I was scheduled to give a talk on Stackato, ActiveStates micro-cloud solution, so I was quite determined to go on the second day. I did however take it slow and did not make it to the venue until 11:00, because I wanted to hear the talk by Peter Brodersen on Openstreetmaps.

Peter Brodersen is the man behind Findvej.dk, a service from the pre-Google maps of Denmark era. The map data came from Kort og Matrikelstyrelsen and was data, which previously was available for download, but now no longer is available for free.

Peter now works with OpenStreetmap (openstreetmap.org), which is a map of the world available under a Open Database License. It consists of both graphics and vector data.

Compared to Google maps its use is not restricted license-wise.

And some prominent companies and applications are now using OpenStreetMap data
- Foursquare changed to OpenStreetMap maps from of Google maps
- Apple uses OpenStreetMap data in iPhoto maps

OpenStreetMap operates with some basic data entities:
- Node – single geospatial point
- Way – ordered list of nodes, not necessarily a literal way
- Relation – ordered list of nodes/ways and/or relations
- tag – key=value pairs for all of the above

In addition a lot of meta data (speed limits, opening hours etc.), the project is open and can be regarded as a Wikipedia of maps of streets and related information.

Much of the Danish data part of the dataset are under a government license approved by Kammer Advokaten, and is compatible with Creative Commons and one others.

In general a really feel good presentation and Peter did a good job of presenting the topic. The use of OpenStreetMap in the public sector is expanding and the project is well respected and opens up for a lot of different uses, including many spin-off projects.

My fellow Perl Monger Mads Toftum did a presentation on Apache 2.4 and its new features. Apache is an awesome piece of software. Unfortunately Mads lost his presentation so the presentation was pretty basic and did perhaps not sell the new Apache version to well. Documentation on speed improvements would be nice since many of the new web servers such as nginx are very focused on this aspect.

Apache does however offer a lot of interesting features and some of the features replace old features and Apache is still a giant and contender in the web server competition. Comparing Apache to the other spiffy new web servers might let Apache look monolithic, old and slow and the release cycle and the Apache organization setup might also signal the same – this might not be the truth, but one of Apache’s future challenges could be one of image.

By the end of the day I did a presentation of ActiveStates micro-cloud Stackato, I will follow-up with a separate blog-post on Stackato. ActiveState had kindly donated a single Komodo IDE 7 license.

Being the author of the Perl module Games::Bingo I had implemented a Mojolicious based single number bingo app and deployed this on my Stackato micro-cloud. I gave the people in the room numbers and the winner was one of the organizers of CloudCamp Copenhagen. She was so kind as to invite me to give a lightning talk at CloudCamp Copenhagen, which is a part of the GOTO Copenhagen Software development conference, where I am participating anyway – so this I am looking very much forward to.

Congratulations to Maja with her Komodo IDE 7 license and congratulations to all the people involved in Open Source Days with yet another successful conference.

Currently several of the Perl 6 contributors are attending:

- Jonathan Worthington
- Patrick Michaud
- Carl Mäsak
- Moritz Lenz
- Martin Berends

More information will follow on the details of the hackathon, please subscribe to the RSS feed or keep an eye on the hackathon wiki for more detailed information.

Please visit the official Copenhagen Perl 6 Hackathon site: http://conferences.yapceurope.org/hack2010dk/ for more information.

For more information about the: The Open Source Days conference please visit: http://www.opensourcedays.org/2010/

Hope to see you in Copenhagen,

jonasbn, logicLAB

See: http://yapceurope2009.org/ye2009/

The conference it the annual european Perl grass-roots conference and we are happy to be able to support this event. The next thing to find out is whether we will be to attend.