Monthly Archives: May 2006

OpenStreetMap to map the Isle of Wight

The OpenStreetMap project is going to map the Isle of Wight this weekend, using hundreds of volunteers simply recording a tracklog with their GPS units.

This is fantastic, and it will be interesting to see how successful such an effort is. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Geograph, it’s that if you can attract even a small dedicated band of contributors, there’s no end to what can be achieved.

I hope the event is a success, it would be great to see local events springing up. On the geograph site we have the concept of “geograph points” awarded to the first person who contributes a suitable image for a grid square. This has worked tremendously well in encouraging coverage, as well as friendly rivalry between contributors. Something similar might work in OpenStreetMap’s favour, maybe tracking people by distance covered in their tracklogs, or points for completing a particular motorway or A road…

London Geek Events Google Calendar

I’ve created a Google Calendar of London events of interest to software developers and web professionals. If you search for a public calendar called “London Geek Events” you should be able to add it, though it can take a few days for new calendars to appear in such searches. In the meantime, click “manage calendars” and “add calendar”, and use the iCal or XML urls for the calendar.

I’ll need some help maintaining it – if you’d like write access to it, or simply want an event adding, let me know.

Some goals for May

Last month I set myself some goals in the hope that “going public” would be good spur into making me get them done. I was partially successful:

  • Complete tagging system for Geograph – early in the month it became clear that the Geograph server wasn’t coping well with traffic and photograph uploading was becoming a struggle. I stopped working on tagging and switched to completing “Guppy”, a desktop application for queuing uploads. I’ve got the basic framework almost complete, so a new goal will be to release it during May
  • Learn Python – I did enough to convince me to continue using it. I used it a couple of times when I might have otherwise turned to Perl. It’ll be a while before I’m truly up to speed, but I’ll most likely use Python now if I need to write more than 100 lines of Perl.
  • Release Pastebin source – success! I’ll continue enhancing it over the next month now that I’m on a roll. Had lots of positive feedback and ideas I’ll incorporate.

I think that if I hadn’t publically stated those goals, I would not have published the pastebin source or bothered with Python, so it’s been useful “life hack” that I’ll repeat! So, what to aim for in May?

  • Release Guppy – I’ll get a working beta of Guppy out there to aid Geograph contributors.
  • Lose a few pounds – I could do with losing a couple of stones, which doesn’t quite tally with geeking out in front of a PC every waking hour developing software. But, I’ll aim to lose half a stone and at report back on how I did it!