Thursday, August 20. 2009

State of the Cloud

Anna Liu, associate professor in services engineering at the University of New South Wales School of Computer Science led the study of Amazon's EC2, Microsoft's Azure and Google Apps. It simulated 2000 concurrent users and measured response times and performance indicators. The bottom line: "infrastructure-on-demand services offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft suffer from regular performance and availability issues."

- C|net

San Francisco Opens its Data Stores

Yesterday Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, who is running for governor of California, announced a new website, datasf.orgthat offers datasets of all kinds about the city by the Bay. It's a bit of a jumble, with data in several formats (and unlike data.gov, no option for .csv, shape or KML). Still it's a start. I'm wondering if "peer pressure" from leading cities can push such an effort to grow across the U.S.?

- TechCrunch article by Newsom on the effort

Update: Michigan Legislator Hopes to put UP on the Map for Good

The legislation was approved 106-0 Wednesday in the Michigan House and heads next to the state Senate.

- AP via Fox 28

--- original post 7/15/09 -------

Michigan is challenged since it's a "two part" state. The Upper Peninsula often get left off, or added to another state or province. So, Rep. Michael Lahti, a Democrat from Hancock in the U.P. has proposed legislation to be sure it's included in all state produced maps. So far the bill passed a house committee.

- AP

Google Doubles Potential Map Makers; Shares Africa Data with NGOs, Non Profits in Africa

MG Siegler at TechCrunch describes Map Maker as a "wiki style" Google Maps and that's about right. The latest announcement from Google ups the number of countries in which people with accounts can add and make changes to the map database. These may or may not make it to the actual online maps.

More interesting is this tidbit, which Google reached out the Siegler to share - which seems to have gone unnoticed: Google is "extending our Kenya pilot and making the entire dataset of Africa fully available for download by non-profits, government agencies and individuals to create and enhance their own non-commercial map-related projects. More details are available on our download site." It's an interesting license but I'd still steer people to OpenStreetMap for a more open one.

- Google Lat/Long Blog post

Mac-based Ortelius "Map Illustration" Software Launches

The MapDiva blog announces the official launch of Ortelius, "map illustration software for Mac OS X." A free trial is available and there's a special price until Sept. 30. MapDiva was founded in 2008 by Graham Cox and Jill Saligoe-Simmel. Jill Saligoe-Simmel was Executive Director of the Indiana Geographic Information Council, Inc., and on the NSGIC board, which is why the name may be familiar.

GPS Drawing Ten Years Later

The New York Times "Style" section hosts an article on the latest in what I know as GPS drawing - that is, navigating on earth so as to draw an interesting picture when the GPS captured route is viewed on a map. The term, created by Jeremy Wood is nearly a decade ago. He hosts gpsdrawing.com, where I first heard about the practice.

There are those who do it for fun, to raise money for charity and then there's this: "Last fall, researchers from the University of Arizona took members of the school’s nutrition club to a football field with GPS units to walk outlines of images with fitness and health-related themes — a carrot with a bushy top, a flexed bicep, a fish. As part of a $1.5 million grant from the Department of Agriculture, the researchers plan to use GPS drawing to help fight obesity by luring children into fitness with technology."

- Hat tip to reader Duane for the link