Recent content in Blogs on Adrià Mercader
Jump to: Reading | Traveling | Running | Working I’ve been slacking off on these yearly updates for a while, but this year I have a bit more time in my hands (more on this later), so here we go. Overall, 2025… Fine, I guess. I can’t complain on any of the important fronts, and I feel very grateful for that, but it has felt like a long year. It’s hard not to feel deflated…
I got a new job! It’s a good one, I’ve been very lucky. Last week I joined Link Digital, one of the key members of the CKAN ecosystem, where I’ll be able to focus most of my time in the development and maintenance of CKAN itself. This means not only scoping and developing new features, but also improving processes, automating maintenance stuff, reducing technical debt, etc. The…
This is the second part in a series of posts exploring how to integrate Machine Learning functionalities into data catalogs. You might want to check the first part in which we introduce what embeddings are: Part 1: Introducing Machine Learning Embeddings In this post I’ll explain how I integrated embeddings into a CKAN extension to provide useful features for users. I’ve been working…
If you cut across all the tiresome hype and snake oil marketing that surrounds the AI / Machine Learning field you can find valuable techniques that can provide value to software projects. This is especially true for those that revolve around data sharing and publication like data catalogs. They are (generally) well-structured repositories of (hopefully) publicly available data described by (one…
Next week will be my last one working at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It still feels weird to write it down or say it out loud, it’s been almost 13 years after all! But it’s time to move on and I’m ready for whatever is coming next. What I take from all these years is overwhelmingly positive. I was hired as a software developer thanks to having a particular set of skills…
A new version of ckanext-spatial (2.1.0) was released this week. Besides the usual gracious contributions from community members and some cleanups to drop support for Python 2 and an old search backend, the main change included in this release is an improved way of configuring the background tiles for map widgets. A while ago, users of the extension might have seen the following message popping up…
(Jump to the English version below) El que necessitava era prou senzill: Com puc afegir les festes laborals a Catalunya (incloent les festes locals) al meu calendari des d’un lloc oficial? Malauradament, una tasca simple com aquesta no sembla que sigui possible. Les pàgines disponibles des de la Generalitat ofereixen una experiència molt pobra: Calendari laboral 2023: les festes només són…
This is a bit embarrassing but I’ll post it anyway in case it helps somebody out there having a slow day (or myself from the future who might forget it). I was recently upgrading a Dockerfile from Alpine Linux version 3.13 to version 3.16. The Dockerfile is fairly straightforward, installing a bunch of system packages, then Python ones and copying some initialization scripts. One of these…
Jump to: Traveling | Reading | Running | Working Another year flew by! This one really felt like it passed extremely fast. There were no major events or disruptions, just the ebbs and flows of daily life. Luckily we’ve all been healthy except for regular non-Covid stuff. Hope that is the case on your end too. Like the previous year, no international travel in 2021. Countless virtual work…
Here’s a news roundup from the Munibot front, everybody’s favourite Twitter geo bots. About a month ago @munibot_cat, the smallest of the current bots, finished its journey across the 948 Catalan municipalities. It took just under a year and along the way it gathered a small but loyal group of followers. Its bigger brother @munibot_es carries on, having just surpassed a quarter of all…
Records show that I joined OpenStreetMap back in 2008, but I never was a very active contributor. Back then there wasn’t widely available imagery appropriately licensed to trace things on, and the tools and conventions to be used were cryptic and felt for the initiated only. JOSM looked scary and the friendlier iD editor didn’t exist yet. Fast forward a decade and, not surprisingly,…
For the past six months the Munibot crew has been humming along, regularly tweeting beautiful imagery of Spanish and Catalan municipalities. The two original bots were later joined by their French counterpart, with the much more monumental task of going over the almost 35.000 communes of France. Over time, I got curious about how many tweets had been published and how many were left, or wondered…
A couple of weeks ago I submitted a pull request to the main CKAN repo, which was promptly reviewed and merged by my tech team colleague Sergey. On the surface it looks fairly unremarkable, just cleaning up some old code and some tests no longer used. But this code has played a critical role in making possible one of the most important milestones in CKAN’s history, its migration to Flask and…
Jump to: Traveling | Reading | Running | Working The Three Kings brought some presents last night, finally bringing the Christmas holidays to their end in this part of the world. It’s time to look back at the year that just ended and, well, what can I say? It sucked. While we are lucky that Covid didn’t take anyone from our close circle of family and friends, it has shaped our lives…
I wrote Munibot, a small Twitter bot that tweets aerial imagery of municipalities (or any other administrative region). Its current two incarnations are @munibot_es and @munibot_cat, sending regular images of municipalities in Spain and Catalonia respectively: Original tweet Of course it is open source and you can easily customize it to run your own. The source and documentation is on GitHub. I…
PostgreSQL JSON fields are a really convenient way of storing structured data alongside traditional row / column values. They avoid the need to create extra tables and relationships and when properly set up they can perform really well for a lot of use cases. SQLAlchemy supports JSON fields natively so you can easily add support for them in your ORM models. There is one thing that has bitten me a…
Our youngest son is at that magical stage when his speaking is really starting to pick up. In a short period of time he has started to use more and more new words, combining different ones and expressing more complex concepts. There has been something he learnt recently though that really stuck with me. Soc aquí Literally, “I’m here”. What’s special is that he won’t…
Jump to: Reading | Traveling | Running | Working The year is ending so it’s time to look back. 2019 has been an intense year and overall I’m happy with what it brought. I’m definitely happy with where I’m ending it, up in the Pyrenees, close to the Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park. It has been the second full year since we moved back to Tarragona from the…
I’ve been listening to podcasts pretty frequently for some years now, but I wouldn’t say I’m an avid consumer of them. I can’t listen to music or podcasts while working (unless it is really mechanical stuff) so I mostly do it while running or driving. I use my phone for this and from the beginning I was a happy user of Podcatcher Deluxe as it was simple and did exactly what…
Well here we are. This will be my first post in *checks archive* … almost 7 years so I guess better late than never. The first version of my website, which I put together back in 2010, did have a blog where I posted fairly occasionally. I did enjoy putting posts together but as it often happens I started to put it off more and more until they became rarer and rarer.
First things first, Newcastle City Council plans to close down 10 libraries across the city as part of a wider series of budget cuts. This represents the closure of more than half of all existing branches and will cause considerable harm, apart from being just silly. If you are concerned about it, head to SaveNewcastleLibraries.org to find ways to get involved, or click on the image below to open…
After a long day in front of your laptop or just to think of a fresh approach to that annoying bug, what’s better than going for a run? There are amazing examples out there of the kind of stuff you can do with your running data, and more and more readily available data visualization tools open a lot of possibilities. To make easier to get started hacking with your running data to those of…
I finally managed to set aside some time to read OpenLayers Cookbook, written by Antonio Santiago. Antonio is a great developer (you should definitely check his blog for some cool spatial development stuff) and a really nice guy, so I was looking forward to see how the book had turned up. As the rest of the Packt Cookbook series, the book is based on increasingly complex small code…
(For the eager ones, I’ve written a new version of WikiGeoLinks with Leaflet and Bootstrap. It lets you discover interactively how the georeferenced articles of the Wikipedia are connected. If you want the long story, scroll down…) Click to enlarge I’m sure one of the most common ways in which people use Wikipedia is jumping to different articles from the original one they were…
Let’s be completely honest, we all knew it was going to happen. You start a new blog (maybe you’ve even built the engine yourself), add some enthusiastic new posts, start publishing fairly regularly… And then at some point you start procrastinating a bit, telling yourself that next weekend you are going to write about this new thing you’ve found and without knowing it has…
I recently needed a bit of geoprocessing for which PostGIS turned out to be the perfect tool. I’ll share my findings in case they are useful to somebody. But first of all, here goes some context: I had imported the countries dataset from Natural Earth to PostGIS (piece of cake with ogr2ogr), and I needed to obtain the extent or bounding box of each country. Getting the extents The most…
Here is a really nice video produced by the Open Knowledge Foundation introducing Open Government Data. ( {'base_state': {'language': 'ca'}, 'video_url': 'http://vimeo.com/21711338'} ) Notice the subtitles options below the video. It is using Universal Subtitles, an online service that makes really easy to add or edit subtitles to existing videos. I helped creating the Catalan version of the…
The past Friday and Saturday took place in Hilversum, near Amsterdam, the first Europeana Hackathon. Europeana is a project funded by the European Comission that aggregates cultural content from organizations across Europe. It hosts around 16 million records, and the variety of stuff you can find on it is incredible, from ancient maps to fashion clogs to dolls sitting on a monkey. The team behind…
Probably not. Some say blogs are not cool any more (i.e. they are “dead”), left behind by the frantic pace of Twitter and Facebook. News and ideas are more and more condensed to fit the sacred 140 characters, and they become outdated sooner than ever before. I use Twitter and Facebook daily, but I still found the most interesting and useful resources reading blogs. I value the effort…