Harry Wood Blog

I’m at the Aid Information Challenge day watching the final hack presentations. This seems to be part of a series of hacking events happening at the Guardian offices, following on from rewiredstate National Hack the Government day (where I made the find my nearest registry office/hospital thingy).

The idea is to get techy types to meet with people from other areas, in this case aid organisations, and look for ways to bring their skills to bear, preferably in the form of super-quick super-agile thrown-together-on-the-day “hacks” which get presented at the end. I probably should have got more involved in a mapping hack. There was a fair bit of this going on, and I got into a few conversations. Lots more potential for OpenStreetMap hacking and promoting OpenStreetMap by getting it into projects.

Instead though. I mostly busied myself with throwing together this slide deck “OpenStreetMap For Aid Information” which I then presented:

OpenStreetMap For Aid Information

I originally thought I’d have two minutes to talk at the end of the day, but I actually talked for 20 minutes as a side-line talk during the day.The main emphasis of my talk was on two nice recent aid information examples Haiti and Kibera. Some related links:

• OpenStreetMap.org homepage
• Haiti earthquake maps and resources
• mapkibera.org
• Donate to OpenStreetMap

I also mentioned London events.

WhereCamp.EU was pretty mind-blowing. I wrote a few posts to the official site during the event:

• Day 1 sessions complete. Now geo-beers
• Day 2 in progress
• Wow! That’s a lot of sessions

From a personal perspective it was massively enjoyable and rewarding, but the whole thing flew by too quickly. Preparations started months ago, but suddenly on the day there was so much to do, and at the same time so many people I wanted to chat to and fascinating sessions I wanted to see.

It got off to quite a blurry-eyed start due to geo-curry with the team the night before, followed by staying up late to prepare slides. As organisers we decided we would need to seed the unconference “wall” with some post-it notes in the first session slot, to get things going and spur other people to participate by setting an example. This meant I was feeling stressed and tired from the off, but it worked well, and despite a lot of people being new to the unconference style, a great atmosphere of participatory buzz carried the proceedings forwards at an alarming pace.

You can read more about my session “The State of the States in OpenStreet Map” on the WhereCamp.EU wiki

This got a pretty small audience because I was up against some awesome sessions from the other organisers, but I guess I’ll get the opportunity to re-use some of these slides on some other occasion. I might change the background colour. I’d had a few beers with the geo-curry, and the purple-green gradient seemed like a good idea.

I also contributed to the OpenStreetMap Q&A Session (mainly by asking the first question)

On the Saturday I ran another little session called “OpenStreetMap Practical - Never edited OpenStreetMap? Bring your laptop and we’ll show you how”, which kind of worked, although it clearly needed longer than the 15 minutes we had.

The event left me completely shattered, and I was quite surprised when I popped into the pub for a quick pint afterwards to be confronted by a massive crowd of geo-people all enthusiastically continuing the discussions.

I’ve just been checking out some blog responses and write-ups of the event: Gary Gale (vicchi.org) , Guardian Open Platform blog ,  Ed Parsons , Steven Feldman (giscussions) , jokru , Eamonn Neylon , James Cheshire (spatialanalysis.co.uk)  As I say, from my perspective the whole thing flew past very quickly and it was quite difficult to know whether the event was actually going well, so it’s gratifying to know that people enjoyed it, and found the format successful.

WhereCamp EU is tomorrow! I’ve been organising the posters:

We have a small team of organisers who are all people from the London geo-conference/meet-up circuit. In particular we have Chris Osborne who frequently puts together the very popular #geomob events, and Gary Gale who seems to live his entire life at geo conferences. These combined with a team of five or six others (including myself) have come together to plan two days of geo-map-technology goodness.

We were very successful with our marketing of the event before and during release of the tickets. Maybe a little too successful. It’s a limited capacity venue, and it is very much at its limit. Some people were slow to book their place. These people …well you can’t come (especially Steve)   Sorry about that

The posters involved lots of fun playing around with sponsor logos (In truth it was only fun at first, and quickly became a big hassle. But anyway)  We are of course hugely grateful to these organisations:

Gold sponsors: GoeVation & OS OpenSpace, and Guardian Open Platform.

Silver sponsors: Axon Active, bing maps, ERSI UK, Google Maps, data.gov.uk.

Bronze sponsors: DBVU, ito, nestoria, SVGOpen, and Yahoo! Developer Network

Being an “unconference” we haven’t actually planned the content of the conference in a lot of detail. This is where we’re relying on the imagination and motivation of the attendees.

“The attendees drive the content of the sessions on the day instead of having a prescribed schedule and set of content. Therefore, the event is what you make of it, and is only as fun as the people who attend. So be prepared to speak and contribute.”

This may sound chaotic, but I’m reliably informed that it does actually make for an fun and fulfilling event. Looking down the list of attendees, I can see that there will be plenty of amazing ideas. Should be a fair amount of OpenStreetMap related stuff hopefully. I’m excited to see what kind of sessions people come forward with.

I got an exciting Christmas present for my dad. Pretty sure he doesn’t read my blog so I’ll tell you about it here (shhhh)

There’s a bunch of different sites for ordering custom jigsaw puzzles. Obviously the normal thing is to use one of your own photos, but how about a jigsaw map? ….open licensed of course. A map could be a cool image to use on a jigsaw puzzle, because its a nice intricate image, with evenly spread complexity (compared to some photos at least) and it becomes a puzzle of geographical knowledge rather than just colour matching.

I decided to order one from AllJigsawPuzzles.co.uk which does 1000 piece jigsaws! This is 66 x 50 cm (26 x 20 ins) and costs £29.99 (+ £2.79 delivery) I sent them an OpenStreetMap image which was 7168 x 5448 pixels, here’s what I received a few days later:

I’m pretty pleased with the result. It comes in quite a nice box. The box and the jigsaw pieces themselves are with a papery finish, not gloss (maybe less durable)  The text of the road names came out a bit on the small side. I think the fuzziness you see in the photo is actual fuzziness of the printing rather than camera blur, so yes the text would definitely benefit from a few more pixels, but hopefully it is not too painful to read while doing the puzzle.I knew that this was a danger as I prepared the image. An interesting “feature” of AllJigsawPuzzles.co.uk is that, despite a deluge of information on there, it doesn’t tell you much about what kind of image you’ll need until after you’ve made a credit card payment. In fact the image upload page is available with all this information, but you’re not linked to that until after paying.

Even then it doesn’t actually tell you what pixel dimensions to go for, but you can work it out. The information is: “If possible save the picture at around 300 dpi (dots per inch), that is the resolution we work at. If you crop your picture before sending it, then try to have the picture size in the ratio of 25:19;”. The printed image is 26 x 20 inches, so it’s recommending 7800 x 6000 pixels. Now I sent a slightly lower res image at 7168 x 5448 pixels. To be honest I’d already faffed around a lot with the image at this size, before reading the instructions on this page, and I couldn’t be bothered to re-do everything. But also I figured they were probably erring on the high side at 300dpi, and I knew the text size was going to be an issue. If I’d sent a larger image (covering a large area of map) then the text would have printed even smaller.

Of course what I should have done, is generated the map image myself, using a custom Mapnik stylesheet with larger text for printing. I notice Holger Schöner has some nice examples of this: ‘Mapnik maps for other resolutions’ on his demo page. But I was too lazy, so I used the BigMap perl code which creates a big image by tile stitching. I did actually use a custom CloudMade style with no buildings and no residential grey patches showing. This was because the coverage of these things is irritatingly incomplete at the moment (I organised a special mapping party to tackle this back in September, but there’s still a lot of work to do on that) and it would have annoyed me to have these problems showing on a jigsaw.

I may regret this though because it means fewer recognisable details for the purposes of puzzle solving. In fact it remains to be seen how do-able this 1000 piece puzzle will be. I was thinking afterwards perhaps I should have gone for a 520 piece one, or maybe I should have added a slight graduated fill to the whole background (make it easier to roughly place pieces). Or maybe that would be too easy. We’ll have to wait and see how my dad gets on. I’ll get back to you on that after Christmas!   ( UPDATE: Doing the OpenStreetMap jigsaw )

Big thanks to everyone who came and helped me celebrate my 30th birthday! Lots of people came and squeezed into my back garden for a BBQ. It was really great to assemble this random collection of mates. It was that classic slightly odd meeting of worlds, with groups of kayakers meeting OpenStreetMappers, meeting friends from back home, meeting brothers and sisters, and everyone in-between. Having said that we did partition off into different parts of the garden quite effectively. Hopefully everyone had fun. Much meat and beer was consumed, and best of all we actually had sunshine!

Comedy highlight was hearing everyone singing “Happy Birthday” with a dawning collective realisation that I was actually upstairs on the toilet at the time!

More photos on facebook

For my girlfriend’s birthday we had a big weekend of sunshine and fun. I took her for a posh meal in the OXO tower on Friday, then we had a party on Saturday, with a sunny garden full of people.  Friends from Holmfirth travelled here for the weekend, so on Sunday we all went for a sunny walk in hampstead heath and and look around sunny Camden market. I’ve just stuck many sunny photos on facebook, but here I’d like share this photo with you…

Feijoada! We had to go shopping for a special kind of black beans to make this Brazilian dish. The big Morrisons didn’t have them. Eventually we found them in a little supermarket on Severn sisters’ road, and we bought their entire stock. About 20 tins of beans for the party  …Yummy!

Hallelujahpraisethelord my local pub has re-opened!

….Change the openstreetmap node back to amenity=pub

….Update the details on deadpubsociety wiki.

….Tell everyone about it on stroudgreen.org (*1)

….Leave a message on their myspace page (*2)

The Shaftesbury is back!

(*1 Hmmm no actually theyre way ahead of me)
(*2 Nooo! My eyes! MY EYES! )

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.

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.

.

Last Sunday I spent the whole day roller-blading around the streets of Wembley. I managed to get a sun tan (in October!) and it was the most exercise I’ve done in a long time. It’s taken about a week for my legs to stop aching.

It was the Wembley Mapping Party, a gathering of OpenStreetMap enthusiasts who were surveying the streets gathering street names, pubs, bus stops, post boxes, and other such details to go on a map.

Here’s my GPS trace

Notice the interesting circular loopy bit. That’s Wembley Stadium!  I was also on personal mission to bag another stadium. I skated in a loop around the base of the building to get this GPS trace which I could then use to map it out reasonably accurately. OpenStreetMap did already have it, but the outline was drawn around yahoo aerial imagery which was out-of-date, showing the smaller previous stadium before it was rebuilt. The more circular footprint of the modern stadium should be showing up soon on openstreetmap (here)

This was a fun loop to draw by GPS, but most of the time the process of mapping out London is a bit more straightforward. We can rely on Yahoo! Aerial Imagery to give us a road layout, and so it’s mainly a matter of collecting street names (eliminating the orange unnamed streets) Anyone can get involved in that. It’s not too complicated. Create an account and try editing!