Wow, before starting this blog post I thought I’d check the date on my previous post. I haven’t written anything in nearly three months! That’s pretty terrible so I’ll try to do a few more posts sometime. I’ve been pretty busy with a number of other things recently but that’s no excuse, I know interesting things have happened that I should have found the time to mention.

I guess the biggest of the things that have been restricting my time recently was the recent redesign of the Multimap.com site and the availability of Microsoft Virtual Earth content within the Multimap API. Oddly enough, this was the third time that I’d worked on a project to pull VE content into our API. The first two times we had done it by wrapping VE’s API into our own, passing function calls to our API onto VE’s where necessary in a similar fashion to OpenLayers Base Layers. Though this gave us access to VE content and allowed us to resell the content to the UK Yell.com site, it was never going to be the best method. The finished product required loading the entirety of both APIS (nearly 300KB just for JS), and because we only had access to exposed functionality resulted in some odd behaviour, such as when our API and VE’s were both trying to smoothly pan a map to a new location.

Selecting bird's eye mode from within map mode using a pointer that follows the mouse.

In December of course we were bought out by Microsoft and as a result were able to get direct access to their imagery. Making use of VE’s maps and aerial data was fairly simple but including the Bird’s eye imagery was a little more difficult. Fortunately with the help of a few guys at MS who sent through some source code, and with the existing good “custom map type” functionality in the Multimap API, I had a good working model pretty soon. We then spent a long time trying to come up with a really good way of communicating “Bird’s Eye” mode to users. Though we had trials and tribulations along the way I think we did pretty well with the solution we came up with, it’s live on multimap.com if you want to take a look (or see the screenshots above and below).

A bird's eye view of the london eye shown in the Multimap web site.

Another thing that I’ve been trying to get sorted out is the server that hosts my blog. I’ve been using the same dedicated server for a good 4-5 years now. That server was hosted at Sago Networks and it’s been through a lot, including Florida hurricanes, but has recently started hanging on a regular basis. A replacement NIC a few weeks ago gave promise of a reprieve but it has again crashed since then. Though I’ve had really good service from sago who have been happy to manually fsck it every time it went down recently, I decided I had to go with price and have now switched to Hetzner. Their prices were too good to miss, and though the fact that I don’t speak a word of German has caused a few issues along the way everything seems to be going well with it now.

I’ve even decided to be all modern and am hosting my site on a VMWare Server virtual machine. I’m hoping that this will allow me more control over that machine, making it safer to upgrade and reboot as I’ll always be able to get access to the console through VMWare. Hopefully it’ll also make things much easier when I eventually decide to move to a new server again (I’ve had this new server for a month now and have only just found the time over the long weekend to move everything across!) I’m also hoping it will lend me a little more security by allowing me to segregate important sites that I need to keep secure away from older less reliable code.

One other thing to mention, I’m going to San Francisco next week! Where 2.0 is the second most important conference for location based services providers (the most important, of course, being OSM’s State of the Map) but in past years I haven’t been able to attend. Fortunately this year some budget has turned up and I together with four of my colleagues will be there. Though the main event is the O’Reilley conference, I’ll also be going along to WhereCamp 2008 the following weekend, and as many other events as I can cram in on the Thursday and Friday between. If you’re going and I don’t already know it then get in touch with me on twitter or friend me on the WhereCamp site.

I’m also intending to map my journey there as much as possible, I have to get from Liverpool to London on Friday night, over to Heathrow on Saturday morning and then fly to San Francisco International airport at lunchtime (leaving 10am, arriving 1pm, still freaks me out ;-). Obviously it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be able to log anything while I’m flying but I’ll do my best, and I shouldn’t have too much problem on the train down. Check back later this week when I’ve figured out how I’m going to share my location with you :-)