This is a cross-post from the Mapufacture Blog, but I wanted to point out an article published in Business Week: Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes that discusses the role of collaborative mapping in emergency response situations. In particular it highlights the work of GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap, and Mapufacture, open geodata, and easy to use tools. Read the Mapufacture post for more thoughts on the article.

There is quite an underlying question here about the importance of both crowd-sourcing as well as curated, or expert data and tools. I believe moving forward there will be a lot of effort mixing the differences as well as applications that allow for the proper use and understanding of the data and published maps.

One minor point that is disappointing about Business Week’s site is the lack of external links to the organizations or tools. The only links are to Business Week’s own internal listing for businesses. In fact, besides the Digg & del.icio.us taggings, I don’t think there is a single link on the article’s page that isn’t either an internal link to Business Week, or through one of their advertisements.

I haven’t gotten a chance to blog about it yet, but I’m really excited to point out my article in Make Magazine, My House is a Robot. (hint, it’s on page 72, but listed on the cover and featured article in the table of contents).

The article is a beautifully renditioned (thanks Greg Ruffing and Nik Schulz) 4-page story of my day and life living in my automated house. It started when I gave a pecha kucha talk at EuroFOO last September in Brussels. Dale Dougherty really liked it and introduced me to Bre Pettis, and away I went.

One of the primary points I wanted to convey, but I think was lost in the “artist’s rendering” of my house, is how easy and inexpensive the entire setup is. I rent my house, and no, it’s not shaped like a huge, 4-story robot, complete with sun deck above my bedroom.

I hope to do more articles in the future detailing some of the hacks in-depth. This article was fairly high-level and just convey the idea of what is possible and how it can fit into your life in a helpful way (yeah, I know, probably breaks a simple rule of hackerdom, usefulness). I have a series of articles discussing the software side in MacTech Magazine, but haven’t gotten to present the hardware side as much.

And there is more information available in the AutomationWiki with more being added all the time (it’s a lot to document). Drop me a comment or email if you have a specific question and I’ll try to answer it quickly & put the response up in the wiki.

Another announcement. I did quite a bit of writing in the fall. My article “Automate Your Place” (part 1) was the cover article for the January 2007 issue of MacTech Magazine. Apparently there was a large display of it, and was given out at MacWorld, but as I was somewhere on the southeast coast of New Zealand, it made physically attending to see it somewhat… difficult.

The article gives an introduction to location automation, which is more than just home automation, using Apple Mac’s. This includes information on what you need to get started, options for hardware and software packages, and a walkthrough on designing a system for use in small office. Learn about the infamous X-10, and the new and upcoming integration options like Insteon and Zigbee.

Next month’s article, in the February issue of MacTech, will walkthrough installing and configuring the automation system, and setting up scripts and triggers for when people show up to the office, want to make coffee, and so on.

Automation is really intriguing. Besides just the fact that something you make in software affects the real-world (which is awesome in its own coolness - yeah, I’d go so far as to say that), it also has benefits on saving power for reduced power bills, and environmental energy conservation. Depending on your situation, automation is also useful for physically challenged people who may need assistance controlling their living environment (temperature, lights, security) and alerting others to their situation or status.

I hope you pick up the issue and enjoy the article. Look forward to additional article on more advanced automation concepts like remote control (web browser, mobile device), advanced scripting (retrieve information from web services to make decisions), and gadget integration (Nabaztag/SlimServer/Roomba).

I have a poster at the Space Mission Challenges in IT conference hosted by NASA JPL. Unfortunately, I was unable to make it to the 4-day conference, despite it being an incredibly large number of amazing projects.

In my place, Katie Betchold has done a great job getting my rather large 3′x4′ poster out there, hung up, and my in fact be presenting it today for the 2-minute poster precis. She is totally awesome!

If you don’t, in fact, find yourself in Pasadena, California at the conference, then you can virtually check out my poster (1.8 MB pdf). The accompyaning paper should be in a future IEEE publication available at local newstands everywhere.

The title of the paper is: “The Development and Use of Open-source Spacecraft Simulation and Control Software for Education and Research”, and primarily covers the experiences of developing Open-SESSAME spacecraft modeling and simulation framework, its use at the Space Systems Simulation Laboratory at Virginia Tech, and by various researchers around the world.

Let me attempt to redeem my prior remarks about Google Calendar by offering this bit of how to publish your iCal (via iCal or Mozilla Sunbird) to Google. This was inspired by How to subscribe to Google Calendar in iCal.

Create your calendar

You have numerous options for creating your calendar: iCal (Mac), Mozilla Sunbird (Mac, Windows, Linux), Outlook2iCal (Windows), etc.

Setup a public server to host your calendar

You have several options to publish your iCal calendar:

• Apple .Mac provides iCal hosting, but costs $$ (or £, ₪, 圓, ﷼, etc.)
• Setup WebDav on your own server to host calendars
• iCal Exchange is a free calendar sharing host
• Just FTP/Automator your iCal file to a public server

Publish your calendar

Using one of the prescribed methods above, you will then want to actually publish your calendar to the host (or upload via FTP/SSH/SFTP/carrier pigeon on 5.25″ floppy disk). You can turn on “Publish Changes Automatically” to have your changes on your computer automatically uploaded to Google Calendar.

Subscribe to your calendar in Google Calendar

Do the following:

1. Manage Calendars
2. then under “Other Calendars”, click “Add calendar”
3. Fill in the URL of your published calendar - this is probably supplied by the hosting server (like iCal Exchange, .Mac, or you can figure it out for your own server)
4. Click “Ok” and wait a little bit for it to be uploaded

Bask in the warming, glowing warmth…

You’re now done and have a Google Calendar version of your local iCal calendar. Unfortunately, at this point, Google Calendar doesn’t let you edit this “public” calendar, though you can add events from this calendar to one of your Google Calendar calendars (if that makes sense, you’re astute). Now you can just publish when you’ll be available to stop at the local pub for a brew!