Hackathon revisited
Two notable followups of the 2010/10/30 Boston Hacks/Hackers hackathon:
Adam Marcus and Tim Danford have continued trying to extract OpenBlock’s geocoder into a standalone package. Their work is on github, called djeocoder. They are working on removing dependencies on postGIS and other specific parts of the OpenBlock stack, so it can be used by a wider audience. We’ve talked a bit about merging their work back in to OpenBlock in some way, possibly just depending on djeocoder as a separate package.
Mahmood Ali created an Amazon EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image) of the OpenBlock Boston demo. As Mahmood says, “Go from zero to a fully-configured and running OpenBlock instance in 3 minutes!” This is a much faster way to get started than installing it yourself. More info in this discussion. We are going to pursue this avenue farther and expect that this will become a common way to run OpenBlock.
