search features. The MongoDB 2.4 release brought several improvements to MongoDB’s existing geo capabilities and the introduction of the 2dsphere index.

The primary conceptual difference (though there are also many functional differences) between the 2d and 2dsphere indexes, is the type of coordinate system that they consider. Planar coordinate systems are useful for certain applications, and can serve as a simplifying approximation of spherical coordinates. As you consider larger geometries, or consider geometries near the meridians and poles however, the requirement to use proper spherical coordinates becomes important.

In addition to this major conceptional difference, there are also significant functional differences, which are outlined in some depth in the Geospatial Indexes and Queries section of the MongoDB documentation. This post will discuss the new features that have been added in the 2.4 release.

What’s New

Storing non-point geometries

Unlike the 2d index, which only allowed the storage of points, the 2dsphere index allows the storage and querying of points, lines, and polygons. To support the storage of different geometries, instead of introducing a proprietary format, MongoDB conforms to the GeoJSON standard. GeoJSON is a collaborative community project that produced a specification for encoding entities in JSON. It has garnered significant support, including the OpenLayers project, PostGIS, and has growing language support for python and ruby.

Here are a few simple examples of GeoJSON embedded documents:

A BSON Document with a GeoJSON Point embedded in the geo field:

    {
        geo: {
            type: “Point”,
            coordinates: [100.0, 0.0]
        }
    }

A BSON Document with a GeoJSON LineString embedded in the geo field:

    {
        geo: {
            type: “LineString”,
            coordinates: [ [100.0, 0.0], [101.0, 1.0] ]
        }
    }

A BSON Document with a GeoJSON Polygon embedded in the `geo` field:

    {
        geo: {
            type: “Polygon”,
            coordinates: [
                [ [100.0, 0.0], [101.0, 0.0],
                  [101.0, 1.0], [100.0, 1.0],
                  [100.0, 0.0] ]
            ]
        }
    }

Note: A GeoJSON Polygon’s coordinates are an array of arrays of point specifications. Each array of point specifications should have the same starting and ending point to form a closed loop. The first array of point specifications defines the polygon’s exterior geometry, and each subsequent array of point specifications defines a “hole” in the polygon. Polygons should be non self-intersecting, and holes should be fully contained by the polygon.

Inclusion searches on a sphere

The new $geoWithin operator, which takes a Polygon geometry as a specifier, returns any geometries of any type that are fully contained within the polygon. It will work well without any index, but must look at every document in the collection to do so.

Intersecting geometries on a sphere

The new $geoIntersects operator, which takes any geometry as a specifier, returns any geometries that have a non-empty intersection with the specifier. $geoIntersects also works well without an index, and must also look at each document in the collection.

Better support for compound indexes

The 2d index can only be used in a compound index if 1. it is the first field, 2. there are exactly two fields in the compound index, and 3. if the second field isn’t a 2d index. 2dsphere indexes aren’t limited in this way, which allows us to pre-filter based on a non-geo field - which is often more efficient.

Consider the following queries: Find me Hot Dog Stands in New York state i.e. use a compound index: (business_type, location). Find me geometries in New York state that are Hot Dog stands i.e. use the compound index: (location, business_type)

The first query will be much more efficient than the second, because business_type is a simple text field, and greatly reduces the set of geometries to search.

Additionally, we can have multiple 2dsphere indexes in the same compound index. This allows queries like: “Find routes with a start location within 50 miles from JFK, and an end location within 100 miles of YYC”.

How it Works

Everything starts when you insert a geometry into a 2dsphere index. We use the open source s2 C++ library from google to select a minimal set of cells that fully cover a geometry. This set of grid cells is called a covering, and the size of the cells is dynamic (between 500m and 100km on a side) based upon the size of the polygon being covered.

fig 3 - A very low granularity covering of the entire United Kingdom

fig 4 - A fairly granular covering of the A4 around Trafalgar Square

Each cell in these coverings is now added to a standard B-tree index, with a key that is easily calculable by the location on surface of the sphere - more granular(smaller) cells will have the same prefix as a larger cell that occupies the same area of the surface of the sphere.

Intersection & Within searches

Finding geometries that may be intersecting or within a search polygon becomes as easy as generating a covering for the search specifier, and for each cell in that covering, query the B-tree for any geometries that interact with these cells. Once the list of possibly interacting geometries has been retrieved from the index, each geometry in checked in turn to see if it should be included in the result set.

Near searches

The near search provided by the $near operator is implemented by doing $within searches on concentrically growing donuts (circular polygons with with circular holes).

We encourage user feedback and testing on these new Geo features and are excited to see what the community builds.

Source: blog.mongodb.org

Skype 4.2 For Linux Released With Minor Improvements And Bug Fixes

Changes in the latest Skype 4.2 for Linux:

• add subscription status and link to the account brief view in the main window;
• increased the stability when logging in from a Microsoft Account;
• add a button to enable voice message from the options dialog;
• you no longer have to re-type your password when entering via “My Account” if you are already logged-in with the client;
• when sharing the screen in a multiple monitor setup, share the one where the call window is at the moment;
• add Messenger predefined group when logged-in with your MSA account;
• create an entry point to hold a conference call from the conversations view;
• new sizes for the Skype icon.

Among the bugs fixed in this release are:

• artifacts in the contact list after changing topic or picture in a multichat;
• searching in the chat window when ‘Ignore poster names’ is set might lead to client crash;
• Skype crashes on attempting to stop sharing selection being in a call on hold
• disabling Birthday notification doesn’t work;
• clicking on certain contact request notifications lead always to the wrong contact request against ‘live’ contact;
• call hold overlay icon goes away giving the idea the call is resumed when is not;
• do not show the login window if autologin plus start Skype minimized are enabled;
• do not allow more than 256-length conversation’s topic;
• more.

Download Skype 4.2 for Linux

sudo apt-get remove skype skype-bin

cd
sudo dpkg -i skype*.deb

sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins:i386

Author: Andrew
Source: www.webupd8.org