Archive for January, 2007

One More Google Maps Mash-Up

Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

Delicious, part Flickr, part Platial. The idea is that you login and tag a place, associating it with keywords, which can be searched via a Delicious style tag cloud. The site also lets you associate an image with the location. The magic that is Ruby on Rails means that whereas sites like Delicious and Flickr, which are owned by Yahoo, or Platial have significant budgets, Places2Go is seemingly a one man job.

Beyond representing a plethora of Web2.0 technologies, its hard to see what Places2Go is all about. The funtions that it supports alrady exist in one way or another with services Flickr and Platial. Tag clouds are nice to see in a geo app and it will be interesting to see how they develop as the site attracts more visitors. As for the data that is gathered, it could potentially be extremely useful – information about people’s favourite places around the world, with no limits on what can be entered – only problem is that they are all derived from Google’s map data.

The sites designer, Pedro Costa, makes it clear that this is very much a beta site, so we’ll have to wait and see how it progresses.

Posted in Geodata, Ruby | No Comments »

Modelling OSM in AUS

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

INSERT_MAP

My family have just got back from a visit to New Zealand and Australia, where my brother took the opportunity to model his fantastic OpenStreetMap 2nd Anniversary T-Shirt, that lets you show your support for OSM and stick-it-to-the-man at the same time:

There are still a few of the original T-shirts left. If you want one, get in touch.

Posted in Openstreetmap | No Comments »

5 Things you didn’t want to know

Friday, January 5th, 2007

Steve has ensured that I go for a mammoth 3 blog postings in one day, as I spread the 5 things you didn’t know meme:

  1. After graduating from UCL in 2003, I won a graduate scholarship with the British Institute in East Africa, a research body who conduct Archaeological, Historical and Geographic research in East Africa. I got the chance to work in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and got my first exposure to sordid world of GIS and surveying, helping run mapping and surveying projects in Laikipia and Engaruka.
  2. I have a strange aversion to honey-comb and some other organic materials that have repeating patterns. The aversion is so servere that I have not been able to research the problem on the web for fear of seeing an image of a honey-comb
  3. I have always had an interest in music, playing the saxophone and piano and have experimented with electronic production, under the producer alias CubicSphere. More recently I’ve turned to Djing and organised a night last year.
  4. In 2002 I was the Treasurer of ARSE – The Association of Ramsay Street Enthusiasts – a ULU society that I started with the aim of diverting as much cash from the University of London’s coffers into my body via beer. The union were bankrupt that year due to administrative ineptness, so the project died. The Freshers Fayre was fun though.
  5. I have a long-standing problem with authority, which has always caused me trouble and has recently manifested into a tendency to argue with the police. They nearly always deserve it!

    I choose…

    Rich, Tom, Dan, Chippy and, err, thats it.

Posted in Misc, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

NPE Now Covers the Isle of Man

Friday, January 5th, 2007

The
NPE Map project combines the public domain information contained within out of copywrite maps, with a nice web interface with the aim of building a Free postcode database. The project has been picked up by various people on the Geodata scene: there is a JOSM plugin that allows people to derive vectors from the data and contribute them to Openstreetmap – though I cant get it to work at the moment.

The map collection has also been put onto a WMS by GetMapping, as this demo shows:

For those interested in hacking, the WMS connection string is:

http://www.getmapping.com/iedirectimage/getmappingwms.aspx

The most recent addition to the NPE mapset has been the Isle of Man, though its not currently served by the WMS:

More free than:

INSERT_MAP()

In places like the Isle of Man where nothing that drastic changes over 50 years or so (no Motorways or dual carrigeways for example), the NPE maps can offer a way to produce independent cartogaphy very quickly and easily. Exciting times!

Posted in Geodata, Opensource | 2 Comments »

The Economics and Management of Pens

Friday, January 5th, 2007

I have one degree in Archaeology, one in GIS and I’ve worked for all manner of people; from being a Pizza deilvery boy, to surveying, from academic research to web-development. All and none of this makes me well qualified to talk about management – as well qualified as anyone can ever be. So after a brief experience this morning, I have developed The Law of Relative Biro Value

Assume:

  • R = Risk, expressed as a percentage of a working stealing or misusing a pen
  • P = Cost of a pen
  • S = Cost of the pen guardian’s time
  • W = Cost of workers time in obtaining a pen
  • Tw = Time in seconds taken by a worker to retrieve a pen
  • Ts = Time in seconds taken by the pen guardian to retrieve the pen
  • M = The wage per second of each party

Consider,

S = Ts * Ms
W = Tw * Mw

If RP < S + W
then

DONT LOCK THE STATIONARY CUPBOARD!!

If you need to lock your cupboard, either your pens are too expensive or you workers are not trustworthy enough.

I am available for hire for a wide range of management consultancy :)

Posted in Management, Society | No Comments »