Vermont Hackathon

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Wesley Wright

On Sep 27, 2013, at 3:11 AM, Becky Grenier wrote:

Hello there,

I have been a fan of the Vermont Landscape Change Program website for many years now. I get such a kick out of seeing how familiar sights used to look so long ago.

Oct. 11th will be the third Vermont Hackathon, where teams are challenged to use open data in Vermont to see what they can create in 24 hours. (http://hackvt.com) I have put together a team and we are now trying to think of an idea, and I immediately thought of your project.

I have a lot of ideas about what we could do, one idea is some kind of app on the smartphone that would identify your location with GPS and get you the pictures from that location, so you could compare how it looked a long time ago with modern times. Maybe it could make it very easy to take and upload a modern picture of the area if there is not one already.

But what I was really hoping to do would be to pick your brains about what you might find useful for us to work on — I bet you have some ideas. Maybe we can talk on the phone or have a meeting about ideas you might have?

Sincerely,
Becky

—
i thought about and declared:

I am a bit time constrained at the moment, so I can offer only limited help

It sounds like what she really needs is an API: Application Program Interface. This would take the form of a URL that would accept as input very simple queries and return a specially formatted simple result. For example, assume their app knows its Lat and Lon, and being a smart app, figures it is in New Haven. It asks us:

https://www.uvm.edu/landscape/api/?browse=town&TOWN=new+haven

and we return a list of LS numbers, titles, and spatial coordinates (if known). Or it asks us

https://www.uvm.edu/landscape/api/?browse=ls&LS=32454

And we return selected metadata and an image URL

We would also need a method to accept a new public upload

I have in fact cobbled together such an API at

https://www.uvm.edu/landscape/api/

arguments:

browse = town, ls, or locate

if town, TOWN=town name

if ls, LS=number (with leading 0s)

if locate: geo=latlon or geo=utm ;
if utm, utme=easting , utmw=westing, delta=number . finds items in box bounded by utme plus or minus delta, utmw plus or minus delta
if latlon, lat=latitude, lon=longitude, delta=number . finds items in box bounded by lat plus or minus delta, lon plus or minus delta

All responses in JSON format

examples
https://www.uvm.edu/landscape/api/?browse=town&TOWN=new+haven
https://www.uvm.edu/landscape/api/?browse=ls&LS=32454
http://www.uvm.edu/landscape/api/?browse=locate&utme=4973712&utmn=0650300&delta=5000&geo=utm
http://www.uvm.edu/landscape/api/?browse=locate&lat=44.01001&lon=73.17551&delta=.05&geo=latlon

Seems like that was enough, as Becky informs us…

Hello Wes, Paul, and Christine!

Well the hackathon is now done, and I am proud to report that with the data available through the API Wes created, we won 2nd place. Here it is:

http://hackettes-2013.herokuapp.com/

The judges were so impressed with your data and our interface for it. So thank you for your help with this.

I wanted to CC our team and tell you who did what, as we all worked very hard to make this happen:

* Buffy Miller was tech workhorse of the team, both front end and back end. I believe she was the only Mother competing at this 24-hour programming competition.

* Meagan Brown was our front-end designer and did a great job presenting our app in a way that helped us win.

* Sarah Lindberg is a statistics nerd (self-proclaimed), a wizard with data visualization using JavaScript libraries.

And me, I had the idea and helped a little bit with everything!

Anyway, if you folks are interested we can meet and give you what we did and maybe put it live on your site at some point? It is mostly done with javascript and HTML so I think you can pretty easily incorporate it. I am willing to help out.

Thank you again,
Becky

—
Rebecca Grenier, Software & Web Developer
http://www.rebeccagrenier.com
(802) 318-4941
@BeckyTheBest

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NERCOMP Webinar: Remote Control: How to Engage, Educate and Entertain Your Webinar Audience Monday, 09/30/2013 at 01:00 pm

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Wesley Wright

The recording for yesterday’s session is now ready for you to view:

http://nercomp.adobeconnect.com/p820420rnyb/

password: nercompvw

My notes:

 

webinars are the future of presenting

audience size,cost,reach,staffing, longevity, connectivity
challenges detached from audience, uncontrolled environment, new tools, verbal only, no grounding feedback
play the webinar game your way (like football).Winning = info delivered, interaction created, questions asked, feedback,actions taken
Speaker tools audio video slides music
Audience chat, hands
teammates
HOST – focused on delivering content
cohost – like on tv , sports metaphor, host/guest, comedy team
scout — manges comments, questions,
IT manager – fixit
audience — position (title, org, job desc), style (expertise, attention span) how do they see you? as your sponsor (UVM). as a (welcome) intruder, disembodied voice, uncertain expectations, soft commitment (they can walk away). what makes them cheer 4 u? Strength, warmth.
Break for questions
Wesley Wright UVM: why aren’t you using webcam?
Wesley Wright UVM: when should or shouldn’t

Answer : depends. Use technology you need, mindful of complexity. most times, no need

pre-game practicer practice. set up a studio audience. warm up and calm down stand up smile welcome attendees thanks for coming, small talk questions
kickoff grand entrance -> give thanks, ask teaser question, state “after this webinar you will know …” instruct them to remove distractions, take notes, and one fun thing
The core claim. All slides lead to this
half time questions reduce anxiety, facilitate content, help you understand audience
end game inspire and retire ; take questions, final announcements big finish sum up
audience questions. make them feel smart. have a back pocket ice breaker; pause and think. don’t know? ask audience

 

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CTL Lab machines updates

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Wesley Wright

starting now to be ready by december. There were 65 Important Windows updates alone since June.

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ENVS Capstone Evaluation

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Wesley Wright

Amy Seidl, PhD, Environmental Program , asks

We have an evaluation form that the evaluators of senior capstones (theses and internships) fill out. Currently, the form is filled out with pen, signed and returned to us. Because it has a rating scale we are then tallying by hand a quantitative evaluation. We’d like to make the form a) on line; b) automatically calculating, like a spreadsheet and c) electronically sent to ENVS.

Can you help us with this? If not, can you recommend someone who can?

The form can be found here http://www.uvm.edu/~envprog/formslinks/assets/202-intern-eval-site.pdf
There are a couple of versions but this is typical.

 

 

 

  • How many forms are we talking about?
  • What is the scoring formula? Simply add the scores? Averaged? How is N/A treated? How about the doubling? Seems like a double excellent works out as a 2, which is merely a Good in other categories, is that fair? If there is more than 1 form, is the scoring the same for all?
  • What exactly do you want sent back to ENVS? Name and final score? The completed form, suitable for printing? A link to the completed form?
  • Do the names and scores need to be stored somewhere (like a database) for future reference?

 

 

 

 

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Faculty Development survey

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Wesley Wright

Some 70 responses were deleted because they contained no data

Filtered to exclude COM and include Full Professor, Assoc Prof, Asst Prof, Senior Lecturer and Lecturer

A few additional responses (What is your academic rank: 1 Extension Faculty , 2 Research / Clinical Faculty , 1 Other ; primary University affiliation as faculty:1 (COM) appear because respondents clicked two or more checkboxes in the same group.

See it here
Faculty_Development_at_UVM

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Events calendar updates

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Wesley Wright
  • Updated “Create new event/copy from old” to show just the past 24 months of old events
  • Updated Create new event to auto select end date as same date as start
  • Added to Admin ->People: export attendees email list filtered by event start and end dates, formerly offered as stand alone app here https://www.uvm.edu/~waw/php/recent_event_attendees.php.
  • Added to Admin -> Events: export events details as CSV file suitable for Excel filtered by start date range
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BBB v.81RC

Posted on September 23, 2013 by Wesley Wright

Downloaded and installed BBB version .81RC (Release Candidate) . Release notes: https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/ReleaseNotes

 

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Landscape Change at Fair and on TV

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Wesley Wright

Also see http://www.uvm.edu/landscape/banners

Begin forwarded message:
From: Paul Bierman <paul.bierman@uvm.edu>
Subject: on TV
Date: August 28, 2013 11:31:44 PM EDT
To: Wes Wright <Wesley.Wright@uvm.edu>, Jamie Russell <Jamie.Russell@uvm.edu>
Check this out.  Thank you both for all the hard work that made this possible.

p

Begin forwarded message:
From: Ana Vang <analeishavang@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Landscape error message
Date: August 28, 2013 5:59:18 PM GMT+02:00
To: Paul Bierman <paul.bierman@uvm.edu>
I also did an interview for channel 3 news and we’ve had a bunch of people come visit as a result of that. The interview was a but of a surprise (Hey want to do an interview right now!). In the future I’ll have to remember not to talk with my hands so much!

20130827_153404
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Various and sundry Landscape issues

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Wesley Wright

Immediately upon return from 6 weeks leave, I was met with this

 

On Tue, 27 Aug 2013, Scott Dellinger wrote:

After we started getting alerted again about webdb server load, I have spent the last several hours looking into the recurring load issues on
webdb.  The issues we’ve been having are due to attacks on several vulnerable PHP scripts on www.uvm.edu, inserting code into SQL statements that causes them to run for very long periods of time while holding open table locks.  This is being done by calling the BENCHMARK() function, which makes code run repeatedly, in combination with SLEEP().  We have seen this type of attack before, but it’s been a while.

Specifically, http://www.uvm.edu/landscape and http://www.uvm.edu/~geomorph

Since they shared code base, I only had to fix the one and copy-paste to the other; nonetheless, some aspects were non-trivial. Ultimately, I prevailed.

Soon after, however, I heard

Looks like the back door you gave us for use by our publisher’s been shut both for them (and I just tried it, for me)

http://www.uvm.edu/~geomorph/gallery/xxxxxx.php

Funny, the landscape back door works fine…

In fact, I can’t get into the gallery at all from here in Paris unless I use any connect – otherwise I get a forbidden error.

The site was temporarily blocked from outside UVM access pending code fixes to address the DoS attacks. I unlocked it, and delivered a much enhanced “back door,” URL of which cannot be revealed.

But wait — there’s more

From: Steve Bergeron <steve.bergeron1@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Landscape Change Comment
Date: September 5, 2013 7:32:24 PM EDT
To: Paul Bierman <paul.bierman@uvm.edu>

Paul,
I know that you personally may not be able to address this concern, but I am trying to upload a reshot image for LS69689.  When I enter the photo number that I want to submit a reshoot for, I get this generic looking screen (the error on the top may have something to do with the problem)

Variety of Bugs introduced in latest bug fix (denial of service stuff). Squashed.

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Landscape script

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Wesley Wright

Paul said

We are getting ready to close the NEH grant in 15 days…and it looks like we might have a few $$ left to do some image processing.

Question (programming challenge) for you.

We would love to target our efforts on “missing” images – those that didn’t get described and uploaded.

We should have a complete run of AOTNXXXXX file names as the original uploaded file name but of course, there are gaps for all sorts of reasons, including some that remain in the holding bin – not many tho.

Could you write a script that spit out a list of AOTNXXXX missing from the sequence that should go from AOTN00001 to AOTN36,XXX.

If we could get that list from you this week, we could go searching for the images on our hard drives…and get them to Jamie to describe and upload.

http://glcp.uvm.edu/landscape_new/glcp_missing_aot.php

 

 

 

 

 

 

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