I was going to complain at my time management skills (or lack of), I find myself doing seemingly nothing all day - and only starting to begin to work at midnight, and even then not on the current priority… Oh well.
Anyway, I’ve just discovered Wordpress 2.7, and all I can say is WOW! Fantastic admin interface. It just works so well!
The new themes are just awesome, I particularly like the touches on “Bus Stop” and “Tree”, they react to the weather and time of day and just look fantastic in my opinion.
Ok, so another month passes by, another one without completing my personal statement, or getting my ucas application off, will it matter?
The router did something odd just now, in the time taken to fix it, I lost the nice IP 82.43.81.42…
I’m now stuck with the less memorable 77.103.210.112
I’ve had that IP address for many years now, a shame to see it disappear into the ether…
And so it’s that time of month again, that instinctive feel that I’ve not written here for a long time and should keep up with it.
So, what’s new with me?
Not much to be fully honest. Our team came third in the GLSW night hike. (Route to come when I write that bit of the website…)
My interests are slowly moving back towards OSM from other stuff, although I have got quite a few good books that keep getting in the way of doing work for OPLS… I feel I’m letting Tom down, must really focus on it….
I’ve been attending the lectures at UCL for 6th form science students recently, the first in this term was on Deployable Structures. The lecture was a bit dry, essentially explaining what one is (think umbrella) and why they’re useful (small size for transportation), issues and different types.
The second was on the solar powered car that the engineering department built and raced across austalia. It was a genuinely interesting lecture, giving details on the core aims the car must reach (efficiency being the core priority, which requires low weight, efficient motors, low air resistivity etc)
This week was the magic of computer science, and how the methods used in magic tricks (mostly the card puzzles) is actually highly useful in CS. Many of the shuffling tricks are actually efficient sorting algorithms. More on this to come, once I’ve researched this a bit more to refresh my mind of the terms.
What is it with obsessives arguing over commercial entities?
The Groundspeak forums have a set of guidelines that are written to be as straightforward as possible and to prevent conflict in the long run. The issues occur when people refuse to interpret the guidelines the way that they are intended to be - if at all.
Back in April, two of the three volunteer reviewers and forum mods stepped down from their posts as a result of being forced to moderate the forums in a way they didn’t see appropriate, stepping down due to their issues with Groundspeak.
The run-up, 19th April, rapid change to cache adoption rules leads to a healthy discussion.
This all started over Groundspeak’s closing of a charitable fund-raising thread on the 21st April (originally opened on the 3rd), for cachers doing a ‘commando challenge’. Soon after (21st), a thread was opened cautioning us not to open threads without thinking first. Jaz666 made a good roundup post of previous commercial cache issues.
This was rapidly followed by the opening Mandy of Us4&Jess’ charity calendar thread (Apr 22nd) and closing of the same thread on the same day, the warning post having been around for at least a day already. AFAIK, the issue of her methods of advertising the calendars had been brought up with Groundspeak before - unsolicited spamming from what I’d heard. As such, it seemed the Groundspeak clamped down on the reviewers to enforce the rules without the previously allowed leeway.
A message giving the mods a vote of confidence was opened on the 22nd, and remained with little argument.
And then the fallout begins on the 23rd. Lacto’s retirement message, Ecky does the same, and Deccy’s left on his own to mod the UK, his roundup message. Shortly followed by SP’s call to boycott the forums. Mandy questioning Why? the retirement.
Tensions are obvious elsewhere, the thread questioning what a commercial cache is quickly dissolves into a US vs us argument. And, a thread wanting to split the UK out of geocaching.com, both are obvious signs of the tension of parts of the community.
People continued to stir, it finally died a little after the news had settled. Luckily, Mandy reached some agreement with Groundspeak and was allowed to advertise the calendars a little on the forums.
… skipping big spat cos i can’t recall it…
More recently, late August, the commercialism issue was brought up again by Simply Paul’s “Monkeying about” event, which is a standard event linked to an optional commercial activity. The issue here is that the cache page’s contents were posted to the forums before being OK’d by the reviewer. It seems that GSP got wind of this on a standard browse and asked the moderator to pull the plug (my guess, it is hard to second guess who’s choice it was, although if GSP were to pull it, they’d use their own account).
Naturally, SP was annoyed at what happened, and this argument was the result. I’m sure it’s partly a bad aftertaste after the heavy-handed bans earlier in the month.
The most recent calendar thread started off another spat between the community and Groundspeak over the charity and commercial nature of the post. The thread was closed by our moderator, Mandarin, but I’m not sure whose choice it was. A question was asked of Mandarin to confirm why the thread was closed, although (imo) clearly stated on the closing post of the offending thread:
Closing this Topic because it relates to a charity payment and therefore breaches the Forum Guidelines.
The guideline it was breaching was posted by Mandy in the Question thread, Hornet does make a good point that the post was made ‘in good faith’ and was not soliciting any further monies. However, the standard argument of Us vs GSP over commercialness ensues.
A forum bug resulted in a missing first post on a thread by Matrix entitled “Commercialism“, the assumption was that the post had been deleted by TPTB (probably leading from raised tempers from the previous thread closure), however, a hamster had just died whilst putting that post online. 
Unfortunately, this resulted in a rather extreme response, luckily it was quickly resolved, and no caches were archived.
Well, lots has happened since my last post, it included this little todo list:
I have completed 3 of these 6 tasks.
The server migration from 4.2 to 4.3 was a massive undertaking, since I wanted to do a completly fresh install. The backup itself took almost 12 hours (several of which I was asleep for). I also wished to revise the partitioning scheme, since it was organised very inefficiently:
A bit of manual sector tweaking (a spreadsheet is so useful to do this!) with disklabel later, some hairy growfs and newfs commands, a bit of file juggling, and I was left with this:
Much better! The OpenBSD 4.3 install was painless, as usual, and the system was soon back up and running. All that remained was to manually merge any config changes, but I’ll do most of them as I come across problems! LambdaMOO also required a quick recompile, but nothing too strenuous with that!
The Lappy and Desky machines are working well now, too. The desktop setup hasn’t changed very much, if at all, and the laptop now has Ubuntu (yuck, yuck) running on it. My excuse for not running Open is lack of wifi drivers, my excuse for not running Free is lack of simple netboot installs and/or blank CDs, my excuse for Fedora is that it just felt a little odd and I couldn’t get the wifi to work quickly. Ubuntu just worked out of the box (/netboot install)!
Another annoying thing is that sshing to the server over wifi doesn’t work. It just hangs before authentication, oddly it works fine over eth0 and putty works well over wifi, another ubuntu oddity.
(Post backdated to time originally written, published 10 days late!)
Wow. This week has been unusually quiet, given the insane busyness of the weekend. Time flys too quickly, it just goes missing.
Wednesday last week was the Canning Town OSM mapping party, great fun was had discovering one massive twiddly and insanely boring housing estate in Beckton - I’ve yet to map it up Anyways, that’ll be done soon, hopefully, or I’ll get the wrath of smsm1 on me, hell, I also need to organise the Croydon one!
Last weekend was the first UK Geocaching Mega Event it was quite insane, 3 events over the weekend that I was there. I got to met up with loads of people I’ve talked to online through the forums and irc. Particular credit goes to Dave and Mary of the purple_pineapples for essentially being my host for the weekend, I tagged along with them and Helen in Mustardland(+), who I met on the train to Harrogate.
As I was saying, the weekend was great fun and absolutely manic - more than 30 caches in the two days, 22 alone on the Sunday. The Saturday’s fox hunt event was a great twist on geocaching - it adds competition to the sport, especially the aspect of real-time FTF races! I’ll note I got my first 2 FTFs in a close race with TMM and TDW.
So, what now? I left with 180 finds, and on Thursday decided to go out for 17 more to boost my total to 197 - ready for a fun cache for the 200th. Unfortunately, the day went disasterously, finding only 5 of the 10 I attempted, so I dropped it and went back home.
And on the Friday, I purchased a nice (discounted) laptop. In the several years since I built my desktop machine, computer prices have become phenominally low, this laptop is more powerful than my desktop machine and almost as expensive (I never actually did do a full check on the price of it as building it). I’m in two minds now whether to ditch the desktop altogether, as it is a noisy and its performance has really been grinding on me recently. It must be because software demands now expect good powered machines, the 256MB of RAM and 1.4GHz processor must not be enough to run the Gnome desktop anymore, which is a shame, since the one thing I (theoretically) liked about linux was its simplicity. WTF am I talking about? Gnome is anything but simple…
If only OpenBSD were a good desktop system, I really should look at a nice lightweight wm that looks ok, (or just look at the config files closely for some of the not so good looking ones). The only issue I’m likely to have there is with the sound, it’s sound support is lagging behind linux by some way, I found it doesn’t ‘just work’.
So, now onto the laptop, it’s a HP Compaq 6720s, 2GHz Celeron processor, 1GB RAM, a do-everything optical drive and 80GB HDD. I think it is good value for £270, I particularly liked it over the other model eBuyer were doing for the same price, due to it being lighter and having a longer battery life.
The one issue with it is the preinstalled software, and in particular the OS - Windows Vista, I’m wondering if I should give it the benefit of the doubt and see how it goes, or just nuke it and start a cycle of testing Linux and BSD to see which will work with the hardware I have. Again, the issues I forsee are the sound support and possibly also the Wifi, since I’ve not seen this broadcom chipset on the OBSD hardware support pages yet…
I’ll just do a battery drain test on low use to see how long it lasts, Vista recons 3 hrs 30 on a full charge…
And finally - todo:
Great…
Stuff really gets on top of you if you don’t pay attention. OpenBSD 4.4 is now in beta, and I’ve yet to upgrade the server to 4.3 stable! Don’t really want to upgrade until I confirm with Ian.
I’ve just peeked into PythonMOO for the first time in months, looks a bit lonely. Trac is broken (why isnt it coded in MOO anyways?)
What really annoys me is that there’s something wrong with the shell scrollback on the box, and the cursor keys, really annoying when working on it!
Google are certainly trying to take over the world. I need to push away from them, get rid of (all my, not just gmail) third party email accounts.
Why this? With their recent announcement of MapMaker, it’s seen as a direct competitor to OSM. And that’s not good for the community, or is it?
Some have speculated that “they’ll” come over to OSM when they discover that that have no rights and many of the liabilities over their work!
Don’t be evil, really Google, stick up to your motto.
Of course, those familiar with this sort of thing will remember People’s Map (which already has a few of my own brand copyright easter eggs embedded into it!)
Let’s see if we can do any interesting selective mapping on GMM!
Care for a map?
Well, that’s my attempt at micro-mapping The Grange, that odd gardeney section of Beddington Park. Moo much detail?
I expect there to be errors with it, I had considerable difficulty in getting a clean GPS trace with the heavy tree cover. I suspect it’ll take me many more walks around that path before I get a good trace. It may be worthwhile finding a more sensitive GPS to try and use.
In a nice fully mapped state!
Just a quick post to mention the mapping party went very well, OSM is looking much better for the western half of the borough!
Tom has a good round-up posting.
Thursday, 11th Janurary 1917 - Friday, 16th May 2008
She peacefully died this morning at her care home whist sitting drinking a cup of tea.
This post was going to be a rant about the rest of my year group.
This post was going to be about how people change.
This post will just be in memory.
And so April closes, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Depressing.
And yet I’m blogging again? Twice in a month, a week even!
Well, yep, I am, why? I don’t fully know, I just felt like it.
Exams rush nearer and I’m feeling less prepared. It is worrying.
I’m sleeping too much, why am I always so tired? Why does time move so quickly?
At least there’s not a coursework rush this year.
Why can nice people be so two faced, say things behind someone’s back? Please tell me if I am, I really don’t want to be.
FeatureServer is a nice little thing, very simple to set up, took me around 15mins to get a working example including a flickr layer running 
Of course, getting the data in and out of it is the hardest part - especially if we want authenticated input.
Ok, so the blog post titles are getting more abstract, but I promised myself to do this, and try to tie it in.
Wasn’t Dr Who this week good? Martha is really becoming a soldier girl.
Right, thats the tie-in done 
Anyway, exams are coming up - everyone panic!
What else, I’ve installed GeoPress for WordPress, it’s rubbish, not suitable for 2.5 yet.
I need to get my head around tagging and categorisation of blog posts - whats the difference?!
The somerset geography fieldtrip was mildly amusing, it really is odd how people react when confronted with (almost vertical hills/short walks across fields/floodplains/mud/rivers/thigh-high wellington boots (Bruce :D)). Great fun!
And even more fun was the Gold DofE practice expedition. The route is visible here, and some pics over on flickr, I should have blogged about it sooner. I’ll have to try an extract the memories otherwise.
Day 0: Familiarisation
We started from the car park near to New Houses, about 2.5km NNW of Middlesmoor, day 1’s start. There was a nice coating of snow here, as there was throughout the day. We crossed the River Nidd, and followed its bank west. We encountered our first narrow gates and our first wildlife of the trek - sheeps and lambs, baby little lambs, cute at the time. We then started climbing the hill to the west of Woo Gill (don’t they have great names here?) at our first false peak we encountered a junction and decided to head off the marked rights of ways. The path steadily degraded, and we had to cross the river at one point, we decided to follow what we thought was the path and ford the river at a narrow point (little did we know we’d be getting used to this!), at this point me and Ben decided to ignore the footpath and breakaway from the group, taking a bearing up an almost vertical hill, to Sportsman’s Rest, a little toppledown shack literally in the middle of nowhere. There was very deep snow, so what better than to make snowmen!
Our explorer map was invaluble for the next stage - straight across the moor on a rough bearing. This was a really wet and cold stage, since the heather was deep, and the snow on top of it just too cold. The Landranger map doesn’t show the fences, or the grouse butts where we had lunch, but it really was a rather bleak place. The short climb to Little Haw was our next target, an easy ‘peak’ for the day.
We headed south back to the car park, losing the bridleway several times.
The terrain was rather tricky as several of us by falling into streams/rivers/deep holes up to our necks (Tony).
I wonder how more dryly I could write my account of the expedition, should I continue?
So, we’ve now almost hit spring break, easter has come, gone, and left me with stuff todo!
Now, since my last post a lot has happened, I can’t remember it all, but here’s a basic run-down of it all:
Red Flare - the Ruskin team came 9th, which is ok. I won’t do a close look at the stats yet, I’ll leave that for some other time. (GLSW Scouts.org.uk)
My first exam results for AS levels were good, as expected, a quick rundown: C1 99/100 S1 96/100 P1 88/90 Ch1 78/100 GS was a B overall (100/100 for GS2)
Maths coursework was also ok, dropped a mark or half somewhere, doesn’t bother me too much…
OpenStreetMap is coming to Sutton! Come, map, be geeky! And why not preview the OPL Sutton OSM map?
This upcoming week is the AS Geog fieldtrip, we’ll be staying at the ‘Magdalen project‘, in Dorset (not Somerset, as they claim). They also claim to have changed the name of the hamlet to Magdalen from the original Maudlin (as is shown on OS maps)
And then, the week after is the Duke of Edinburgh Award Gold (50mi/80km) expedition! How fun! If you’re interested in how this looks on a map - just look at the wiggles!
Anyway, I guess I should probably finish up now - my blog entry for the month 
And so half term begins, a very early middle of a very short term!
That can only mean that exams are here soon!
Anyway, I’m sticking the Roundshaw data into OSM and it’s beginning to look very nice indeed. What amazes me is how old other providers’ data is. It is an absolute mess!
Let’s kill Google’s map reputation first and let’s use their own tools to highlight the issues. This is mostly just a case of old and poor map data. Starting in the northeast, Google has most of the newroad layout correctly in their dataset, but it is still possible to see remnants from the old housing blocks there. One particular example that is easy to pick out is the infamous Instone Close still remains on Google’s version of Roundshaw, even though it was demolished in 2001. Google has an odd contrast of old and new data and slightly newer satellite imagery.
Yahoo is quite a nice contrast, it has up to date map information (excluding the recently demolished), but at the expense of slightly old satellite imagery. I can’t fault them for any obvious data errors.
MS Live Maps (the buggers won’t give me a logical permalink) would appear to use the same map data as Yahoo for this area, and interestingly they have the oldest aerial view of the three providers. The beauty here though is that they also provide ‘Birds Eye’ imagery, which turned out to be of varying age (at the original drafting time of this blog post, mid feb) However, now most appear to be showing the demolition of the current stage of development, and only one tile I could find showed it still in a pre-demolition state.
What I love about the choice of these map services is the (modern) historical information you can glean through comparisons. Its a shame that most of this will be lost to the general public when they decide to do another update of it all. (OTOH, who really cares apart from geographers and map geeks?)
Oh, and the main point of writing this post - my OSM progress. I think we win in Roudshaw by a long way - just look at the depth of detail! I don’t know if there are errors or not, but if there are, it’s all my fault! It matters, but not enough for me to go out today - I have a resurvey planned to remove that ugly brown patch of redevelopment from the map when it is completed on the ground.
And talking of errors, I’ve just spotted one and corercted it (only a minor tagging issue though)
Aand since I’ve not blogged here for so long, here’s a news review:
Anything else? Maybe, can I remember? No.
Ah, wait, yes. The reason I originally started writing this post. The sports hall has failed planning application for 8 reasons, yes 8! Rather disgraceful, I think.
…sometimes.
I cycled in a nice ’shower’ yesterday, strong gusty winds and horizontal heavy cold wind. I hadn’t experienced such difficult weather since on top of a moor in the Peak District. (I guess cycling at high velocity over the brow of the hill had a slight impact on the severity of the weather, though)
So, exams, 2 to go. C1 was simple, GS1&2 were odd, S1 was also ok, PHY1 had some quirky questions.
So, its a fail.
