Spotted two new articles on OpenStreetMap recently – one on the PocketLint site: “OpenStreetMap – Crowd sourced cartography set to re-map the world“; and the other on Wired: “GPS Hackers Blaze Own Trails With Crowdsourced Maps“.
They both mention how OpenStreetMap cartography is more detailed than the alternatives produced by Navteq, Teleatlas et al and the Wired article even goes to include at least four links to various parts of the OSM wiki and mentions some of the devices that our maps can be used on such as iPhones, TomToms and so on.
What with this and more OSM ‘love’ spilling into Episode 83 of Floss Weekly – Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap, was interviewed in Episode 81 it looks like activity is only going to increase.
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
OpenStreetMap in the news again
Friday, August 28th, 2009Save Nenagh Hospital
Saturday, January 31st, 2009I’m back home from a “Save Nenagh Hospital” rally earlier on today – I estimated the number of people there to be at least two thousand.
As you might infer, this is quite serious – the Health Service Executive in Ireland have already made the first steps in downgrading and then closing the General Hospital in Nenagh. Already there are plans for numerous cuts, including a proposal to remove 24-hour accident and emergency services at the hospital in favour of the introduction of advance paramedics to partly replace the present service.
The only numbers important to the HSE, it seems, are those balanced on their accounts sheets – not the number of lives that will be lost, the number of minutes late that ambulances will arrive to road accidents, the ill and those in need.
Representatives of the HSE were invited to attend but did not – most likely because they know no matter how they try they can not make sense of their own arguments. In short, they can not justify what they are proposing.
Google for phrases such as “save nenagh hospital” and “friends of nenagh hospital” to see just how serious and important this is – you’ll find links such as this article in the Irish Times (Doctors to fight cuts at Nenagh hospital).
Please add your voice by joining the Save Nenagh Hospital group on facebook, by writing to your political representatives and by writing to the papers.
Don’t let Nenagh become the next Monaghan.
7 things…
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009I got tagged by Chuck for this “7 Things” meme. So here are 7 things you may not know about me:
- I first met my wife at her house warming party seven years ago – it took four years for anything to happen though! I’m so happy it finally did though!
- My first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48K that was bought when I was seven years old – I’ve since progressed through BBC computers, Apple Macs and then onto PCs. I also had a accounts on the WRTC vax – VMS and OSF/1.
- I’ve similarly gone through a number of differing computer languages: Basic in various incarnations (ZX Basic, BBC Basic, VB), Z80 Assembler, HyperCard (yes, really), C, C++, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, ColdFusion, Java.
- I might be Irish but my surname isn’t.
- I read a lot of fantasy: Gemmell, Eddings, Tolkien, Pratchett; though I also enjoy Tom Clancy and Dale Brown novels.
- I’m long-sighted in one eye and short-sighted in the other: one good reason why I’ve never been that good at sports.
- I am an active PEAR developer.
Tagging Others
I’m supposed to tag 7 other people who then repeat the whole process:
- Proinnsias Breathnach for being such a good friend all this time. And because he doesn’t blog enough.
- Kae Verens for having a name that sounds the same as his first inital – and for helping out loads at the IPUG stand at last year’s Irish Opensource Technology Conference.
- Donncha O Caoimh for his trojan work back in the day with the ILUG CMS and for Wordpress mu.
- Jaime Hemmett for her exuberance and energy she’s brought to the Irish PHP scene.
- AJ McKee for starting the Irish PHP Users Group in the first place!
- Justin Mason for Spam Assassin, SiteScooper and being an all round nice guy.
- Fuzzix for his levity and humour. That plus he’s a ZX head like myself.
Rules
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Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
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Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
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Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
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Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter
Book Review: Learning jQuery
Saturday, July 5th, 2008Packt sent me a copy of “Learning jQuery” by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. jQuery is a javascript library that I have been using on and off and was delighted to be given a chance to review this book and have a chance to read through and learn about jQuery in a less urgent manner than I had initially.
With a tag-line of “Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques” and some 376 pages long (split into 10 chapters, along with three appendices) the book excels at fulfilling that promise.
From the chapter on Getting Started through selectors (css, dom, xpath), Chaffer and Swedberg examine and show how to use jQuery for animations, ajax and manipulating tables to the all important client-side form validation with disarmingly concise eloquence and skill. They also detail how to use and develop jQuery Plug-ins.
Any of the required server-side code examples, for the AJAX chapter, are in PHP but that doesn’t make the book any less relevant or more specialised towards PHP – it should be trivial to rework them for any language.
The authors use an example based approach and this works very well as they continue to progressively enhance each example with additional features and functionality – you can really see their shopping cart and image carousel examples really build up into very well formed examples of what can be done with jQuery.
If you haven’t already been turned on to jQuery by it’s excellent on-line documentation and fluent API (method chaining), this is the book that will do it.
There is one caveat though: “Learning jQuery” was written for jQuery v1.1 and published in June 2007; version 1.2 of jQuery was released four months later with some substantial changes to the API.
This doesn’t matter all that much to be honest; obviously this book doesn’t cover what’s available in v1.2 but until there’s a second edition of this book (and wouldn’t that be great?) you won’t find a better book on the subject.
“unable to find swap space signature”
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008My darling wife told me when I got home from work today that the laptop, running Ubuntu, was a bit slow.
On a hunch, I ran free -m and saw that the swap file wasn’t being used. I rebooted it, and sure enough saw the phrase “unable to find swap space signature”. This generally means that the swap file needs to be regenerated (this can happen with some laptops if they unexpectedly drop into hibernate mode), so I rebooted into Recovery Mode and:
- I checked the output of
fdisk -lto ascertain which partition the swap space was on (/dev/hda3) - Recreated the swap space with ‘
mkswap /dev/hda3‘ and activated it with ‘swapon /dev/hda3‘ - I then opened the file
/etc/fstaband edited the line referring to the swap space so it would be referred by /dev/hda3 rather than the UUID value. - rebooted and kept my fingers crossed.
Everything worked just fine.
Sad state…
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007As Chuck Burgess says, “The sad state of U.S. Homeland Security…”
There’s some mapping ahead
Sunday, November 18th, 2007Inside the next seven days two things that I am very excited about* are going to happen:
- On Thursday (22nd November), Steve Coast from the Open Street Map project will be giving a talk at the HEAnet offices in the IFSC, Dublin.
- There will be a “Mapping Party” in Dublin on Saturday and Sunday.
*Never said it wouldn’t be something geeky 
Irish PHP Users Group Website
Thursday, July 12th, 2007This week a number of us have been discussing the need for a website the Irish PHP Users Group aka PHP Users Group Ireland on http://www.php.ie and what should be on it.
If you are a PHP Developer in Ireland we’d appreciate your input – please do so either on the mailing list (you’ll need to be subscribed to email it) or on the #phpug IRC channel at irc.php.ie ( or irc.linux.ie) .
Thanks
Tagged by Donncha for Charity
Monday, July 2nd, 2007I got tagged by Donncha this morning for the charity-link meme – which is a very good idea to heighten our awareness of [Irish] charities and raise their page ranking. This seems to have been started over on SEO Refugee.
The idea is you “add your 5 favorite charities or non-profit organizations to the end (link to their sites with anchor text of the causes they champion). Of course finish things off by tagging 5 other webmasters/bloggers and then publishing the post or the webpage.”
The list of charities so far is:
- MS Society Ireland
- Irish Red Cross
- Samaritans
- Cancer.ie – Irish Cancer Society
- Irish Hospice Foundation – Hospice and palliative care in Ireland
- Barnardos – Ireland’s leading children’s charity
- The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity – Polish Charity
- CPR For Schools Across Poland – CPRTraining
- Program of Insulin Pumps in Diabetic Children Therapy – Insulin Pumps For Children
- Non-invasive Neonatal Breathing Support – Infant Flow
- Program of Universal Neonatal Hearing Screenings – Neonatal Hearing
- American Red Cross – disaster relief
- Raleigh Rescue Mission – homeless raleigh
- Samaritan’s Purse – emergency relief programs
- St. Jude Children’s Hospital – cancer research
- Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors Without Borders – Humanitarian Relief
- American Red Cross – Emergency Preparedness
- AMREF – African Medical & Research Foundation – African Health Development
- DOROT – Programs for Elderly
- Feed the Children – Protect Children
- Service International – Disaster Relief
- Pujols Family Foundation – Children with Down Syndrome
- National Alliance to End Homelessness – Homelessness
- The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research – Parkinson’s Research
- Ronald McDonald Care Mobile Program – Child Healthcare
- Aids Research Alliance – Aids Research
- Wildlife Conservation Society – Wildlife Protection
- Cancer Research Institute – Cancer Research
- Second Harvest – End Hunger
- AARP Foundation – Helping Senior Citizens
- Bubblegum Club – Children In Crisis
- Autism NI – Autism Northern Ireland
- Adoption Ireland – Irish Adoption Charity
- Ireland Funds – Peace and Reconciliation In Ireland
- Dublin Simon Community – Combating Homelessness in Dublin
- Aware
- To Russia with Love
- Debra Ireland
- Focus Ireland
- ISPCC
- Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind
- The Jack & Jill Foundation
- The Carers Association
- The Chernobyl Children’s Project International
- The Samaritans
I added the last five; and nominate: Kae, Noirin, Proinnsias, Dave and David to carry this on.
Wedding photos
Monday, June 11th, 2007As promised, here are a few wedding photos – as taken by some friends: thanks guys!
We’re back from honeymoon!
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007Three weeks ago today I got married to the love of my life and caring gorgeous soulmate, Aisling, in the Abbey Court hotel in Nenagh – thanks so very much to everybody who were able to come and help us celebrate such a wonderful day, which I doubt I’ll ever forget 
It meant everything to know [and see!] that our closest friends and family were there to witness the happiest day of our lives – especially considering the distances some of you had to travel to get there, so once again, thank you.
And, of course, thank you Aisling – you have made me the luckiest man there ever could be.
Thanks also to Sean Hession and his band who, along with Advance DJs provided the music.
The photographer and DVD guys really put us at our ease and captured our wedding day so wonderfully. The custom stationary was provided by Bespoke Cards and Keepsakes.
I know it might seem crass to link to all these guys, but I know the value of a well placed link to help point people in their direction than not.
Barcamp South East
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007BarCamp South East, which was in Waterford last weekend, was very enjoyable. Very good talks (varying between informative and entertaining to thought-provoking – thanks James, Justin, Elly, Donncha and TJ) and it was good to meet up with old friends and to match names and faces of some that I’d only known on-line.
(As an aside, Michele was a barrel of laughs trying to get me to learn to juggle!)
It also gave myself and Aisling a wonderful excuse to be down in Waterford and meet up with some old friends of mine from WIT days
Introverts: Learn to network ;-)
Monday, January 8th, 2007
Got an allergy?
Monday, January 8th, 2007Found AllergyCards.com a short while ago; the site lets you print out business sized cards about your allergy – useful going into restaurants or if you, heaven forbid, have an accident and no one knows you’re allergic to, say, penicillin.
I don’t have any allergies myself but thought it would be useful to share the link
System Administrator Appreciation Day
Friday, July 28th, 2006Don’t forget folks, it’s System Administrator Appreciation Day today, it being the last Friday in July, so it’s time to let your sysadmins or anyone in the IT department know that you appreciate what they do [fixing your computer, getting some program to work properly etc etc].
a tip from Seb…
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006Seb’s Tip of the Day: Do not put your fingers anywhere near your snotrils any time soon after handling chilli peppers. Much with the Augh! and It burns! if you do.
SlopeSide.ie Launch Swishingly Superb!
Thursday, June 15th, 2006I was at the Slope Side Ski Tour operators business launch yesterday in the Odeon here in Dublin.
They offer tailor made packages to the world’s largest linked ski resort, Portes du Soleil [more specifically Morzine where their chalets are], in the heart of the French and Swiss Alps. You get picked up from the airport, which is only a two hour drive from the resort so you don’t have too much of your trip wasted on travelling and you even get a live-in Chef for the duration of your stay so you can be sure the meals are spot-on delicious and to your own liking!
The guys gave such an ebullient, professional and energetic presentation that I can’t but believe they’ll do well in their new business.
It’s also nice to spot they’re using OpenSource for their website
(small disclaimer/note of interest: one of the business partners is my Fiancée’s brother).
Visited counties
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006Taking a cue from Braz and ultimately Moonbeam, here’s a little map of the countries I have been to.
create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands
Number Changes in Ireland
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006Just a reminder to all DBAs, developers etc – have you made the required changes for the ComReg numberchange?
The newly expanded area codes are 044, 053 and 057.
Jack L concert Live CDs
Friday, April 21st, 2006went to the Jack L concert at the Olymia last night. Very enjoyable.
Bought a ‘Live CD’ of the gig immediately afterwards, which really is a very good thing – blast the bootleggers out of the market
I wonder, how long will it be before we can download MP3s and OGGs from kiosks at venues immediately afterwards? Now that would be cool.