Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category.

OpenStreetMap Christmas

One day to go before Christmas, and the UK government have made an astounding contribution to the OpenStreetMap project. It will shortly be announced that through collaboration with the Department for Transport, Traveline, and OpenStreetMap, most of the NaPTAN and NPTG datasets will be offered to OpenStreetMap as a one off bulk import, with the possibility of updates in the future.

This means the import of up to 350,000 geocoded public transport access points, such as bus stops, ferry terminals, trains stations, etc, along with the import of up to 50,000 geocoded place names in a hierarchical format.

Once again, a big thank you to the DfT and Traveline for this massive contribution, and to the OSM Foundation for making it all possible.

Birthday

It seems unreal, but today is the tenth birthday of Glasgownet.com. All those years ago, thinking I was crazy and it was a passing fad. My grandpa paid for the first two years subscription, and here we are today.

I think now is a good time for cake.

A Book Meme

Normally you’re supposed to tag the next people to carry on the meme, but in Flash’s instance, she didn’t. So here goes anyway…

If the connection between devices A and B breaks, then the devices know about it immediately because there is two-way communication between them, and they have now lost contact with one another

It’s not exactly nitty, gritty fiction, or classical prose. More along the lines of simple ring topology in O’Reilly’s “Designing Large Scale LANs

The rules for this meme thing are :

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Other followers of this meme suggest several sentences from the book, and 5 nominees to go next. I’ll do the latter.

Ben Thorp
Mike Quin
Joel Rowbottom
Calum Morrell
Alex Holden

Location Location Location

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It’s time, and Ofcom are beginning to enforce the latest revision to General Condition 4, whereupon VoIP providers must, where technically feasible, provide location information for their VoIP users. In order to aid emergency services, they will transmit details of your fixed line location to the recipient when you make an emergency call.

Obviously this is quite an important thing, and not something you want to get wrong. So take a few moments now to ensure that the details held by your VoIP provider are the correct details.

100Mb/sec to 95.5% of the country?

As Steve points out, Ofcom have recently released their study on the potential future of the UK broadband network using the existing copper telephone network.

There’s two main methods of DSL delivery to end users. One is to have the DSL modems hiding in the local exchange, and the other is to have the modems stashed inside the cabinets on the streets. The latter is similar to the cable network, and hence why Virgin are touting their ‘fibre’ network. It’s really just fibre to the cabinet, and then coax to the home.

Continue reading ‘100Mb/sec to 95.5% of the country?’ »

Isle of Man

It would appear that Google has decided that their map data for the Isle of Man isn’t good enough, and now allow everyone to edit it through their MapMaker system. Several things spring to mind… firstly that OpenStreetmap has great coverage of the island, and secondly, why doesn’t Google want to re-use the OSM data? It’s already freely available under Creative Commons licensing. I fail to understand their method of thinking here.

Infamy!

Well, not quite. I just spotted that my favourite bit of work, Anderston was featured as an image of the week on the wiki. Admittedly it was in relation to OpenStreetbugs, but it’s a bug I filed as a reminder that’s the highlight.

My claim to fame at last :-p

An Idea

It’s probably already been covered, but my 30 seconds of Google-Fu hasn’t turned anything up so bear with me…

Take one OpenMoko phone,  a geolocation service like Fire Eagle, an online celltower database such as CellDB, and some code to use those lovely d-bus bindings, and you could have a location reporting service that’s easy on the battery and mostly precise in urban areas. If your area isn’t covered by CellDB, then run around with the OpenMoko GPS reciever online for a while to report celltower locations, and you’re sorted.

Use all of the above to create services like Socialight, location based Twittering, rough geotagging for photos (courtesy of Flickr and FireEagle [both Yahoo companies]) , pre-emptive OSM tile downloads, Asterisk routing – you could even implement ex-girlfriend logic to it all, if she were to have a similar device :-)

Well, I’m sure someone has thought of this already, but I thought I would commit ideas to storage just in case. Once my FreeRunner arrives, I know what I’ll be working on

Flickr Video

It’s been a long time coming, but Flickr have finally done it. Welcome to Flickr Video!

Are we still terrorists?

It would appear so…

To: postmaster@cityoflondon.police.uk
CC: Kenny.MacAskill.msp@scottish.parliament.uk, public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

Dear City of London Police,

I see that we still have not had a response to this request for information. Please can you provide the answers that we seek, or suggest alternative routes to go down. If we are to be arrested without good reason, we would like to know how best to respond to the incorrect assumptions made by the police.

Regards

Kyle