This week, we’re going to be working on OSM, all week long. Check out the ZXV blog for more details.
ZXV and the Week of OpenStreetMap
January 21st, 2008South East London Mapping Party
January 15th, 2008Come map the streets of South-East London:
The OSM South East London mapping party will aim to fill in the blanks in the OSM map of the area. Greenwhich, Lewisham and Blackheath are all well covered by Yahoo!’s aerial imagery, so lots of roads have been filled in but most of them don’t have a name and there’s lots of mistakes with junctions not joining up properly and so on. We’ll also be collecting point-of-interest data; schools, hospitals, shops, pubs and restaurants all make OSM’s map richer and more useful.
There’s more details on the OSM Wiki. As always, OSM Mapping Parties are open to everyone – if you are interested,
Now you can eat like me
January 13th, 2008Subscribe to this feed 
to get a weekly recipe from my multi-talented girlfriend.
What you can expect if you fly with GB Airways
January 2nd, 2008Last August I took a flight with GB Airways from Gibraltar to London. When breakfast was served, we opened the seat-back and saw this:
Click on the link and take a look at the high resolution version and you’ll see the filth I was greeted with. Its not what you expect from a £3 tube fare, let alone a £150 flight. I called the flight attendant, who told me there was nothing he could do about it. I suggested that there must be something that could be done. He returned in a few minutes with some wet face towels. “What do you expect me to do with these?”, I asked.
“Clean the tray,” the attendant replied.
“Even RyanAir don’t make you clean your own trays,” I said.
Eventually the manager came to my seat and cleaned the tray for me, which wasn’t really good enough. There was still caked on filth which smelt like old milk all over the seat back and tray infront of me. By way of compensation the attendant offered me a glass of champagne – really not what I wanted at 7am.
When we got home, we emailed GB Airways and attached the above photo. This is the reply we received, some time later (click on the image to see it in more detail):
There’s little point in getting pissed off with stuff like this. I’ll be pretty unlikely to fly with GB Airways in the future – there is plenty of choice on the routes they operate that I take a couple of times a year from the south of Spain to the UK, and their prices would have to be substantially cheaper than anyone elses for me to risk their unique brand of in-flight filth combined with surly attendants. Thankfully, the company’s Gatwick and Manchester routes have been bought by Easyjet, who in my experience have new, quiet and clean planes.
My advice: steer clear of GB Airways.
OS OpenSpace Preview
December 15th, 2007It was great to spend the day in Southampton yesterday at the Ordnance Survey, to preview the new OpenSpace API:
The API has been a long time in the making, having first been announced at the OS Mashup Event last year. The API is based on the OpenLayers Javascript library, an interesting decision in itself and one which should see bug fixes and improvements fed back into OpenLayers.
Essentially, OpenSpace is just another slippy map API, with most of the features everyone’s come to expect and a few features that make it stand out. It uses the OSGB (OSTN02) datum projected onto the British National Grid (transverse mercator) rather than using WGS84 Latitudes and Longitudes and a mercator projection, as most other web mapping APIs use. To ensure compatibility with the growing volumes of geodata based on WGS84, OpenSpace includes Javascript libraries to transform from WGS84 to projected OSGB – which it seems to do pretty accurately.
Another notable point is the cartography. The Ordnance Survery have a far richer dataset at their disposal, so its not surprising that they can produce map tiles like this:
Whilst the “Street View” (the name for the highest zoom levels) cartography has been criticised by some specialists, its undoubtedly an improvement over Google’s. Its going to be interesting to see if the new map content spurs new types of mash-ups – people can now pinpoint the exact position of their houses and countryside users now have, well, something compared to the nothingness of the Google countryside. I spent at least an hour yesterday just browsing around the map – just having a nice, fullscreen slippy map of the UK is really cool. Take a look here
The license is a license, so some people are going to love it, some will hate it and most will just get on with hacking. One thing that the guys from the OS were emphasising yesterday, was that they really want people to consult with them. That’s why we were there yesterday – so that the people who made OpenSpace could see what we thought. I think the desire of the OpenSpace team to listen to people’s feedback and act on it is a genuine one, so maybe we could all try some constructive criticism before trashing it. But hey, this is the internet.
The most interesting thing about OpenSpace is that the OS own the data. Google, Yahoo, MicrosoftMultimap etc all license their data from other providers, which is why they do things like this. Google don’t want you to hate them, they want you to love them and use their services but are restricted from doing so by licensing regimes with data suppliers. The OS shouldn’t have this problem – its their data so they shouldn’t suffer from the problems that Google et al blame on their providers.
During my first play with the OpenSpace API, I stuck a pin on a map to invite you all to the ZXV christmas party, and grabbed an NPE WMS feed from GetMapping, so you can overlay 50 year old mapping onto the latest OpenSpace tiles. Take a look here.
Riots, vivisection, brown dogs
December 10th, 2007The front page of Wikipedia today links to an article about the Brown Dog Affair – an incident that occured 100 years ago involving the dissection of a dog at labs in UCL, my old university. I’d never heard of this story before today, who’d have thought you could actually learn something from the internet.
Everything I ever wanted to get accross about farm subsidies
December 10th, 2007The Economist sums it up more succinctly than I’ve ever managed to:
Most of the [agricultural] subsidies and trade barriers have come at a huge cost. The trillions of dollars spent supporting farmers in rich countries have led to higher taxes, worse food, intensively farmed monocultures, overproduction and world prices that wreck the lives of poor farmers in the emerging markets. And for what? Despite the help, plenty of Western farmers have been beset by poverty. Increasing productivity means you need fewer farmers, which steadily drives the least efficient off the land.
Read the full story, here
A new MacBook Battery
December 1st, 2007Last week, I called Apple Support to report problems I was having with my MacBook battery. The symptoms I reported were:
- MacBook will occasionally turn off without warning when not plugged in
Which gets gradually worse over the course of a month until:
- MacBook will turn off unless connected to an external power source
- MacBook will not turn on unless connected to an external power source
Apple told me that this is a know problem with their batteries and that they would send out a new one. Sure enough, a few days later a new MacBook battery was sent to my office. In return, I have to send back my old one. I now have a shiny new battery:
So what I definitely would not recommend to all MacBook owners is phoning up your local Apple Store (020 7153 9000 in the UK), choosing the support option, describing the symptoms above and taking delivery of a new MacBook battery for the cost of a local phone call.
FOSS4G OpenStreetMap Slides
September 30th, 2007Incase you missed the talk, here are the slides:
To accompany the slides, here’s a condensed version:
Some guys with GPS units on vans donated their traces to some other guys who made a collaborative map. This was cool, so lots of people joined in, collecting lots of traces, making nice maps and writing software tools to edit the map. The project is now growing very quickly and a Foundation has been set up, which does things like fundraising and organising conferences.
The most valuable thing to OSM are the people. But people are often disparate and hard to organise. For OSM to work the people need to be motivated by incentives other than money. The people won’t do stuff unless its fun, they trust the organisation and they see the results of the hard work.
Geo-data in the UK is very good, but very expensive and is sold by the Ordnance Survey. OSM’s data is not as good as the OS’s data, but its free. As OSM’s data gets better, the OS’s data will get cheaper. When OSM’s data is good enough for 80% of uses, proprietary vendors will be forced to compete on a margin of 20% of use cases. This will lead to more innovations in the mapping industry and more price cuts.
Some people say that OSM’s data is crap. Others just get on with making free maps.
Map my Scooter
September 29th, 2007Teleatlas have the van and now OSM have the scooter:
Scooter mapping has a lot of potential – you are able to rapidly stop and start, scooters have a small turning circle, you can take voice notes, easily pull out a camera and even stop to make notes. Efficiency compared to cycling is pretty impressive:
Saturday – by bicycle
nick_am_traces.gpx
av speed: 6.03 km/h
distance: 25.56 km
time: 04:14
Sunday – by scooter
nick_am_sunday_trace.gpx
av speed: 16.86 km/h
distance: 28.32 km
time: 01:40
The average speed is so low on the Saturday morning because of the stopping time – I stopped for a coffee half way through the morning and left the GPS running. I decided not to adjust for my stopping time though, as the coffee break time was time I could have been mapping had I not been nackered.