The next London pub meet-up will be at the Mulberry Bush this Wednesday! Sign up! Sign up!

Last time we went to a new pub called the Euston Tap (eustontap.com). When Ollie linked to this pub suggestion, I couldn't quite believe the location, and as I approached on my bike, I still couldn't believe it. There's only one "building" out the front of Euston station. well actually a pair. either side of the entrance road, they're decorative stone gatehouse type things. And they've managed to squeeze a new pub into one of those! We sampled the interesting ale selections from the ground-floor bar, but headed up a tall spiral staircase to get a table in the windowless upstairs room. All a bit odd, but in an interesting kind of way.

We talked about the maps and building drawings on the wall, and took rather too long to figure out that they were not describing the building we were in. We also talked about whether Austrlia is bigger than Europe. freepchelp.co.uk (??) seems to have the answer. It pretty much is bigger yes.

We talked about progress with the London Streets Challenge. Back then Hammersmith and Fulham had just made it past 95%. Since then Islington and Hillingdon have both past the post. Congratulations to all of them!

We talked about NaPTAN bus stop data. NaPTAN fixup has progressed slowly in London as far as I can tell. I think this could be another thing to track progress of.

iPhone people were out in force, and experimenting with some procedure which required pressing the reset thing with a needle. Not sure what that was all about. Some more people installed placr's UK TravelOptions app. It's fun showing it to new people because the map display starts off looking fairly normal. Then I tell them to try moving two fingers up the screen. This gets a nice "ooooh" response every time, followed by another one when I tell them to try two fingers across the screen.

And speaking of "ooooh" inducing graphics, we chatted with Ollie about the awesome bike routes animation that he and his colleagues created (recently updated) He used OpenStreetMap London data to do routing. This give the illusion of real tracking of bicycles as they weave through the streets of London. That's a pretty interesting use of the data. The system he used was "routino", and he actually calculated every possible combination of routes between the boris bike docking stations. The animation graphics was done using "processing".

There was some talk of osm2pgsql and "slim mode". As far as I'm aware pretty much everyone runs it in slim mode, as it needs many gigabytes of RAM otherwise.

The OWL (OpenStreetMap WatchList) system is currently running on the dev server, but could be moved soon with a view to making it a more kind of "official service" of OpenStreetMap (if that means anything). One potential idea would be to plumb this into the 'history' tab to replace the crude bbox matching logic we currently use for finding changesets in an area.

The Euston Tap had ales aplenty, but the promised pizza was unavailable. Happily there is much curry to be had at https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/4257240 (Drummond Street) just around the corner. We went to a place which did meat curries, although actually I've heard the better curry houses along there are vegetarian ones. Maybe it was a vegetarian who told me that though. Anyway we had meat, but no beers at this place, which was probably a good thing. Kept the bill reasonable (if a little non-descript)

more photos on flickr

It took me a little while to get around to writing this because there's been some other London geo excitement. #geomob was the same week. Always fun. And last week I gave a talk about OpenStreetMap at BeingOpen, which I blogged about over here.

As mentioned before, the next pub meet-up is this coming Wednesday at our old favourite the Mulberry Bush on the South Bank. Sign up here.

You can also now sign up for the Hack Weekend which will be 2nd and 3rd of April. If you've got some technical skills or you're just curious, come along!