It's been almost a month since our last normal London mapping evening in Waterloo/South Bank area. We were back in the good old Mulberry Bush, so nothing unusual at all...

Well that's not quite true. I found it quite an interesting meet-up because we had along two people who were new to mapping. I arranged to meed David beforehand, and took him on a quick walk around Gabriel's Wharf and the park alongside. Meanwhile Clare seemed to manage very well on her own, turning up at the pub with scribbled-upon printout, looking like a pro-mapper!

I got out my laptop and gave them an demonstration of JOSM editing. It had to be JOSM because I was without internet connection. I had cunningly saved the downloaded area earlier. I even had a saved yahoo imagery file but the offline file feature of the WMSPlugin seems to be a bit buggy. Anyway, I secretly prefer teaching JOSM to new mappers. I find it more usable, so why wouldn't anyone else? Speaking of which I've got a new screencast tutorial I have to finish editing some time (in the meantime if you've never tried JOSM, do it!)

Anyway I managed to not spill beer on my laptop, and both of these people seemed to get the hang of JOSM to the extent that they have since inputted more data (in addition to the pub changes I saved) More mappers. That's what we like! I should've got some photos while this interesting stuff was happening, but I'm afraid I only got the camera out later. So...

Here's the usual bunch sitting around getting drunk:

According to the minutes (my scruffy peice of paper) we also talked about:

• Potlatch2 and shapefile support.


• Drawing circles in OpenLayers.


• osmfoundation.org content management in relation to some early communications working group discussions


• JOSM as an applet, and how the edit tab might be configurable.


• About how Matt is not only working for satan, but is working on Microsoft Excell spreadsheet manipulations in .NET for satan


• Traffic light tree on the isle of dogs. (ooh you weren't kidding)


• Top speed of a fiat punto

If that makes sense to you, then perhaps you'd fit in with our merry band of mapping pub-goers. If it doesn't make sense, well I guess you needed to be there. Either way you should definately come along on the next one:

Wednesday 13th mapping around Bloomsbury. Tomorrow evening meeting at The Enterprise pub afterwards at 8p.m.