Just wanted to post and say Merry Christmas! I am spending the holidays with my in-laws. Pics of that will be up I’m sure.

Everyone have a safe and happy holiday!

Here are some videos I took at Christmas. The first one I started out filming sideways (sorry, it was my Mother-in-law’s camera), but I right it out quick. There are a few swear words so be careful of little ones.

Xmas 2007 Video 1

Xmas 2007 Video 2

Xmas 2007 Video 3

Here’s another clip from AAMI, this one from the exhibition floor. The Draeger TeleSmart was shown at last year’s AAMI. Since then, they’ve received their 510(k) and released the product; manufacturing is gearing up now, and the product should be shipping later this summer or fall. Jeff gave a quick product presentation/demo that would make any product manager proud.

After a long, long haul, r6945 tags OpenLayers 2.6 as a final release.

The OpenLayers Development Team is proud to announce release of OpenLayers 2.6. As of this final release, the OpenLayers 2.6 release closes 294 outstanding tickets. This is the largest of any OpenLayers release to date.

Client side reprojection! Smooth commercial layer panning! KML styling support and pretty, auto-sizing popups! Improved styling support! And lots more.

Six months in the making, this is the best OpenLayers release ever. (And only two RCs! A new record. Here’s hoping that’s not just because we had no testers… ;))

Use 2.6 today!

Using Client Side Storage for Mapping — a proof of concept which saves locally drawn features either via HTML5 Offline Storage or the same from Google Gears.

In order to use TileCache to cache tiles for use in the Google Maps API, you need three things:

• A WMS server which supports the spherical mercator projection
• A properly configured TileCache pointing to it
• A small snippet of code to add a custom TileLayerOverlay to your Google Map
• A small snippet of code to add a custom TileSource to your Virtual Earth Map

WMS Server

My experience is with MapServer, so that’s what I’m going with here.

MapServer uses proj.4 for its reprojection support. In order to enable reprojection to Spherical Mercator in MapServer, you must add the definition for the projection to your proj.4 data directories.

On Linux systems, edit the /usr/share/proj/epsg file. At the bottom of that file, add the line:

 <900913> +proj=merc +a=6378137 +b=6378137 +lat_ts=0.0 +lon_0=0.0                +x_0=0.0 +y_0=0 +k=1.0 +units=m +nadgrids=@null +no_defs 

After you do this, you must add the projection to your wms_srs metdadata in your map file:

 map   web     metadata       wms_srs "EPSG:4326 EPSG:900913"     end   end   # Layers go here end 

This will allow you to request tiles from your MapServer WMS server in the Spherical Mercator projection.

Configuring TileCache

Your TileCache configuration will need to point to your WMS installation, using the parameters suggested for Spherical Mercator in the default tilecache.cfg.

 [google-tiles] type=WMS url=http://labs.metacarta.com/wms/vmap0 layers=basic extension=png bbox=-20037508.3427892,-20037508.3427892,20037508.3427892,20037508.3427892 maxResolution=156543.0339 srs=EPSG:900913 

Here, you can see that I’ve used the MetaCarta Labs vmap0 WMS. If you’re using a standard MapServer WMS, you might have a url more like:

url=http://example.com/cgi-bin/mapserv?map=/mapdata/mapfiles/vmap0.map

Setting up Google Maps

Finally, you must make a GTileLayerOverlay for your tiles.

     var myTileLayer = new GTileLayerOverlay(new GTileLayer(null,null,null,{       tileUrlTemplate: 'http://example.com/tilecache/1.0.0/google-tiles/{Z}/{X}/{Y}.png?type=google',       isPng:true}));     var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"));     map.setCenter(new GLatLng(0,0), 0);     map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl());     map.addOverlay(myTileLayer); 

The ‘type=google’ flag on the end of the URL tells TileCache to use the “Google-style” 0,0 in the upper left corner.

Once you’ve done this, you should have a TileCache layer on top of your Google Maps base layer. You can see an example of this setup, just for proof that I’m not putting you on.

Virtual Earth Javascript

“But I don’t like Google!” you say. “I want VE!” Well then, why aren’t you using OpenLayers already? I mean, that’s what it’s for, right?

More seriously, VE isn’t much more difficult:

     vemap = new VEMap('myMap');     vemap.LoadMap(new VELatLong(0, 0), 0 );     //Add layer     var tileSourceSpec = new VETileSourceSpecification("mclabs", null, 1,        [new VELatLongRectangle(new VELatLong(-86,-180),new VELatLong(86,180))],        1, 16, function (tileContext) {    if(tileContext != null && tileContext != "undefined")    {       var key = tileContext.ZoomLevel+ "/" + tileContext.XPos + "/" + tileContext.YPos + ".png?type=google";       var path = "http://example.com/tiles/1.0.0/google-tiles/" + key;       return path;    } }, 0.8, 100 );      vemap.AddTileSource(tileSourceSpec);       var tileLayer = new VELayerSpecification(VELayerType.VETileSource,"mclabs","mclabs");      vemap.AddLayer(tileLayer); 

And, for your viewing pleasure: an example of the same tileset in use.

So, a couple people have asked me why Google thinks that my site may harm your computer.

On Wednesday, I received an email from “Google Search Quality”:

We recently discovered that some of your pages can cause users to be infected with malicious software. We have begun showing a warning page to users who visit these pages by clicking a search result on Google.com.

I looked through, and sure enough, the links they offered were indeed ‘infected’: I’ve always used Wordpress despite my knowledge of the fact that it has security exploits more often than I get around to fixing them (though I do try to keep up). They had has a small iframe included, which claimed to be ’stats tracking’: Instead, there was Javascript included which, presumably, was malicious.

To the best of my knowledge, I solved this problem on Wednesday night, by removing the mal-links that were pointed out, and patching the security holes I could find fixes to in Wordpress. (I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5; In the past, upgrading has been painful, but it wasn’t so bad this time, and there are not yet any known security holes for 2.5 that I’m aware of.)

All in all, not a bad thing: Google emailed me, I fixed the problem, everyone wins. Except…

Following Google’s FAQs, I went to Webmaster Tools, signed up, verified my site, went to their tools…

And in the site management tools, found no such link as they described. Great.

At the time, I assumed only Google was using stopbadware: I’ve since discovered that other things are using it, so I’ve requested reconsideration there.

Still, Google now tells users that my site may be dangerous, despite the fact that it no longer is, and there appears to be no tool in the website management ‘tools’ panel to have them check it out again. Stretches the definition of ‘Do No Evil’ a bit… (Edit: Okay, not really, but it always works when you really want to get a response out of Google to just tell them they’re being evil: People get defensive and help you out ;))

In any case, my web site should be safe. Sorry that people have been confused by the problem.

Edit: JohnMu in comments pointed out why I was having a problem: Since crschmidt.net/blog/ was the only thing listed as ‘infected’, I had to sign up and verify for crschmidt.net/blog/ *seperately* from crschmidt.net. Certainly not exactly intuitive, but doing so allowed me to request a review of my site, so hopefully soon people will be able to view my site again in FF3, and won’t be caught out by Google’s warning (assuming I got all my malware off).

Tonight, starting around 7:30, there is a plan to descend on The Dubliner, in Noe Valley, San Francisco, for beer and hackery. If the plan changes, I’ll update twitter. If you want to join us, please:

• Comment here
• Email me (crschmidt@crschmidt.net)
• or Text or call me (603.264.2294)