OpenStreetMap Notes – SOTMEU Dundee talk
I was at the OpenStreetMap conference State Of The Map EU in Dundee a couple of weeks ago. Lots of fun! Right at the end of the schedule, I gave a talk all about “OpenStreetMap Notes”. Below is a full textual transcript of what I intended to say, but you can now also watch my […]
I was at the OpenStreetMap conference State Of The Map EU in Dundee a couple of weeks ago. Lots of fun! Right at the end of the schedule, I gave a talk all about “OpenStreetMap Notes”. Below is a full textual transcript of what I intended to say, but you can now also watch my actual conference talk as a video The following slides are also available as the original LibreOffice ODP (76Mb) or as PDF (12Mb). Jump to slide: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 Slide 1 Hello my name’s Harry. I’m a long time OpenStreetMap contributor, and today I’m going to talk about “notes” Slide 2 Not this kind of “notes”…although. I do quite like talking about taking notes on paper. When I introduce OpenStreetMap to new people I like to point out that gathering data can involve mobile apps, cameras, GPS units or dictaphones, but it can be a simple as writing some notes on a piece of paper. …But that’s not what this is about! Slide 3 OpenStreetMap “Notes” is a feature on the openstreetmap.org homepage, over here on the right. If you click that, you can place a marker and add a little textual description of something which is wrong or missing on the map. For example imagine you live on this street and you notice your local cafe has here has changed it’s name, you might make a note like this. It’s a very easy way to contribute without needing to learn how to use the editors. You don’t even need to log in. Slide 4 The “Notes” feature started out around 2009 as this separate website called “OpenStreetBugs” created by user Xav and later re-built by user Emka. I remember looking at OpenStreetBugs and thinking “I wish I’d thought of that!”. It’s brilliant in its simplicity. A very simple interface to use, and a very simple thing to develop. The community used it on this separate site for quite a while, but we liked it so much, it was brought onto the main OpenStreetMap site (and bugs data moved over) in 2014. (Old screenshot found on the mapperz blog) Slide 5 And here’s where we, as mappers, can consume this information. Tick to enable the “notes” layer here. Then we see red markers for open notes, and sometimes some green markers for recently closed notes. Here’s how it looks in Dundee Slide 6 And here’s how it looks in central London In London it’s getting crowded with thousands of notes, so we start to see the limitation of this notes display. It’s showing a maximum 100 notes. Slide 7 And as we zoom out we see some markers weirdly disappearing from the display. I don’t think it is random, but it seems quite random. And as we zoom out all the way, it stops fetching any notes at all and looks like this. So this kind of gives a summary indication of where some notes data is, but it’s a bit weird. In this view there are in fact tens of thousands of notes to show, so this would be too much data for the browser to show, or the server to serve, so that’s why we have limits, but it would be nice to have some better overview of all this data when we zoom out. One solution which may spring to mind is… Slide 8 “Marker Clusters”. This is a common way of displaying many many data points on web map. Here we see the MapComplete app in “notes” mode. So they’ve had a go at doing the marker cluster thing on there. We can see little counts across the map showing where there are many notes. But I often look at marker cluster maps with some frustration/disappointment because when we have loads of data points, this is a missed opportunity for a more much pretty cartographic technique… Slide 9 A “density map!” So this is a thing I want to unveil today, created specially for this SOTMEU talk. If we go to https://harrywood.co.uk/maps/notes we can see a density map of OpenStreetMap notes, available as a zoomable tiled map up zoom level 9 Slide 10 It shows closed notes over all time in green, and open notes in red. We can see that cities tend to have a clustering of both closed and open notes. As we’d expect over all time there are more closed that open. So each pixel is showing the intensity notes data. It’s designed to look good on a dark background. I’m quite proud of this. I’ve always wanted to know how to make a density map like this, and I finally figured it out for the purposes of this talk (It took me a while, although I’m sure there are a few people in this audience who could do this in their sleep!). Slide 11 I did this using these GDAL tools. Here is my bash script. Actually this is only half the bash script because it does it once for green notes and then again for red notes as two separate layers. [Update: Here is the full bash script for creating the notes density map] The fun bit is in the middle here where we define the “colour ramp”. You can see columns here defining the colour levels Red, Green and Blue and then Alpha transparency. So you can see we start off transparent and then the green colour gets more intense, and then for particularly dense areas of notes we fade to white. It’s this which gives it that electric zinging effect. The last command creates the tiles. I like the way this command spits out the tiles and also a little HTML leaflet map to browse the results. Slide 12 So going back to the question of what to show on the OpenStreetMap site when we zoom right out. We could make it look something like this, bringing in these tiles. This is just a mock-up of how that would look. I’m only showing red open notes. We could also show some green notes, but for continuity with the markers as you zoom out I suppose ideally it would only show a sprinkling of just the green notes closed in the past week. Slide 13 Another way of getting an overview of notes, is the stats site by Pascal Neis. There’s lots of great stats on this site, but here’s what the notes section gives as global overview. On the right it’s talking about notes active in the past 10 days, but down the left we have a ranking of countries. It’s an interesting ranking though because it’s by “opened” notes. Is it good to be high on the rankings of having lots of open notes? It means we’re using notes very actively, but it also might mean we’re not closing them enough. Slide 14 And we can see if we click on the UK stats, our count of open notes is going up and up. My first instinct would be to worry that we’re not managing to keep up with the notes getting opened. Notes are sitting there unresolved. Surely this is a bad thing. But we can see there is increasing churn of opened and closed notes each month. I don’t think the situation is very unhealthy. Maybe having lots of notes hanging around, lots of little puzzles to solve, isn’t necessarily a very bad thing. Slide 15 You may have noticed a patch of intense green on my density map, and this is backed up by the stats for Netherland and Belgium. These countries a both ranking very low on the count of open notes, and we can see they’ve both had periods of steep drops in their notes counts. Slide 16 They’ve been getting organised about closing lots of notes. In Belgium in particular, you can see a wikipage coordinating resolving notes. They’ve had some face-to-face meet-ups and generally rallied their community around the challenge of resolving notes. This wiki page has lots of great ideas on it actually. They’ve described some best practices and also suggesting using some hashtags in notes comments, such as #SurveyNeeded [update: I investigated and found that “#surveyme” is actually a more popular hashtag to use for this] Slide 17 I also want to shout out to the Colombia OpenStreetMap community and the Latin American community who invented the word “Notathon”, for their coordinated notes closing events. There’s a nice blog post on the main OpenStreetMap blog about this. They had a big push during lock-down to remotely resolve notes, and we can see in the data, they achieved a big drop! Slide 18 This brings me onto the idea of whether a note needs a survey to resolve it. Clearly for a lot of notes you can resolve them remotely, hence we can run a “notathon” and have a big organised push to try to close lots of them. But sometimes there’s no way to resolve a note without going to the place in real life to take a look. It feels like an important classification, and dividing line between two very different approaches. Now I’m quite excited about the right hand side here, but let’s start by thinking about notes we can close straight away… Slide 19 First of all there’s “spam”. Well I think we over-use the word spam actually when we’re really talking about a spectrum of different kinds of “abuse” of notes. Here’s a clearly abusive note: https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/5048825 Somebody wrote a foul-mouthed message directed at OpenStreetMap in general. It got me wondering how often this happens. If we take the F-word for example. This appears in the opening message in only 2 open notes, so we’ve clearly been pretty good at closing this kind of abuse. Over all time in the closed notes: 265 times. I was surprised how low that number is. One reason is that the Data Working Group has the power to “hide” notes completely. These would not appear in my analysis (or on the density map). So it’s possible some of these notes which are just outright rude, get hidden. [Update: I’m told DWG do not systematically go looking for this kind of abuse. They mostly hide notes which are on their “report” queue. Bear in mind it’s fine for the community simply “resolve” such notes, and better than reporting them, since reporting takes up the time of DWG. Another mechanism is a spam filter which might remove some of these even before DWG see them] Anyway, this particular rude message was also some sort of complaint about a problem this impatient person was having downloading something. We don’t want to encourage people to get their general problems solved via notes (Placed arbitrarily. Clearly an abuse), especially if they’re going to be rude, so I closed it, but referred them to the “Contact channels” wiki page, which I think is a good place to send people. Slide 20 Here’s another kind of abuse. Just straightforward “nonsense”. Here somebody’s just written the word “hi”: https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/314656 I think this happens quite a lot. Just single words or other nonsensical text, unrelated to the map. If we “assume good faith” and take a charitable interpretation of the situation, then we can imagine that this person is “experimenting with notes”, so we might reply thanking for experimenting and explain what OSM Notes are really for. Now I’m very conscious that some people probably work hard on dealing with this kind of abuse, while I’ve not got involved very much at all, so I don’t want to sound like I’m preaching to those people to do a better job carefully replying to everything. I appreciate we need a workflow which is quick and easy. But maybe standard snippets to paste as pre-set responses could work. In fact this example is clearly over the top. I laughed at myself of 10 years earlier when I came across this, because I clearly spent quite a lot of time crafting a reply to try to get this person involved in mapping. Clearly had nothing better to do. Ridiculous when you consider that there’s a very slim chance a person leaving an anonymous would even read such a message. Slide 21 And then there’s notes like this one where it starts to feel more like “spam”. They’re out to promote something. With this one quite near me https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/3843466, somebody’s linking to “Simon Power Estate agents”. There’s definitely no estate agents shop here, it’s an attempt to aim promotion at people looking at property here in the area. Quite spammy, but then again… If we “assume good faith” we can imagine that this is just a reasonable misunderstanding of what OSM notes are for. So here again I’m spending way too long patiently explaining this as I close the note. We do see quite a lot of notes seeking to promote a business, either when they’re not located there at all like this, or sometimes something that might be in an upstairs office, but not really the kind of verifiable thing we would normally map. Slide 22 But we do have some good notes too! Sometimes somebody leaves a note like this https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/1359337 with a good clear description where I look at it and feel confident enough in what they’re saying, to go ahead an make a map edit. I guess it will vary a little bit, how much confidence we feel. It helps if people have written whole sentences. The more description the better. I have to say, for me, I rarely see a note where I feel confident enough in the description to go ahead and make an edit. Obviously it’s pretty problematic trusting anything written in an anonymous note. Even here you can see I mention that I will make the edit, but plan to go there an check at some point. But I could make the edit here, this is the happy scenario. The ideal scenario, and something we’d hope to get more of with notes. Slide 23 So let’s talk about the other side of things. Notes we have to solve by going to take a look. For me this is the more fun side of notes, and I hope to persuade you to feel the same. We might see it as a bit of a chore, and of course it is more slow and laborious than resolving them remotely, but I find it quite satisfying to resolve these little puzzles. If you know me, you’ll probably know that I’m keen on survey-based mapping. These notes are a good way of guiding survey mapping activity where otherwise, in a place like London, things can feel like they’re “finished”. And it’s typically a very quick bite-sized bit of mapping. These days I rarely get the time to do extensive mapping sessions, so having a little puzzle to solve suites me. …particularly if I can be casually aware of notes that need fixing when I’m out and about. Slide 24 That was the thinking behind my KML notes tool. The KML format’s not important. What’s important is that when I get a KML download on my phone it opens straight into Organic Maps to give me this “bookmarks” layer. It’s handily available offline. It’s kind of a noddy solution, because it’s a read-only display of notes, but I find it very useful because… It’s bringing notes onto the app that I use all the time for getting around. So now I can easily spot those opportunities to snap a quick photo and resolve a note. If you get around using Organic Maps or CoMaps, give this tool a try. Slide 25 When I go to take a look to resolve a note, I find myself almost always doing this by taking a photo. That’s partly because it’s my normal mapping approach (Take photos because it’s quick. Leave the editing to do later) But I’ve also come to quite enjoy the sharing of note mapping photos. Normal mapping photos are too boring and too numerous to share online, but when fixing a note like this https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/3609433, this human-to-human interaction is greatly enhanced by sharing a photo. As well as the information in the photo itself, it also sends a clear (quite fun) message “I actually went there!”. I’ve been using my instagram for this. I find it amusing to mix in some random pictures of traffic lights while everyone’s sharing their serious artistic photography. I see it got a like from my sister in law, so it must have some artistic merit! Slide 26 Here’s MapComplete again, this neat website and app created by the Belgian community. When you’re viewing a note it has various photo features. Most importantly there’s this camera icon alongside the text box. Given how useful photos are for solving notes, I sometimes think we should add a little photo upload feature like this on the OpenStreetMap site. This note has a photo mentioned as a URL to a jpeg, in the text of the note. You can see that MapComplete shows the image instead of just the URL. At the bottom you can see it’s bringing in nearby scenes from Panoramax and Mapillary. I imagine this is sometimes useful although I found it would tend to snap to nearby images from a few streets over. Even so it’s a good reminder that those street-level imagery sources exist, because they can often be used to resolve a note. As I say, some of these ideas could be brought onto the OpenStreetMap site, but then again, the interface can end up feeling cluttered. We don’t want to compromise the beautiful simplicity! Slide 27 That previous note we were viewing was actually one created initially on the StreetComplete app. You’ll recognise these as the notes which begin with “Unable to answer… “ . StreetComplete is currently responsible for 14% of all open notes (I expected that to be slightly higher actually. It feels like we get lot of these) You may also recognise the westnordost.de domain name of photo URLs coming from this app. It’s a photo hosting service for notes, run by the same developer. It sometimes feels like there’s a quality problem with some of the notes coming from StreetComplete users, but I do think it’s really neat that it’s encouraging users to add a photo the their note like this. Great way of getting folks to contribute on-the-ground information without needing experience with editors. Slide 28 So we talked about clearing down all the notes on a country level, but I tend to think much more locally. For survey-based note solving you have to. So like with all my mapping I get a bit territorial about it, and try to sort things out where live and where I work. In my head I always visualised pushing back the boundary of a circular area, and trying to extend my “notes free radius”. I realised I could build an actual tool to visualise this, so let’s give this a try. Our notes free radius right now is 332 metres: https://harrywood.co.uk/maps/notes/notes-free-radius.html?lat=56.463579&lon=-2.973921 It really just finds the nearest note, which incidentally is a non-trivial thing to do because I had to make a binary search logic which grows and shrinks a bounding box query to find it. That’s kind of silly. I probably should’ve just contributed a new API method! I suppose the main idea is to be a shareable thing. You can get a permalink and maybe post it to social media to show off your “notes free radius”! But… Slide 29 I actually think it’s sort of problematic to obsess about closing literally all the notes. Some notes you can’t close so easily, and so maybe we should try to be more relaxed about it. This is the note closest to my work. https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/4139620 It’s an example of something Flohoff described here on the forum as a “tracking note”. It’s a note which is being kept open at a building site which we are all keeping an eye on. Should notes be used this way? I think there is a good argument for saying that any note which cannot be immediately resolved, is not valid (and therefore can be closed!). But I’m in two minds about it, because I’ve seen the idea used to good effect. There’s a note on a building site near me where we’re having a fun discussion and sharing photos of the building progress. But it is a shame it throws a spanner in the works for the note closing squads …and for me looking at my notes free radius! Slide 30 So I’ve talked about various types of notes, and we can start to try to classify them. I started out thinking that this “survey needed” question is a key dividing line. On the left we’ve got these note that should be closed, and can be closed remotely. Likewise notes which are “poorly described”. In a way that’s just another type of “nonsense” notes. Of course we’ve got that sweet spot, that ideal scenario, where a good description means we can go ahead and do a map edit to fix it remotely. On the right are the notes we can fix, but only by going to survey on location, and we’ve got “tracking notes” and maybe other types of notes which get left open because they’re “difficult” in some way. Slide 31 But thinking about those “poorly described” notes, there’s a bit of a spectrum of usefulness there, and if they seem to be providing a little bit of valid description, a small clue about a thing which might need fixing on the map, then there’s a couple of things might happen: As a remote activity, we can look at these little puzzles, and work together on “refining” them. Add comments with more details. Tell us what your interpretation of the note text is. Ask it as a question in case the original person comes back to give us more details. Link to the map object we’re talking about. Describe how it currently looks, and how the imagery currently looks. Link to street level imagery which may help. In this way we might refine a “poorly described” note into a “good enough to fix” note. Instead of, or maybe after this kind of refinement, we could decide that the note is going to stick around for a while and the only real way to solve it is going be a survey. So we could say these get “promoted” to the right hand side. This means that that first division between “needs survey” or not, is perhaps less of a solid delineation Slide 32 I realised as I looked through the red notes in central London, that clearly these are just what’s left open, and actually the community has been doing a very good job of closing the nonsense and the abuse notes and the closing the really poorly described notes. We’re looking at what’s left after that. And what’s left… there’s always something there which presents an interesting little puzzle, to be resolved by going to take a look. So this is the thing: They are all “survey needed” Although I think there’s quite a lot which are on this spectrum of being fairly poorly described, and that can feel frustrating, and there’s some potential to do more remote work to “refine” them, actually… the majority of them are clear enough little mapping challenges, and as a whole the notes are tending towards becoming quite a good rich data source which we can use to guide survey-based mapping activity. I got quite excited about OSM notes again when I realised this. Slide 33 I’ve hinted at some ideas which might be expressed “good practices”. Short notes of only a few words feel untrustworthy and poorly described. A key “good practice” is generally to write more words. Whole sentences! The more description the better. Obviously a photo makes a huge difference. Use those whenever possible. It’s also really good to link the relevant data. We should link changesets when we’re resolving notes, or just link the node/way we’re talking about when discussing. Sometimes there’s a datasource that is relevant. Often we’re looking at aerial imagery (Often this is implied but not stated clearly). We should link to street-level Mapillary/Panormax imagery when possible, to bring that into the conversation, but with any of these, or even just with OSM data, we have to remember the time dimension. It can be good to try to describe what we’re seeing as it currently appears, because these data sources, and especially the OSM data, have a habit of changing after we write the text. Again, the more description the better! However, I realise maybe I should stop short of saying this is a “best practice”. It’s more just a “some things I try to do”. Again I don’t want to sound like I’m preaching, and telling people they must spend longer on resolving notes. And at the end of the day, notes are simple. I wouldn’t want to make them seem more complicated. Slide 34 I will finish with one more “best practice” suggestion though. When a note gets resolved it can be frustrating that further discussion isn’t possible, so you don’t get to say “thank you”. But you can always do this by finding the changeset (e.g.). Changeset discussions remain open, so you can always go there to say “Thanks”. Slide 35 And on that note… Thanks for listening! Check out the things I’ve been showing at this URL https://harrywood.co.uk/maps/notes/ The notes density map and the KML download tool, and I hope you will all have a go at pushing back your “notes free radius!” Jump to slide: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 Slides slung with slideslinger Thanks for reading to the end! I have a few follow-ups in mind. Things I should blog about. Further investigations I should do. If/when I get chance to do any of that, I will add links here: Here is the bash script for creating the notes density map complete with GDAL commands, plus an earlier step, a ruby script to create an SQLite file from the notes planet dump XML.
My version of Repton running in its dinky window (watch video) I’ve been involved in a funny story of retro games and broken encryption going back several decades. In case you’re not interested in the Repton 3 game, I’ll skip ahead to… the broken encryption bit …because there’s an important lesson here. Do not roll […]
My version of Repton running in its dinky window (watch video) I’ve been involved in a funny story of retro games and broken encryption going back several decades. In case you’re not interested in the Repton 3 game, I’ll skip ahead to… the broken encryption bit …because there’s an important lesson here. Do not roll your own encryption! As a 19 year old computing student I’m not sure if I had yet started learning about encryption on my course, but either way I should’ve known better. I made a feature of my game, to allow creating “locked” levelsets. The intention was mostly to prevent cheating at the puzzles, but also to prevent opening the puzzles in the map editor. Not an ultra-secure encryption requirement, but I did make it scramble the file format, so that there was no easy way to unlock the maps by fiddling with it in a text editor. I thought I was being quite devious with various “scrambling” tricks, essentially re-arranging the bytes of the file with an algorithm only I knew about. Of course this is not proper encryption at all, but my naive younger self believed it would be enough to prevent anyone decoding it. At some point Gerald J Holdsworth figured out my file format. He’s created a repton map decoding tool, and even documented exactly how the scrambled file format works here! (page 41 “HW Repton 3”) “Each screen map is interlaced with each other, and the passwords, transporters, time limits and visible flag are interlaced with the map data. Also, the column and row order is interlaced. In addition, it is encoded with the lock password and a counter.” Oh yes! I remember doing that! I remember thinking I was being very sneaky. I never imagined someone would painstakingly figure out this encoded byte arrangement! How did he do it? I assume he did it with “known plain text” attacks, or in this case by crafting known repton map designs. This is generally the fatal flaw if you take this approach of trying to just algorithmically scramble the file a lot. So remember, if you’re locking up some more important data, don’t do that! Use actual encryption. Even so I imagine it took Gerald quite some effort figure this out. I’m deeply impressed, partly just because it’s cool to see someone sufficiently motivated to access my Repton map designs! I’m also glad that he did, because of what happened next. Repton 3? …rewind to the 1980s I remember visiting our older cousin, who showed me Repton 3 on their BBC micro. I was instantly enthralled, and a little too obsessed by this game. It’s mostly a puzzle game, with a bit of speed and dexterity required at times, and coming with its own map and sprite editor. Eventually we got our own BBC micro, and I played Repton 3 a lot. …Fast-forward to 1998. The BBC micro was broken, and I hadn’t been able to play Repton 3 in years, but home from university that summer I decided I needed to re-create it to play on the PC. I think I was trying to push my Visual Basic programming skills. Compared to BASIC I had learned on my Acorn, this was a proper language on my dad’s PC. A poor choice as games development language, but that didn’t put me off. I figured out a way of flipping images on a grid of image objects to create the game screen with a reasonable, if a little jerky, perception of motion. And so with an outpouring of youthful programming energy I created a faithful reproduction of Repton 3 entirely from memory, including a map editor. And then I designed some map puzzles to play on it. Designing the puzzles takes a lot longer than playing the puzzles. A very interesting exercise in itself. I remember spending weeks and weeks devising devilish puzzles. It was probably a bigger effort than the programming. I created a complete set of eight maps for “easy” and “main”. I never finished making my “hard” levelset. I’m particularly proud of this beast. Level 5 on the “main” set. This is probably the hardest of my maps. The rocks start in a striking diagonal arrangement, so that if you drop too many too early, then the spirit will be released at the top of the map, causing the crown to be blocked. (That’ll make more sense if you give it try) Around the same time, or maybe a year or so later, I designed a website for it. You may have noticed the funny little repton 3 sub-site of my website (This is looking pretty retro itself nowadays. The repeating-pattern background has a bit of a 1990s geocities vibe!) …since then More recently (well this millennium at least), some people completed my puzzles and let me know. Not many. I’d love for more people to try it. But part of the problem is that even back then, the .exe file download doesn’t work very well. The version of Visual Basic I had used produced an outdated 16bit binary which started to be harder to get running on newer windows, and I haven’t had a windows machine in a while now, but… …more recently I became aware that the BBC could be emulated on a PC well enough to play the original repton 3. In fact BeebEm has apparently existed since 1994. I probably wouldn’t have bothered with any of this had I known! And it demotivated me to do anything to try to rescue my old codebase into some more useable form. These days you can even emulate a BBC micro to play the original Repton 3 in your browser! Sadly I couldn’t play my own maps online until… …in 2025 Just recently my son was browsing projects on scratch. Scratch is a whole other story. A visual programming environment. It’s quite fun, and it’s also impressive that the site has so many people sharing projects on every imaginable topic. Lots of weird stuff created by kids, but also lots of surprisingly professional game creations. Somehow my son came across Repton 3 created by colinmacc …with me getting a mention in the credits! Why? Because you can play my map designs on there! So I recently enjoyed a bit of repton-nerdy discussion with colinmacc. Goodness knows how he used something like scratch to develop this. It’s an impressive piece of work. But he also confirmed he’d been able to make use of Gerald J Holdsworth’s decoding work (described above) to bring in my map designs. We discussed some quirky aspects of the original game which I had misremembered when making mine. These past few weeks I’ve played through all these maps again. I’m delighted that my deviously designed Repton maps are now more readily available. So I guess there’s an open data lesson here. In addition to “Don’t roll your own encryption” we could say “Don’t expend effort locking away data which could just be open!”. I’m much more of an open data warrior, than I was at age 19, but even then I presumably weighed up pros and cons of bothering with encrypting. I was hoping to see lots of people try my maps, and I wanted a way for them to prove that they’d solved the puzzles fair and square. That was potentially fun, and it happened a tiny bit, but you know what’s more fun? Open data! After all my effort encrypting, causing Gerald lots of effort to decode it, the final result is that colinmacc was able to bring this data into his software, making my maps more widely and easily available. And that’s way more fun! So here we go: Click here to try it now! (Click the green flag to run) and let me know if you can complete my ‘easy’ and ‘main’ scenarios.
I passed out again today. It’s happened before, and I blogged about it before back in 2006 and in 2008. Since then… There was the hospital occasion some time in the mid 2010s. I can’t remember if this was before or after getting married and having our first child. I had decided to go into […]
I passed out again today. It’s happened before, and I blogged about it before back in 2006 and in 2008. Since then… There was the hospital occasion some time in the mid 2010s. I can’t remember if this was before or after getting married and having our first child. I had decided to go into hospital worrying about chest pains (kind of a follow-up to that 2008 occasion). More tests, and this time they kind of answered the puzzle with the conclusion that it was probably a “sprained sternum”. But before that, one of the tests was a blood test, somewhat botched by medical students failing to find a vein, and it was that which caused me to pass out. Again, I felt like I’d been in a dream for a while. Curiously, I remember it being a particularly distressing dream in which I was wrestling to gather my thoughts. I came to with some more senior doctors looking concerned and the freaked out medical students in the background. Apparently I had been convulsing, but when I immediately started laughing, saying “Did I pass out? ok. Happened before” it probably set minds at ease. But if you thought blood test needles was a lame reason for passing out… Another half passing out happened during a conversation about teeth. I almost passed out in a restaurant with my parents, because my dad was talking about a gruesome cracked tooth injury he’d had. Suddenly I needed to go outside and sit down. I could feel myself going. With the fresh air and my head between knees, I managed to avoid passing out, but pretty weird that only talking about something could bring that on. And today? I slammed my finger in the door. A surprise gust of wind pushed the front door particularly hard and fast onto my middle finger. Several hours later it’s looking quite purple. Ouch! After swearing profusely and running it under the tap, I started to feel faint. Again a weirdly distressed dream about not being able to work out what I was dreaming about, and apparently I was convulsing again. Because of this, and because I looked pale and slack-jawed like I was dead, my wife called 999. As I came to I tried to reassure her that I was ok, but passed out again. I should have elevated my feet. That’s the trick. When I did that, lying on the sofa, I immediately started feeling better, and I knew the cold sweats would subside after 5 minutes, so I knew we could cancel the ambulance because…. it was just that same old passing out thing again.
It’s a weird time in technology and the web. It feels like a couple of big shifts are happening all at once. One of them is a big rise in “enshittification”, most noticeably for me with the death of twitter. It’s pretty surprising watching twitter die and, I’ll be honest, it’s upsetting. I allowed twitter […]
It’s a weird time in technology and the web. It feels like a couple of big shifts are happening all at once. One of them is a big rise in “enshittification”, most noticeably for me with the death of twitter. It’s pretty surprising watching twitter die and, I’ll be honest, it’s upsetting. I allowed twitter to become a bigger part of my online life than I should have done, and now it’s going down the toilet in a shift that feels quite sudden, given that I’ve been on twitter for about 16 years. Throughout 2023 I found myself gradually swapping from twitter to mastodon. Admittedly it wasn’t a very deliberate choice. I still go on both, but these days I think about posting to mastodon first and I’ll copy the post into twitter if I can be bothered. Why is twitter going down the toilet? (I refuse to call it “X” by the way) It took me a while to notice the problems, and maybe it was only the contrast with mastodon that helped me see it more. People talk in dramatic terms about nazis posts, which I never really saw, but there’s a shift in “the algorithm” of the feed. Mastodon only shows stuff from people I follow (and their re-toots). When I first played with mastodon a couple of years ago, it felt similar to twitter, but now twitter has shifted. It’s not even a subtle shift any more. My twitter timeline has very few posts from people I follow. Instead it’s full of clickbait videos and other “engaging” posts from non-followees. A lot of ads too of course. This algorithm shift is also noticeable with less engagement on my tweets. I see fewer likes and retweets these days. My tweets are hopefully not too dull, but they’re not exactly carefully engineered to “do big numbers”. They’re in a medium-interesting middle-ground which now seems to mean they go ignored more. And, before you roll your eyes at my dreadful narcissism, I know this is not just me. Others have said the same. If you’re guilty of paying attention to how many likes and retweets you get, then you’re probably noticing fewer of them these days. Meanwhile the tweets we do see, from strangers who we’re not following, do often appear to be engineered for engagement. All the click-bait tricks. This includes posing questions where we don’t get to see the answer until we click. Video tweets usually do the same. We see the intriguing freeze-frame. We don’t get to see what happens next until we click. How twitter made me an angry cyclist Then there’s the outrageous statements, or the statements which we know to be false and it’s hard to resist replying (or at least clicking to make sure that somebody has set them straight. Invariably hundreds of people already have). Just another kind of click-bait, but I think this one gives rise to the idea that the algorithm is actively evil. The outrageous statements can be on matters which are innocuous yet somehow engaging, but of course it’s also on serious matters of politics, culture wars, nazis versus black-lives-matter etc. I imagine this is where the “twitter is full of nazis now” idea comes from. I think it depends what you engage with. Also I think a lot of people look at what Elon Musk is interested in and maybe extrapolate that as a statement from twitter. But by even looking at that, the algorithm begins to steer you onto these topics. From my own perspective I really noticed this, not on nazi topics, but on cycling related tweets. I follow quite a few keen cyclists. It’s not a big obsession for me although admittedly it might sound strange to some people if I say that I am sad to no longer be cycle commuting since I started working from home. The algorithm has really pounced on this. It bombards me with videos of cycling road accidents (because I have to click to see what happens!) and people airing rather extreme pro-cycling or anti-cycling opinions. I do click on this stuff. I can feel the result is that twitter is making me angry, to the point where I feel I’m being recruited as foot-soldier in the war between cyclists and motorists. The really bad thing is that I can feel it effecting my psychology and spilling out into the real world. On the rare occasions when I do get on my bike these days, I feel anxious and angry at all the motorists around me, ready to go out and get into a confrontation with somebody. …until I calm down and remember the truth …the reality …the big cycling secret. It feels unfashionable to say it these days because nobody finds it exciting or anger-inducing but the secret is: most other road users are considerate, and the vast majority of cycle journeys, even in central London, are enjoyable and pass without incident. How boring. You would never get that from my twitter timeline, and this, more than anything, has made me aware of the nature of “the algorithm”. It cuts across all topics of course. In politics I used to think a big problem was the “echo-chamber” effect. But nowadays we’re presented less with our friends agreeing with us, and more with a weird mixture of strangers agreeing with us, plus strangers with unhinged extreme opposite opinions to us. It’s not mild-mannered strangers who vote the other way. It’s people posting short ridiculous caricatures of political opinions. Extra engaging and extra anger-inducing. Profit-driven enshittification I think people tend to attribute too much malice to the algorithm. Nobody at twitter sat down and said “how can we make all our users more angry about stuff?”. They just wrote an algorithm driven by clicks. If we engage with something, we get shown more of it. Maybe the anger that emerges from it, is in some sense an expression of human nature. But of course this algorithm is controlled by twitter, and it’s a shift from what went before. Previously we saw more posts from friends, and fewer ads. But maybe we still attribute too much malice because after all, it’s just about $$$. Blame and outrage is directed at Elon Musk. I’m not here to defend him (the guy’s clearly a bit of a dick, and I wish he would stick to rockets and electric cars) but I can well imagine all that really happened is, he told the twitter staff to take urgent action on profitability. Sort of fair enough I suppose. They already knew about various levers they could pull to make more money. Musk told them to crank the profit levers up to max, and that’s the effect we see. No big nefarious purpose. Just more ads, and more shovelling of engagement fodder posts instead of the (apparently less engaging) posts from our followees. We call this effect “enshittification” thanks to Cory Doctorow, who writes excellently on the topic. But this ramping up of ads and other money-making patterns has limits. I’m sure the staff at twitter have worried about whether they can get away with pushing the profit levers, the enshittification, up so high. Will users put up with it? It all depends on the degree of lock-in we feel. In this post, Doctorow explains “An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed” “the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite” From my perspective twitter has crossed that threshold. I know plenty of others who (wisely it turns out) had a lower tolerance and left twitter earlier. And in my free-software loving communities such as OpenStreetMap, I know folks who never even touched twitter in the first place (who no doubt read this kind of blog post with a smug sense of “told you so”). Of course quite a few people didn’t leave, but I guess the fact that it lost 72% of its value is strong evidence that Twitter has done something wrong, and that something is “enshittification”. The word “enshittification” is taking off as a way to describe the place we’re at with a lot of tech at the moment. Actually it seems like a very clumsy word for it. I do prefer Rohan Kumar’s suggestion of “User Domestication”. Like animals which used to run wild and free, but which gradually become dependant on their masters, users are eventually herded into enclosed online experiences where the tech companies can tame us, pacify us and then exploit us. <img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-935" src="/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/twitter-user-domestication.jpg" alt="Twitter user domestication (Sheep at South Molton Livestock Market)" width="600" height="400" srcset="https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/twitter-user-domestication.jpg 600w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/twitter-user-domestication-300x200.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /> Photo by Roger A Smith on geograph, CC-BY-SA 2.0 It’s not a surprise to me that, as a profit-driven company, twitter would start to seek that profit in ways which make things worse for users, or that the lock-in network effect comes to work against us in that circumstance. I was a bit surprised by how dramatically they have yanked on the profit levers to enshittify twitter over a relatively short timespan. It takes a lot to escape user domestication, but the cattle are bursting out of the twitter enclosure right now and running wild across the prairie. Or at least there’s suddenly a lot of people looking around for alternatives. Seeking new pastures. The move to mastodon One way the cattle analogy doesn’t follow, is that there’s no real harm in signing up for other services to try them out. You can join the herd in many new cattle enclosures at once. The only question is whether you allow yourself to become domesticated. For example I have signed up and created my profile on “threads”, the new Facebook/meta twitter alternative, even though this seems like an utterly asinine choice for a new twitter alternative if you think in terms of hoping to avoid future exploitation as a domesticated user. Why on earth would you put down roots on a social network closely tied to Instagram, the very flag-bearer of the engagement algorithms we were trying to get away from? There are alternatives, including some operated by quite small friendly looking tech start-ups. No harm in trying them out, but… there is a better way. Mastodon is very twitter-like but free and open source software, and decentralised software. A network hosted across many “instances”. I won’t go into the full pitch here, except to say that it’s a smart alternative to the depressing inevitability of enshittification we see on any for-profit hosted service. I recommend it. However… I think the mastodon community (who seem to do a lot of meta-posting about how wonderful mastodon is) is a bit too self-congratulatory sometimes. On-boarding of new users is confusing just because you’re immediately faced with this paralysingly important choice: which instance to join? I don’t think it really matters that much, or at least I don’t think it should matter, and people should feel free to post on topics unrelated to the topic focus on their instance (the etiquette is a little unclear but hopefully most folks feel the same). But the choice of instance does matter when it comes to the usual service hosting type questions. It made me laugh when people first started crowing about mastodon saying things like “because we don’t trust twitter with all our micro-blogging content” …the solution is to move to some server our friend’s friend has spun up in their free time? This even pre-dated the ability to migrate accounts between instances, but even with that ability, the reliability of hosting (the idea that my instance might disappear suddenly) is still a worry. Relatedly there’s the question of funding. People donating, or talking about donating, to their mastodon hosts. Coming from the twitter-hosts-millions-of-users-for-free model, this feels a bit fragile, and perhaps unlikely to be able to receive those millions of users. Many of us moved from twitter and followed eachother initially using tools such as “debirdify” or “fedifinder” to slurp our follow-lists from twitter (This is based on mentioning your mastodon account in your twitter profile, so be sure to do that) This was a good little cheat that meant mastodon didn’t really need to build the community from scratch. Even so, it’s obviously a sub-set of my twitter followees who have made this move. To me it feels like a more tech-savvy sub-set. Mastodon is like in the early days of twitter. That’s nice in a geeky clique sort of way. Mastodon enthusiasts will say we don’t want to attract all of twitter onto the platform. But I would like my less tech savvy friends to be on there, and to me the mastodon experiment hasn’t really succeeded unless/until it can go mainstream enough for that to happen. Decentralisation offers a lot of solutions, but mastodon is not guaranteed to succeed. I think it’s too early to pat ourselves on the back and say we’ve successfully used mastodon to free everyone from twitter domestication. But having said all of that, mastodon is better than the enshittified twitter experience of 2023 / 2024. I am feeling a lot less twitter domesticated these days. Time to follow me on mastodon instead!
I started working at Vivup (vivupbenefits.co.uk). Actually I started there approximately one year ago, so in order to keep this blog bang up to date as ever… time to tell you about this! Vivup helps organisations provide benefits to their employees. We have many large government clients such as NHS trusts, local councils, police forces […]
<img loading="lazy" src="http://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/vivup-logo-1024x709.png" alt="vivup" class="wp-image-900" width="375px" height="259px" srcset="https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/vivup-logo-1024x709.png 1024w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/vivup-logo-300x208.png 300w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/vivup-logo-768x532.png 768w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/vivup-logo.png 1054w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> I started working at Vivup (vivupbenefits.co.uk). Actually I started there approximately one year ago, so in order to keep this blog bang up to date as ever… time to tell you about this! Vivup helps organisations provide benefits to their employees. We have many large government clients such as NHS trusts, local councils, police forces etc, and increasingly bringing in private companies too. The benefits on offer are many and varied. One part of the website is like a shopping site with all kinds of products available as a “salary sacrifice” purchase, paid for over many months. There’s lots of bicycles available via cycle-to-work schemes, and there’s store discount cards, and all sorts of health & wellbeing offerings. If these benefits sound good, you’ll have to arrange to sign your whole company up to Vivup! As you can imagine, it’s quite a big complicated website, and it’s a rails app! We have a tech team working on various aspects, including people focussed on the mobile apps, and the separate .NET bits. We also have people who are a lot more front-end focussed. They’re migrating more and more of the site to use React on GraphQL. Our sub-team’s focus is on the rails coding. There’s back-end aspects, the database and API integrations, plus a big back-office admin interface built with ActiveAdmin, and lots of interesting workflows and dataflows. To deliver improvements to all of this, we have quite a rapid pace of projects running in parallel, which is taking some getting used to. We also have a bunch of QA people, which is something I’m not used to. Quite a big tech team in total. But the wider organisation feels big compared to previous jobs. I think in my previous big organisation jobs (e.g. 3mobile, B.P. & Alstom) I was in tech project teams isolated from the rest of the organisation, whereas at Vivup I’ve been involved in occasional bits of collaboration and communication across the organisation. Also it’s small enough that the whole organisation gets together on a quick video call each Friday, and for face-to-face social meet-ups three times per year. These are a lot of fun. I joined Vivup just in time to go along to the 2022 Christmas party in Newcastle, and we’ve just had the 2023 one in Liverpool.
I was waiting for the right time to blog about my latest job. As it has now come to an end, I guess that’s overdue! So let me tell you about where I spent the past ~8 months: Oomph! Wellness. They’re a company providing training and content to care homes in the UK. Activities and […]
I was waiting for the right time to blog about my latest job. As it has now come to an end, I guess that’s overdue! So let me tell you about where I spent the past ~8 months: Oomph! Wellness. <img loading="lazy" src="http://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/oomph-homepage.png" alt="" class="wp-image-836" width="476" height="324" srcset="https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/oomph-homepage.png 951w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/oomph-homepage-300x204.png 300w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/oomph-homepage-768x523.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 476px) 100vw, 476px" /> They’re a company providing training and content to care homes in the UK. Activities and exercises for old folks! They’re not a tech company, or at least not until recently. For many years they’ve been doing face-to-face service provision, with teams of people going out to care homes to train staff in how to run activities and exercises. Another service involves sending bus drivers to take residents out on trips. And then there’s a third service “Oomph on-demand” providing activities and exercise related content on the website by subscription. This side of the business has been expanding rapidly, particularly during the pandemic lock-downs. By “content” I mean videos, or just written instructions/inspiration on activities. Also things like puzzles. There’s quite a variety, and they’re constantly building it into an extensive library. The nice thing is that they’re drawing upon all their experience of working in care homes, and it really shows. That kind of grounding in the real world is something that is so often missing in tech up-starts, and of course their past work gave them a foot in the door to sell this web-based service to many existing clients. So it’s a low-tech company transitioning into a subscription web content company. In fact they’d made that transition and were already selling on-demand subscriptions on a site built within wordpress. That was done by an agency with many wordpress plugins and not much coding. It’s quite impressive how far you can push that approach, but the agency had to say “no” to some of their newer ideas. They were going to need coding, actual data-modelling, and development. They were going to need me! Obviously looking at a wordpress set-up with a tangled mass of plugins, I was quick to tell them this whole thing was going to need re-building (Ruby On Rails was my suggestion!), but I’ve done a fair bit of wordpress tinkering over the years so I wasn’t afraid to roll up my sleeves and implement some of their feature ideas in PHP. I added a surveying and reporting feature, which had some enjoyable data aspects to it. I’ve had fun with c3js graphs in the past, so brought that in. <img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="331" src="http://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/oomph-stats-reporting-1024x331.png" alt="" class="wp-image-838" srcset="https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/oomph-stats-reporting-1024x331.png 1024w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/oomph-stats-reporting-300x97.png 300w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/oomph-stats-reporting-768x248.png 768w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/oomph-stats-reporting-1536x497.png 1536w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/oomph-stats-reporting-2048x662.png 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /> That whole thing turned into quite a rich interface. I probably should’ve taken the chance to learn a rich javascript framework. I did learn the way of wordpress a little bit. For example wordpress developers have a particular way of doing database querying, and AJAX requests. I also learned more than I wanted to know about how to persuade IE to print graphs correctly! Maybe I should blog some more about these learnings. I was doing these things to meet the clamouring needs of some existing customers, to make the sale to a large new customer, and to lay the foundations for a grant funded project. I gradually settled into a role which can best be described as “the one-man tech team”. I quite enjoyed the challenge of always designing solutions and solving problems single-handedly, and presenting the solutions and options to a less-techy rest of the organisation, but I did miss having fellow developers to bounce ideas off. I was always a little out of my comfort zone in that regard. Enjoyable challenge but… I’m looking forward to re-joining a developer team for my next job I think (although I’m keeping an open mind) While juggling php features and bugs, I started to look at doing a big website rebuild project for them, and I had got as far as architecting this as a Ruby on Rails project. I planned out how I could do the work single-handedly, however this was going to be lot to take on. The alternative for them, was to bring in an agency to do the rebuild, and I think it was sensible for them to go with that approach in the end. A better way of getting it done in time to meet some grant deliverables, as well as to do some Salesforce work which I certainly didn’t want to go near! It makes a lot of sense, and I wish them well with it. They’re a nice bunch of people and they’re doing good things. So… if you run activities in an old folks home (not sure that’s my core blog readership, but you never know!) be sure to check out Oomph Wellness! It also makes a lot of sense for me to move onto something different. It’s been an interesting time, but as I look for a new job I’ll probably look to get back into ruby, probably within a larger tech team. That’s more my comfort zone. I have a few other ideas about what I’m looking for, but I’m also pretty flexible and keeping an open mind.
2020, the year of the virus, has been pretty alright for me actually. For me it was never going to be a normal year, with a new daughter arriving in January. By comparison the virus …well it’s a big deal, but impacted me relatively lightly. The wife planned to be on maternity leave for a […]
2020, the year of the virus, has been pretty alright for me actually. For me it was never going to be a normal year, with a new daughter arriving in January. By comparison the virus …well it’s a big deal, but impacted me relatively lightly. The wife planned to be on maternity leave for a full year, expecting lots of quiet mother-daughter bonding time. Instead she’s had to put up with me working from home. During that first lockdown, the 4 year old little terror was at home too. I remember a period of a few weeks where the virus was pretty big news, having clearly arrived in the UK, yet still not quite impacting anyone significantly. Then suddenly things moved fast. My company decided we’d all work from home. At the time it seemed very cautious on the part of my employers (OpenCorporates) and I suppose it was a nice expression of care towards employees. But as it turned out, it was only a week ahead of everyone being told to work from home (first lockdown). It was a relatively easy transition for us, since we’ve always been geared up to do our software development work from home. Just a matter of getting used to the whole team being at home the whole time. We’ve since ditched our office and gone remote-only, as I’m sure many companies have. I remember some friends laughed off the virus as an overreaction at the early stages, and I did begin asking myself a question which I can’t help keeping in the back of my mind: “Will history remember it as an overreaction?”. There’s a paradox. With a multiplying virus we need to take aggressive measures before they seem necessary. If they work, they won’t seem like they were necessary. I don’t envy decision-makers dealing with that lose-lose choice. My twitter feed is full of people either explicitly advocating stronger measures, or expressing worries about the virus (which implies we should respond more aggressively). I think that’s right, however I can’t help also thinking ahead to a time in the future where we will all look back and say “well that was a whole lot of fuss about nothing”. It’s almost inevitable actually. Surely the smart (cowardly) choice is to hold off being opinionated until we can be wise in hindsight. That said, I do have some opinions. The first lockdown was the big one and (anecdotally) it felt like people were taking the virus more seriously than they are now, in my corner of North Islington. Myself included if I’m honest. I remember heading out to the supermarket, trying to choose a quiet time, and trying to get in enough supplies to avoid any more shopping trips for a week. The streets were eerily empty in a way I haven’t seen since (No traffic. No people. Crows squawking on a nearby rooftop. End of civilisation kind of vibe). I followed a few people arguing for wearing masks. In the early days there was concern that demand for masks would cause a shortage for NHS workers, which I guess was the main reason it wasn’t a big recommendation. That seemed like a missed opportunity in the early days of the virus response. There could’ve been more encouragement to make your own mask (seemed quite fun to me!) But masks continue to be a missed opportunity. In this second wave they’re easily available to all, and required when shopping, and yet somehow many people who frequent my local corner shop don’t seem to have got that message. Given what an easy virus solution masks are (compared to other restrictions and shuttering of businesses) it is a shame people don’t seem to be doing it enough. I can only imagine this means people are not washing their hands enough either. Am I arguing for more enforcement? Not sure, but with so much debate and anguish about the tough measures of closing schools/theatres/pubs/whatever, it’s a shame if these relatively painless solutions are getting skipped by many people. These days the news is all about the different tiers, but (because we’re lucky I suppose) the different tiers make very little difference to our lives. For us the big thing is school closures. Whether the primary school and nursery remain open makes a big difference to our lives and … some news just in … turns out schools are closing again next week. Oh joy. Educating/entertaining the kids more than anything else, has been the theme for the year. Our son just turned 5 and so he started at school reception class this year. The daughter is turning 1 and has started at nursery. During the first lockdown our son would have been in nursery, but it was closed for his final months there. More recently during his first months at school: 1st They sent the class home for one week due to a covid case 2nd We were all self-isolating awaiting a test result for my wife, which took ages (quite a bizarre experience and a story in itself) 3rd He got chickenpox! Three weeks at home in all. It feels like more, maybe because school closes earlier than nursery. Coping with this extra childcare has been largely down to my wife to look after both kids while I was working, since she’s on maternity leave. She found that quite tough. I think in general our lad’s at an age where we’re struggling to find ways to avoid just screaming at him for being naughty the whole time! But it’s also quite an interesting stage he’s at. I thought we were doing ok at introducing him to maths and reading/writing (not just with the games I developed!) and I was imagining he’d be ahead of his class for the first half year or so. But no! At school they’ve been motoring on through to more advanced reading and writing and he’s been coming home with ideas about writing whole sentences. I need to develop some new games! The pace of his learning (and the teaching) is impressive. I think less progress was made when we were officially supposed to be home-schooling. There wasn’t much to the materials his teachers posted onto “google classrooms” (and wow that google sign up process is surprisingly broken). Probably we should’ve done better at adding more structure. But I do quite enjoy coming up with whacky ideas to entertain him. The xmas cardboard “reindeer project” as a recent example. I’ve been taking him on regular walks to try to burn off his energy. Avoiding unnecessary transport, this means we’re restricted to his walking range from the house around the neighbourhood, so I’m taking it as a challenge to avoid route repetition (That’s for my own entertainment. He’s probably not bothered), and I’ve been getting some OpenStreetMap address detail mapping while I’m about it. Sometimes I can interest him in reading people’s door numbers. The 1 year old daughter meanwhile, is mostly a smiley bundle of joy. Of course it’s a kind of nappy-filling joy, and she’s less joyful when she head-buts the furniture (which is often), so it is also hard work looking after her. Because of the virus our family (especially the grandparents) are sad to be missing out on seeing all the rapid growing up that babies do in their first year. I had worried that she would be missing them, and generally missing meeting anyone outside the house, but she’s started nursery now, and seemed to take to it reasonably well. But my wife has had a lot of extra time doing childcare and got a bit fed up of it at various stages. During the first lockdown she was craving an escape from the house, while I felt quite at home staying at home (I’ve been practicing for this moment my whole life). So she went online and booked a summer holiday cottage in Cornwall. Bit expensive as they were booking up fast, but we had a very pleasant week in Portscatho. The week before we were due to go there, the evening news had a piece on how Cornwall was overrun with visitors. Certainly when we went to the bigger town of St Ives, it was packed, but otherwise not so bad. Shopkeepers there were taking the virus very seriously. Strict distancing and mask wearing enforced. On the whole the biggest virus risk felt like the dirty overcrowded service stations on the motorway to get there. The day job at OpenCorporates has been keeping me very busy. Working from home does make a difference and (this seems to be unusual but) I’m trying to decide if I like it. I’ve always allowed the day job to spread into my evenings but that feels different now that there’s no office time and no cycle home to divide up the day. My OpenStreetMap obsession has fallen by the wayside in 2020. I think this is mostly because there’s been no OSMLondon pub meet-ups, which in turn makes it easier for me to forget about OpenStreetMap. I’ve neglected the Communications Working Group for example. Sorry about that. Hopefully OSMLondon pub sessions will resume in 2021! So overall 2020 saw a lot of focus on family. That’s kind of a nice way of saying “focus on coping with childcare” although …it has been good on the whole, and I’m sure this year has been harder for many people. There’s some things to worry about with what’s coming in 2021, but let’s be optimistic. Happy New Year!
I keep doing the same calculation over and over again, so I decided to make an online tool specially for it: >>> Linear time calculator <<< It’s a simple enough calculation to work out a time estimate for something based on progress so far (assuming progress has a number). Could be used for anything I […]
I keep doing the same calculation over and over again, so I decided to make an online tool specially for it: >>> Linear time calculator <<< It’s a simple enough calculation to work out a time estimate for something based on progress so far (assuming progress has a number). Could be used for anything I suppose, but I keep doing this for long-running data processing scripts, where a count is being spat out to a log file e.g. a count of records processed. Here’s how the tool looks for script I was running recently. Alternatives Maybe I should’ve just worked out how to do the time format conversion and arithmetic properly in a spreadsheet, but why use a spreadsheet when you can build a whole dedicated tool for the job?! There are some similar existing online calculators. You can do the time between two date times on timeanddate.com which I suppose is the error prone part. Various online calculators do a speed calculation (division!) If you imagine “miles per hour” is “records per hour” it works.
Our second baby arrived last week. Here she is. Our new baby girl! It was a planned C-section, and all went to plan, in contrast to the unexpected twists and turns of our boy’s birth which I blogged about four years ago. She seems partial to sleeping, sometimes for six/seven hours straight, and the breastfeeding is […]
Our second baby arrived last week. Here she is. Our new baby girl! <img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-748 aligncenter" src="http://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/baby-holding-finger-298x300.jpg" alt="" width="298" height="300" srcset="https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/baby-holding-finger-298x300.jpg 298w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/baby-holding-finger-150x150.jpg 150w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/baby-holding-finger-768x774.jpg 768w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/baby-holding-finger.jpg 1000w" sizes="(max-width: 298px) 100vw, 298px" /> It was a planned C-section, and all went to plan, in contrast to the unexpected twists and turns of our boy’s birth which I blogged about four years ago. She seems partial to sleeping, sometimes for six/seven hours straight, and the breastfeeding is proving to be less stressful this time. Some of the same problems as last time, but this time we know what to look out for, and what we wanted to avoid! A second child is an important milestone in my life. My chosen mate and I have now successfully spawned offspring in sufficient numbers to replace ourselves and project forth our genetics to a new generation. I do feel like a successful organism now. <img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-749 aligncenter" src="http://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/me-holding-baby-261x300.jpg" alt="" width="261" height="300" srcset="https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/me-holding-baby-261x300.jpg 261w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/me-holding-baby-768x882.jpg 768w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/me-holding-baby.jpg 871w" sizes="(max-width: 261px) 100vw, 261px" /> But we humans have long lifespans, and we rear our young for several years before they are ready to face the world on their own. I can confirm that even my older offspring, now facing his fourth winter, still requires food and shelter supplied by me, although he has a heightened sense of foraging where chocolate is concerned. By convention (for we are socially advanced creatures with widespread social groupings and strong social conventions) I understand we normally rear our young for over a decade. Eugh! So I definitely can’t declare myself a completely successful organism yet. But worse, we humans are an advanced intelligent species, capable of not just of globe-spanning social interaction, but of contemplating the overall health and ongoing survival of our species within its environment. We can project population growth and demands on resources, and when we do, we see that humans are on course to overpopulate, exhausting our resources, and polluting our environment. As an intelligent organism, perhaps by reproducing I have failed after all. But we are a highly intelligent inventive and increasingly technological species. We might find ways to collectively solve the environmental threats we face, and/or we might build a sustainable community on another planet as an insurance policy for the survival of our species. We might, but no guarantees we’ll achieve this in time. We should try. And by “we” I mean my offspring. Astronaut training begins today! Here she is trying on the jetpack in our mini neutral buoyancy pool: <img loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-750 aligncenter" src="http://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/baby-sink-bath-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/baby-sink-bath-300x225.jpg 300w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/baby-sink-bath-768x576.jpg 768w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/baby-sink-bath-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/baby-sink-bath.jpg 1333w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
I went to Open Data Camp 7 last weekend. It’s an event I’ve been hoping to get along to for years now. Always lots of interesting looking twitter chat coming out of it. But this year it happened in London, and I managed to be on the ball getting a (free) ticket before they sold […]
I went to Open Data Camp 7 last weekend. <img loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-743" src="http://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/open-data-camp7-logo-300x296.png" alt="" width="300" height="296" srcset="https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/open-data-camp7-logo-300x296.png 300w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/open-data-camp7-logo-768x759.png 768w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/open-data-camp7-logo.png 926w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> It’s an event I’ve been hoping to get along to for years now. Always lots of interesting looking twitter chat coming out of it. But this year it happened in London, and I managed to be on the ball getting a (free) ticket before they sold out. I hadn’t particularly realised it’s the “unconference” format. It reminded me of the London “wherecamp” events I was involved in once upon time, although OpenDataCamp is even more unconferency. I mean the sessions were all very conversational. Didn’t see anyone with prepared slides, and often heard less from the session leader than from other people chiming in. <img loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-744" src="http://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/odcamp_session-1024x768.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="480" srcset="https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/odcamp_session-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/odcamp_session-300x225.jpg 300w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/odcamp_session-768x576.jpg 768w, https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/odcamp_session.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /> It was also different from wherecamp because there was a “pitching” session at the beginning to establish all the ideas. Those were then written up as a very busy schedule with four/five parallel tracks! Here’s all the sessions listed. In fact that has links on to more notes on each of the sessions too. Here’s the session choices I made: “Bad data” – Discussing the precision of library visitor stats. I gave the example of bad data in company registries! “Quantifying value of open data” – How to measure/justify the value of open data by tracking usage. The great unsolvable problem. “Sorting out configuration so we can do cool things” – Really boiling down to: software can be hard to install and get working. Another great unsolvable problem. “SPARQL 101” – A very quick intro to linked data querying. SPARQL playground and epimorphics qlassroom. “What is non-commercial?” – Or does non-commercial really count as Open Data, or what other ways are there to avoid giving away all your value? As applied to the NHS! “Open Procurement data for less carbon” – Influencing contract and procurement processes to (be more open and) reduce carbon emissions “Joy Diversion” – An Open Data Manchester idea which I was always curious about. Walk round the block looking out for joyful serdipidousness. Quite fun. Quite similar to OpenStreetMap mapping (not as good!) “OpenStreetMap” – My Session! I tried to introduce OpenStreetMap editing and using. Mentioning tags quickly led to questions and conversational diversions (as documented in the session notes) That made for an interesting different way of presenting it! “Learning from our data mistakes / Open data horror stories” – People confessing failed attempts to open data, or opening data leading to other problems. Some of the discussions gave me a strong sense of deja vu. We’re still collectively bashing our head against some problems of open data which feel unsolvable (not that I didn’t enjoy discussing them anyway!). I also enjoyed bringing some OpenStreetMap (hobby) and OpenCorporates (day job) perspectives to discussions. I just realised I have over a decade of open data experience in both hobby/volunteering with OpenStreetMap and in my career spanning CloudMade, TransportAPI and OpenCorporates now, but I don’t always think of these things in abstract open data terms. My overriding impression of Open Data Camp was an enjoyable feeling of being among open data people again!