Author Archives: Paul Dixon

OpenStreetMap and HertsLUG

I went to my first ever HertsLUG meeting last night as OpenStreetMap were giving a talk. While I lurk on the OpenStreetMap mailing list and was familiar with their project, it was interesting to see the various tools demonstrated. JOSM, their primary online collaborative editor, looked particularly capable.

I was hoping to bend the ears of some of the OpenStreetMap chaps about Geograph and Ordnance Survey issues, but the talk went on a little longer than planned and I had to leave to transport a colleague back to the train station. Even so, it was worthwhile and has inspired me to go out and at least map my home town of Baldock.

My first post in September. Must try harder!

NFS to the rescue

After Samba proved too problematic for Geograph we switched to NFS and have enjoyed a good period of stability ever since. The webservers are barely breaking a sweat, but the load on our database is a little higher that I hoped. By no means maxed out, but definitely a lot more than it needs to be. The next week or so will be spent distributing some of that load to the webservers (like using memcached for session storage) and also looking at some of the heavyweight queries and tasks to see how they could be performed more efficiently….

Bruce Schneier Facts

Everybody is linking to Bruce Schneier Facts today. As a long-time reader of his excellent Crypto-gram newsletter, it tickled me. Unless you are into cryptography, your mileage may vary. I even added a few of my own!

My favorite is “Bruce Schneier writes his books and essays by generating random alphanumeric text of an appropriate length and then decrypting it.”