Walking around with a notepad and pen, along with a little black box with flashing lights on (my gps ‘mouse’ for which I should get a spare battery) aroused some interest; between some people telling me of their favourite walks and at least one man telling me that what I was doing was very strange indeed I think, after the fact of course (hindsight always being 20-20), I should have brought a few OSM pamphlets or leaflets with me – not wanting to stick out too much I’d left my openstreetmap hi-viz vest behind in the car.

What, if anything, do you bring along when mapping – both for the act of mapping itself and for ‘spreading the word’?

obexftp -b AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF -c C: -g TODO.txt; #get the file from the phone
vim TODO.txt; #whatever
obexftp -b AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF -c C: -p TODO.txt; #push it back up again.

The 2010 Open Source Awards was launched last month by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.
WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.
The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software. CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category.
These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.
Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at http://www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September. For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website http://www.PacktPub.com/blog/packt’s-2010-open-source-awards-announcement

• Open Street Map Fast Facts
• There’s the recruitment poster; with other formats at http://svn.openstreetmap.org/misc/pr_material/recruitment_poster/ – there are quite a few shops along my commute-route with this on their noticeboard
• The OSM Flyer
• This OSM Licence Card appeared mid-February

If there are any others please let me know so I can update the list

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.

1. 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!
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. I might be Irish but my surname isn’t.
5. I read a lot of fantasy: Gemmell, Eddings, Tolkien, Pratchett; though I also enjoy Tom Clancy and Dale Brown novels.
6. 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.
7. 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

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.

• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.

• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.

• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter

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.

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 -l to 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/fstab and 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.