Category: software

Gisgraphy

My boss stumbled across a project named Gisgraphy recently. A big part of what we do involves the need for geocoding. We have generally been using geocode.com for batch geocoding, but there’s a cost to that, and they only do US and Canada. There are many other geocoding services, but if you’re doing heavy volume, you’re generally excluded from free options, and the paid options can get expensive.

Gisgraphy is an open source project that you can set up on your own server. It will pull in data from freely-available sources, load it all into a local database, then allow you to use a REST web service to geocode addresses. A little testing with some US addresses leads me to believe that it’s generally accurate to street level, but not quite to house level. So, I’m not sure that we’ll want to use it for all of our geocoding, but it ought to be generally useful.

We decided to set it up on an AWS EC2 instance. We started messing with EC2 VMs for another project, and it seemed like EC2 would be a good fit for this project too. I started out with a small instance Linux VM, but switched it to a medium instance, since the importer was really stressing the small instance. I will probably switch back to small after the import is done. That’s one nice thing about EC2: being able to mess with the horsepower available to your VM.

Gisgraphy uses several technologies that are outside my comfort zone. I’m primarily a Windows / .NET / SQL Server guy, with a reasonable amount of experience with Linux / MySQL / PHP. Gisgraphy runs on Linux (also on Windows, but it’s obviously more at home on Linux), so that’s ok. But it’s written in Java, and uses PostgreSQL as its back-end database. I have only very limited experience with Java and PostgreSQL. And, of course, I’m new to AWS/EC2 also.

So, setting this all up was a bit of a challenge. The instructions are ok, but somewhat out of date. I’m using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on EC2, and many things aren’t found in the same places as they were under whatever Linux environment he based his instructions on. For the sake of anyone else who might need a little help getting the basic setup done under a recent version of Ubuntu, I thought I’d list out a few pointers, where I had to do things a bit differently than found in the Linux instructions:

  • Java: I installed Java like this: “sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk openjdk-6-jre”.
  • And JAVA_HOME should be /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-i386/ or /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64/.
  •  PostgreSQL: I installed the most recent versions of PostgreSQL and PostGIS like this: “sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib postgis postgresql-9.1-postgis”.
  • Config files were in /etc/postgresql/9.1/main and data files were in /var/lib/postgresql/9.1/main.
  • PostGIS: In his instructions for configuring PostGIS, the “createlang” command wasn’t necessary. 
  • And the SQL scripts you need to run are /usr/share/postgresql/9.1/contrib/postgis-1.5/postgis.sql and spatial_ref_sys.sql.

That’s about it for now, I think. I want to write up another blog entry on Gisgraphy, once I’ve got it fully up & running. And there might be some value in a blog entry on EC2. But now I have to get back to finishing my laundry!

WIndows 8, Mountain Lion, and Ubuntu 12

I have to do a 10pm web site rollout tonight, so I find myself at home with some time to kill. I haven’t gotten much of a chance to play around with Windows 8, so I decided to download the 90-day eval, and install it on my old laptop. I have the ISO downloaded and ready to go now. However, I had installed Ubuntu 11 on the laptop back in February. I haven’t really played around with it much since then, and I was ready to wipe it out, but when I turned it on, I got an update message letting me know that I could update it to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Well, I decided I’d rather upgrade the Ubuntu install on this laptop rather than wiping it out and starting over with Windows 8. It’s running now, and seems to be chugging along smoothly.

I did a little searching, and it looks like 12.04.1 was only just released. There’s an article about it on ZDNet, dated yesterday. And I guess the original 12.04 release was a few months back, based on the date on this Lifehacker article.

There’s been a lot of OS-related news lately, with Mountain Lion just released and Windows 8 nearing general availability. My old 2007 MacBook can’t handle Mountain Lion, so I’m sticking with plain-old Lion on that for now. I’m tentatively planning to buy myself a new MacBook Pro early next year, but I’m not really that worried about it right now. And I’m curious about Windows 8, but not that enthusiastic about it, given what I already know. I read an interesting CNET article this morning, comparing Mountain Lion and Windows 8. I think I agree with his conclusions, for the most part.

I will likely upgrade both my Windows desktop and laptop to Windows 8, when the consumer version is released, but I’m not that excited about it. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll play around with Ubuntu a bit more!

IPredator

I keep thinking that I ought to sign up for a third-party VPN service, so I can put all my traffic through an encrypted tunnel when I’m on public (or quasi-public) wifi. I meant to do something before I went off to San Diego, but I just didn’t get around to it. Some of the services I’ve seen are fairly expensive. These guys, for instance, are $15/month.

I just found one that’s reasonably simple and inexpensive: IPredator. It’s € 15 for 3 months, which comes out to about $22 US. So, about $7 per month. And it doesn’t auto-renew, so if I stop using it, I can just let the account go inactive until I decide to start using it again.

I have it set up on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad now. Setup was easy enough, and the speed seems reasonable. I need to do some more experimenting on that front.

I’m curious to see if it will work on the wifi at my office. We have a SonicWall security device on our network now, and it can be a bit agressive about blocking stuff. I’m not sure if it will let the VPN traffic through or not.

no more iGoogle

I’ve had my home page set to iGoogle for several years now, on all of my home computers. (Prior to that, I was using my.yahoo.com.) I just found out that it’s set to be discontinued. I don’t really understand why they’d be discontinuing something that can’t be costing them much money, and that entices people to have a nice big Google search bar on their home page. It’s not scheduled to disappear until late next year, but I decided to switch over to something else now anyway. The only reasonable alternative I could fine was Netvibes. If you go to their home page right now, they’re pushing their corporate dashboard stuff, but you can still sign up for a free account and use it like iGoogle. It’s pretty nice, though the page is slower to load than my iGoogle page is.

Windows backup weirdness

I hadn’t done a backup of my main home desktop PC in a while, so I decided to get one done today. I’ve previously used the built-in Windows 7 Backup, and, more recently, Crash Plan. I’ve had problems with both, so I needed to find another backup program.  I have a 1 TB drive, about 70% full, and two 500 GB drives that I can use for the backup. So, I need a program that can split the backup across two drives, which turns out to be more of a limiting factor than you’d think it would be. I’m currently running a backup with Macrium Reflect Free, which *should* be able to split the backup between two drives, though I’m not sure if it will or not.

The “weirdness” referenced in the title of this post is with regard to the speed of the backup. This is a desktop PC, and I’ve never really tweaked the power settings on it. I have the display set to blank after 10 minutes, but my assumption has always been that the PC will keep running at full speed, if it’s doing something, like a backup. When I started the backup, it was running at about 300 Mb/sec. That seemed like a good speed, and I expected it to get done fairly quickly. I’ve noticed, though, that if I check on it after it’s been running for awhile, it shows at 100 Mb/s.  If I sit in front of it for a few minutes, it gets back up to about 300 Mb/s. But, if I step away for an hour, then come back, it’s back down to 100 Mb/s. So, clearly, something is happening to slow it down after a certain period of keyboard/mouse inactivity. So, I’ve switched the power settings from “recommended” to “high performance”, thinking that maybe it’s going into a low-power mode or something, but I don’t think that’s helped. Which could mean that some other background process is kicking in after a few minutes of keyboard/mouse inactivity and slowing things down. All very frustrating. We’ll see if I can manage to get a backup done before the NFC Championship game is over.

laptop stuff

We’re in the middle of Hurricane Irene right now, but my part of Somerville is fine, and we haven’t lost power. I’ve been using this time to finish setting up my new ThinkPad, and to wipe my old Inspiron and Aspire One.
For the Aspire One, I uninstalled a few programs, let Windows apply a bunch of pending updates, then created a new account and wiped out my old one.  I gave that machine away yesterday, before the storm hit.
For the Dell Inspiron, I had too much stuff on there to easily clean up, so I just did a clean install of Windows 7 on that, created a user account, and ran updates to get it (mostly) current.  I think that’s ready to sell now.
On the ThinkPad, I’d done most of the quick installs already — Firefox, Notepad++, and a bunch of stuff like that. Yesterday, I took care of the two major installs: Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010.  Now, I’m letting the system pull down and install updates for both of those programs.
Over all, I think I’ve probably pulled down 5 or 10 GB of updates over my internet connection this weekend.  Thank god I don’t have a data cap on my Optimum Online account!

kicking and screaming

OK, I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into 2011. I finally upgraded my home desktop machine to Firefox 4 and IE 9. (The work machine, of course, has had both installed for quite a while.)
I didn’t want to upgrade either until I was sure at least one of them would work with LogMeIn. It does seem to work OK in both Firefox 4 and IE 9 now, so there’s no reason for me to not upgrade now.
On a related issue, I was testing HTML 5 video in IE 9 last week, and ran into a really annoying problem.  For some crazy reason, my work machine has Windows 7 N on it, the version without Media Player. Well, it turns out that IE 9 won’t play HTML 5 video if Media Player isn’t installed. And it won’t show you a useful error message either.  It just won’t play. I eventually figured this out, and installed the Media Feature Pack for Windows 7 N. Now, all is well.

done with taxes

I managed to talk myself into doing my taxes before the SuperBowl started. I bought TurboTax this year instead of the H&R Block At Home (aka TaxCut) software, which I’ve been using for more than 10 years. I was curious about TurboTax, since I’ve never used it before, but it turns out that there’s not much of a difference between them. Either one is fine.
I think this may be the earliest I’ve done my taxes in years. I usually wait until around St. Patrick’s Day to file.