Harry Wood's diary

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London Pub Meet-up Oxford St.

We had a nice long merry drinking session last night for our London pub meet-up.

We arrived a bit late because Andy was on a mission to map bicycle parking. I usually drop in a few of these while I'm out mapping, but when you're actually deliberately looking out for them (and nothing else), there's quite a few of them. Andy's knocked up a wee heat map:

But there's plenty more to map in central London. You can add the capacity too (tag docs)

But enough of this mapping. This was supposed to be a pub meet-up. Again the Blue Posts near Oxford Street provided plenty of space and a good venue for map-chat despite upstairs being closed on a Monday. The pub grub was pretty reasonable too. Shaun ordered lasagne in his Scottish accent and got steak'n'ale pie, and Matt dropped half his macaroni cheese on the floor. All adds to the entertainment.

A wide a array of topics were covered, and topics became more random as the cheap sam smiths booze flowed.

There is a plan to add ventilation holes to the metal server cabinet door. This is necessary. It's not just because Andy wants to use his new power drill :-) Also on the servers topic, there is a plan to install a new one hosted at a different London university. That might actually go ahead this evening, but maybe I shouldn't speak too soon. Anyway this prompted increasingly less serious conversations about universities, including Matt's story of how to clog up a super-fancy new uni printer by sending it a little ray-tracing job. We even got onto talking about ADFS and other outrageously geeky topics.

It was nice to relax with much beer and friends after an intense couple of weeks giving talks to GIS people and trying to piece together a new career plan. In fact with all that going on, I forgot to write a diary entry about the last meet-up in at McGlynns in Kings Cross. Ah well. Here's photos from McGlynns. As for last night, I forgot to take photos apart from this masterpiece:

Not very much blood in my alcohol stream at the moment, but Steve's visiting from U.S. at the moment, so the situation is unlikely to improve.

Coordinates:
51.516937037432; -0.1354405230421
(View / Edit)
Posted by Harry Wood at Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:29:14 +0000 in English (English)
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Philippines armchair mapping

It's been quite a miserable weekend in London. Not great for mapping. Personally I did a little armchair mapping instead. There's some nice new aerial imagery for the Philippines which Andy has made available. This was a donation from DigitalGlobe showing an area hit by flooding after the Typhoons (and we thought our weather was bad) Check out Philippines HOT page for details.



Humanitarian OSMers will also be interested in mapkibera.org, Mikel's latest project which is in full swing right now. Note that this is not a remote mapping exercise (See note)

We'll be unleashing some other challenges for the U.S. TIGER fixup, on the CloudMade community blog pretty soon, since the dupe nodes clean-up is going so well.

But armchair mapping is not as good as real mapping. It's great to see the weather doesn't stop some people. There's been some good follow-up mapping taking place after some of our previous london mapping parties too: Roger in Farringdon, Tila in Paddingdon

Even so... I'm afraid our next meet-up is just a pub meet-up (This Wednesday in Kings Cross) Maybe we should sit in the pub and map the Philippines!

Posted by Harry Wood at Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:16:02 +0000 in English (English)
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Farringdon. Last one in the series

I had a good mapping session last night even though it was in the dark. My dad and I went around slice 10 which I'd picked because it's a one of those weird areas of central London I've never really explored much. Also in the aerial imagery I could see a churchyard with an interesting shape.

...A challenge for fuzzy yahoo sketching. I made plenty of corrections to that along with a various other building outlines, by labelling spots which were particularly unclear, and then having a good look around on the ground.

The Three Compasses was renovated since I was in there several years back. Quite nice, and it still had a Thai restaurant on the floor above. We split up, and half of us went to eat there later on, but before that we were sitting around doing the usual technical chit-chat. Joined by the mighty Steve8 this time too. Later on we were talking about replicated databases for read operations and the idea of maybe making read-only OSM DB/PostGIS available on the dev server.

So that was the end of the London Summer Mapping Party Marathon 2009. It is no more, but rapidly to be replaced by the London winter pub meet ups 2009-2010. For mapping (in daylight) we'll need to organise something on a weekend.

I didn't take any photos last night. But how about this nice picture printed big in the Guardian Technology supplement today (article):

OpenStreetMap with CloudMade style in the Guardian Technology... on Twitpic

Coordinates:
51.520008066448; -0.10362952412669
(View / Edit)
Posted by Harry Wood at Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:39:15 +0000 in English (English)
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Mapping<->IKEA

My girlfriend and I struck another deal

  • Keep me happy <-> Keep girlfriend happy

  • Pleasure <-> Pain

  • Mapping <-> IKEA shopping

  • Exploring unnamed streets around White Hart Lane <-> Shopping for unnecessary household style clutter in a hideously crowded out-of-town warehouse
  • Just kidding. IKEA shopping is actually quite entertaining too. But it was great to get out and do some real mapping (unnamed streets yay!) in the White Hart Lane area, although I got a bit bogged down in POI mapping along High Road.

    Seems we need to do this stuff at the weekends now. It's just getting way too dark for after work mapping. ....Oh go on then. Let's do one more.

    The FINAL London mapping evening of 2009 Tomorrow (Wednesday) evening in Farringdon. The area looks like it could do with a shiney new blue marker on my mapping parties map. Now maybe we haven't gone there previously because it's already mapped. It is very central, but looks can be deceiving. Checking against Yahoo imagery I spotted a few wonky streets and even something looking vaguely like a missing street! If you fancy it, grab a slice of the cake and take a look at Yahoo! imagery beforehand to check for patches which might need work. Personally I'm probably going to do a bit of building outlines sketching too, but each to their own. No doubt some people will just go to the pub!

    Coordinates:
    51.608178300527; -0.046605760472408
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:53:31 +0000 in English (English)
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    Paddington Mapping Party

    At the London mapping party last night we had a pretty big turn out for the pub, but not so many people out mapping beforehand. By 7:30 it was completely dark, so that might have had something to do with it.

    Jon Burgess was along. We also had Brian who was telling us about his plans to do mapping in Nigeria.

    I think the Monkey Puzzle goes on the list of good pubs for having an OSM meet-up. Spacious and quiet, and best of all it has a great big out-of-copyright map of London on the wall!

    I mapped a bunch of shops along Edgeware Road as planned (slice 7), but I was showing a new guy, Michael, the mapping process, and so I also took him off-cake in search of some variety (Photoing a whole row of shops is not the most interesting kind of mapping) As it happened we stumbled upon some important missing details including a missing street name, a one-way, and two missing pubs. Missing pubs! (still to be uploaded)

    It's satisfying to find these pockets of missing map, but frustrating that we have no effective way of figuring out where they are, particularly when trying to pick where the next mapping party should be. I made a quick map of where we've had mapping parties, which shows we've done a pretty good job of heading to different central London areas. The next one will be the last evening mapping party of the season. It'll have to be central again because there's so little daylight in the evenings. Still pondering the options.

    Coordinates:
    51.516576511749; -0.17008393467712
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:14:33 +0000 in English (English)
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    Monday Enthusiasm

    I have a bit of blocked nose. Dreary weather. Start of another week. All very depressing,...

    ...but then I read Roger's diary. He can't make it to the mapping party so he's gone ahead and mapped his cake slice in advance in super-turbo-amazing detail! This kind of enthusiasm always cheers me up.

    If you want to go looking for some "enthusiasm", we've had weekend mapping parties in Barcelona, Schnatgang Wuppertal, Hannover, Basildon, Trieste. We're down to 6501 duplicate nodes on the important highways. 43 blog posts, 22 SVN commits (development!), 37 posts to the forum (5 new ones for the unanswered list) and of course X million mailing list emails and Y million recent changes on the wiki

    Too much enthusiasm for my Monday morning mind. Maybe I'll focus on London afterall. Here's some photos taken by Atilla at our last London mapping party:

    hehehe. I think Jenny was trying to get Matt in trouble.

    The Paddington mapping party is tomorrow (Tuesday) night. If you're in London, come along!

    Posted by Harry Wood at Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:13:54 +0000 in English (English)
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    Old videos from SOTM 2008

    I was just watching an old talk by Ed Parsons from the State Of The Map 2008 (over a year ago in Limerick) in which he makes his excuses for Google's launch of MapMaker (clearly evil) and for some of google's other less open geo strategies. He talks a bit about aerial imagery. At topic which has resurfaced recently. There's a joking comment about the lack of "field work" mapping the Caribbean, which lead on to great things, and various other funny moments I'd forgotten about. Likewise Steve's keynote was a good one to remind myself of what's moved on since then, and what hasn't. Andy's gradually adding more videos listed here

    In other news, I've scheduled the next London mapping party in Paddington next Tuesday featuring a cake of many flavours:

    Before that there's a Basildon Mapping Party (quick train hop out to Essex) this weekend.

    But if you want an armchair mapping challenge this weekend, check out the latest duplicate nodes display!

    Posted by Harry Wood at Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:03:33 +0000 in English (English)
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    Building mapping. How did it go?

    On Wednesday we had our special edition of the London mapping party marathon focussed on building mapping. This was an experiment in a slightly different mapping approach. Sketch some building outlines from Yahoo! aerial imagery beforehand, then go check them on the ground.

    So how did it go?

    Well my experience was pretty good. While doing my sketching, I left a bunch of FIXME nodes dotted around my area in spots where I wasn't too sure what shape the building was. I printed this out as an inverted colour screenshot from JOSM with search seleciton on 'FIXME'. We only had a brief mapping session because darkness comes a bit earlier these days, so I went directly to those FIXME spots to check them out. This was a surprisingly satisfying kind of mapping. Recognising buildings which I had been sketching around, and areas which I had been puzzling over, and discovering the solution to the puzzle.

    Mixed responses from everyone else. Some people had a go at it, some others didn't fancy it.

    "homework" requires more forward planning, to set aside some time for sketching beforehand. Maybe it feels like too much of a commitment in advance (Similar psychology applies to signing up in advance for attending a mapping party. People can be quite averse to doing this, even when they fully intend to come along)

    But there's also uncertainty around whether mapping every building in the central london is a worthwhile thing to try to do, how much detail to go into (each building according to what kind of roofs you can see, or just one building area for a city block?) Also casual Yahoo sketching is something people are uncomfortable with, or even philosophically opposed to. I've described my thinking behind the whole idea in previous diary entries (some initial explanation, and follow up thoughts) But basically the building mapping party wasn't exactly universally accepted as the awesomest thing ever, but not exactly rejected as a rubbish idea either, so maybe we'll try it again some time. In the meantime maybe people will look at the expanding building coverage, and chip in a little more here and there.

    We were back in the Blue Posts pub in Oxford Street, which is one we've been to before. It's notable for being really nice and quiet on a week-day. No problem getting seats. No problem hearing ourselves talk. Good for the map chats.


    We had a couple of new faces along, including Roger who drives a night bus! He was super-keen and looked like he was managing to gather some great detail, so hopefully we can get him mapping Buses too. OSM shall infiltrate the public transport organisations from the bottom-up! Oh yes!

    We've got time for a few more mapping parties before it gets really dark and miserable. Location/pub suggestions welcome, although I guess we're looking at quick mapping sessions in the centre now (winter boo!)

    Coordinates:
    51.516997124766; -0.13545125187816
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:16:18 +0000 in English (English)
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    Let's talk buildings tomorrow night

    Don't forget, tomorrow night is Building Mapping night. Have you done your homework yet?

    OpenStreetMap (mapnik) map of the area around 51.51470, -0.12660

    I did mine last week (teacher's pet), and I notice a couple of other people have sketched theirs. Slapping in building outlines quickly using Yahoo! imagery can feel a little bit careless, particularly given its overbearing rendering style. It's a high impact kind of mapping, without the effort of doing any real mapping, which all feels a bit wrong.

    Of course we are going to try to do some real mapping tomorrow night, to double-check building outlines where the imagery wasn't clear. It remains to be seen how effective that will be.

    My experience was that the most unclear aspect of building outlines is more to do with how buildings back onto eachother in areas off the main streets, which probably don't have pedestrian access anyway. Many city blocks appear to be composed of a large number of small interlocked buildings, judging by the rooftops. Should these be intricately mapped as separate areas or lazily sketched around as one area per block?

    But in general I'm thinking let's not worry about it too much in the first instance. Edit with confidence. It's a wiki after all. We can refine building outlines over time. As I said before, it's always good to get some first hand experience of doing before discussing mapping, but maybe tomorrow's meet-up can be a time to discuss the best mapping approach for buildings.

    Whether or not you're on board with the building outlines homework idea, feel free to come along and join us tomorrow night near Oxford Street (meet-up details)

    Posted by Harry Wood at Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:23:16 +0000 in English (English)
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    London building outlines homework assignment

    I've set a homework assignment for the London Mapping Party a week on Wednesday. Time to sort out those building outlines!



    (brightbuildings style)

    If it looks like I'm starting to run out of ideas for London mapping parties... it's because I am. However this is one thing I have been meaning to experiment with for a while. A tweak to the normal mapping party format, as an attempt to tackle some of the problems of detail level in Central London. We've been doing pretty well at scattering node features everywhere recently, but as I've already mentioned landuse around Marble Arch is bugging me, and building outlines are even worse. Some parts of London now have lots of building outlines drawn in. On the one hand they're making the map look beautiful in these areas, but on the other hand they create a rather ugly imbalance. The solution is obvious, and delightfully inevitable. We have to map 'em all!

    Not sure if this "homework" idea is going to work well though. We'll give it a try, and anyone who doesn't do it is getting detention! Get drawing those buildings in, then come along on Wednesday 16th!

    Posted by Harry Wood at Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:38:30 +0000 in English (English)
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    Camberwell Mapping Party

    We had a lot of fun in The Bear pub in the Camberwell for last night's London Mapping meet-up

    Which country is this? (The fat double-line is the Atlantic coast)

    That's right. It was pub quiz night again! The above map-based question appeared. There was even an aerial imagery recognition question. All plain sailing for team "OpenStreetMap" you'll be pleased to hear. In fact we did pretty well on the whole quiz this time. We got really stuck on the first question, which was "Do you want to take part in the quiz?", but after much discussion we hit upon the correct answer, and went on to win! Our vast winnings (~£38) have been donated to the OpenStreetMap foundation.

    Our team only won by half a point, although we did forfeit another point for having too many people. The victory was largely down to Stephen and Welshie who turn out to be far more generally knowledgeable than our previous pub quiz team.

    Anyway... we did also map Camberwell, which provided one or two opportunities to eliminate NoName streets. Always fun.

    The next London Mapping Event will be Wednesday Sept 16th. Just off Oxford Street. Nice and central.

    Coordinates:
    51.475097021916; -0.095947677508485
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:12:41 +0000 in English (English)
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    London meet-up tonight!

    I just blogged over here about the 5th Anniversary Party. With all that weekend excitement let's not forget there's mapping to be done!

    Next London meet-up is TONIGHT in Camberwell South London. Enough of the sugary cakes, here's a cold harsh bitter digital cake with a sprinking of NoName streets:


    Sign up on the wiki for a slice of the cake

    Coordinates:
    51.475083656903; -0.095942313090333
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:24:21 +0000 in English (English)
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    Brick Lane Mapping Party + other events

    If the state of my gastrointestinal system is anything to go by, then Monday's London mapping and curry meet-up in Brick Lane, was a real stonker. A good turn out as predicted, and we all met up and managed to spread onto several tables outside the stylish Vibe Bar, before heading on to have a meal in the "Standard Balti House" which was... well pretty standard really.

    >>Brick Lane photos on facebook<<

    I suppose this curry house might appear on the map soon (here somewhere) although nobody had signed up to take on the challenge of slice 2 in the end (cake diagram) Overall this is a pretty mixed and varied area to do mapping in. My slice 12 was fairly grotty along most of its length. In the facebook album there I've included a photo of a derelict building with several trees growing out of it. Without wanting to be too impolite to the residents of Whitechapel Road, it really does look like a 3rd world country in places :-)

    As predicted a key topic of conversation was the OpenStreetMap Foundation elections. If you care about OpenStreetMap you really should be voting, and before you can vote you have to join, so get yourself sorted out now! The deadline for voting by email is Thursday midnight i.e. Friday 00:00 BST i.e. not long to go! In fact if you didn't join already you might be pushing it.

    The next London mapping evening is scheduled for Tuesday 25th August in Camberwell, but before that on Saturday we've got the aformentioned AGM, and the worldwide party spectacular that is the OpenStreetMap 5th Anniversary Birthday party. The London location is now set. The Porterhouse. I like the beers in this place, and I shall be drinking many of them. Oh yes! [went to the mulberry bush in the end]

    And for a little more event-overload, we've kicked off planning of WhereCamp EU.

    Coordinates:
    51.521643638701; -0.071893627063833
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:24:08 +0000 in English (English)
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    Brick Lane tonight, etc

    Tonight is curry night! Sign-up! Sign-up!

    We don't normally do Mondays, but even so I've a feeling this one could be quite popular. Nick's been promoting it on facebook where we already have "13 confirmed guests".

    We're heading to brick lane to do a bit of mapping and then meet-up at the vibe bar, which has an outdoor seating area under and tent type thing. We'll sit there and have a chat before heading to a restaurant.

    There's plenty to chat about. Thanks to the efforts of Thomas Wood, the NaPTAN Import has finally arrived in London, giving us a spectacular sprinkling of bus stop nodes! We've continued to fiddle with U.S. interstates. Here's a duplicate nodes map. More on that soon. Also emerging today, a new improved whitewater maps from Johnathon Riddell. Gnarly! I dare say the forthcoming foundation elections will come up in conversation too.

    In other exciting news, I went out exploring yesterday afternoon and discovered that the path around this reservoir (part of the "capital ring" route) has been blocked up with construction hoardings.

    If anyone wants to help me get to the bottom of this grave matter, I didn't survey the eastern extent of the construction area.

    ...well I thought it was exciting anyway.

    Coordinates:
    51.521653652223; -0.071893627063944
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:23:47 +0000 in English (English)
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    Landuse

    I've been pondering landuse again.

    Some people seemed to be confused by using the tag landuse=farm for mapping farms fields AKA farmland AKA farms! A field is part of a farm is it not? The confusion seems to come when people see the farmyard tag. So let me help you out here:

    That wasn't so hard was it?

    To be fair though, this does leave some unanswered questions. There are many awkward questions about mapping landuse, which haven't really been answered with any kind of guidelines as far as I'm aware.

    What is the ideal end-goal for landuse mapping? Are we aiming to map out landuse everywhere? So here in temperate European climes this logically means we'll be mapping a whole lot of farms. Do we really want to use the landuse=farm tag to cover all of the farmland which makes up most of the land area of our countries? Do we want to map this as many little areas e.g. around each farmer's land, or some kind of all encompassing big area punctuated by cities which will sit as islands within the sea of farm land? What about mapping desert surrounding cities like Las Vegas? Currently there are some patches of desert tagged, where it useful to illustrate these appearing between suburban/outlying areas of housing, but eventually the cities gives way to whole Nevada desert. How to map that?

    And how much detail should we go to when thinking about landuse? This is a question for the countryside (Do we want to draw areas around individual farms, or individual fields?) but also for the city (Do we want to delineate exact borders around landuse=retail? If there's a shop in the middle of a residential area, should we do a little pink retail area for that? Over the top? What about if there's five shops? )

    A question for the renderers: If we go ahead and fill in landuse=farm for large areas of our countryside, how should this look on the map? There's some good (or bad) progress mapping landuse=farm around Wakefield, so here's the question. Should the whole map of England be turning bright green or brown or something different?

    All these areas can create lot of troublesome data mess. The areas are fiddly to work with in editors, especially in the city where there's all sorts of other way-node clutter in the mix. When we look at the nitty-gritty data details, what is the recommendation for landuse areas? Do we draw the areas sharing nodes with roads? (way segments on top of each other. eugh! I'm not a fan of this approach myself) or draw in parallel? in which case, how close should these parallel way segments be drawn? And what about where two landuse areas meet each other with no road between. Share nodes then? Should footpaths going into parks include a connecting node with the area of the park? Or should we try to separate out all landuse data from other types of data? And how should little areas interact with building outlines? How can editors be improved to make this easier?

    Lots of questions, but in my OSMing experience, it's always better to just get on a map stuff. It's better because it helps you to gain a practical understanding of mapping problems, and realise that some problems don't matter as much as you might think. It's also better to work on real problems rather than theoretical problems. For example the farm rendering question is a real question when you look at Wakefield, because somebody went ahead and mapped the farms!

    So enough of this pondering. I'm going to try and do more landuse mapping, starting with some pink landuse=retail along Oxford Street (finally, after three years, that funny patch of landuse in Marylebone sticks out a bit less)

    Posted by Harry Wood at Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:07:53 +0000 in English (English)
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    BBQ meat-up!

    As I said on my blog, big thanks to everyone who helped me celebrate by 30th birthday by coming along to my BBQ bash.

    More photos on facebook

    As well as consuming vast quantities of meat'n'booze, quite a few people got involved in mapping Tottenham on the Saturday Morning (see Cake Diagram). I feel quite guilty about dispatching people to do my mapping dirty work. ....Guilty? or jealous about my territory? not sure. Anyway hopefully everyone had fun. I even organised some sunshine! Not bad eh?

    Next one will be Brick Lane on Monday 17th. Sign up! Sign up!

    Coordinates:
    51.570236704298; -0.12544124783495
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:26:04 +0000 in English (English)
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    Mayfair's paper-based mapping party

    So we had our big post box gathering session in Mayfair over a week ago now (Another London evening meet-up) I guess maybe I should report back on the spectacular number of postboxes we've added, but so far I've not even found time to enter my data. Promise to do this soon though.

    This meet-up was papertastic, with most people opting to use the walking-papers.org service over any kind of GPS-based mapping. GPS is not so effective in central London, so paper is the way to go.

    A good bunch of people this time. Lots of new faces, including some people quite new to mapping (I want to attract more of these to come along!)

    We also had Nick demonstrating Mapzen. The new OpenStreetMap editor under development at Cloudmade. I'm excited about the tutorial features which are designed to help newbies learn the ropes in a more gradual less "thrown in at the deep end" kind of way, rather like the training missions in computer games.

    The Iron Duke pub, despite being small, had plenty of free tables at the back, so this worked out well apart from... no food! (well they stopped with food after 8p.m I think) So most people decamped to an amenity=restaurant cuisine=italian later on.

    Gregory ate a pizza with egg 'n' chips on it, so maybe not so cuisine=italian..

    ...

    Speaking of cuisine, the next meet-up is tomorrow, and it's a meat-up! Oh yes! Come along for a quick bit of mapping in the morning in Tottenham area, then BBQ for lunch!

    Coordinates:
    51.512570478805; -0.14578312100313
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:03:18 +0000 in English (English)
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    From Chattanooga to Mayfair

    We've been pondering TIGER fixup in the states, and getting basic interstate routing working. I think Andy's going to blog about it a bit more. I made a fun clickable visualisation of routing connections. You can use it to figure out where major connectivity problems exist in the tiger data, or you can use it to test your knowledge of U.S. cities!

    Cities like... Chattanooga. Never heard of it? Neither had I, but I've spent a good few hours editing the motorway junctions there. Like this one for example:

    But this evening we're turning our thoughts closer to home. Tonight's mapping party is in Mayfair. Come join us!

    I picked this location based on detailed analysis of cross-correlated data visualisations, but it turns out I should've just asked Dave why he didn't map the postboxes around there when he was mapping it back in 2006. Time to revisit the area I'd say... If you're in London, come join us tonight!

    Coordinates:
    35.03189; -85.31376
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:33:21 +0000 in English (English)
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    Mapping Kings Road

    The last London mapping evening, was on Thursday last week, which was uncomfortably close after the big conference weekend. I've been ultra busy all week following up on things and catching up on things (CloudMade have had a flood of enquiries about this that and the other). Happily User:Solexious was keen to prepare a nice cake diagram, which was one less thing for me to worry about. Thanks for that.

    By the way, if anyone ever wants to get involved organising a London meet-up, or just one aspect of London meet-up, please feel free join in and/or take over. Choosing pubs, preparing cake diagrams, setting up event listings, etc, all takes time. I mostly enjoy doing it, but I also quite like not having to do it :-)

    In fact I didn't have to choose the area & pub this time either. The Kings Road mapping party was Matt's idea. It's a frightfully posh area. I think we all enjoyed not having any grotty concrete housing estate to map for a change. No no, it's all quaint little residential streets with white columns, or multicoloured pastel washes, in an area which apparently has the largest per square-metre property prices after central Hong Kong!

    I met with Joe Eckert who was interested to see my mapping techniques, and interviewing me about OpenStreetmap for his research. It was a good mixed mapping session for this purpose. We wandered around some of these pleasant residential backstreets, and also mapped a length of Kings Road itself. Lots of shops, which I photo-mapped (which means leaving most of the effort still to do back on the computer) Very hoity-toity fashion shops. Nothing like my mapping Roman Road at the previous Bow mapping evening (The fast food icons are mostly kebab shops. Classy)

    So nice bit of mapping, and then we went to the pub fairly early, to have a proper interview. Henry J Beans was pretty crowded and noisey, but it was Matt's recommendation, so we shouldn't be surprised. He is an all-night clubbing party animal kind of guy. We managed to find a secluded corner with a big table in the garden at the back, but sadly that part of the beer garden closed at 8pm. The remaining garden area was quite crowded. We beat a tactical retreat into the noisey indoors, which was a smart move because we got a big table, and shorty afterwards it started chucking down!

    It was good to have Cragg along. He was testing walking-papers.org. Shaun made it too. He always makes it, so that's no surprise until you consider that he'd been to Edinburgh and back that day on some crazy OpenStreetMap errand! Gregory was along. He's around in London for a while before heading out to live in Vancouver for a bit. Very nice. All in all we had about 12 people.

    Hopefully we'll see a nice use of our mapping efforts later in the year when kingsroad.co.uk launches. They're planning to use OpenStreetMap.

    Coordinates:
    51.487037097611; -0.16941338242329
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:40:19 +0000 in English (English)
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    King's Road Mapping Party tonight

    It's looking like tonight's King's Road Mapping Party (Central London), will be a big one. We're starting to run out of cake slices for people to bagsie!

    I haven't had chance to enter in my data from the Bow mapping party yet. Gah! Too much going on!

    Coordinates:
    51.486990332278; -0.16941874684145
    (View / Edit)
    Posted by Harry Wood at Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:25:33 +0000 in English (English)
    Comment on this entry | Reply to this entry | 0 comments

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