Anyway, I’ve just discovered Wordpress 2.7, and all I can say is WOW! Fantastic admin interface. It just works so well!

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…

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.

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.

• OPLS Site
• Canning Town Mapping
• GM maps script
• Laptop setup
• Desktop setup
• Server 4.2->4.4

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!)

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:

• OPLS Site
• Canning Town Mapping
• GM maps script
• Laptop setup
• Desktop setup
• Server 4.2->4.4

Great…

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!

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!