Blog What I Made

Not quite so stressful a week this week though it did have its moments. I spent Monday morning catching up on some much delayed tasks. Nothing particularly interesting just bits and pieces like polishing off the print styles for case studies on the Marketing PRojects website and adding a blog feed to the homepage.

A new bug was reported on the music iPhone app though which caused some consternation. The app allows you to log into a site and download the information about music that you’ve previously bought. It seemed though that for some users it would display nothing even though the information was being downloaded. It didn’t take me too long to track it down to something relating to an SQLite database I was using. I would parse the reponse from the server and then add all the information to the database. I would then close the database in one function and then reopen it in another function and read it back in. For some reason though when I tried to read the information back in it was finding no rows in the database. The bug seemed only to occur on iPhone OS 3 and only for certain users. In the end I couldn’t track down the actual cause and had to just save the information to the database but then ignore the database and just use the information from memory. It’s obviously a more efficient way of doing things, there’s not really much point reading the information back from the database when you already have it in memory. I guess I was doing it that way to make sure that I always read the current data from the database to make sure it was always in the same format. Now the database is only used when you first load the app and everything works nicely. Annoyingly though I wasted a day trying to sort that out.

I also worked on adding some features to a property management database that I wrote last year for The Restaurant Group. This is a site built using the Zend Framework to give a fairly lightweight API onto a database and then a rich JavaScript interface built with JQuery and the Multimap API. Most of the features were fairly simple and were sorted within a day. The most troublesome one though was to add the ability to log into the system by entering a username and password from a Microsoft Active Directory system. I managed to get the authentication step working without too much difficulty using the Zend LDAP Authentication class but I also needed to check the groups that the user was in to determine whether they were allowed to make changes to the system or were only allowed to view the information. After a few hours of getting nowhere we eventually decided to try using an alternative library. adLDAP is an LDAP wrapping library specifically tailored to accessing Active Directory systems. I used this and again managed to get the authentication working easily but the groups still caused some issues. In the end we found that the AD system I was testing against was set up in a non-standard way. After a few tests against the real live system we found that the library was working fine and I eventually managed to get it all working.

I also managed to spend a little time on the chess app, didn’t make too much progress but I’ve managed to get the full moves view to slide in from the side and slide out again when you’ve selected a new move to go to (or clicked the “X” in the corner).

The final thing that caused issues this week was the mapme.at server. On Thursday morning I decided to upgrade the kernel as ubuntu was telling me there was a new one available with some security fixes. The upgrade went fine and I carefully made sure that all the services were running and that nothing had been broken by the upgrade. A few hours later I just happened to go to the site only to find I was getting errors. I logged in to try to track down what was happening, at first this was difficult because oddly I was getting no errors in the log file. It was only when I realised that the filesystem had mounted itself as read only that I realised something fairly major was wrong. This has happened once before and at the time I just rebooted the system and it came back fine, I rebooted now though and it didn’t come back. I was hoping it was doing a disk check so I left it for a few minutes before eventually requesting console access from my hosting provider hetzner.de. When that came through I found the system was complaining that it couldn’t find the superblock, or the disk or something along those lines which was when I realised something was quite wrong. I put in a support request for them to take a look and waited for them to get back to me. After an hour or so of no response I sent them another email, two and a half hours after the original request I was told it was just a filesystem error and that they had booted into the rescue system to run a disk check. After over 12 hours of waiting for more information I emailed them again to be told that the disk check was waiting for input and that I should just run it myself, so it had essentially been doing nothing for all that time! I logged into the rescue system and ran the check myself. It took nearly two hours but finally after that I got the machine back up and running. I realise now that I should really have been able to handle most of the “repair” myself but I’m still very disappointed with Hetzner’s feedback. Taking hours to give any response and then failing to anticipate that the disk check would need user input (“fsck -y” would have fixed this) are pretty crap. At least now I’m more prepared if anything similar happens in the future. Not only am I more confident about how to fix the problem (though I’m still not 100% sure how to get into the “rescue system”) but I’ve now also invested in the services of Pingdom. When mapme.at went down it actually took me a few hours to notice but now that I have Pingdom set up it should alert me ASAP if there’s any further problems.

To end on a positive note, I went to the third Ignite Liverpool on Thursday night. We had another really fun night with talk subjects ranging from cows to cannibilism, and had Batman talking about using the “Systems Failures Approach” to analyse why his arch enemies were so unsuccessful (see photo above). Social events in Liverpool are just getting better and better these days. At the end of this month we’ve got the second Social Media Cafe Liverpool and Jelly Liverpool to look forward to (both on the open labs calendar). There’s also How? Why? DIY! which is not, as it may sound, going to consist of a Sunday afternoon putting up shelves but will offer a day of interesting sessions aimed at helping people use the full potential of the technology, community and social media facilities available to them. Take a look at the link for that one as there’s some interesting sessions planned and I’ll be going along to try to get people interested in mapping too!

Just a short week this week so a short blog post too I think. Fixed plenty of bugs in the two client iPhone apps I’m doing at the moment and got new versions over to the clients for testing. One of the apps seems to be running a bit slow but I think this is just an issue with how I’m keeping the UI up to date which should be quite fixable. They seem happy with the UI now which means that they’re happy with the functionality so hopefully it’s just some final bug fixing and polish left to do. I haven’t heard anything back about the other app so I’m hoping they’re happy with that one now too.

I finished off the week by attending the Hacks & Hackers event organised by ScraperWiki and OpenLabs Liverpool. The idea of the event was to bring together Journalists (hacks) and software developers/hardware hackers/general web people (hackers) and see what they could come up with by working together. We began the event by introducing ourselves and those with a specific interest in a topic declared this interest. We then had 10 minutes to meet each other and form groups around the various topics and then had 6-7 hours to get building something.

I ended up in a group who wanted to look at the social legacy left by the World Cup in Africa. Not something that specifically relates to me but I thought it might be interesting to see what we could produce. After an hour or so of looking for data sources we ended up realising that there really wasn’t much out there. We had tried looking for data on the social implications of the World Cup, looking at how previous similar events had affected developing countries and tried comparing aspects of this World Cup to England’s bid for the 2018 tournament. In the end we decided to bring together 11 facts about the South Africa tournament and 11 facts about England’s bid and display them like player lineups.

Trying to find 22 statistics proved fairly difficult, unfortunately we couldn’t find a single source to use for all of them so there was no opportunity for me to automate the process, which also meant I didn’t get to try out ScraperWiki. It did have one benefit though as the journalists could all spend the afternoon researching while I and the other developer, Francis Fish, could be working on the presentation mechanism.

We decided the best way to get the player lineups to display would be to use a HTML page styled up to look correct and then use CSS & JavaScript to present the statistics when the shirts were clicked on. Some of the CSS got quite tricky, and is still not perfect, but the JS wasn’t too bad just using jQuery to animate between properties. I thought having the numbers appear on their own on the shirts and then having any extra descriptive prefix and postfix fade in would look pretty good. A small description of each stat also appears below. I also tried out a jQuery plugin that allows fading between colours including alpha channels. This gives some nice effects allowing you to fade a colour background in by increasing its opacity without having to change the opacity of elements within the element. In the end though I found I didn’t need this but I may use it in the future.

If you’re interested in seeing what we created here’s a link to it, The other World Cup. (Now updated with the correct link)

So a very busy week as I had various projects to try to finish off and plenty to do to prepare for my State of the Map talk. Also kittens!

It might seem a bit odd to mention kittens on a blog post about my work week. It’s actually quite sensible though, these fluffy critters took up a sizable amount of time in my week!

But apart from that. Most of my time last week was spent trying to tie up loose ends and get the iPhone apps I’ve been doing ready for testing. I discussed the changes in functionality needed for one of the apps and the client has agreed to pay for some more of my time to get those bits added, so that’s great. I spent some time getting the most important changes done but will do most of that extra work this week and will hopefully get that app finished soon.

The smaller app that I was waiting for sign-off on I finished on Monday and sent that off to Testing first thing Tuesday. I was quite happy with it and felt it was working well. I heard from the client on Friday but haven’t yet had time to look at how many bugs they’ve found, hopefully not too many!

I began some work on new functionality for mapme.at to allow users to consolidate their favourites. Part of this work is to allow user’s to take their old favourites and merge them with places that mapme.at has found in the OSM database. The other part is to allow users to manually match OSM places on to Foursquare venues that perhaps have slightly different names or for other reasons the automated matching hasn’t been able to manage. I was hoping to have this ready by the time of State of the Map so I could announce this great effort to come up with a repository of ID mappings but unfortunately with kittens and finishing client work I didn’t manage it. In fact I didn’t even manage to finish my presentation until I was on the train to Girona and finally had an hour to sit in front of my laptop with no distractions and no interruptions. My talk on Friday seemed to be well received. People were interested in some of the applications and uses of the site and there was definite interest in the ID mapping data that I explained would be available in the future.

I described the site as a “Social Location Experimentation Platform”. I had come up with this term a few days previous, I think trying to channel some of the excitement that BERG find with their name (based on British Experimental Rocketry Group). Though I came up with it after the description I think my explanation was valid. I pointed out that the mapme.at platform allows experimentation not just by developers who can come up with some interesting and fun apps (like Adrian McEwen’s ferry trackers or my “Weasley” clock) but also by users who are able to experiment with mapme.at and with other location tracking applications like Foursquare and Google Latitude and can do it knowing that even if they only play with a service for a week and then stop using it, they won’t have wasted that week of data collection because mapme.at will do the job of storing up all their history in one place that they can access at any time and from any other compatible service.

If you’re interested in reading through my talk you can find the slides here.

As I spent most of yesterday travelling I now have a very short week this week (and hence this blog post being very late). I’m probably also going to the Hacks and Hackers event on Friday which will also restrict the time I have to spend on client work. Hopefully there’ll be less interruptions from kittens too (though this blog post has already been interrupted by them once!) On that note I better get started, see you next week!

Well, this past week was supposed to be devoted to a new client iPhone app. “Unfortunately” I didn’t get sign-off for it but that did mean I could keep going with my chess app. With various other bits and pieces to cover I’ve managed to spend about a day, maybe two on that in the last week. Last Monday I also ended up finishing off the wordpress blog project for Clear Digital and then taking a trip over to Manchester. I had an interesting meeting with a potential client who want to do a really big iPad project. They initially wanted me for 12 weeks full time which actually spooked me a bit as I don’t usually do full time. I’ve yet to hear what’s happening with that but could be an interesting project to work on if they do want me to go ahead with it. After that meeting I met up with Dave Verwer and went to NSManchester in the evening. While at NSManchester I gave a very hastily put together presentation on the iPhone app store positions app that I worked on the previous week. Talk seemed to go well and I had time to chat with some interesting people in the pub afterwards too.

I got home from Manchester at about 11:30 and began my planned server migration. My current server is hosted by Hetzner and is a “DS3000″, AMD Athlon 64 3700+ with 2GB memory and 2x160GB drive (probably, I bought mine over a year ago so specs may have changed). They now have an “EQ4″ which offers Intel i7-920 quadcore with 8GB memory and 2x750GB drive for exactly the same price, though with a setup fee. I’m currently hosting mapme.at on one of these and it’s running really well so I decided to upgrade my other server too. On the older server I’ve been using VMware to host most of my stuff in a virtual machine. The idea for this was that when it did come to moving servers in the future (i.e. now) I could do it by simply copying the VM across and starting it up. By about 3:30am on Tuesday morning after wrestling with VMware and networking for many hours I was getting pretty tired. I got a few hours sleep (as much as my cat would let me before she decided she needed feeding) and then tried again in the morning. After another few hours I decided that VMs were not the way to go :-/ Considering I host everything on ubuntu and that’s super easy to set up anyway the ease of setup isn’t really that big a deal, also having to copy massive virtual disk images wasn’t proving to be fun anyway. I’m going to host my services on the bare metal which means I can switch from one server to the other by doing a simple rsync to get up to date, re-syncing databases and then switching DNS. Unfortunately I haven’t yet had time to do this, ideally I’d do it overnight like I attempted last week but considering the app store positions app keeps filling up the disk and knocking out services I’m worrying less about the downtime, it should be minimal anyway now it’ll just take some resyncing.

I ended the week by attending the Liver & Mash event organised by Mandy Phillips. The event was in the spirit of previous “mashed libraries” events which have tried to introduce librarians to the concept of mashups and the many ways in which they can be useful. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from the event but had agreed to talk on “Maps” so prepared some slides and went along. In the end the event was really useful, it wasn’t really too dissimilar from other web/technology events I’ve been to. Everybody was really interested in mashups using various web APIs, hardware hacking with Arduino and other techologies, and pretty much anything that interests geeks. The libraries side of it gave it some focus but was easy to get to grips with for someone like me who has had minimal experience of libraries recently.

Most of the talks were given in three tracks and the rooms were assigned by order of popularity. As it happened my talk on maps was voted most popular and I was asked to give it in the main room to everybody! The talk seemed to be well received, looking at the twitter back channel, with most people finding the various examples I gave interesting. I only had 15 minutes so gave some basic background on maps in general and where my experience of online mapping started. I gave some examples of using mapping APIs and OpenStreetMap then finished off with a quick overview of mapme.at and my experiences of tracking my location. As usual slides can be found on slideshare (usual problems with videos, though these can be found on my user page on vimeo).

In the afternoon I also ran an hour and a half workshop on mapping. I’m not sure how well this went as we were in a fairly small room and I hadn’t particularly prepared any tasks for attendees to try out. I tried to go through some of the best ways to use mapping APIs (use mapstraction!) How to get involved with OpenStreetMap, how to edit the map using GPS, Aerial imagery or even the new Ordnance Survey data. I also covered the various ways to use OSM data including loading it into mapstraction or using the Cloudmade APIs to generate custom map styles and retrieve data through the web services. I got plenty of questions from my audience though and gave answers for all of them so hopefully they enjoyed it.

All-in-all I think the day went really well. Unfortunately when my talk finished at 3:30 I had to rush out straight away and didn’t get to enjoy the evening revelry. Instead I hopped into the car to rush to London for a leaving party!

Hm.. doing week 88 a day before I should be doing week 89. Oh well, I’ll try to make this a quick one just to get it out.

Last week was really busy with Where 2.0 and WhereCamp in San Francisco. The conferences went really well, met up with lots of old friends and made some really great new friendships. I got my talk finished and gave it to a good sized audience. The people I spoke to seemed to think it went well and especially liked the video of the clock (as usual) and the new visualisations I got ITO World to produce. I put a write-up of the talk over on the mapme.at blog.

All trips taken in the past 3 years from John McKerrell on Vimeo.

At WhereCamp I also got the opportunity to show my visualisations again, including the clock video and the graphs as well as the videos. This was during an “open mic” style session on geo-visualisation which was fun. Various people got up and showed what they’d been doing.

I could probably have done more to get push mapme.at and make connections while I was out there, unfortunately I didn’t get any meetings arranged or anything like that, but I still think the experience was valuable. Hopefully I’ll get to go next year, I’ve already thought of something I can show at the WhereFair!

WhereCampEU was this past weekend and by all accounts it was a blast! In case you don’t know, WhereCamp is based on the BarCamp model meaning that it’s a conference which is free to attend at which anyone can speak. The schedule is blank until the day of the conference when any of the attendees can announce their talk by putting it on “The Wall”: a big grid drawn out using masking paper allowing you to choose a time slot and a room.

It may have started out blank but the schedule was packed with great talks by the time the conference got going. I tried to go to as many as possible but, especially on the first day, many of the rooms ended up full to bursting. I was also tired because I’d just got off a 24 hour flight from Sydney so I did end up missing a few slots. Harry’s already posted photos of the wall and the talk titles have been copied onto the wiki, now it’s just up to the speakers to add some info about their slot (I’ve only just done mine).

The first talk I went to was about “GeoPrivacy, Your thoughts”, a discussion introduced by Chaitanya. It was interesting but most of the discussion was about privacy on the internet generally, rather than specifically location privacy which interests me most. I later caught the end of the Pedestrian routing talk as they came to the conclusion that for ideal results it really would depend on the user (a young female is likely to want to walk down different streets to an older male, probably). I also found a talk about using Apple’s iPhone “MapKit” library quite interesting as so far I’ve only used the route-me library. It also gave me the opportunity to plug my LocationManagerSimulator code. There was a few talks around the concept of “place” too, with my recent switch on mapme.at to using “places” these were quite interesting.

The evening involved geo-beers kindly sponsored by Axon Active:

Day two started for me with my own talk on Hacking Location into Hardware. I had intended to discuss my “Weasley Clock” a little and talk about how it worked. In the end I think I just rambled on too much and probably didn’t actually help people to understand how either the hardware or the software was put together, but hopefully I was entertaining at least.

I actually quite enjoyed the talk titled “A little light relief. Using global terrain data in your maps”. I only really attended because it promised light relief (and I only just got the pun today!) and because it was being given by an old colleague – Simon Lewis but it ended up being quite interesting and inspired me for some visualisation I need to do soon. The talk covered various aspects of Simon’s attempts to add terrain and relief shading to maps using a selection of open source tools.

I have to mention that one of “my” biggest contributions to the event was actually the logo, which I asked a friend to produce. Though I knew the logo was good originally it looked really great when printed out and mounted on posters, t-shirts and blog posts so I’ll definitely thank Sophie Green for producing that. I’ve used her for my mapme.at business cards before and always been happy with the results.

And there’s more geotastic geogoodness to come with Where 2.0 in two weeks. I will be talking about my experiences of tracking my location for the past few years in a session titled Why I Track My Location and You Should Too. It’s based on the session I’ve given at a few events already but should have fully new material. Maybe this time I’ll actually answer the question of “why?”, but more likely I’ll just show more pretty visualisations and hope no-one notices!

So one of the great events that I’ve, er.. delayed writing about was the annual OpenStreetMap conference “State of the Map”. This year it was a 3 day conference (previous years had been 2 days) with the extra day accommodating the various commercial people that have started making use of OSM data. It was a great idea to bring in some fresh faces to the conference and actually gave me my first speaking opportunity of the weekend, talking for five minutes about mapme.at. The following two days took a more traditional course with various members of the community talking about the ways in which they are using and working with the OSM data.

A selection of countries gave a “State of <country>” type talk, these are always really great to hear, especially for the smaller countries where perhaps Internet access or access to GPS technology is not so great. Often in these locations there isn’t even any existing map data so there’s a great opportunity for the OSM community. The talks from Pakistan and Brazil were particularly memorable and were only made possible due to the great OpenStreetMap Foundation “scholarships” program which was a great way to make sure we had attendees from all areas of the world. It was also good to see these attendees being handed GPS devices as part of the GPStogo program which hopefully they’ll take home and use to collect many more GPS traces.

The OSMF Scholarship attendees

The conference took place this year in Amsterdam and it was my first time visiting the city, though I didn’t see much of it in the first few days while at the conference we fortunately stayed on (we being my wife and I) to spend another few days in the city for some rest and relaxation. We had a great time there and I had plenty of opportunities to use my (still relatively new at the time) DSLR camera as you should be able to see from the photos scattered around this post.

I managed to make it three years running speaking at a SOTM conference not only with my 5 minute segment about mapme.at but also with a full half hour on Saturday afternoon talking about OpenStreetView. This is my idea for a project to try to create an openly licensed database of street-level imagery, and ideally some really impressive software to go with it. The talk went well though I had an “interesting” Q&A session afterward, obviously people are still concerned about the privacy aspect even when related to what I hope will become a very open project. Unfortunately at the time I hadn’t completed the software side enough to launch the project, and as you may have noticed I haven’t yet launched it, more on that soon.

Next week I’ll be attending another conference, and again will be speaking about OpenStreetView. Ed Parsons has written about the conference that he “was disappointed with the introspection and backwards thinking demonstrated … and had all but given up attending” which doesn’t sound like a big vote of confidence. The conference is AGI Geocommunity and fortunately a big effort has been made by Stephen Feldman, Chris Osbourne, John Fagan, Rollo Home and many others to improve the situation leading to a really great and interesting looking programme.

As mentioned I’ll be speaking about OpenStreetView again, but this time I’m intending to have something launched and usable beforehand. It won’t be particularly pretty, it won’t have a huge number of features, and it probably won’t have a huge database of images, but I’m hoping this will all change once I open it out and get more people involved. My aim with the project is to build a database of images and metadata which can be built upon by others who are already working on the software side for viewing these things. It should also provide a home for imagery being created by various people who are already building hardware solutions for collecting it. Unfortunately (for the project, good for me) I’ve been very busy over the summer with paying clients but I’m hoping I can get things finished off this week to allow upload and moderation, then the fun can begin!

I also can’t talk about conferences without mentioning another speaking date I have coming up in November. While the AGI is a national group aimed at representing the interests of the whole UK’s geographic information (GI) industry, they also have smaller groups aimed at bringing together the GI community in different areas. The AGI Northern Group achieves these aims in the North of England with a monthly meeting and this year their first full-day seminar – the AGI Northern Group Where2Now Conference. It’s being held on the 10th November in Harrogate and I’ll be speaking along with a great list of people. Ticket information isn’t yet available but put the date in your diary, check out the linkedIn events page and head over to Tim’s blog for more information on the speakers.

If you’re going to the conference next week and we haven’t met before then please do say “Hi!” I’m really looking forward to it, not just for the great content on offer but also for the opportunity to meet up with some old friends that I haven’t seen in some time, and also to meet some new faces. I’ll close this blog post out though by quoting Tim Waters and his write-up of the SOTM conference, it’ll be interesting to see if the AGI Geocommunity conference can generate just as much emotion:

Yes, I got a bit emotional at the third OpenStreetMap conference, held in the CCC, Amsterdam last weekend – mainly because this globe we are on is the only one we know – we really are mapping our universe, doing it our way. Creating the world we want to live in.
Tim Waters

Last weekend I went to the Howduino hack day which by good fortune was happening on my doorstep, in Liverpool. The day was organised by two friends of mine – Adrian McEwen and Thom Shannon – who have been doing hardware hacking for quite some time now and wanted to open things up for more people to get involved.

The day was partly named after Arduino (with a bit of Scouse humour mixed in – “how do we know?!”). From their website:

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

Basically you get a circuit board that has a USB slot, a power slot and a set of digital and analogue inputs and outputs. You can load software onto the circuit board via the USB slot, the software can then run on the board when it is disconnected from the computer and can operate other hardware through the inputs and outputs. Adrian used one of these devices to make the famous Bubblino twitter monitoring bubble machine and the Mazzini power monitoring project. Thom has used it to make, amongst other things, a light tracking mini.

Though Howduino got its name from the Arduino boards, the day was actually more of a general hardware hacking event. Sophie Green spent most of the day making artworks using “brush bots” which were incredibly simple devices made from motors and batteries mounted on toothbrushes. Some people built a “drawbot” from scratch on the day and a few people tried making racing radio controlled cars with movements controlled by twitter hashtags.

My project was suggested by Grant Bell, he thought that I should use mapme.at to create a “Weasley Clock”. This clock is described in the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling, it is used by the Weasley family to see where each member of the family is. Instead of telling the time, each hand shows a photo of one of the family members, the clock face has a number of locations written around the edge, such as “Home”, “Travelling”, “School”, “Holidays” and even “Mortal Peril”!

Now one way in which I could’ve handled this would be to create a web page that showed my location on a picture of one of these clocks. That would be fairly easy to do but much less interesting than the hardware hacking version. I started off by getting hold of an old clock. My Dad has been tinkering with and fixing clocks for years, and often gets given old clocks and told “This stopped working years ago, thought you might like it” so fortunately he has a few lying around and gave me this one:

I spent a morning taking it to pieces carefully and working out how it worked, until I pulled the back off it and the chime spring caused an explosion of gears:

I then took all the bits to Howduino together with a stepper motor that I’d taken out of a floppy drive. After a short while working with Aaron from Oomlout we managed to get the stepper motor going but then I had the problem of connecting the motor to the clock. After many hours of trying to glue and solder the small stepper motor on I finally decided to ask around to see if anyone else had stepper motors. Fortunately someone did, a much bigger motor that could fit through the black of the clock mechanism and unbelievably had a gear on that meshed perfectly with the gears in the clock. With the application of some super glue and a few pieces of metal “salvaged” from an old printer I got the motor attached and turning the hand reliably:

Once that was done I had to write some software. The software for moving the clock is fairly simple. As the motor is a “stepping” motor it can be controlled very reliably. One step of the motor moves it by a well defined amount, with the gearing from the clock 150 steps of the motor turns the minute hand around in a complete rotation, meaning 12 × 150 = 1800 steps will turn the hour hand around completely. I knocked up some Arduino code that reads the current location of the hands from the EEPROM memory on the Arduino. To reset it I manually move the hands to “midnight” and zero the EEPROM memory. I can then tell the Arduino to position each of the hands by an hour. As the hands are still geared together I can only put the hour hand between one hour and another, while the minute hand can be precisely positioned. When the clock has moved to the position you’ve requested, it saves the new location of the hands to the EEPROM memory again so that it’s safe to be powered off.

To get my location I’ve knocked up a MapMe_At class which can request the location for a user. It makes a HTTP request to mapme.at, using the Arduino Ethernet Shield, pulls down the location and uses a very lightweight JSON parser to pull out the label for the favourite location that I’m currently at. From my core code I then request the location of two users from mapme.at every minute, convert that location to a position on the clock and then move the hands. When it works it looks really good, I’m only running the clock forwards at the moment because some of the gearing for the chime is still there and makes funny noises if I run the clock backwards, this means that it can take nearly a minute for the hands to move but considering it’s unlikely for location changes to happen that often this should be fine. I do seem to have a problem whereby the clock stops working after running for a while so I’ll have to do some debugging, but as you can see from the photos and the video it is looking pretty good at least!

(Unfortunately hardware hacking can have its casualties, as you can see the glass on the face of the clock was one)

I’ll be taking the clock along with me on the next Tech Bus Tour from London to Liverpool. I’ll be updating the face to show our progress between the locations as this should be more interesting than showing that I’m “Travelling” constantly. I’ll also open source the Arduino source code when I get around to tidying it up.

UPDATE 2009/01/04: The code is now available on github, I haven’t had time to fully clean it up and add comments throughout but hopefully it’ll be useful anyway. Download the code here.

If you’ve been following my Twitters you’ll be well aware that I’ve just spent the past week in San Francisco. I came here to attend, and speak at, the launch event for CloudMade’s new APIs for location based services. CloudMade is a company that was launched around 18 months ago by Steve Coast, the founder of the OpenStreetMap project, and Nick Black, a core member of the OSM project. The aim of their company is to bring the power of crowd sourced data, specifically OSM data, to more developers and to commercial companies around the world. The first step of this was of course to develop some products to make this possible and to make them available to the world, hence this event.

The event was split into four main sections. Steve started by giving an overview of the OSM project, its history and some glimpses of what’s likely to happen in the future. Nick then came on stage to explain their ideas behind forming CloudMade and what they’re doing to get OSM data into the hands of more people. After this I and four other developers who have been working with CloudMade’s APIs got on stage to give 5 minute presentations about our experiences developing with the new APIs.

Andrew Turner, CTO of GeoCommons, explained how they have integrated CloudMade’s tiles into their Maker application and talked about how the new Style Editor enables great looking mashups. Jaak Laineste of Nutiteq told us how they’ve been integrating CloudMade’s tile, geocoding and routing services into their Mobile map libraries. I talked about my experiences working with the new APIs, though I won’t go into too much detail here as I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise for Thursday. Andre, of Advanced Flash Components, then showed us a live demo of CloudMade’s APIs being used in a flash application and showed the speedy responses that the API gave.

Cragg Nilson then talked more about the specific products that CloudMade are making available and how people can get access to them. Finally a Q&A session allowed some light interrogation of the CloudMade team before we moved into another room for demo sessions. Jaak, Andre and I all had a plasma screen each that we used to demo what we’d discussed in our talks. The CloudMade team also demoed various other applications that were using their services, centred around a large range of mobile devices that are able to access the APIs using various applications.

I’ve been really impressed by what CloudMade are offering considering they are still a young company. While a large reason for the quality of their offerings is down to the great team they’ve built up, they do also have an advantage in that the data they’re using, and the license it’s built upon, allow them to offer so much more to the developers using their products. The OSM dataset is incredibly rich and can cover a wide range of features that often don’t get much coverage from standard data providers. Also because the data is free CloudMade can make all of it available in their APIs without having to worry about extra charges such as you might get if you wanted to return vectors from existing data providers.

Now the good news, if you’re reading this thinking “I wish I could’ve gone to San Francisco and seen these great talks”, you need not fret. The whole event is being repeated in London on Thursday 12th. It’s currently oversubscribed but if you are interested in going I believe they’ve managed to arrange extra room so there shouldn’t be a problem with more people going. This page should give more details about the CloudMade launch event in London.

Oh yes, and as a hint to what I’ll be talking about on Thursday, take a look at the new logo for one of my existing mapping sites:

Wow, BarCamp was such a long time ago. Though I had an amazing weekend and felt really inspired by the end of it, real work brought me back down to earth pretty quickly

So far I’ve only been to one BarCamp, in Manchester, that was really good but only lasted for one day. I’ve also been to a WhereCamp which is basically the same thing specialising in location based services, this one did involve an overnight stay and was also fun (this one actually took place in the Googleplex!). Having had so much fun away from home I was really looking forward to having a BarCamp in my home town.

Something that I’ve been planning for a while to do at the next Liverpool Mapping Party, when I get around to organising it, was to prepare a big printout of the OSM coverage of Liverpool, get some stickers printed up with POI icons on them, and invite everybody to place stickers where there was missing POIs on the map. As I hadn’t got around to organising a mapping party I decided to do this at BarCamp and try to get everyone interested in editing the map. Cue me spending 3 hours the week before trying to finish all the surveying of South Liverpool and then spending hours on the Friday before BarCamp trying to input this data and prepare a PDF file of the map, suitable to be printed at A0 size. I managed to email my PDF over to the printers at 2:30 on Friday afternoon, fortunately they managed to get it printed within the hour so that I could pick it up on my way to the iPhone event. Unfortunately though the print-out came out looking great, and the vector-based PDF file had given a great result, for some reason all the road names were missing! This is the second A0 printout I’ve done that has had problems so I’m definitely going to have to spend more time on it if I try again.

This is a photo of the map at the beginning of the weekend. Unfortunately it didn’t look much different at the end, only a few people bothered putting stickers on it. This was a little surprising to me but I guess that actually most of the people at BarCamp were from outside of Liverpool, and most of the ones from within Liverpool were from the parts that had been mapped. There was also an issue that the map was at such a small scale, and the stickers so big, that each one covered an area of about 1km². I think the idea could still work but definitely needs to to be done with a larger scale map, more like the type of area you’d try to cover at a mapping party.

The talks at BarCamp were quite varied. Unfortunately as it has been so long now I can’t remember too many of the ones I went to, and I haven’t been able to find a full set of photos of the sessions board. Adrian did a good writeup here that you should read. I do remember a few of the sessions I went to though including one from Gill Hunt of Liverpool Ventures who talked about VCs and how to look for funding. Last thing on Saturday there was also the “Bitchin’ Pitches” session. I used this one to talk about my iPhone app iFreeThePostcode, it was good to get up alongside all the other pitches and talk about my app, but as I wasn’t really looking for money or anything like that there wasn’t actually all that much point and I didn’t end up winning a prize.

In the evening we all went to the bar downstairs at which Microsoft was sponsoring drinks. Beer tokens were handed out by the organisers which we all dutifully exchanged for beer at the bar. The “Bitchin’ Pitches” session also continued into the party with the best pitches being repeated in front of everyone. Melinda Stockington pitched her idea of a site that allowed you to log how often you read books and Adrian pitched his Arduino based Mazzini project for which he won first prize!

Due to the effectiveness of the MS sponsored drinks we were a bit late arriving on the Sunday but when I got there I decided to go for the “Let’s talk about sex” session as I couldn’t find anything else that interested me. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from a load of Geeks talking about sex, it wasn’t quite as scary as you might expect though and most of it was a discussion of relationships and the Internet, including things such as the volatility of the “relationship status” on Facebook. Much amusement when someone suggested the use of HTTP error codes in sexual situations, the following being the ones I found most amusing:

• 411 Length Required
• 413 Request Entity Too Large
• 405 Method Not Allowed
• 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable

I don’t know if we covered normal status codes on the day but I just noticed the following could be used too:

• 100 Continue
• 201 Created (pregnancy ensues!)

After this I went to a talk about “CodeWiki” which unfortunately I wasn’t really paying attention to at the time. This was followed by John O’Shea’s discussion about his Meat License Proposal. Again I wasn’t really paying attention at first, sitting at the back playing on my laptop. After a while though his talk made me pay attention, basically he’s proposing that to eat meat a person might have to obtain a “Meat License”. To get a license the person would have to have killed an animal with their own hands. It sounds fairly grotesque, but I found it a really interesting proposal and raises some good questions about how much we know of what goes into making the food we eat. Afterwards I talked to John about some work that he’s done as co-director of an artist’s collective that could make some good use of maps, hopefully I’ll be in touch with him again soon (just as soon as I get around to replying to his email!)

Later on in the day I gave a talk about the use of location tracking services on the iPhone. Really it was just to give me an opportunity to talk about mapme.at and get some opinions of what people expected from this type of service. It was also good to chat to Paul Stringer about his experiences from creating Coffee Buzz.

The final talk that I went to was Adrian’s Don’t Just Change the World… Improve It!. This was a good inspirational talk, it reminded us that the North-West was the birthplace of the industrial revolution and probably has a few environmental debts to repay, so if we can get involved with this side of things it would be a great way to repay those debts. Maybe I just liked his talk because his last slide was one of my photos!

This artwork was actually just outside the door to the venue for BarCamp and it really summed up Adrian’s talk well, this quote is definitely something to live by:

FIRST RULE OF THE COSMOS
GET OFF YOUR ARSE
& MAKE IT HAPPEN