Last: April 2003
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May 16, 2003
geolocation links
At Earle's request, here's my raw list of links to do with geolocation and places. I am going to sort them, and update them, but for now it's a start.
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king of nodes
So I took part in Noderunner London tonight, and I won! Yay for me! Woo! Hoopla!
I managed to connect and send photos through 5 open nodes, and logged about 100 nodes all together, in two and a half hours. Not bad, considering I left 40 minutes at the end for tube + DLR to Limehouse. The biggest motherlodes were around the City high walk, and the Barbican. Very little in the City itself, especially that's open. Our old buildings have walls that are far too thick, and the financial institutions are too clued up.
Basic route was:
Old Street
City Road
Moorgate
Finsbury Circus
London Wall
Guildhall
High wall to Barbican
Near and in the Barbican Centre
Barbican Exhibition Halls
Barbican tube station
tube to Tower Hill
DLR to Limehouse
Commercial Road
Limehouse Town Hall
I'll document the process properly soon, but for the time being:
Photos I took here (note some of these weren't uploaded as part of the game).
GPS tracks here, in text, XML, and even AutoCAD DXF.
Macstumbler log here.
What was odd was that, for a variety of reasons, I was on my tod for this. A one man noderunning machine. I was expecting other teams to do a lot better than me, if only for more hands (GPS + digital camera + open laptop), but also different types of wi-fi hardware: signal strength is low on the nodes picked up, and some hardware will do better than others. I hope this shows that there's lots of colab mapping that can be done by many individuals - the whole is bigger than the parts. I've got an idea for this, but I need time to meditate on it. I'll publish something soon.
Anyway, great fun, congrats to Jo and Earle for organising this.
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May 14, 2003
mobile maps
Just as a heads-up, Orange now offer maps on their WAP portal. They're actually very good, and supplied as part of the deal with Webraska.
At the moment, they're pretty hidden, under Find > Where's My Nearest. You can't seem to get just a map of where you are - I'll have words with people.
For those on smartphones (P800 at least), go to the WAP portal at http://orange.multimedia , rather than the HTML portal at smartphone.orange.co.uk. Haven't played much, but I can't get a WAP connection on the SPV.
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collaborative mapping show'n'tell
Here's my notes from the collaborative mapping show'n'tell at Limehouse Town Hall. Nice to meet everyone, and it's great to seee there's so many people doing so many good things.
Some events:
Thursday - Noderunner
Saturday - Hijacker Island party
week after - Orfordness
Ben from Headmap
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blogosphere
http://danger-island.co.uk/~dav/blogosphere/friendster
XML plotted onto a globe.
Spider of Friendster contacts.
Maybe data is open and available, but the connections between things are hidden/private.
FOAF - lots of work of people creating spiders
Focus on RDF, XML - graph related. Touchgraph & SVG.
Etcon - lots of connectivity - give verbal people with a common interest laptops, and see what happens. All that was important is if people were approximate or not approximate - so maybe relative is more important than absolute places/lat-long. Need Internet connection to start.
ambur.com
trail of GPS snowboarding
collaborative mapping
build up trace database (webmapper.net)
godseye.com
realtime.waag.org
gpsdrawing.com
[saul: might get realtime over, map something interesting]
Masiki Fujiawara (sic.) - mapping island in Essex (Norsey? Mailsea?)
video camera with GPS
10 year project
(talked at Tate last week)
Friendster
LinkedIn
Have FOAF people talked to them?
All networks are pretty incompatible and closed.
what are the reasons to use it?
FOAF uses RDF - you can join bits of RDF together, create a web of information.
Could be used, for example, as a trust network - FOFOFs probably won't send you spam.
Jo
--
Grubstreet - open source guide to London
XML representations available, can include location information
Some SVG visualisation
http://space.frot.org/a_space/London/
IM, IRC bot interface
sharing data over lots of sites
noderunner - running around picking up wireless networks, upload pictures and GPS data for each
http://maps.nocat.net
uses lots of open source programs, server software and data to draw maps of their community wireless networks
Brian / Mongrel
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working with Waag society
9.waag.org
formulate your own subjective maps
link maps of sounds, texts, images to others
meant to overcome cultural barriers - looks for frequencies of languages to determine cultures
each area owned by different people. Links are subject to emails between space owners.
maps as self-representation? looks at how people subjectivise their world
community oriented
9.scotoma.org - 90s art and community, photocopy and plagarist work
work on hsitory of cartogrpahy
many maps are due to illness, such as smallpox
john bryant - Ordanance Survey
------------------------------
set up 200 years ago, to map the invasion of France
(uses mapinfo professional)
230,000 1kmx1km maps
old Victorian maps had a greater level of annotation
moves from OS map to 25cm accurate topo map showing outlines of everything - buildings, plots, fields, roads
collected from the early 70s
not structured as sensible data
now OS master map - completed in last 5 years
objects that mean something - houses, roads
change in things that are mapped is purely on need
where does a mountain start and finish? how do people associate areas to spaces?
how do people subconciosly map their area?
expensive - but they map everywhere. Without OS, there would be lot of competition, but it would only map economic areas - cities etc.
OS Select map - can order inkjet print based anywhere - 15 quid
how to productise data?
[how can we get hold of the 1952 maps? (out of copyright)]
Urban Tapestries
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urbantapestries.net
public trial in Dec/Jan
works about spaces, and how we inhabit spaces
interested in public authoring
relies on communities rather than service or network providers
technology and network-agnostic
interested in sound (normally forgotten)
knowledge - social practices and customs
particular content - hobbies etc.
spontaneous content - annotated and added on the go
gpster
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spacial data
client works on an iPaq as well as the web
adding more ways to import and export
get data in waypoint database import (e.g. text file)
but want server that can ask waypoint databases if there are any points within range, and each database could cascade questioning each in turn
can show on blogosphere, or in html, magellan waypoints, xml etc. etc.
merging blogmapper and gpster
grubstreet
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open source guide to london - currently like a wiki - everyone can edit
now creating suite of software to create information about places - openguides
query svg images by location or type, filter
writing plug-ins such as geocaching or consume.net
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May 13, 2003
apathetic
Feeling very apathetic after San Francisco, though not quite as much as Webb. Trying to get motivated to build everything I want to build, do everything I want to do. No time. Well, no mental time.
In response to Tom, I know what you mean. AppleScript seems to be an ugly language to do anything hard. The joy of AppleScript on OS X is using the Studio to create a GUI (very easily), and hack out to Perl or whatever for the heavy lifting.
So what am I thinking about?
Well:
GMing insects so that they communicate via EM rather than sound. Then teach them to talk 802.11.
Wireless access should be looking to internet cafe pricing, not telco pricing. Costs should be lower than even the cafes: after all, you're providing the hardware. Give me somewhere to sit, and I'll pay a pound.
The Cartographic Congress. I'm sitting in the map room now. Cool.
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May 08, 2003
absent minded musical map help requested
in the spirit of the hot summer of psychogeography;
I WANT THE SONGS IN YOUR HEAD.
As part of the Cartographic Congress[0] / Collaborative Mapping Week[1], I am compiling a location-based musical-mind-wander, but for that I need branes.
I would like people to record the random music that enters conciousness, including time and place. This will, in the first instance, be plotted (anonymously) on a map, but will turn into something interactive, with a goal of created some kind of location-based iPod, that lets you enjoy the contents of other's heads as you walk around.
Whilst respondents in the UK/London are most useful, everyone is welcome to take part - the more data the better. I'll even buy extra maps for the other countries.
Start today - start tommorrow, but start. Send logs to me whenever you want - c[at]deaddodo.com.
Rules:
Songs that are heard playing through normal recorded and distributed means do not count. Unless they pop in your head at some other time to when you heard them.
Please give date, time, place (postcode/number and street, and GPS readings if you have them), song title and artist. If you want to record why you think it popped in your head, that's great, but won't be used for the initial map.
Having tried this out, it's hard to realise that you've got a new song in your head, and to remember the song and context after the event. I'm carrying round pencil and paper and jotting them down, and whilst I don't expect others to, the songs that are most interesting to me are those whilst travelling, not just in home/work.
To show what I mean, here's yesterday's log for me:
*******************************
7/5/2003 (all London)
8:00 on a rope - Rocket From The Crypt home, SE1 0TJ
8:45 agado - tom ze outside estate, southwark st
9:00 you can leave your hat on - tom jones in bond street tube
10:15 is this the way to amarillo?-tony cristie at work/desk (wigmore st,w1)
10:45 fawlty towers theme at work/desk
13:15 clarks shoes ad oxford street (hsbc)
(Tony Avlon & The Belairs - Sexy Coffee Pot)
15:15 the grid - koyaanisquatsi - Glas at desk/work
17:00 7 nation army - White Stripes at desk/work
*******************************
apologies to the song in my head mailing list for ignominiously ripping off the title; I couldn't think of anything better or more fitting. Please take part :)
Thank you!
Chris Heathcote
c[at]deaddodo.com
[0] http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/CartographicCongress
[1] http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/CcSemanticMappingWeek
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May 07, 2003
MCs smoke crack, I smoke aluminum!
I'm not normally one to drink from the Apple kool-aid (sysadminning OS9 networks tends to suck the fun out of computers), but I'm enjoying my new iBook immensely, and I've just realised it has a really powerful, easy programming language inside. For free.
I haven't bought a computer with a programming language included since DOS 6.22, with QuickBasic.
AppleScript now comes with a whole Studio of development tools, including an easy interface builder. I've been looking for a language to learn recently, as Perl is great, but doesn't build nice GUI clients easily. I was considering .NET and C#, but I think AppleScript trounces it.
AppleScript is a bit of a coup for Apple that they don't shout about. It isn't just a language, but a design idea - many/most programs implement a level of scriptable functionality, so you can use script juju to link pieces of functionality together from several different apps, the OS, web services, and hopefully Rendevous (which is also very exciting, even if I'm not quite sure why). And with OS X, it can talk to any of the other loosely-joined UNIX apps, including Perl if I get scared and need to do something hard.
A few niggles - AppleScript Studio isn't installed by default, and the documentation seems to suck. Even O'Reilly turn up nothing recent - some web articles at the devcenter. I think there are also a few compatibility problems, especially between 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2 - but the joy of this is that people can create their personal apps to do their bidding, maybe published, editable and hackable.
I'm also excited about Sherlock 3 - a piece of software I never really got. It seems to integrate with AppleScript well, and may help information sucking from the Internet.
Matt talks about the lack of easy-to-use programming languages, and I don't think AppleScript is the pancea, but it strikes me that you could weld together a point and click Visio-esque GUI, and create a world of live flow diagrams - read from this page, listen on this port, get the current iTune, send this to my blog, send an email...... and even better (smoking the crack pipe now), we have the hard part - the GUI. It's OmniGraffle. It's loaded to the gills with AppleScript. People have turned it into an RSS reader. AppleScript slices, and dices. You create an information cloud on your computer, and funnel it any which way.
OK, so tonight I try and build my first AppleScript app. Expect bad moods tommorow.
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place names
In SE1, we have a good discussion forum, that's quite popular. Our upmystreet conversations seem to be a bit floundering. I wonder whether it's because we have a placename to unify under - Southwark, rather than something impersonal, and arbitrary (a postcode). The site is called in-SE1, but people using the forum don't use the term.
I think it's also easier to have a community with a boundary. Maybe I don't need to know if a conversation is a mile away, but in E1, SW9, or WC1, or even better, the City, Brixton, or Covent Garden.
The parts of Southwark most mentioned are Bankside, Borough, Bermondsey and Elephant. Some places, like London Bridge, only exist on maps - no one really identifies with them, it's just a convenient term for when describing where you live, and all else fails. Maybe I'm lucky in that there has been a lot of work to create some sort of community (especially in Bankside and Borough) - our community councils have just met for the first time.
So where do you live? Where do you say you live - where do you identify with?
