Cloudmade launch event

Posted on February 14, 2009 by Harry Wood

We had our big Cloudmade launch event on Thursday. All the key people at cloudmade have been very heavily focussed on preparation for this for some time now, and it seemed to pay off. The guys did a great job with slick professional talks getting across our message, that the openstreetmap project is opening up exciting new opportunities for mapping and location-based services, above and beyond anything that google maps could ever offer, and that cloudmade’s products and services help to bring that power to your applications.

They’ll be more product release announcements like this one on the cloudmade blog, over the coming months, which will no doubt generate even more buzz.

My job for the evening was to man a demo station. Answering people’s questions about openstreetmap and cloudmade, with a big plasma screen behind me. This turned out to be really quite fun.

These photos and many more great pictures taken by Christian Petersen at the event. Afterwards we had a little after-show party, which got a bit more messy.

Got home at 4a.m. although that was after an accidental visit to end of the 134 bus route

RSS feeds and WordPress plugins

Posted on February 1, 2009 by Harry Wood

I’ve set up my homepage to show some RSS feeds. One from this blog. One from my OSM user diary.

Showing multiple RSS feed is kind of the most basic example of a “mashup”. A web development problem you can solve with five minutes of tinkering. Sure enough I did manage to find a free script from somewhere and get a feed showing in five minutes, but only because I consciously said to myself that I wasn’t going to spend hours choosing which free script to go for. I knew this was a danger from past experience of wading through all the websites offering free scripts, looking for the right one. So I then spent a while tinkering because it wasn’t quite right, then regretted my choice of script, and wound up accidentally spending several hours re-coding it from scratch. This was mostly an irritating kind of tinkering, but…

I also had a go at making a WordPress plugin (to extend the features of my blog). This was fun, and amazingly easy. There’s tutorials about coding wordpress plugins, but I didn’t need to read any of that. I just fiddled with someone else’s code. It’s nifty the way wordpress automatically latches onto your php file and presents meta-information like the title of the plugin within the admin interface, and gives you the option to “activate” the plugin. I called mine “Harry’s cache deleter”, and made it delete the cache of my homepage RSS feed whenever I add or edit a blog entry. Just a matter of calling the add_action function to have my code invoked on add/edit events.

So let’s test it out right now… Publish!

Joining CloudMade

Posted on January 17, 2009 by Harry Wood

I’ve just had my first week at my new job working for cloudmade. OpenStreetMap has progressed from being an interest, and then a hobby, and then an obsession. Now OpenStreetMap is my job. Maybe that makes me one of those annoying smug people doing the job of their dreams.

But lets not get carried away now. There’s lots of work to be done. I’m going to need to learn the ropes of proper OpenStreetMap coding. No more skulking in the side-lines fiddling with the OpenStreetMap wiki (well OK I’ll still be doing a fair bit of that)

I’m in the process of learning Ruby on Rails, a super-modern agile web development language the likes of which my old “enterprise” clients wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. It’s pretty impressive, with lots of nifty short-cuts around the tedious bits of building a database-driven web-app. I can see why people rave about it. I guess I should remain a little sceptical about just how wonderfully easy it all is, until after I’ve done some real work with it and tried solving my own problems outside of the scripted tutorials. I did scrabble around with some rails “views” before (at the November hack weekend) without really knowing what I was doing. I know a little bit more now, although I may still need to go back and learn Ruby properly. Anyway, it’s fun to be learning a funky new language.

In addition to that, I’m also learning to use Linux as a full desktop OS. Ubuntu comes with some fairly user-friendly pointy clicky GUIs but of course they’re all different from what I’m used to (windows, and my various favourite windows apps) so every little click involves overcoming muscle-memories. The all-powerful linux command line is not completely alien to me, having learned quite a few unix tricks over the years, generally through a putty window running in my (nice familiar pointy clicky) windows desktop. But in general switching to another OS feels like doing everything with one hand tied behind my back. I guess I’ll get over it. No self-respecting open source developer uses windows right?

It’s great to be surrounded by people who are embracing open source and all the newest web technologies. This is the way IT companies should be, and developing for OpenStreetMap, I have a lot of new stuff to learn, but this feels like a job I can get passionate about.

Leaving Green Hat

Posted on January 11, 2009 by Harry Wood

Friday was my last day working for Green Hat Consulting. I start my new job tomorrow, and this is something I’m very excited about …but more on that later.

I’ve been at Green Hat almost seven years (!) working as an enterprise integration consultant. In 2002 during the dot-com bubble-burst, shortly after I graduated, I was forcibly ejected into a job-seeking situation, and Green Hat Consulting is where I ended up. So it’s not exactly a career path I chose. It chose me. Since then I’ve been sent to work at various different client projects, each of these being very much like starting a new job. Seven years working at the same company almost seems like a lack of ambition in today’s job market, but at Green Hat it’s felt like I’ve done seven or eight different jobs over the years.

I think probably my most enjoyable assignment was the year and half spent working at Alstom in Swizerland, not just because I got to enjoy two full seasons of snowboarding, but because I was able to take a lead within the small team and get stuck into some really juicy development work involving JSPs and applets. But there’s been good times on every assignment, and I’ve met lots of great people.

Back at the Green Hat headquarters I’ve seen a lot of people come and go, so that has been a constantly varying experience over the years too. These days the development of GH Tester is really stepping up a gear, especially GH Tester version 5 which adds some spectacular features for BusinessWorks developers. I wish them good luck with that, and I’m sure Green Hat will continue to go from strength to strength.

Show us a better way …preferably without copyright issues

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Harry Wood

The Ordnance Survey have a strangle hold on UK geo data (maps, data for drawing maps, data about locations, and data for routing applications) This is something which has barely registered in the public conciousness. It takes a little techy vision to understand the stifling effect, or to imagine the growth industry we’re missing out on. But even the tech community haven’t really been massively moved to kick up a stink about the problem because …well why not just use google maps?

(copyrights!)

The Guardian has done well to focus on the issue over the past year or so with their “free our data” campaign. Suddenly a few months back, the government appeared to sit up and listen, launching the “Show us a better way” competition. What’s more the winning ideas were mostly related to maps. All good news for free geo data.

But the competition entrants had instinctively taken the beautiful Ordnance Survey maps and then reached for the flexible google mashup toolset. How else would you build a funky free geo-app? Think again! Ordnance Survey had given some kind of agreement for the purposes of the competition, but last week they turned around and said OS “derived” data can’t be mashed with google. Back to the drawing board guys!

This rather wonderfully illustrates the bear trap you are stepping on if you ever make the mistake of thinking these maps are “free”. Even in the context of this competition, issues of copyright (and terms & conditions) loom over UK geo data.

Now hold that thought …and take a look at the OpenStreetMap project. As web developers and technologists look to work around these corporate copyright restrictions, they will increasingly understand the reasoning behind what might at first appear crazy… building maps from scratch.

It’s not all about copyright of map images though. OpenStretMap has an open API giving access to the underlying data in it’s raw vector form, something nobody would even dream of asking Ordnance Survey for, competition or not. The open source toolset built around OSM’s API is still rough around the edges, but it’s already pretty simple to solve the same kind of problems (show postboxes, public toilets, school catchment areas) which were awarded funding by the “Show us a better way” competition.

Wiki Wednesdays – 1st October

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Harry Wood

Last night’s London Wiki Wednesday was held at the BCS offices, and a load of BCS folk came along. They’re a funny old bunch, and judging by their comments, they found the wiki wednesday people rather odd too.

I explained one detail of using wikipedia to somebody who had been experimenting with editing there. Basically I had to show him the finer points of picking through a wiki history display to figure out what had happened to his contribution. I guess this isn’t the easiest thing for a newbie to grasp. Interesting to follow through useability problems from a newbie’s point of view. I wonder if there’s scope for interface innovation to make that easier.

Someone had reverted his contribution, and explained why in their editing comment. Perhaps the thing which really went wrong here, was that the explanation was very brief and therefore unclear (the newbie didn’t even register that this was the explanation) Wikipedia these days is full of people who will revert edits in a somewhat cavalier manner, and this is surely putting off a lot of potential new contributors. On the flip-side though, wikipedia articles need to withstand a bombardment of sub-standard edits somehow. I guess “defenders” of wikipedia need to try hard to engage people with useful explanations about how to improve their contributions. Basically we should always assume good faith, but when faced with people pushing biased viewpoints or promotional links, engaging in conversation can be the last thing you want. Not an easy balance to strike, but I do think a lot of wikipedians are too harsh and disdainful with their reverting these days.

But wikis are not just about wikipedia! Wiki Wednesday discussion came around to MediaWiki several times (a pleasant change from the usual “enterprise” slant) This was despite starting out with a discussion on the evils of Microsoft Sharepoint, which I don’t really have much experience of (thankfully!)

It was good to meet Dario Taraborelli. If I was doing a PHD, I’d want it to be on topic like his. Interesting stuff! He showed us some of his work on wikitracer and analysis based on spidering to gather wiki metrics across many different wiki websites.

This is something I’ve experimented with myself. More than two years ago now, I was practising my skills with ‘TIBCO BusinessWorks’, and created a web-scraping bot to generate a list of wikis by response time to help with early building of the database at wikiindex.org. Bots are fun! That reminds me. I need to fire up my more recent java creation again some time. The “most active london wikipedians” bot.

Postholiday

Posted on September 22, 2008 by Harry Wood

I am back from a week’s holiday in the South of France. Immediately I’ve dropped into a firestorm* of emails to respond to, things to to prepare for, and political fires to extinguish.

So I will blog about beautiful French vineyards and other such relaxing things ….later. Right now I’m too busy and more importantly I’m just not in the mood.

* “whirlwind”, “quagmire”, “steaming heap of poo”. What’s the right word here?

Windows CleanUp

Posted on September 8, 2008 by Harry Wood

I ran low on disk space.

In the past I’ve found treesize utility quite handy for figuring out where space is being used up. Windows should have something like this built-in surely? Anyway I set that scanning my whole disk (takes several hours) But no real disk space revelations this time actually. I just seem to be using up a lot space with photos and mp3s, but not really wanting to delete them.

Then there’s the wonderful windows “Disk Cleanup” tool. This is some kind of usability masterstroke. With the introduction of XP/2000, at about the same time they figured out that yes you do want to be able to press ctrl+F to find things in notepad, and to be able to open JPEGs in paint. Yes, around about then, some genius also figured out that you might actually want to be able to easily flush away all the temporary crap from your hard disk. It even prompts you to run it, if you get really low on space. So somebody’s really thought about the problem. Well done microsoft. Except….

It doesn’t work! I ran it a couple of weeks ago, without much luck, and soldiered on with only a few hundred megabytes free.

Today I’ve just discovered 2.6 gigs of wasted space mysteriously held hostage by windows.

No. The way to truly cleanup unneeded temporary files, is to download and run a little utility written by ….some random bloke. CleanUp!

Do ‘Options’ and untick everything, except ‘Fully Erase Files (wipe clean)’ which should be ticked. It runs very slowly for some reason, but it has spent the past 6 hours deleting ‘c:\Recycler’ directory files which looks like a copy of my complete photo collection twice over, or something ridiculous.

I can only imagine that it’s something to do with recycle bin space for other user profiles, but I thought I’d been logging on as the same user the whole time, so why Microsoft’s built-in “Disk Cleanup” tool doesn’t free up this space is mystery to me.

Swirly Sweden

Posted on August 27, 2008 by Harry Wood

I was sent to Sweden last week to give a training course in GH Tester . This was very stressful for various reasons, and hard work. I spent the whole three days in a hotel/conference centre just outside Arlanda airport near Stockholm, which seems like a terrible wasted opportunity to go see Stockholm or do something more interesting, but in between working and stressing there was no time.

I think the training course went well though, which is quite satisfying to look back on. Other good things about the trip…

There was a funny guy from Finland on the course. We got chatting about how he goes on big moose hunting expeditions. Apparently as a young Finnish hunter he partook of the tradition to drink a cup of blood from the first beast he killed. Warm and quite salty he told us. He also talked a lot about saunas. Apparently in Finland there is ludicrous ratio of saunas to people. One for every family. And when farmers settled into a new area of the wilderness, they would build a sauna first, and then the farmhouse.

I got to fly BA from the new Heathrow terminal 5. I didn’t approve of Heathrow expansion, but they’ve done it now, so might as well enjoying being in a nice modern airport. I also enjoyed BA’s headrests on the way out, but not on the way back (Headrest designers please design them so that you can rest your head to sleep. It’s not rocket science)

And this view over Sweden on the way home was nice.

View over Sweden’s swirly lakes

I was looking at the swirly arrangement of these lakes on the Stockholm map So here’s a challenge for you: See if you can work out exactly which lakes on the map we can see in this photo. I couldn’t.

UPDATE: There’s quite distinctive little island in view in the photo, which wasn’t rendering properly before on the map. Having fixed this, it’s clear that the view is looking North Northwest with plane being about here.

Wiki Wednesdays – Back in 2008

Posted on August 16, 2008 by Harry Wood

Last week the London Wiki Wednesdays thing kicked off again, which I’m pleased about. I enjoyed this regular meet-up of wiki and web 2.0 enthusiasts. It was happening monthly for a while, but this is the first time we’ve managed to get together in 2008. Apparently David Terrar has been struggling to find people to host it, so if anyone knows anyone who has a big (~40 capacity) room with a projector, we’d love to use it (in exchange for appreciative blog links). Big thanks to David Terrar for managing to bring it together again, and special thanks this time since he paid for the food & drinks himself! I showed my appreciation by drinking all the booze and rambling to him on the tube on the way home! And thanks to Alek for hosting us again.

Andreas Rindler’s OmCollab looked interesting. It’s a blending of MediaWiki with WordPress and bookmarking tools. Some nice customisations, obviously including skinning, but also dropping in various extensions for added toolbar buttons, category tag clouds, easy attachments etc.

Andy Roberts pointed out that wordpress is adding a ‘revisions’ feature, which is rather wiki-like. This kicked off a discussion about using wordpress as a wiki , whether it can be regarded as a wiki, and whether you want to use it that way. Without actually playing with it, it’s not clear whether it would support open editing, how it would relate with the “publish” button, or what would appear in RSS feeds. Personally I don’t expect wordpress to become a wiki. It is fundamentally a blogging tool, and this little revision feature does not represent a dramatic departure from that. But it is nod towards the wiki way of thinking, and this is exciting because wordpress is so extremely widespread, with a colossal installed-based. That’s a lot of users who may start to feel more comfortable when they see a history page in a wiki interface.

People pointed out that this wordpress-wiki wouldn’t support wiki style links, that is, links which are (perhaps) created via some [[square brackets]] or CamelCAse, to create a new page by the same title, or to point to a potential new page. In my opinion this a defining feature of the wiki concept. It is the linking approach which allows wikis to function as a gloriously simple but powerful knowledge management tool, and can also lead to a characteristic wiki sprawling mess in the absence of careful wiki-gardening. Conventional HTML linking features won’t cut it, in my opinion. On the face of it, the only thing which matters about a wiki, is that you can edit a page really easily. But for me the wiki linking aspect cannot be dismissed.