The 2011 London OpenStreetMap meet-ups kicked off with a bang last Thursday. Actually that's not entirely true. It was a pretty quiet one, with just a few of the usual faces, making for a nice friendly chat down in the little cubby-hole at the back of the Daniel Gooch. Both the scots were in attendance, but we were all disappointed when it turned out the kitchen wasn't open. The promised little scottish pies were nowhere to be seen! The natural fallback plan was curry at node:511172059. I've been to Khan's several times five or six years back, but these days they don't serve alcohol, so it was mango lassies all round.

Later on we returned to the curved ceiling splendour of the Daniel Gooch, where we met Jenny, and got chatting to an old south african lady. Firefishy started talking in a strange language. That aside, the meeting was thoroughly minuted as ever...

Andy has changed his GPS device recommendation from Garmin Legend HCx to Vista HCx. Vista includes a barometer for more accurate altutide readings, and the extra cost of these features is only a few quid these days.

Firefishy showed off his new android phone. This made the pub gathering predominately androiders. Andy was the only iPhoner present, but he boasted "all the best apps come to iPhone". I would've joined in with disagreeing, except that I also wanted to show off UK TravelOptions which is not yet available for android. Andy took it for a spin (literally), and if you have a iphone or ipad, you should too! This is the fluid vector rendering app, with 3D buildings, using streamed tiled OSM data which I hinted at last month... out last week for free in the appstore! There's a more OSM-oriented description of the app on a 'UK TravelOptions' wiki page.

We talked about some wiki stuff:

There was a new "essay" label which got deleted. I didn't delete it, but removed it in some places and pondered some wiki psychology discussed here

We talked about talk pages. They can be confusing. You can learn about Talk pages in the MediaWiki user manual (written largely by me in fact). Not all that mysterious! But in a couple of cases people have whinged about wiki discussion, and used it as an excuse for not discussing or collaborating properly. We have many other channels of course (OSM is not a wiki project!) But there's always a magical concept known as the "link", to ensure that people can find a forum/mailing list discussion from the associated wiki talk page. Link to discussions! When wiki edits are causing upset, not discussing is not acceptable.

But in the pub we also chatted about mechanisms around talk pages. I use my "watchlist" extensively (I click the star icon on many wiki pages, and I revisit the 'my watchlist' page regularly) but other people in the pub said they didn't use this. User talk pages are another thing. Similar but different. I've never been all that sure about the etiquette around these myself. The one-sided email notification is oddly imbalanced. I often add other people's talk pages to my watchlist too. Any discussion on this topic usually leads to some smart alek piping up with "Let's use liquid threads". I'm not all that convinced by liquid threads myself. Clearly there's hefty pros and cons, but anyway on a large wiki it's a major change needing a lot of consideration (don't hold your breath)

We talked a bit about MapQuest. They have some technical staff in india, and I was wondering about the MapQuest India portal: open.mapquest.in and whether MapQuest were keen to make inroads against google there using OpenStreetMap. India is where google launched MapMaker, and the big G seems to be having some success in quietly persuading the population to contribute to their google-owns-all-the-data system. We're having some success in helping Indians do it the free and open way, and hopefully MapQuest has an interest in helping that.

Andy has his first opencyclemap API customers. He continues to battle with abusive users hitting his OpenCycleMap server with unreasonable numbers of bulk tile requests. These would quickly swamp his map rendering system if he didn't block the offending IP addresses, but for those users who are willing to pay for it, he's developed a bulk tile requesting API with a nifty trick to avoid server overloading. They are limited to only those meta-tiles which are available already on disk, so bulk request customers will never place load on the rendering system. In fact they bypass rendering altogether via a little php script he's written for the API, which fetches the meta-tiles directly from disk (nice and fast) A meta-tile is an 8x8 set of tiles. In the renderer a 2048x2048 pixel area of map is rendered, this is sliced up into the 256x256 pixel tiles we know and love. But it's actually written to the disk cache as a single meta-tile file, consisting of the 64 png file contents concatenated. It works the same way on the main OSM tileserver and any mod_tile system.

Andy also told us he has many OSM leaflets still. If you want some Andy will send them to you for free. You only have to ask (UK only). But what are the best uses of these leaflets? One of the best uses must surely be to have some with you while mapping, to give to anyone who asks you what you're doing. Now that hasn't actually happened to me very often, so what's the next best use of OSM leaflets? Are there places we can leave leaflets? e.g. libraries. What are the most effective places to do that? Andy was saying he'd be interested to share ideas from people who are putting them to good use.

We spoke about the next London Hacking event. I've set up details (such as they are) here: London Hack weekend early 2011. We need to know when the usual suspects are available. Add yourself to the matrix, but obviously anyone else is welcome to join in too. "Hacking" mostly means working on code. There'll be some core goals discussed, but there's a lot of scope for different languages to be involved, and even a few less technical tasks such as documenting and icon designing, so actually anyone can get involved in this kind of event.

The next #geomob event is all set up for February 10th. If you're in London, don't miss it. Sign up on lanyrd

As for the next London meet-up, I'm not sure at this stage. I'm going to be away doing some OpenPisteMapping from 15th till 23rd. So perhaps somebody else could set up details for a meet-up in the middle of that week. In any case it'll all be organised on the wiki page. Is it on your watchlist?