home about me blog photography web gis stuff contact news guestbook search  
Dan Karran

« Main | July 2005 archives

Marking your route

When I created a map of events on 7th July here in London I wanted to learn how to do it using the Google Maps API. I did learn how to do it, although in a rather long winded fashion by copying and pasting geographic co-ordinates from Google Maps into my Javascript code for each and every turn in my journey. If I had more time then I would have written a little app to do the whole process for me. I was still thinking I would, but then today realised that somebody had done exactly the same thing over at Gmaps Pedometer.

This nifty little script lets anybody go in and create their own routes anywhere that Google maps. Whilst you are doing it, the pedometer measures the distance for you and will even tell you how many calories you've burned if you really want to know. Best of all, if you want to show others your route, you can easily link to it.

I will probably be making some London routes in the future, perhaps to show some picturesque walks around the capital.

Posted in at 2:52 PM on Saturday 23 July 2005 | Comments (3)
Tags:

Light reading

Mapping HacksLately I've been flicking through the excellent Mapping Hacks book which has a set of a hundred useful things you can do with maps, from simply mapping things of interest using online mapping websites to creating all sorts of things of your own. The name hacking has bad connotations to many but in this sense it literally means making the most of services which are available (in an above board sort of a way). It's a great book which you can just pick up from time to time and find a hack or two that are of interest to you. It gives a wide range of things you can do and is suitable for people at different levels of competency.

You can read some sample hacks and excerpts from the book on its publisher's website, or see the Mapping Hacks blog.

Web Mapping IllustratedAnother book came in the post as well the other day - Web Mapping Illustrated. This one is more about web mapping using open source software and is more to do with creating systems of your own than the mix and match Mapping Hacks of creating your own and using existing systems for all sorts of ingenious things. I've yet to look through the book properly but it is looking like it may be useful in giving me some guidance when creating a web map for my dissertation project.

I'm really reading these two books out of general interest whilst also having to look into some of the more academic books and papers that will be useful for my dissertation.

Posted in at 1:19 AM on Saturday 23 July 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags:

Visit to Ordnance Survey

Our visit to the offices of Ordnance Survey in Southampton yesterday was fascinating, with a chance to get an idea for the breadth of stuff they do and learn a little more about some of their work. For those of you who may not know who the OS are, they are the National Mapping Agency for Britain.

The tour of their headquarters started off with an introduction to some of the new research projects they are working on at the moment such as innovative ways of visualising the geographic information they hold about houses, allowing them to be depicted as a 3D object, for example. Next up was a refresher on some of the details of OS MasterMap, the 'definitive digital map of Great Britain', and an overview of some of the potential applications that it could be used for.

After lunch we were taken around a number of departments within the organisation, from cartographic generalisation to their printing services and finally their photogrammetry department.

The guys who showed us the generalisation were basically demonstrating the sort of work they need to do to remove/select/alter clutter such as text from their vast database of geographic information so that they can produce useful 1:10,000 scale maps. They were completing the work that their automated generalisation algorithm started but that requires that human input at present.

The print floor was really interesting to see as we were guided from the order processing stage right through design, making of printing plates, to the actual print presses, guillotines, folding machines and finally to despatch.

The final visit of the day was to see the photogrammetry and aerial photo department who plan the flights that take photos during the summer months and then process all of the information that comes back for inclusion in a number of their products - the most obvious of which is the OS MasterMap Imagery Layer that will provide aerial photo coverage of the whole of Great Britain. They've recently invested in digital technology to simplify the process slightly, and apparently the images returned are of an even higher quality than the optical imagery they are using currently.

Posted in , at 7:45 PM on Friday 8 July 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags:

A sad day for London

Today has been a very sad day for London, the antithesis of the celebrations which were due yesterday for winning the 2012 Olympic bid. This morning unfolded as one of the worst days in London's recent history as terrorists attacked first the London Underground and then a bus near Russell Square.

I managed to avoid the attacks - although apparently by quite a close margin - though I know many others were not so lucky. My heart goes out to those who had this cowardly act inflicted upon them for no reason, their familes, their friends, their loved ones.

My department had today arranged a trip for the people on our course to pay a visit to the Ordnance Survey in Southampton. We had left London by about 9.20, unaware of any of the events which had happened on the Underground in the preceeding half an hour. Garbled reports of power surges and then terrorist attacks started to filter through to the radio on the coach but it wasn't until later that we realised the extent of what had happened so close to the place we had left from.

Map of my morningThe whole day has left me a little shaken. To show you some of the reasons why, I have created a map (partly to learn more about programming using the Google Maps API) that plots the events of this morning. You can scroll around and click on markers to find out more.

It is frightening how close these events were to affecting me and the people I was with this morning, my friends and so many other innocent people in London. The London I came back to this afternoon is a different London, a London I never wanted to experience.

Posted in , at 12:46 AM on Friday 8 July 2005 | Comments (1)
Tags:

Learning about AJAX

Mapping my photosIn order to improve the interactivity of my photo map, I have been learning about different ways of linking the information that comes from my database of photos and the mapping data which comes from the Google Maps API to what the user is doing.

Using a mixture of technologies that are commonly known as AJAX (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), I have allowed the list of nearby locations - which shows to the right of the map - to update itself whenever the user moves the map around the screen. It will show a list of 5 places closest to the centre of the map and also the distance they are from the centre.

One next stage of development will be to allow the user to click on one of these name and automatically zoom the map to the right area, along with other features including improving what is actually shown on the map for each place.

Some of these new mapping features will probably require broadband to be able to enjoy them properly because they can be quite data intensive.

Posted in , , , at 11:48 PM on Tuesday 5 July 2005 | Comments (1)
Tags:

Tynwald Day

Tynwald Day - by Dan KarranOn the 5th July each year the Isle of Man holds a public holiday for Tynwald Day. This is the one time each year when recent laws of the island must be promulgated - or read to the atendees - in both English and Manx Gaelic in order for them to continue to have effect.

You can read more about Tynwald Day in the Wikipedia or see my photos from last years proceedings in the photo gallery section of my site.

It was rather disappointing googling for Tynwald Day to find that the Isle of Man Government haven't updated their own page about the day since the Queen attended in 2003. As our only national day, I would have thought that it would be really important to have an up to date information page about it on their website.

Update: It is listed in the tourism events calendar, but that's about it, and very little detail is given.

Posted in at 1:31 PM on Tuesday 5 July 2005 | Comments (1)
Tags:

Dublin photos

Ha'penny Bridge, DublinThe weekend after our last set of exams, I went off to Dublin for a few days to celebrate taking the last exams we'll take in our academia (for now at least - who knows what will happen in the future). We had a great time, enjoying the Guinness and Bulmers Irish cider, and I even managed to find a little time to take some photos of the city.

The weather wasn't the best whilst there so a lot of the nicer photos (outside of the pubs) were taken within about 10 minutes of each other, with a sunset-coloured sky over a relatively calm River Liffey.

You can see some of the photos in my Dublin photo gallery.

Posted in at 1:36 AM on Monday 4 July 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags:

Mapping my photos

Mapping my photosDespite the fact that somebody seems to have hacked into my server this evening and deleted all of my photos, I have been working on a way of mapping all of the photos I've uploaded to the website over the past few years.

I had the idea of mapping them a while back but didn't progress further than showing roughly in the world a place is located. Recently, however, online mapping services have improved in leaps and bounds. As part of this, Google has just opened up their system for anyone to add their own data to as well. Tonight, this is what I have begun to do.

Each of the towns and cities in my gallery has been 'geocoded' to a specific location and is now pinpointed on a map of the globe which you can click, drag and zoom to your hearts content.

I am still experimenting with the opportunities here, but features you can expect from the site soon will hopefully include photos in the popup bubbles and maps on each town and city page to show nearest neighbours. Mapping travels would be something I'm interested in trying out as well.

Posted in , , at 2:48 AM on Saturday 2 July 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags:

Exam results

The final exam results of the year came out last week, and generally they looked a lot better for everyone than the first semester results of the January exams.

We weren't told exact results but I managed to get Passes with Merit in Management in GIS, Spatial Decision Support Systems and in our Group Project, along with a Distinction in Advanced Topics in GIS - the more technical of our modules this semester.

To celebrate, and generally just to treat myself, I flew to Salzburg for three days to enjoy some time on one of the lakes nearby. More on that later.

Posted in at 5:56 PM on Friday 1 July 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags:

 

 

©1995-2008 Dan Karran. All rights reserved. View sitemap.