Links for 08-25-2013

• A World Without Randomness | Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
• Kevin Spacey Goes All House of Cards on Hollywood (Video) - Kara Swisher - Media - AllThingsD
• Storytelling with Maps
• Our 'Kodak moments' – and creativity – are gone | Jason Farago | Comment is free | theguardian.com - This Guardian article on Kodak had me until last 3 paras. Then seemed to veer into elitism
• Why the open source way trumps the crowdsourcing way | opensource.com
• VMware's Cloud Strategy Equal Parts Foggy, Stormy - CIO.com - "With VMworld on the horizon, VMware has been touting its cloud strategy. That 'strategy,' though, seems to involve dissing Microsoft and Amazon, marginalizing CSP partners and clinging to the idea that the cloud is solely the domain of IT departments. If VMware keeps this up, it can expect a stormy future in the cloud, CIO.com columnist Bernard Golden says."
• Cloud podcast gives plenty of food for thought | Cloud Pro
• Best Practices For Horizontal Application Scaling | OpenShift by Red Hat
• Scaling in Action on OpenShift | OpenShift by Red Hat
• Converting Geotagged Photos to KML PhotoOverlays - Keyhole Markup Language — Google Developers
• Map creator online to make a map with multiple color pins and regions

Pics from my recent Haute Route trip now up on Flickr

Climbing from Villa to the Col du Torrent, a photo by ghaff on Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitmason/tags/hauteroute2013/

Links for 08-01-2013

• 4 Reasons PaaS is Perfect For Your Startup | OpenShift by Red Hat - Nice piece on 4 reasons PaaS is perfect for your startup by @TheSteve0
• London Tubemap - A new angle on the London Underground
• Where to Live to Avoid a Natural Disaster - Map - NYTimes.com
• Introduction | EMS Open Educational Resources
• How Google Has Completely Botched Zagat - Businessweek - My big objection to the "new" Zagat is it seems more a blog than a restaurant site:
• Map Collections Home Page
• Practice @ Celestial Navigation
• New NYC Subway Map Elegantly Inspired By Concentric Circles: Gothamist

An OpenShift app for mapping river levels

I wrote my first OpenShift app a couple of weeks back. It's an interactive map of USGS stream gauges--i.e. it shows the river height and flow for about 9,500 locations throughout the US. I was kinda excited to do this as it was something I've been wanting to do for a few years, and even spent some time poking at it, but it always seemed as if it was going to be too much work to pull all the pieces together. However, between code and blog posts that one of my colleagues put together and the way that OpenShift (Red Hat's Platform-as-a-Service) simplifies a lot of the back-end "plumbing," I was able to get over the hump and get the app on the screen.
Check out the app (http://wwos-bitmason.rhcloud.com) or check out the fairly lengthy blog post I wrote about how the app works over at the OpenShift site. I'll be following up with another post that goes into more detail about the data itself.