Adam Wisniewski’s Blog

The Geonames graphical database contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.3 million unique features whereof 2.2 million populated places and 1.8 million alternate names. It was created by Marc Wick, a software engineer in Switzerland. He has released it under a Creative Commons license and was nice enough to provide a freely available Web Service to integrate it into your applications.

The Geonames web service has proven itself very useful to me for the development of Carpool Connect. I’m currently using it to reverse geocode longitude and latitude coordinates and plan on using other features of it in the future.

I’ve put together a ruby library for accessing the Geonames Web service and released it under the Apache Open Source license. You can find more information about it on the project page.

To insatall:

# gem install geonames

Example Usage:

require 'geonames'places_nearby = Geonames::WebService.find_nearby_place_name 43.900120387, -78.882869834p places_nearby

country_subdivision = Geonames::WebService.country_subdivision 43.900120387, -78.882869834p country_subdivision

The server hosting YakAlike, Carpool Connect and some other small services had a hard drive fail in the recent days / weeks. I say “weeks” because it has been failing for a while, but still mostly usable.

Carpool Connect has been moved off to another service provider, while YakAlike will be down until data can be restored off the old hard drive. Sorry for any inconveniences, things should be back to normal, and more reliable within a day or two.

This weekend, YakAlike – the Jabber version was launched. Functionally and visually, not much had changed. The other part of the update is out. Have fun testing the Jabber Internet Explorer support. As always, provide feedback

Use any Jabber IM client
Any IM client that supports Jabber can be used to chat on YakAlike. You can join website chatrooms and talk directly one on one with other YakAlike users. I’ve posted instructions on configuring Adium – my favorite IM client. Configuring any of the others should be very similar, here’s a list of some that should work:

• Spark – Windows / Linux / OS X
• Gaim – Windows / Linux / OS X
• iChat – OS X

Internet Explorer Support
Internet Explorer users can now join in on the chatting. I’ve added a bookmarklet link on yakalike.com that can be used in Internet Explorer to pop up a window containing the YakAlike chat for the website being visited. Test it out and let me know how things go.

Decided to write a Rails plugin to learn something new in Rails. After reading about Google’s Rounded Corners Generator as described at ajaxian, I figured I should make my own.. Using the moz-border-radius CSS tag isn’t all that supportive of all browsers after all

So, came my first Rails Plugin, and my first project hosted at Google Code. It uses all of the same inputs as the Google generator, so if you’re steeling Googles, you can just move over to using yours in your own Rails app…

Added a page on Yakalike for posting new features. This will be the dumping ground / announcement page for all new features.

Todays addition was a very much requested feature. The ability to stay on one channel while surfing to other sites. This is mostly useful when browsing links from such sites as Digg.com. You are able to visit all of the interesting links listed on the site, but still continue chatting with others in the digg.com channel.

Unfortunately not. But it was fun and it did get documented.



Digg here if you have an appreciation of totally useless eggspirements.

So I pushed out Yakalike on the first day of this year. Things weren’t quite all that ready, but I figured that 5 years of talking about this chat thing was enough and it should finally be released.

The digg.com posting generated way more traffic that I could imagine, rendering the server barely usable within a few hours, but not before about 1500 users got to sign up. It was a blast to be dugg – a new experience for me. Things are quite stable now, much more traffic can be handled as a result of a hardware upgrade and several revisions of the yakalike software.

So, thanks to everyone who has used Yakalike and for all of your great feedback. I’ve taken in a lot of bug submissions and features requests. A lot of things have been addressed, but there is much more in store for Yakalike, so stay tuned.

• Ignore – almost ready to be released
• Sticky Channels – many users have complained about the constant reloading of the chat window when switching tabs, this will be resolved in an upcoming release
• Yakmasters – the title might change – Giving some control to webmasters. Recognizing users who are webmasters for a certain domain. Probably with a robots.txt like file in the root of the domain – need suggestions, please add comments to the blog if you have something to contribute
• Scheduled meetings
• Ability to schedule times for users to congregate at a channel.
• Javascript to paste into a site to notify users of upcoming scheduled events
• Post comments to this blog if you have suggestions.
• More… – Post suggestions if you’ve got ‘em.