Sjors

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

One of the questions in the student evaluation of the Google Summer of Code reads:

If there was one thing you wish you had known before getting started in Summer of Code, what would it be?

It is a very typical evaluation question and we all sortof know what it means and how to answer it. However, if you insist on thinking about it – and this is very acceptable behavior in some circles – it is actually a very difficult question.

I tend to read this question as follows: if you could meet yourself in the past, what would you tell your past self?

Well, I would probably give myself the final git repository, plus an external hard disk with as much of the interesting new information on the present day Internet as possible.

What would my past self do with that information? He would probably decide to use the outcome of a couple of footy matches to make a decent living. But apart from that, he would pick another project. Not because my project is uninteresting, but I really enjoyed that part of the project that I worked on. Continuing to work on this particular code base is really interesting, but not as interesting as it was to build it in the first place.

So my conclusion is: the more advice that I give to my past self, the less intersting his project would become. This is not a real problem however, because the information would provide him with many new opportunities.

I have the same view on Sudoko puzzles. A friend of mine wrote a computer program, while he was drinking beer in the pub, that could solve a lot of these puzzles. Many fanatical puzzlers would never consider using such a program; it would take away the fun.

I completely disagree with them. Now that my friend has releaved the world of The Sudoko Problem, mankind can move on to solving new problems.

I do not understand why people take such pleasure in creating artificial problems and then solving them over and over again, when there is an astonishing abundance of problems already out there waiting to be solved.

Just to make an even bolder statement: anyone who spends even a minute a day solving problems that have already been solved, should feel really guilty about climate change, poverty, diseases, slow public transport and millions and millions of other problems. Well at least, I tend to look at my own behavior from that perspective. All that without losing the ability to enjoy live; that is the real tricky part.

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Although there are still a couple of days left until the official Pencils Down date of the Summer of Code, I am now officially putting my pencil down because I need to catch a train to Adelaide tomorrow morning.

I guess this really marks the end of my student period; even though I graduated in June, this project allowed me to feel like a student just a little longer. Sniff, now I really have to enter the big scary adult world.

But first I will go on a trip for two weeks to see Adelaide, the Ghan train, Darwin and Kakadu National park. It will be a very culturally diverse trip; from what I have  heard, Adelaide and Darwin are pretty much as different as it gets here in Australia.

Route profile demo by Lambertus

I am very happy to see that my application has found its way to an actual route planner website (see figure above)!

So what is next? Well, I will obviously have much less time to work on this project, so my highest priority will be to explain other people how to use and improve the application and how to install it on their own server. So don’t hesitate to mail me about that!

I have to keep this post short because I still have to pack some stuff and it is already late. But I do want  to thank some people of course. Thanks Google for sponsoring me (and for creating all sorts of cool and useful tools for my project). Thanks OpenStreetMap community for selecting my project, your confidence in me and your support. And of course, thanks Artem for mentoring me during the project and for being a great and interesting person to talk to in general!

These are just thankyou’s, not goodbyes. So see you soon!

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

This is the second time that I am living in another country for a while and once again I have stumbled into a huge problem that I believe is massively under appreciated by many. I need the internet, but it’s not as ubiquitous as you’d think.

Has anyone seen the South Park episode about this? The entire United States flees to refugee camps on the west coast where there is still a bit of Internet. People wait in a cue all day for only 40 seconds of Internet. Does that sound a bit ridiculous? Well if you are a homeless person without a laptop (and except Japan probably, most homeless people do not have one) and want to use the Internet, you’ll have to cue up at the State Library in Melbourne for 15 minutes of Internet (it takes about 1 minute to load gmail, so do the math…). And that is the best deal in town as far as I know.

When I see these people (probably not all homeless) I get the same emotions that most people probably get when they see hungry people in Africa. Of course, that is not fair or rational, but it’s just easier to emphasize with for me. I completely depend on the Internet for almost everything I do and it allows me to live a fascinating life. But those 15-Minute People, as I call them, have to do everything the old fashioned way: more time consuming, more expensive., less opportunities. For example, they have to make a phone call to book a flight; that adds at least 15 dollars, plus you can’t easily compare fares. They have to find a place to live through newpaper adds; most rooms are shared online, so they miss those. And they don’t have access to all sorts of job search websites.

I can probably find the best price and book a flight in under 15 minutes, but most people can’t; there are many important tasks for people need to sit down and focus a lot longer. 15-Minute People have a serious disadvantage here. How about adding two hours of Internet per day, for everyone, to the list of government responsibilities? Or shall we just wait and see what happens if we don’t?

Anyway, I’ve been one those 15-Minute People a couple of times during my travels. I take the Internet for granted, but I have been without it quite a couple of times at great costs to productivity. It is even worse if the situation is unpredictable; if you do know for how long you will be connected, or how long it will take before you are connected again. This makes it impossible to plan anything.

I spent six months in Slovakia and I would have some weeks with and some weeks without the Internet. At the office! And with no way of predicting what would happen next. Not very practical if your work is Internet based. But I guess people kind of expect that sort of thing in Slovakia (although I think it does not have to be that way).

The biggest surprise in this respect is Australia. I was completely taken by surprise at the terrible state of the Internet over here. I was expecting more or less 99% household penetration of Internet, free wifi at hostels, the usual, but I found the opposite. Hostels will gladly charge you 4 dollars an hour and it won’t be wireless either. Many homes, even with young people, do not have an Internet connection. And in general the Internet is very slow, has download limits(!) and is expensive.

Just a comparison: at home in The Netherlands I pay 30 dollars a month for my Internet connection, plus about 15 for the phone line that you need to have with it. For that money, I can download at 20 Mbit and there is no limit to how much I download. The best deal I could find here, is 50 dollars for the Internet plus 20 for the phone. That gets me 0.5 Mbit download and a 25 GB limit per month. So that is 40 times slower for almost twice the price and you get a download limit as a bonus.

So what is causing this? Well, let’s just say Telstra (the former state company) blames crushing government regulations and most others blame Telstra for acting like a monopolist. I leave the choice to you.

The good news is that people are not happy with that and there is a lot of work going on to upgrade Australia’s physical, and equally important, organizational Internet infrastructure. The other good news is that Australia has a pretty cool system that you can use to quickly switch between providers and that the business of connecting and disconnecting people seems to be a *lot* faster than at home (it took only 3 hours to disconnect from our old provider; these things take weeks in The Netherlands, months in Slovakia).

I hope I will have a working 24/7 Internet connection at home by the time I get back from the Google Developers day, my Sydney excursion and the Burning Couch festival next week. That would great for productivity and peace of mind!

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Every year Google pays students to do work for several open source software organizations. They call it the Summer of Code, although for people like me it will be the Winter of Code; see my previous post (English translation).

I will work for OpenStreetMap which is an effort to create a detailed map of the world with no nasty copyright restrictions. Like Wikipedia, they allow everyone to contribute to this map. I for example added a few things in my neighbourhood.

Groups of volunteers all over the world are traveling around with their GPS devices to map the world and sometimes an organization like AND donates their maps.

The objective of my project is to create altitude profiles for (bike) routes. For this I will use a global elevation map created by the NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).

Since the world is pretty big I expect to learn a lot about scaling a database application. Perhaps, if time allows and if I get an invitation, I could even outsource the scaling work to the Google App Engine.

I will store the SRTM data in PostGIS (spatial database extension for PostgreSQL). That will be my first time away from MySQL.

Another new thing that I want to try is the Git version control system: you can watch Linus Torvalds talk about it:

Of course, in the end it is all about one thing: the free T-Shirt! I will write more about my project later.