British Computer Society Talk

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Harry Wood

Yesterday I gave a talk to the British Computer Society about openstreetmap.

OpenStreetMap talk on slideshare.com

Audio mp3 (68 MB)

Download the slides : BCS-OSM-talk.odp (34.2Mb)

The topics I talked about were

OpenStreetMap purpose and premise – Comparison with wikipedia, graph showing the long tail nature of the community
Data structures – Nodes, Ways ,Tags and their XML representations
Editor demo – Quick demo of adding a road and a POI in JOSM
OpenStreetMap servers and architecture – Component diagram, UCL hosting details, and the OpenStreetMap foundation
Rendering and map displays – OpenLayers, Tile serving/hosting challenge, Mapnik toolchains, and other renderers
The license – Attribution. Sharealike. The spirit of the license, and change to the Open Data Commons

That was all well received. Of course OpenStreetMap is a topic I have tonnes to say about, and I as prepared I got a bit carried away, and came up with 146 information packed slides. I had quite a long time to talk, but what with JOSM demonstrations and video interlude, it was clear I’d overrun by a mile, so I stopped at a convenient juncture part way through.

I intended to spend a lot more time talking about CloudMade products and services, particularly the styles and style editor at maps.cloudmade.com and the developer zone.

Other topics I didn’t cover include: Imports, Yahoo imagery, Landsat & NPE, Armchair mapping, a demonstration of photo mapping in JOSM, Mapping Parties, Developer community, and details of how to get involved. Enough material for a part II some time perhaps!

State Of The Map 2009 – signed up

Posted on March 27, 2009 by Harry Wood

I just signed up for the State Of The Map conference for 2009. If it’s anything like last year it’ll be a fun-filled map fest, but actually I predict it will be even better. The OpenStreetMap community is getting pretty massive nowadays (100,000 users), and it seems like clever new uses of OSM data are springing up on a daily basis, so the conference should be pretty amazing. But also it’s in the middle of Amsterdam. Awesome location! It’s going to be really fun to go there and meet hundreds of other OpenStreetMap enthusiasts.

Doug Ammons kayaking talk

Posted on March 21, 2009 by Harry Wood

I went to see a talk by super-kayaker Doug Ammons last night. He flicked through slide photos of amazing wilderness locations and big rivers, while talking about his philosophies and the mindset needed for taking on these big whitewater challenges. It was interesting and slightly hypnotic (I think Francine found it more hypnotic than interesting)

Photos don’t really show the scale of things well. That’s why seeing fireworks for real, is always more impressive than photos of fireworks. It’s true no? But it works for landscape scenery too, and seemingly also for really big rivers.

There is also a classic problem, even when looking at a river for real, that if you’re viewing from really high up the valley side, it’s very difficult to judge whitewater. You see white rapids and you’re always tricked into thinking “Yeah that looks like it could be some nice whitewater” (when if fact you’re looking at a terrifying honking great deathfest)

A lot of Doug’s photos were from quite high up, and although he had quite a few pictures with kayakers in, showing scale, it only really registered when he showed some video. …”Ok so it’s *that* kind of whitewater we’re talking about“. …Absolutely insane. I won’t be paddling the Grand Canyon of the Stikine any time soon.

At the beginning he also showed a beautiful photo of “Agua Azul”. Amazing light blue colour of the water. That looked more tempting. Hang on…. no maybe not.

I’ve never been to a kayaking talk before, although I have been invited to a few (river rats used to organise a lot) Quite liked it. It’s a different way to spend a Friday night.

Odd photos on my way to work

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Harry Wood

Yesterday as I was walking to my office from Waterloo I saw this lady (or is it a man?). Now I’m no great follower of fashion, but…

Then this morning on the roundabout just by Waterloo a fire engine had toppled over.

It might’ve been my physics teacher who told us that fire engines have an extra stability problem created by the water sloshing around in their tanks. Modern fire engines have perforated plates called “baffles” fitted inside their tanks to reduce this effect. In this case though, it wasn’t a normal fire engine it was some kind of fire equipment truck. Anyhow they were obviously taking the roundabout a bit too quickly! So I took this snap and sent it to the BBC. To my surprise they phoned me back a minute later to check if it was OK to use it. So here’s my photo on the BBC site. Only made it onto the ‘extra’ photos section, but I’m surprised they were interested in it at all. It’s not actually a very good photo.

The joy of spring …poo

Posted on March 15, 2009 by Harry Wood

Apparently spring starts next weekend, but it felt pretty springy today. We dusted off the roller-blades and headed to Hyde Park. Perfect weather for it.

Just now I also ventured into the garden and had a good look at it for the first time in months. As I prepared to give the lawn a trim I discovered it was absolutely full of evenly spaced piles poo from the neighbours’ cat. Hadn’t noticed this during my dark winter trips to the compost bin, but no doubt trod in them a few times!

All cleared up now and the lawn is looking glorious.

…hmmm well as glorious as it ever does using a strimmer.

.

Liverpool. Cathedrals, Beatles, etc

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Harry Wood

Went to Liverpool last weekend. Fabiana wanted to go sight-seeing there before she heads back to Brazil.

We stayed in Jurys Inn, which was good value, but a bit travelodgish, and breakfast was unpleasantly busy. Nice shiny new building though. Near the Albert Dock. There’s lots of shiny new buildings in Liverpool actually. Some of the shopping areas are spectacular, and we saw them adding the final stone cladding to outside of a snazzy new river front museum of Liverpool. We’ll have to go back for that one.

We also saw the modern (but not quite so brand new) architecture of the Metropolitan cathedral. Seeing the bells ringing at the front was pretty cool. There’s another “Liverpool Cathedral” in Liverpool which is less well known I suppose, being as it’s a boring old normal cathedral, but we wandered over to check it out, and it was well worth it actually. It’s massive! We called in at the liverpool tate for some art too, but unfortunately left this until we were knackered and could hardly stand up any more.

We did those things on Sunday. Our priority had been to go see “the Beatles Story” museum. I vaguely remember wanting to go into this as a kid while the parents were dragging us around art galleries and boring shops in Albert docks. Didn’t go then, probably because it’s quite expensive. £12 for an adult. Not sure if it’s worth it really, but it was quite interesting.

It really does tell the “story” of the Beatles from beginning to end, which gives you a feel for what a bonkers time it was (the 60s I mean). The Beatles were lucky, as any band which reaches megastardom is, but they were lucky to have struck at just that time too, before we’d had any megastar bands before, and seemingly just as the world was ready for some cheeky chappies from Liverpool. I also learned the sad story of their manager Brian Epstein, who was a friendly, enthusiastic, supportive guiding force who did a brilliant job of launching them on the world stage, but eventually he died of an overdose of anti-depressants. The Beatles fell apart shortly after. You don’t really hear his tale as much as the John Lennon shooting thing.

Afterwards on the Saturday night we headed to the Cavern (where the Beatles played lots of gigs). We went into the cavern pub instead of the cavern club, but then I think I read that neither of them are really like the original anyway. Quite good though. Saw some live music.

After eating we found a chaotic street (here I think) full of drunken party goers surrounded on all sides by blaring music from pub/clubs. We went into one which was a 90s bar. A “90s” bar! Are we far enough away from the 90s to start having 90s bars?? The cheesy banging dance music brought back a few memories… yes apparently we are far enough away.

Bloody Valentines Fancy Dress

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Harry Wood

There was another amazing fancy dress party round Ana’s house. This time it was on Valentines day, with a bloody valentines theme. I did the old flour-on-the-face trick and put on a suite and bow tie, while Francine dressed in a scraggly wedding dress. Then we both applied fake blood liberally.

Our blood recipe was scarlet food colouring with water and cornflour stirred in to thicken it a little, but then to make it less vibrant pink we added a dash of soy sauce!

It turned out pretty well. We felt compelled to spend some time coming up with a decent effort for fancy dress to try and live up to our robot costumes at last year’s party and awesome 80s look the year before that (you may have seen pics on facebook)

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!

Kayaking, Mapping, and Accidental GeoCaching

Posted on January 27, 2009 by Harry Wood

Another great weekend of kayaking. We’ve had some evil cold spells recently but happily last weekend we had a some fluffy warm rain clouds over North Wales. As detailed on the trip report , and Adam’s blog, we paddled the Dwyfor on Saturday, and the Wnion on Sunday. Both completely new rivers, except that I do remember paddling the easy bit at the bottom of the Wnion before. The Grade 4 bit coming before that was a pretty awesome highlight of the trip.

Now I had planned to do some whitewater mapping on this trip. I did get GPS tracks on the rivers. This is good for mapping out the waterway=river position more accurately than it was before (traced from low-detail out-of-copyright maps) And the track looks very pretty shown against the green landsat imagery of the welsh countryside:

Afon Dwyfor trace

And I had also been taking lots of photos to remind me of whitewater grades and other details for the map such as footbridges and power lines which we’d passed underneath, but unfortunately ‘X’ marks the spot where I dropped my digital camera in the river and lost it!

Accidental GeoCache – Pentax Optio W30

It is a waterproof camera. I dropped it into the river at latitude:52.9394149 longitude:-4.2483416 (well actually about 10 metres upstream from there) I know this because after spending about 10 minutes wading around in the current trying to find it, I recorded a waypoint on my GPS. I thought maybe it might make an interesting accidental geocache for somebody.

That’s right! If you want a fully functioning Pentax Optio W30 waterproof digital camera, head to those coordinates. However you might need some waders and a metal detector! If you do manage to find the camera I’ll be so impressed I’ll post the battery charger and USB cable to you! …so there’s a challenge

Only trouble is, I notice on the description there it’s only supposed be waterproof for up to 3 hours. My poor camera has been languishing on the river bed for 2 days already. How long before somebody rescues it?!

I bought that camera seven months ago , so not really a very good innings. It’s annoying to have lost it for such a stupid reason. I had it tied to me, but the crappy bit of string was too fat, and the knot evidently untied itself.

But in truth the Pentax Optio w30 is a pretty pants camera. Not a very smart purchase. It was starting to annoy me. I had decided to go for a waterproof one, without testing one in the shop first, thinking surely all compact digital cameras are much-of-a-muchness these days. At first I was terrified of submerging it because it really doesn’t look waterproof, but actually the waterproofness was fine. For general use though, it took way too long to switch on and be ready for taking a photo, and it took about an hour to focus in the dark.