Cycling: London to Brighton

On Saturday I cycled from London to Brighton. It's the first day long cycle that I've done since I cycled from Bletchley to Bedford and back, over a month ago. Yeah I did lots of cycling at the Woking Mapping party, but there was lots of breaks and cul-de-sacs.

I couldn't even get 10 minutes away, and I managed to get totally confused by the signage for the National Cycle Network route 23. Having the Cycle Map and an intermittently working bluetooth GPS was really useful. Looking at the trace and where the sign posts were it appears that some of the signposts around the South end of South Norwood Country Park are totally ambiguous, alternatively the route has been changed recently. There was a few other places that I had to double back because I had missed a turn.

Further south there was some nice views across the hills.

I was quite surprised when I found that the national cycle route goes right through the middle of Gatwick airport. 

Had a little bit of a wander in Brighton before getting the train home.

I added a few extra pois, road names and the southern end of the ncn 20 into Brighton to the osm data.

In the future I should try and leave before lunchtime, for these day long cycles, which I should do more often.

And finally Brighton Peir for the first time:

Mashed08

Last weekend I was at Mashed08. I stayed there overnight, so didn't get much sleep.

Didn't do any mashing up, though I did finally start writing a bit of ruby code to take a file with a list of street names, and ask the OSMXAPI whether that street exists within a specified bounding box.

It was interesting to see what people were doing. There was very few people doing anything with maps. There were a few groups who using high resolution satellite imagery rather than plain old maps. A lot of people were working on something that was tv or audio related, such as ripping the subtitles and translating them into another language in almost real time. Twitter seems to be rather popular.

The event was featured in this week's BBC News Click programme. (BBC iPlayer only works in the UK and programmes are only available for one week.)

I'm uploading the better photos to Flicker with the Mashed08 tag.

When your at a station waiting on a delayed train, just get some bean bags out to sit on:

(Kinda ideal for getting passers by ask were the bean bag sale is).

OSM: GSoC blogs on Planet-OSM

All the OpenStreetMap Google Summer of Code 2008 student blogs are now on Planet-OSM, the feed aggregator for OpenStreetMap related blogs.

Screw in Tire

P1010856.JPG
Originally uploaded by smsm1

Cycling to work, and get a screw in my tire. Just as well it wasn't my front tire otherwise I'd have had to walk the rest of the way, or find a bike shop. Instead I just unscrewed it (and took the screw with me so that the next cyclist doesn't run over it.

GoOOCon2008

From the 10th to 13th April I was in Prague, Czech Republic for GoOOCon, an OpenOffice.org conference hosted by Novell.

I done a presentation about the Buildbot system in OpenOffice.org. I didn't have time to prepare new slides, due to my move to London, so I just recycled my slides from ooocon2007.

It was nice to see a bit of another country and to meet up with some of the OpenOffice.org developers in real life.

Planet OSM.fr

There is now a French version of planet OSM.

Device Removal

I don't touch anything, and my slow first generation MacBook will randomly come up with the above message. Maybe an uptime of 13 days is the cause? 

It is about time I rebooted into Kubuntu to get some updated maps on to my phone for TMJ. There has some considerable improvements in the maps in Edinburgh, and I don't know what actually needs to be mapped when I'm out in the field.

OOO: Possible fix for the command timed out error on Leopard

With a change in the way that X11 works on Leopard, the X11 version of OpenOffice.org has been giving an error message on startup saying "command timed out". With previous versions of Mac OS X, OpenOffice.org had to make sure that X11 was running first be trying to start OpenOffice.org.

The following change should work for 2.4, 2.3.1, 2.3, and possibly earlier versions. Open the file OpenOffice.org 2.4.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/main.scpt in "Script Editor". (You will need to control+click the application icon and choose "Show Package Contents".)

Then replace the code block "on openSoffice(aFile)"...."end openSoffice" with the following:

on openSoffice(aFile)
 if (atLeastOSXVersion(10, 5, 0)) then
  -- if we have leopard, we don't need to manually start the X server first
  set theCmd to "sh " & (quoted form of (POSIX path of getOOProgramPath() & "soffice")) & " "
  do shell script theCmd & aFile & shellTerminator()
 else
  set theDisplay to startXServer()
  if (theDisplay is equal to "error") then
   return
  end if
  set theEnv to "DISPLAY=" & theDisplay & " ; export DISPLAY; "
  set theCmd to "sh " & (quoted form of (POSIX path of getOOProgramPath() & "soffice")) & " "
  do shell script theEnv & theCmd & aFile & shellTerminator()
  -- logEvent("open CMD: " & theEnv & theCmd & aFile)
 end if
end openSoffice

Please comment on how this works for you.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Mac OS X [Update: now available]

The release of OpenOffice.org 2.4 (X11 version) is a little behind the other platforms due to a lack of resources in the QA process, as many of the resources have been placed on the upcoming aqua version. It will be another few days to week before they are available on the mirrors and the Mac Port download pages will be updated at that point.

Until then the new smart download pages will continue to give the link to the 2.4.0 build which isn't yet available.

UPDATE: OpenOffice.org X11 2.4.0 for both Mac OS X 10.4/10.5 PPC and Intel are now available from the Mac Porting Download pages.

ITV Catch Up through the browser on a Mac

Today was the first time that I looked at the ITV site for a while, as I had heard on Virgin Radio that the next series of Heartbeat was starting tonight.

ITV are now using Microsoft's Silverlight to allow cross-platform multimedia support. This is different from the BBC's iPlayer, as the BBC iPlayer uses Adobe's Flash player.

It now means that I no longer run Mac OS X without Microsoft software installed on it.