Tom MacWright

tom@macwright.com

Recently

I went to Portland for State of the Map US and gave this presentation about OSM architecture. It was fairly well-received but the topic was too broad to have enough concreteness.

At Portland, we also announced and discussed the Knight News Grant that’s funding some OSM work. And so I’ve been pushing into that - just posted the first bit of information about the iD project, an editor started by Richard Fairhurst that I’m working on completing.

The action is happening in Richard’s git repo, and ~I’m also maintaining a demo instance~ for playing around (it’s far from complete). It’s exciting to be able to work on this project from the relative beginning, since we can learn the lessons of all past editors and think about making it fast & usable on every technical level.

It’s also being built with d3js, and so I’ve been working on making some of the simple parts, like a tiling engine and drawing functionality simple and usable.

Reading

  • Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems is a lot of simple and well-deserved startup creativity-bashing, but also a pretty good contrast with the recent past.
  • Travis Shrugged, also on the topic of ‘startups’ is a pretty convincing ‘connect the dots’ as far as the objectivist/libertarian side of tech.
  • Feist vs. Rural is one of the more interesting and lawsuits to read about on Wikipedia, with a strong ruling on current copyright disputes.

Making

OpenStreetMap Changesets:

OpenStreetMap Changeset Bounding Box Size Distribution:

I’ve updated my module pattern post with more information about memory size - it turns out that the module pattern increases memory consumption when you have many instances with their own function closures.

Happen and simple-statistics are now available through component, if that’s how you roll.

Listening

Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ has been on constant rotation. So has the Happiness Project by Charles Spearin.

I’m more or less gearing up for hmtpng next month, in which I’ll attempt to write & record an album in a month (or, more likely a half-month depending on schedule). Need to dust off the instruments, and dusty instrumental training.

Watching

Lynch: Fire Walk With Me, Eraserhead, Lost Highway.