What I Learned in Math School

E.O Wilson recently published an article in the Wall Street Journal where he argues Scientists don’t need math skills. He feels that many potential scientists are being turned away from science because they find math hard. Wilson goes onto argue that scientists in many fields don’t really need much math. I’m not going to address Wilson’s argument directly but instead talk about what I learned about math in school.

Firefox PowerPC Spring 2013 update

I’ve written in the past about compiling recent versions of Firefox for the powerpc under Linux. The Firefox rapid release schedule means that a new firefox release happens almost every 6 weeks. I last wrote about firefox 16, which is now almost 4 releases old. In the past 6 months I’ve been regularly testing firefox builds on the powerpc as they make their way through the development process. I am going to summarize the state of recent firefox versions for ppc users.

Maproulette Hack Weekend

This weekend we had the second annual Toronto OpenStreetMap developer weekend. The nice folks at the Ryerson Department of Geography hosted us. My focus this weekend was to work the Serge and Martijn on maproulette

Maproulette is software that presents an easy to do mapping task to users which they can complete and then mark the task as completed. Examples of past maproulette mapping challenges include fixing connectivity errors or fixing objects touched by the license change.

Python urllib2, cookies and OpenStreetMap

I found the documentation on urllib2 a bit unclear about how to get cookie handling working properly.

I was working on a python script that needed to contact the OpenStreetMap web server, login with my OSM credentials and interact with the website.

The first step is to setup a urllib2 opener instance that is configured to store cookies.

import cookielib,Cookie,urllib2,urllib
import xml.etree.cElementTree as ElementTree

cookies = cookielib.CookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cookies))

This will create an opener that can be used to retrieve URL’s. Any cookies set in the HTTP response will be stored in the cookie’s cookie jar. If I needed to add additional openers (ie for special redirect handling) I would just add them as additional parameters to the build_opener call. ie urllib2.build_opener(handler1, handler2,handler3)…

Next we need to contact OpenStreetMap to get a blank login form. The blank login screen has a hidden variable ‘authenticity_token’ that needs to be passed back as part of the POST with my login credentials

inptag = '{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}input'
formtag = '{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}form'
# fetch the blank login form
response_tokenfetch = opener.open(request)
html = response_tokenfetch.read()
htmlfile=StringIO.StringIO(html)
# parse the HTML elements in the form
# extract any input fields for later resubmission
# this will pick up the authenticity_token and anything else
xml_tree = ElementTree.parse(htmlfile)
for form in xml_tree.getiterator(formtag):                
    for field in form.getiterator(inptag):
        if 'name' in field.attrib and 'value' in field.attrib:
                login_payload[field.attrib['name']] = field.attrib['value']
login_payload['username'] = username
login_payload['password'] = password
login_payload['remember_me'] = 'yes'
login_payload['cookie_test'] = 'true'

Next we submit the LOGIN request as a POST. Any session cookies returned as part of the blank form will be added to the second request.

cookies.add_cookie_header(request)
response = opener.open(request,urllib.urlencode(login_payload))

If our login was successful then cookies contains an _osm_session and _osm_username that will be used in subsequent API calls.

request2=urllib2.Request('http://api06.dev.openstreetmap.org/user/stevens/inbox)
cookies.add_cookie_header(request2)
response2 = opener.open(request2)
html=response2.read()

You could then parse the HTML to extract a list of messages.
If your using the formal OpenStreetMap API (ie calls under /api/0.6/…) then you should instead use oauth for authentication instead of logging in through the website. Some OSM features such as messaging can only be accessed by pretending to be a web session and parsing/faking HTML.

Pl/Python talk at Pycon Canada

I spent the weekend attending Pycon Canada where I gave a talk on Pl/Python. I want to thank the conference organizers for putting on an excellent conference. I am told that this was the first time Pycon had a regional conference in Canada and that it was put together by a group of volunteers in less than 6 months.

One of my favourite parts of local/regional conferences held on weekends is that they tend to attract attendees who are passionate about computers and technology. The people who I spoke with at the conference were there because they wanted to be there,not because there boss wanted them to be there, and either loved Python or wanted to learn more about it. I’ve attended many great PostgreSQL conferences over the past few years but it was nice to spend sometime talking with people from broader development backgrounds.

In my discussions with people at the conference I noticed a trend. People I spoke with who are working at companies that did Python development tended to be using PostgreSQL. The ones that weren’t currently using PostgreSQL were using MySQL and talking about moving to PostgreSQL or were apologetic for still being on MySQL. The MySQL users were often apologizing before I told them that I was a PostgreSQL contributor. Some of the MySQL users also mentioned that they were using non-Oracle forks like Percona.

This was in contrast to the people at the Python conference that described their workplaces as doing primarily Java development. The Java development shops tended to be using Oracle or SQL Server. I admit that the sample size of of the Java developers wasn’t that big (this was a Python conference after all) but my observations are worth keeping in mind since they might be indicating a pattern. Other people have commented about the popularity of PostgreSQL in the Ruby community.

I wonder how much of this observations is because older written in Java are already using SQL Server/Oracle and there hasn’t been a strong enough driver to change to PostgreSQL. While newer software projects are tending to choose Python or Ruby over Java and at the same time picking a FLOSS database such as PostgreSQL where they don’t have to worry about migrating a legacy application.

My talk on writing stored functions in Pl/Python was well received. A lot of people saw appeal in being able to write their stored functions in Python instead of pl/SQL but that shouldn’t be a surprise considering this was a Python conference.

My slides are available here, the video of the talk is posted at pyvideo

Firefox 16, powerpc

A few months ago I wrote a blog post on compiling FireFox for the powerpc on Debian Linux. I had built Firefox 9 when I was writing that post and in the intervening months, thanks to the Mozilla rapid release cycle, Firefox 16 has been released. Does Firefox 16 still build on the powerpc with Debian Squeeze?

1. I downloaded the latest firefox source code from mozilla
2. This time I didn’t need to apply any patches for the powerpc.
3. When I ran ./configure followed by ‘make’ as described in my post on Firefox9 I encountered a compile error.
   syntax error in VERSION script when trying to build libraries in the subdirectories under security/nss/lib such as util (libnssutil).

The issue is that the mapfiles such as security/nss/lib/util/nssutil.def that are included in the source tree are not suitable as input files to the linker but need to be pre-processed first. The rules to process the ‘MAPFILE’ are defined in security/coreconf/Linux.mk and are invoked by a rule in security/coreconf/Rules.mk that build a proper mapfile by running the mapfile distributed in the source tree (such as nssutil.def) through sed and grep to produce a file that can be passed to the linker.

The make rule takes a mapfile $(MAPFILE_SOURCE)=nssutil.def and generates $(MAPFILE)=nssutil.def from it. If you try building firefox as I describe above it will put the output files in the same directory as the input files. This means that the sed/grep rule won’t be executed because the target (nssutil.def) is already present and isn’t older than the dependency (nssutil.def), itself.

If you instead

1. Set the shell environment variable MOZ_OBJDIR to be a directory other than the source directory
2. Put your configure options in the file .mozconfig, as described in the Mozilla build instructions
3. Run make -f client.mk

firefox 16 will build successfully. The issues I encountered with the version script shouldn’t be specific to the powerpc or debian.

Learning from mistakes

Last year I attended and wrote about FOSS4G 2011 in Denver. The 2012 FOSS4G event was supposed to take place in Beijing this September. Last month OSGEO announced that the conference was cancelled.
Cameron Shorter has posted a detailed analysis on how the conference fell apart. His post does a great job of looking at the sequence of events that lead up to the current situation.