http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog Sun, 25 Jul 2010 19:25:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en (photo Copyright All rights reserved by SINFOGEO)A few weeks ago we had a big OpenStreetMap conference, the annual "State Of The Map". This year it was in sun-baked Girona. "State Of The Map 2010 felt like a coming together of all my OpenStreetMap friends from around the world" Read my ... http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2010/07/24/talks-and-thoughts-on-openstreetmap-mapping-parties/ Ruby code for converting to UK Ordnance Survey coordinate systems from WGS84? It's one of those things I'd assumed would be a five minute search -> cut-n-paste job. But no. Well now you can cut & paste from here. Using Proj4 and the proj4rb bindings You can do all manner of coordinate ... http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2010/06/29/ruby-code-for-converting-to-uk-ordnance-survey-coordinate-systems-from-wgs84/ Last Wednesday was London wiki wednesday again. We struggled a bit with organisation this time. The usual to'ing-and-fro'ing around finding sponsors and hosts was confounded by a problem with the website. SocialText foolishly switched it to be hidden from... well the web... which really doesn't help when you're trying ... http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2010/05/10/paul-downey-and-london-wiki-wednesdays/ 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 ... http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2010/04/10/aid-information-challenge/ For the past few months I've been doing some work for placr, and this week I've joined the team full-time. I'm working on a new transport related API *, with some interesting geolocation and realtime dimensions to it. Currently this is all aimed at partner projects and B2B type clients, so ... http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2010/03/24/placr/ 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, ... http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2010/03/16/wherecampeu-how-was-it-for-me/ 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 ... http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2010/03/11/wherecampeu-tomorrow/ Last week we had a London Wiki Wednesdays event, and this time I was involved helping to organise and promote it. You can read what happened here (including lots more pics) The event was hosted by NYK line thanks to Alek Lotoczko. Alek along with me, Gordon, ... http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2010/03/07/london-wiki-wednesdays-march-2010/ In last week's blog post I casually mentioned the Haiti earthquake, and how we had a little project going on, to improve the map of the area on OpenStreetMap. Since then the scale of the disaster has become clearer to me. 200,000 feared dead, and the story has been top ... http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2010/01/21/haiti-earthquake-on-openstreetmap/ One of the most interesting aspects of OpenStreetMap is its global scope. The whole world map is editable wiki-style, and the various techniques for creating maps can work just as well in Niarobi and Nagpur as they do in Newcastle and New York. The project has always been most active ... http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2010/01/13/openstreetmap-in-the-developing-world/