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Dan Karran

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MSc progress

Well, having started my MSc in Geographic Information Science at UCL back in September of last year, it's now starting to come to an end - or at least the teaching part of it is. This evening I have handed in my last piece of coursework, and next week my final exams begin. This semester I'm taking three modules that have exams and each of them is three hours long. They're basically placed a week apart, leaving a nice period in between for revision unlike in previous years in Manchester where I've had a day in between if I'm lucky.

Following the exams I'll be working full-time on my dissertation for the summer. June to September seems like a long time until I start thinking about exactly how much work I will have to do over the summer. Luckily it's work I'll enjoy doing so there are no real issues. Still, I'm sure the summer will go very quickly, hopefully involving lots of time spent in Regents Park and on Hampstead Heath, both of which are really close to where I'm living. If there are any wi-fi hotspots around there, I can even work while I'm there!

For my dissertation I'm lucky enough to be working with a company I've been fascinated by since the early days of the internet. Earlier in the term a GIS developer (who is also a UCL alumni) came in to give a presentation on the company he worked for, Multimap. With this being just at the sort of time when we should have been thinking about a dissertation to take on for the summer months, two things clicked in my head and I thought I'd get in touch with them to see if they had anything I could help them out with as part of my dissertation. I was very hopeful as they were basically doing exactly what I wanted to do - geographic information for the web. My whole course of education has been based on the fact that I'm interested in geography and computing and especially the areas in which they combine. That desire explains my choice of topics at A-level, BSc level and now MSc level. (If only there was some way of combining photography with them as well!)

I was really happy when Multimap got back to me and asked me to come in and meet them over lunch to talk about the possibilities. So now I have a dissertation topic to work on after the exams, in an area that fascinates me and with a great company. What more could I ask for? After I've researched the area in more detail, I'm hoping to create some geographic analysis software to help them out with some of the work they do. I can't really go into it yet, but hopefully will be able to in the future. I've been discussing non-disclosure agreements with them and my course tutor over the past few days and frankly it's fascinating - if a little scary at the same time. Whilst being aware of them, I've never had to deal with NDAs before at all.

The website I created as the final year project for my first degree (BSc Computing and Geography with Industrial Experience) up in Manchester was designed as a project on its own - not being worked on with any organisations - so there were very few restrictions as to what I could do. Originally I would have had more input from other organisations but sadly that plan never worked out, so it was a complete standalone project in the end. I still managed to achieve a comfortable 1st class mark for the project though, which I was extremely pleased with.

So, next thing on my agenda is to make sure I'm prepared for the first of my final exams on Tuesday...

Posted in at 1:17 AM on Friday 29 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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Oops!

Whilst updating my MovableType blogging software earlier to let me tag my individual posts I seem to have dislodged the posts from the front page of the blog. They don't show up there at all now, though they do everywhere else in the blog.

I suppose that'll teach me not to make 'minor' changes when I'm in the middle of finishing off an essay and revising for my exams which start next week! I'll fix it in time (hopefully tonight), but for now please use the links down the right hand side of the page to find the latest posts.

On the positive side, tagging now works. If you look at the bottom of each post you'll see a 'Tags:' line with a number of tags after it, all linking to relevant posts over at Technorati. At some point I would like to extend it further so that you can click on a tag and it will show you all relevant posts on this site, but until then Technorati will do just fine. I will still categorise my posts using the categories shown on the right, but this just gives a little more flexibility.

Update: Boy, do I feel stupid now. Of course this post has to go and show itself on the front page of the blog, just to make me look like a fool. It did make me realise what the problem was though. In MT, the front page is set to only show 7 days worth of posts, so when I republished a week after my last post there was nothing to show. Now to see if I can fix that...

Posted in at 4:44 PM on Thursday 28 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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Google Maps for the UK

Well, it wasn't long ago that I was trying to find a backdoor into Google's maps of places other than the US. I couldn't find it at the time (probably because there wasn't one) but on Monday Google announced that they were expanding their mapping service, Google Maps, and also their Google Local service, to cover the UK as well. Google Maps UK centres the view on the UK, although for some reason they choose to cut off the northern tip of Scotland. There are limitations though, as Gary Turner points out in his blog. For example, you get pointed to the wrong place when you search for some places in the UK that are called the same thing as places in North America. Or when you search for a Manx postcode such as IM1 2RF - the sea terminal in Douglas - it sends you to somewhere a long way away from the Isle of Man. Also, as Chris Heathcote illustrates, Google has a rather strange view of the world which makes it seem like the US and UK are the only places in existence. An overview map of the world would be a nice feature to have, even if you can't zoom in and get more detail everywhere.

Posted in at 1:52 PM on Thursday 21 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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Repetition

If I was a contestant on BBC Radio 4's Just a Minute panel game I don't think I would last anywhere near that long.

Recently I've noticed that I say and write certain things far too many times within a short space of one another. In fact one of my lecturers highlighted it in an assignment lately, noting an 'irritating repetition' of phrases within a paragraph. Usually I'll check things through to make sure I don't have too many bits like that but sometimes I do forget, or simply don't notice because when reading your own work there is a tendancy to skim-read and avoid important mistakes. When posting to my blog I am often too keen to get the post published, neglecting that checking phase.

On that note: sorry to people who have noticed I use words like 'interesting' too often (and those linked pages are just the ones with the offending word in the title). I'll try and make sure I don't write too repetitively in the future.

Posted in at 1:34 PM on Friday 15 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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An interesting use of Amazon Inside data

Amazon concordanceAmazon has quietly introduced an innovative use of their book data - the complete text of many of the books they sell through their website - showing the frequency of the top 100 words inside the book.

Their Concordance functionality is using a technique which has been demonstrated previously on popular tagging-based (or 'folksonomy') sites such as Flickr, del.icio.us and Technorati that shows the relative frequency of each word by varying the font size used to display it. Until now this had only been seen on sites which allow people to categorize things using a number of tags of their choosing, this being the first I am aware of that takes whole texts and picks out keywords in this way.

(via Waxy)

Posted in at 1:11 PM on Friday 15 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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Open Geodata Forum

I read earlier in the week about a discussion on open geodata occuring in London this week. Being interested in what they had to say I thought I might as well pop along and listen to the presentations. Open geodata, for those of you who may not know, is any kind of data which has some kind of geographic reference (such as a postcode, a place name or anything else which references a place on earth). In the US, much of this is freely available to the public because just about everything produced by government agencies can be used without any restrictions. In the UK however, there is a Crown Copyright placed on just about all of the geographic data produced.

The first presentation this evening was basically talking about ways of creating new geodatasets which could then be reused, by sending people out on the roads with GPS receivers, tracing roads off satellite or other aerial photography or using maps on which the copyright had already expired (dating back to the 1950s). Steve Coast, the guy presenting, had begun to develop OpenStreetMap and was actually another UCL student, although on a different course to the one that I am on.

The second was by Gesche Schmid, a local government manager of ICT at Medway Council who highlighted the uses of geographic data in local government using a couple of different examples from across the board. It was interesting to hear, although hardly suprising, that 75% of data within local government is considered geographic. Medway are one of the councils that has their own online GIS system, Medway Map Service, from which they apparently had to pull their electoral ward boundary data because of inaccuracies. A point which Chris Lightfoot of MySociety later mentioned as well, having worked closely with election data over recent years as a key part of a number of their projects.

Giles Lane of Urban Tapestries, a geo annotation tool, then talked about location based services and their potential social uses without the expense of embedding expensive GPS chips in every mobile device.

By this point in the presentations I'd started to get a nasty headache from looking at the projection screen so I wasn't able to concentrate as much as I wanted.

Jo Walsh was next on stage. An open source developer and co-author of the Mapping Hacks book, she talked for a short time about the ways she'd like to see the open geodata movement progress before introducing Roger Longhorn, a geodata policy expert who was heavily involved in Euopean Union geodata policy for 7 years.

Chris Lightfoot of MySociety then gave a short talk about electoral data and its quirks, pointing out just how difficult a task it is to ensure the data is all accurate and up to date. Nick Whitelegg then gave a quick introduction to his countryside mapping project, Free-Map.

All in all I'm glad I attended. It was good to hear a range of different perspectives - including a director of the Ordnance Survey in the audience answering some of the questions people had about government funding of the OS. I just wish my head wasn't hurting quite so much by the end.

Posted in , at 1:22 AM on Friday 15 April 2005 | Comments (1)
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Centrepoint photos

London Bus infront of Centre PointCentre PointI was in central London earlier this evening and so took the opportunity to capture some photos as the sun was starting to go down, lighting up the Centre Point building by Tottenham Court Road tube station with a nice warm glow. After taking the first I was almost hit by a bus coming up Oxford Street from behind me - but at least I got a nice photo from it (after altering the lighting on the bus slightly).

Posted in , at 11:41 PM on Thursday 14 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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Mapping the news

Screenshot from buzztrackerToday I came across buzztracker, a website which maps the connections between different places based on news items which have been published that day. It's fascinating to see where the 'hotspots' are and how they change from day to day.

The site reminds me of a couple of others I've come across over recent years which also set out to map the news.

Global Attention Profiles were the first to spring to mind, where each country is coloured according to the percentage of news coverage it's had that day based on a number of different news organisations' feeds. The does it slightly differently by adding headlines of stories mentioning specific countries to the countries themselves. It doesn't cover many headlines so it isn't particularly useful but it's an interesting stepping stone to something which in theory could be so much more advanced. The Today's Front Pages interactive map takes a different approach still, showing the front page of the day's newspapers as you move your mouse over the city it's published in. on the other hand doesn't map the news geographically but does map it visually according to how popular stories are judged to be.

Posted in at 1:43 AM on Wednesday 13 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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Photos from Russell Square, London

My first full day back in London was blessed with sunshine so I decided to take a walk around Bloomsbury - the area around my university - to enjoy the weather and take some photos with my new camera.

I've put seven of the photos into my London photo gallery.

Posted in , at 5:43 PM on Tuesday 12 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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Google's headquarters: a field?

Now that I'm back in London I've been able to have a bit of a play around with the new Google satellite service I keep mentioning on here. It certainly is fun to play with, although it's not so much use to me as it would be to people in the US with the satellite images over the UK currently showing at a pretty low resolution. It is great to see they do have a global coverage though, and further to my comment the other week, you can now scroll around the whole globe and get back to where you started. Fantastic!

Before Google at 1600 Amphitheatre ParkwayWhilst 'travelling' around the US I came across this satellite photo of Google's headquarters: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California. Only thing is, it seems Google's headquarters didn't exist when the image was taken, so it looks as though they're working out of a field. Or perhaps they're playing with us, taking a leaf out of the Whitehouse's book and altering the images - in their case to protect security.

Surreal colourful landscapeThinking about security I thought I'd take a look for Area 51 in the Nevada desert, just to see what it looked like from the air.

Before I even got to it though, I spotted this surreal landscape in San Francisco Bay, which it turns out others have pointed out too. It seems these beautiful (although abstract) looking features are actually salt pools full of algae.

Posted in at 6:33 PM on Sunday 10 April 2005 | Comments (1)
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Google Sightseeing

I discovered an interesting blog today called Google Sightseeing, a site which displays satellite images from around the world as found on the recently updated Google Maps service. The postings are broken down into a number of groups, I think the best of which is the 'weirdness' category. My favourite posting so far is this mind boggling image where two satellite photos taken from different angles have been stitched together to create a seamless - if slightly confusing - single image.

On a related note, this image on the Flickr photo sharing site is brilliant - it's the view an ordinary person on the ground gets when Google Maps pinpoints a spot nearby.

Posted in at 4:04 PM on Saturday 9 April 2005 | Comments (2)
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Google extends satellite imagery

Google Maps does satelliteOn Monday Google expanded their Google Maps service to provide users with satellite imagery as well as the maps they provided previously. They work in the same way as the maps, so you can drag them around, zoom in and out and have your search results highlighted on the satellite photos as well. To view the satellite image equivalent, just click on 'satellite' in the top right hand corner of the page. The images are being provided by their Keyhole service, the full version of which is a downloadable programme which lets you view satellite photos of the whole planet and zoom into 1m resolution where available. Keyhole is only free for 7-days and I used up that trial period quite some time ago so it is good to see that they are providing at least some of that data for free again through their mapping website.

Like the Google Maps service though, you really need a fast connection to be able to use it effectively. I'm trying it on a dialup connection here and it's not working as seemlessly as it would on a faster connection. I'm looking forward to being able to experiment with their offering using a broadband connection when I get back to London at the weekend.

Posted in at 4:16 PM on Thursday 7 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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Firewalls for dial-up connections

In all my years of using the internet at home, where we are still limited to using dialup connections because of our location, I had never realised quite how important firewalls are for computers which aren't continuously connected to the internet. I used to think the main use for firewalls was to protect those computers which were always connected to the internet and therefore always vulnerable to hacking.

My thinking on that has changed considerably in the past few days having set up a new computer at home for my family. I realised that within minutes of connecting it up, there were machines probing the computer from all around the world trying to find ports on the computer which were vulnerable to attack. Presumably these attempts weren't hackers themselves but drone machines which had become infected by viruses, instructed to probe other computers and propogate the virus wherever they can.

The new computer comes with software which records the details of all attempts to gain access to the computer, which the old machine didn't have. Not having this facility in the past, I've never realised quite how vulnerable machines are, even when they're assigned a dynamic IP address. I had been thinking about it from the wrong angle though, thinking the main threat was hackers knowing who you are and trying to access your data. I hadn't really considered the other side of it, where it doesn't matter who you are as long as your computer is susceptible to being breached in order to install viruses.

I was shocked to find other computers using our ISP, probing for holes in the firewall. Having said that, IP addresses are probably scanned in sequence so computers on the same network will almost certainly be probed before those that are further away, on different networks. Later on in the day I discovered there were upwards of 10 computers a minute trying to access a certain port, many of which were from university residences in the US where viruses are rife. It seemed though that by disconnecting and reconnecting - to obtain a different IP address - these threats went away, at least for now.

It just goes to show how important firewalls are, for any connection. No matter how long or how often you are connected to the internet, you are always at risk of being hacked.

Posted in at 6:38 PM on Wednesday 6 April 2005 | Comments (2)
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Photos of my dogs

A personal blog wouldn't be a real blog if I didn't post some photos of my pets, so over the past few days I've been taking some photos whilst experimenting with my new Canon EOS 300D camera. I have three dogs who live with my family - Lucy, Willow and Buster. They're all lovely but ever so slightly hyperactive. All the time.

Here is a photo of each of them in turn:

Lucy Willow Buster

The cats may be next, if they'll pose for a photo. Like true cats they enjoy their sleep, and I rarely see them awake!

Posted in , at 12:21 AM on Monday 4 April 2005 | Comments (0)
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Towards a wireless Isle of Man

Towards a wireless Isle of ManA few weeks back I came across a wi-fi hotspot in the departure lounge of the Isle of Man Airport - useful too, as the flight I was supposed to be catching was cancelled due to technical problems. The hotspot was the first I'd heard of on the island and at the time I couldn't find out much about it, except for the fact that it was part of a trial, and as such would be running as a free service. It was only tonight that I discovered more about the wi-fi trials, with another public area hotspot already being in operation and others on the way this year. The scheme is part of the Isle of Man Government's e-business strategy to promote the island to the wider business community whilst also making services more accessible to Manx residents.

These public hotspots, which are running as a free service for a year, are currently located at the Airport (near Castletown) and the Villa Marina (Douglas) with further hotspots planned for the NSC sports complex, the Manx Museum and the Sea Terminal - all in Douglas, the home of about half of the island's population. Other wi-fi hotspots are being promoted in hotels such as the Ascot and also a new bar and grill called Cunninghams, based in Douglas. Almost certainly there will be others but these are just two of the private sector hotspots I've heard of lately.

It is great to see that the island is taking up the wireless revolution, but it would be even better to see them embracing more wireless broadband technologies which offered high speed data access to rural communities. Half of the island's population live in the main conurbation of Douglas and Onchan, and many of the rest live within a short distance of the other towns of the island (many of which house a telephone exchange) but there are a large number of people living in the countryside who have no access to broadband at all. The government has been good at offering grants for ISDN, ADSL, and more recently even wireless broadband links, but there are restrictions as to who can use them. To make it viable for the company offering the services, they have to target appartment blocks and small out-of-ADSL-reach communities but still can't really target lone households unless they happen to be in the path of those links planned already.

Manx Telecom, the sole provider of telecommunications on the island, has always been at the forefront of mobile phone technology, testing the first European 3G networks and also now high speed HSDPA links, which could feasibly bring broadband to everybody else. I am keen to see how that progresses but judging by the lack of services launched off the 3G tests, I won't hold my breath.

Posted in , at 12:16 AM on Friday 1 April 2005 | Comments (2)
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