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Dan Karran

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Mapping NYC Subway by smell

The New York City Subway map has been annotated according to smell by visitors to the Gawker.com website. This is a bit of a stinky mashup of NY, and it's amusing that the only smells recorded at Flushing Ave station (on the G line) are those of Feces.

"This is not a happy station ... Rankest smelling train stop in existence ... Like you bathed in your neighbor's toilet ... Like a herd of cattle with diarrhea." (via Very Spatial)

Posted in at 11:16 PM on Wednesday 27 September 2006 | Comments (0)
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Licensing information in Drupal feeds

After releasing the Drupal GeoRSS module the other day, I sent a message to the GeoRSS mailing list. It created some positive responses and an interesting question back from Andrew Turner of the High Earth Orbit blog, who is interested in giving people the ability to create their own personal geospatial aggregators. He's done some work in this area already, in the form of Mapufacture, a geospatial aggregator that allows people to specify regions they would like to receive feeds for.

When you start to look at aggregating and redistributing information you should really be clear about the licensing of the information that is being brokered. How is it licensed, what are the restrictions, etc? Hence Andrew's question to me was whether Drupal has any way of specifying applicable licenses for its outgoing feeds. I hadn't heard of anything in the community, but whilst researching the area today I came across some Creative Commons syndication examples and also spoke to Boris Mann of Bryght - one of the biggest Drupal shops - about whether this had been implemented in Drupal already.

It turns out it has: the Creative Commons module allows Creative Commons license information to be added per feed or overridden on a per node basis. I need to do some more research into whether there are more general extensions that support other types of licenses than just Creative Commons, but it's a great start.

The next step would be to ensure license information is extracted from feeds being pulled into Drupal by the likes of aggregator2 module and its successor(s). It's becoming clearer from looking more and more into the flow of data into and out of Drupal that there are lots of use cases for ensuring standards compliant information can be pulled from feeds and applied to nodes in Drupal and then also included in outgoing feeds.

Off the top of my head, we have the basic information itself - title, body, author, date, etc - and also additional information such as location, event data, license and enclosures of different types, as well as numerous others presumably. Each module should listen for new nodes being created by an aggregator module (using Drupal's extensive hook system) and handle any elements from the incoming feed as required - so the GeoRSS module would handle geodata, the event module would handle calendar dates, times, venues, etc, the Creative Commons module would deal with licensing information, and so on.

Posted in at 11:11 PM on Sunday 24 September 2006 | Comments (0)
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GeoRSS to KML through Drupal

I was working at the end of last week on pulling GeoRSS-enabled feeds into Drupal and attaching the location information for each item to the nodes created from each item. Once it's within the flexible world of Drupal, all the benefits of having attached geodata then apply.

With the number of GeoRSS enabled feeds around the world slowly growing, the opportunity to make your own geospatial mashup machine (borrowing the name slightly from Zacker's Drupal Mashup Machine screencast) is now here.

Much of the functionality was already there in contributed modules - aggregator2 module to pull in feeds (not sure what's going to happen to this module in the future) and location module to store location data for nodes. Then my recently released KML module can feed all of this information back out in different ways (eg by tags assigned to the incoming feeds), GMap module can display them on top of Google Maps.

The only part that was missing was the bit to pull geodata from the incoming RSS feeds, based on the GeoRSS standards, of which Version 1 was released last week. To do this I created a little module (GeoRSS module) that tied aggregator2 module and the location API together.

The functionality here overlaps slightly with the location module in that it already inserted geographic information into RSS feeds being sent out by Drupal, but I prefer to use the module as an API to store the information and then extend it in other ways. In the future the GeoRSS module could be extended to deal with more complex geodata than simple points, being able to cope with lines and areas as well if that time comes along and people have that need.

Posted in , , at 2:35 PM on Thursday 21 September 2006 | Comments (0)
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In Brussels this week

After visiting friends in London over the weekend and getting back to Stuttgart on Monday night, I am once again travelling, but this time to Brussels with work. I'll be here for GovCamp, DrupalCon and BarCamp. I was also hoping to catch up with the OpenStreetMap crowd, some of whom are up here this week for EuroOSCON, but spent much of the day on the train and so missed the meet-up today.

It should be a really interesting week, from watching presentations, learning about parts of Drupal I've not yet delved into deeply, and also getting to meet others in the Drupal community.

Posted in , at 3:07 PM on Wednesday 20 September 2006 | Comments (0)
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New beta of Google Earth released

I read over at Ogle Earth this morning that a new beta version of Google Earth v4 has been released.

I was pleased to see that the ability to access standards-based OGC Web Map Service servers has been included in this version. Whilst this is an improvement upon the previous methods people had of including WMS geodata as an image overlay in Google Earth, it does seem to be hidden away in an options screen (the Refresh tab under Add Image Overlay) that doesn't make much sense to me. Also I wonder why layers you've selected in there aren't added as children of the Google Earth layer you've created, allowing you to enable and disable layers from that WMS when desired.

Most importantly, this is the first version of the Google Earth v4 beta that hasn't crashed my Mac when I try to zoom in to an area.

Posted in at 10:05 AM on Thursday 14 September 2006 | Comments (0)
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[placename].im update

I found out today a little more information about the .im domain situation I was talking about. I heard back from the guy selling the peel.im domain about the price he was asking for, and also heard back from the registrars about their policy on reserving names relating to some places but not other.

If you're interested in buying the domain for Peel, Isle of Man - peel.im - then you are looking at paying around $1000 (he's "willing to let this one go pretty cheaply"). That's only about 11 times the price it was purchased for. It does seem a shame to have this domain taken away from the people of Peel, and it's a shame that it was allowed to happen, but perhaps he's not broken any of the rules.

It's not for me to say what's right or not about the registering of that domain, but I would like to help prevent it happening to other domains that relate to place names on the Isle of Man. The registry inform me that the place name domains that appeared to have been reserved have not been reserved because they are placenames, but because they have been offered to the owners of the third level domains (e.g. castletown.im reserved for the owners of castletown.org.im) who have until the end of September to claim their domain (costing only £5 initially). After that date, if the second level domains haven't been taken on by the owners of the corresponding third level domain then the domains will be released to the public.

With no policy in place to hold back the names of towns and villages that hadn't previously been registered, I think it's important that something be done to protect them.

Perhaps there should be more publicity on the Island (not being there at the moment, I don't know what publicity there has been already) to convince local authorities that they should invest in their name on the internet. Perhaps for some places, names should be reserved by Isle of Man Tourism or by Manx National Heritage. If these organisations don't pick up on their relevant domains, perhaps there should be a sort of Open Domain project to help protect those domains? I'd donate a domain to that sort of project if others were to do it too.

[stepping down from my soapbox for now]

Posted in at 11:10 PM on Monday 11 September 2006 | Comments (4)
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Isle of Man opens up domain registry

I discovered today that the .im domain registry has been opened up to be more freely available, allowing anyone with an interest to buy a .im domain. The registry has been opened up to be more like the .tv domain which appealed especially to TV companies. The maintainers of the Isle of Man's domain hope that .im will to appeal to Internet Messaging companies.

Previously the domains were only available to Isle of Man based organisations who could prove they had a right to the name; the process was manual, and the domain had to be approved by a committee before it could be created. Now, the process has been automated, has a pretty website, and is available to anyone, whether based on the Island or not. The domains are still checked up-front against a list of 'inappropriate domains' and apparently vetted by a committee (after the automated registration process).

Not having heard about the opening up of the domain registry back in July, I was a little confused when this email arrived in my inbox this morning:

www.Peel.im Domain for sale
Hello,

I am putting the domain name www.Peel.im up for auction and am currently taking bids for it
Please serious offers only as this name is getting a lot of interest. Please bid on the domain by
clicking on FOR SALE at www.Peel.im or by emailing me directly at <email removed>
Thank You
Erin


I thought it was a little weird because previously you could only register third level domains (eg yourname.co.im). Wanting to know more, I went to the nic.im website to check it out, seeing that peel.im is in fact registered and being put up for sale by someone in San Francisco.

It seems a shame to me that people can hold 'local domains' for a ransom. In my opinion, [placename].im domains should be reserved for use by local organisations for a relevant local website, be that perhaps a local government website (though the move of Douglas Borough Council from douglas.org.im to douglas.gov.im instead of douglas.im suggests that maybe needn't be the case) or at least a website that's related to that location. Checking some of the other domains, like ballasalla.im, castletown.im, douglas.im, laxey.im, they do appear to have been reserved by the registry, but there were a number which I tried which haven't been reserved and still run the risk of having some opportunist buying them and holding them for ransom.

Perhaps the rest of the [placename].im domains should be placed on the reserved list to prevent this from happening, though I'm not sure how you'd choose the rightful owner of these domains if they weren't all reserved for government use, for example.

On a related note, it's interesting that my design for geodan.org appears to have been inspired by the 1997 version of the nic.im website. This wasn't intentional, though there must have been some subconscious link reminding me of this website design from almost 10 years ago. How retro.

Posted in at 2:45 PM on Sunday 10 September 2006 | Comments (2)
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Drupal KML module released

Tonight saw the release of the KML module I've been working on for the Drupal content management system. The main features of the module currently include the ability to:

  • add a KML link to the bottom of all spatially enabled nodes
  • view all spatially enabled nodes in Google Earth
  • view nodes tagged with a certain term
  • view nodes from within a group
  • view search results
  • determine order of nodes that are displayed in Google Earth, allowing for alphabetical or time-based flythroughs of nodes for example.

If you are interested in this module, please feel free to try it out. You can see parts of the module in action over at geodan.org/kml-module.

It's been developed on Drupal 4.7 and the source is available in the CVS repository or as a package. If you come across bugs or things that aren't working as expected, please add them (along with any suggestions or feature requests) to the issue tracker on drupal.org.

It took me a while to get to grips with using CVS and specifically MacCVSClient (to add to SVN which I also recently got to grips with) but finally I managed to import the module source to the Drupal CVS repository. I think I still need to tag it to make sure it's packaged properly from the module description page and therefor easier to download, but that can wait until the morning.

Posted in , , at 11:24 PM on Monday 4 September 2006 | Comments (0)
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Reintroduction of a language

Whilst home in the Isle of Man at the end of August I visited my great uncle. He's approaching 100 and is one of the few local people still left in the village of Cregneash, much of which is now operating as a living museum. He's also a bit of a film star, having had a few small roles in locally produced movies - Waking Ned perhaps being the most famous. Being so well known he gets a lot of visitors, and this time was no exception. When I popped by, he had a student visiting asking questions about Cregneash for a university project, and also a teacher from the only Manx language primary school on the Island.

The school, Bunscoill Gaelgagh in St John's, uses the medium of Manx for teaching primary school children. The majority of classes are tought in Manx, with only about 10% being taught in English. They also get to learn French as a third language.

Having learnt a little Manx when I was younger, and being keen to refresh my memory of it when starting university back in 2000, I wanted to find out how the first generation of native Manx speakers in a long time are getting to grips with the language. (I still haven't gone back and refreshed my knowledge of it, though I'd still love to, if I can find a good Manx distance learning course to take).

I had my doubts about how successful the Manx-medium school would be when I first heard about it. It turns out, however, that the children are doing very well, being fluent Manx speakers, fluent English speakers and are picking up French very easily as well.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in years to come, how many people will be speaking Manx again, how often it will be used, and what it will be used for. As you can imagine, re-introducing a language almost from scratch will be a difficult, and probably quite long process. Being a descendant of one of the last native Manx speakers, I look forward to the day when I will hear people speaking Manx to one another in everyday life. Hopefully by then I will have actually learnt some, and will be able to join in.

Posted in at 8:55 PM on Monday 4 September 2006 | Comments (0)
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