The FME community always shows a good spirit and enthusiasm. This spirit nourishes ideas and leads to new cool features. Yesterdays livestream had a few technical problems but following the tweets, blogging & evangelism made it fun as always. You can also find the presentations here.

But wait – there’s more! Plenty of World Tour events on the way.

I strongly recommend participating if possible. New ideas emerges when You meet new people to discuss new features with. -Personally I’m now experimenting with combining PointClouds with none spatial data. Some great potential there. Will post an update on this later.

So I hope to see You in Malmö or Berlin or possibly somewhere else on the road!

Now and then I check how http://bbox.me/osm is being used for generating workspaces. I normally do this by parsing the log-files that the Webserver Apache produce. They look like this:

The “.gz” extension shows that they are GNU Zipped (compressed). I used to manually unzip them and then run them through FME Workbench. But FME reads compressed file directly. So just by changing the readers setting to “access*.*” it runs in one flow. And here is the result:

So by a simple Workbench like the below You can easily parse Apache log-files. Pretty cool….

/Ulf Månsson

The TweetSearcher in FME runs a search for Twitter entries. By entering a coordinate You can also request geocoded tweets within a specified searchradius.

As the Swedish Christmas Goat succumbs to flames (once again) I came up with the idea to investigate that specific area – in Gavle Sweden. So I quite easily created a FME workbench that starts by sending the coordinate of the (former) Christmas Goat to the TweetSearcher.

I was quite surprised by the amount of actual geocoded Tweets that got returned. The TweetSearcher also returns user information and timestamps. By sorting this info and sending it to a PointConnector I could recreate Paths of the different users who have Tweeted in the area.

Each line in the below picture represents a user who have tweeted at least twice at different times and locations:

Tracking the Railway Tweets

An interesting pattern emerged along the railway. I decided to examine this a bit more. In the below picture I have masked somewhat of the usernames. If You enlarge it by clicking You can clearly see that there have been some tweeting along the tracks:

By playing up the actual Tweets along the track an interesting monolog appears:

Simple translation:”Come on train. I don’t want to spend christmas in Gavle”

Simple translation:”Weird that traincompanies have all that power…”

Simple translation: “Won’t get any further. Train decided that I should spend christmas here….”

Simple translation:”Come on train. I don’t want to spend christmas in Gavle”

The passenger seems a bit disapointed due to some delay in the train schedule. (Personally I would not mind spending christmas in Gavle). Without knowing it this have been very helpful to verify the precision of geocoded Tweets….

Don’t forget to get together at FME World Tour in Stockhom, Sept 5-6 and Copenhagen, Sept 7 !

Lot’s of FME Desktop and FME Server stuff in the agenda.

Hoping for a lot of fun!