Putting The Berry Theatre on the map

I don’t go to the theatre that often but this week was slightly unusual: two different theatres, two nights in a row, one of which is brand new. It was The Berry Theatre‘s gala opening evening tonight, which was excellent, but that’s not exactly what this post is about.

Being brand new, I was hoping that it would provide an opportunity to do something I’ve been meaning to try for a while and, sure enough, the theatre wasn’t in OpenStreetMap yet! So, armed with a dangerous amount of knowledge gained during Nick‘s enthusiastic OSM presentations yesterday, I fired up JOSM and contributed my first node.

Update: and as if by magic, The Berry Theatre appeared on the rendered map! (10 April 2011)

Updated: added link to Nick’s presentations. (9 July 2011)

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Hot Chocolate Anniversary

This weekend was our six month wedding anniversary, unfortunately Schott’s Almanac was no help at all working out what the traditional six month wedding anniversary symbol is, only starting after a whole year with cotton. Since there doesn’t seem to be an agreed upon six month symbol, I choose hot chocolate after we enjoyed one at the end of a very relaxing afternoon retracing part of our wedding tour of Hampshire. If you’re in the area, I thoroughly recommend The Old House Hotel and the Marriott Meon Valley; they were both superb on our wedding day.

(I was pretty pleased with the results of tinkering with Open Street Map for our wedding invitations although, after stories of some of the detours our guests took, it may not have been worth it!!)

It’s been a mad six months which seem to have flown past with a brilliant honeymoon in Canada, (unsuccessfully) trying to move house and playing in the snow!

Looking forward to the next six months!

Pic and Mix

Unfortunately decorating the bathroom is higher up the to do list than blogging at the moment — I’d rather be blogging as I’ve yet to gas myself typing on a computer! — so I haven’t had a chance to mention some cool and interesting things that have been cluttering up my list of open browser tabs. While I wait for the paint fumes to subside before going to bed, here are a few of them, in no particular order…

First from the Mix and Mash Blog, and giving this post its title, Pic and Mix project from Kent County Council: I wonder if Eastleigh do anything similar.

From John’s Random Musings, Exposing your WebSphere logs as ATOM feeds: definitely want to give this a try with MDM Server.

From knolleary.net, Twitterlogue: wish twitter had been around when I was in New Zealand. Brilliant.

From developerWorks, Leverage DataPower SOA Appliances to extend InfoSphere Master Data Management Server security capabilities: looks interesting but I haven’t had a chance to read it in detail yet.

And finally, also from developerWorks, two new articles for the user interface generator:

• Build a user model with Rational Software Architect and the User Interface Generator
• Connect your user interface to existing back-end services

Britglyph detour

Britglyph is a project to create a modern variation of a geoglyph, representing John Harrison’s Chronometer H5 in the form of stones left at locations across the country. It’s such a great idea that I’ve been following the progress since the beginning of December- I think I first found out about the idea when @britglyph started following me on Twitter. No idea why, and no idea why we’ve all been going on our mini adventures. I think the most likely explanation is that we’re all insane!

Today, on the way to Wickham (which is actually in exactly the opposite direction from my house!), I finally made it to my nearest marker, outside Romsey. I had some stones left over from an earlier project to secure a sat nav in my car’s cup holder…

…which wasn’t that successful as it turns out. Luckily a baked bean tin is doing a great job instead. Not the most exciting stones…

…but then it wasn’t the most exciting of locations- basically a motorway roundabout at the top of the M271! The stones are actually on the road island where the Romsey Road joins the roundabout, rather than right in the middle of the roundabout. At this point the same police car had driven past three times so I decided against fighting through the undergrowth. That could have been a fun explanation!

Still a few unclaimed markers if you have a stone and nothing to do tomorrow!

Giveup vs. catchup

I haven’t read many blogs lately (I blame Technorati favourites going AWOL… erm, and I’ve been a tad busy). I could do the same as Kelly and declare blog bankruptcy but I thought I’d try something different. I’ve had a skim through and these look kind of interesting:

• My Favorite MDM-Related Web Sites (Part 1)
• A Lot of Tips for Second Life Learning
• BUGs I Like!
• 279 – The Eurovision Text Map 2008
• Mashed 2008 – tickets now available
• Intro to Twitter
• Twitter and responsibility
• Morris Dancers meet the Ug Girls
• Reading the FT: mapping as a turning point

Let me know if any of them are worth reading properly!

Mapping the future

I’m a bit of a fan of maps, even strange ones, and I’ve been wondering lately about a world of virtual worlds and how that might look on a globe, with each virtual world represented by countries, with continents of related worlds. So a continent with countries for the Second Life grid, corporate grids and Open Sim grids for example. Beyond just looking cool, I think mapping out our virtual world – be that social networks, information/tags, 3d environments – in a visual way will make it more accessible. Still checking to see if someone has done it already but if they haven’t I’m thinking FreeEarth might work for a little experiment…

Just thinking out loud.

Canteen Mash

Over lunch we were discussing how it would be handy to know whether a paycut would be covered by cost savings of a shorter commute. A mushup to do the calculation for you seemed pretty doable, and you could use the same thing to find out how much money you’d save working at home a couple of days a week. Oh yes, and the environment etc.!

Well, it seems that there are at least a couple of mashups already that do part of the job. Unfortunately both these examples are a bit US-centric and don’t take in to account PAYE (so now I’m being UK centric!) but they’re a good demonstration.

I also discovered that the OS now have an API! Looking through their FAQ, they (or more likely their lawyers) have some funny ideas about how the web works, but still, better than not supporting mashups at all.

Perranporth, Cornwall

Only six days in to October and I’ve remembered to update my monthly wallpaper- sometimes takes most of the month before I realise it’s time for a change! This month’s Ordnance Survey wallpaper is Perranporth, Cornwall.