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An Inconvenient Truth

I went to watch An Inconvenient Truth with my flatmate this afternoon. Much of it is a very pesonal look at climate change by Al Gore and how he's been involved over the years, but I have to say that it does give a pretty good introduction to the topic of global warming and climate change, tying together different topics to show clearly how they're related.

One thing I found a bit weird was that through the movie, as he's driving and flying all over the place - ever expanding his own carbon footprint - he doesn't say anything about how individuals can reduce their own emissions. A list of suggestions does come at the end though, perhaps in an attempt to help people remember them and think about what they can do when they get home from the cinema.

All in all, I'd definately recommend going to see the movie or watching the DVD to help give you the global picture.

Posted in Movies at 7:53 PM on Sunday 29 October 2006
Tags: an inconvient truth movie film climate crisis

Mapping Munich in a weekend

Early on Saturday morning I got up to catch a train to Munich so I could meet up with a small group of other OpenStreetMap people with the aim of mapping the centre of Munich in a weekend.

I'm not a big fan of mornings but still I managed to get up early enough that I'd arrive into Munich not too long after the others had met. I arrived there, a little bleary eyed from snoozing on the train, and headed to Marien Platz to meet Ralf - the organiser - to find out which part of the city I should go off to map.

I went off to map inside the north western corner of Munich's Inner Ring road with a newcomer to the project. Mapping an inner city area, as I discovered when starting to map Stuttgart, is not an easy task. The GPS units stuggle because of the tall buildings and often narrow streets. It's difficult for them to keep a lock on the satellites, and when they do there is often still interference from all the buildings around that leads to tracks not being anywhere near as accurate as desired.

After a few hours of mapping it was time for lunch and time to meet the others. There were a group of eight of us, each paired up to take a part of the city centre. I struggled through lunch trying to understand as much of the German language conversation as I could, not really able to add much because my German's not good enough to butt into conversations with yet. After a pizza and a beer, it was time to go back to our areas and finish up the mapping.

By the time we all met again in late afternoon we were all starting to feel a little sore under foot, so happily sat down to see how we had all progressed on the first day. There was a slight worry at one point, after downloading the tracks from one type of GPS unit (the NaviGPS, which most of the group had) appeared to have no data from the morning. It turned out later on that evening that the data hadn't been lost, but for some reason there were some issues with the SD cards that the GPS units save the tracklogs onto, meaning that not all the files were showing.

By the morning, Joerg had printed out some updated maps to work from, as we'd all agreed that it was much easier to fill streets in on a skeleton map than to try and start from scratch. Some of the areas hadn't been mapped as a few of us didn't have the ability to go in and draw street segments on top of the GPS tracks, but Joerg and Ralf had both managed to do at least some amount of mapping the streets online in OpenStreetMap from the previous day.

There were four of us on Sunday, two on bike and two of us not. The two of us not on bikes headed down towards Museumsinsel - the location of the Deutsches Museum - to map that area before meeting for lunch. After lunch came another couple of hours of mapping an area around Ost Bahnhof.

After all of that walking, we still need to go in and create all this data in the OSM wiki based on our GPS tracks, notes, diagrams and memory. That's what I've been doing tonight, and still there are a lot of names I have to fill in from the map we drew. Already though, the central area of Munich is looking much more densely covered with map data than before the weekend.

Posted in Geographic at 9:37 PM on Monday 23 October 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: openstreetmap osm geo mapping munich

OpenStreetMap module for Drupal

For quite some time now I've been thinking about the best way to create a mapping and local information site for the Isle of Man - what will become Mapping.im once ready. Currently it's a very bare, ugly site, so don't pay too much attention to it. Working with the Drupal content management system so much, I naturally thought of that as the way forward, largely because of its flexibility but also because it gives me a good head start in developing a site that can do all sorts of things already, without me having to implement them individually.

I had jotted down some notes in the past about what I wanted out of a site, but never really got quite as far as implementation details. Then earlier this week I went to an old haunt of mine - an Irish bar by where I lived in the first few months of being here in Stuttgart - and sat down with my notepad and pen (both of which I carry at all times). I wanted to start jotting down some more fine grained requirements for what I want, and how I may go about integrating this into Drupal as a module that other people can apply for their own local areas as well.

Then last night I started coding the OpenStreetMap module up. I'm hoping - as long as I can spend enough time on the project - that I will soon have the ability to create a local information site for the Isle of Man, based on top of a map from the OpenStreetMap project to which I've already contributed a large amount of data for the island to get the mapping process started. (Since I started earlier this year a number of other people have joined in to flesh out that data even more, which is handy because being in Germany right now, I can't add too much).

I would have spent the weekend working on the module but I'm actually travelling over to Munich in the morning to meet up with a bunch of OpenStreetMappers for a Mapping Weekend to map the centre of Munich.

Posted in Drupal, Geographic, Isle of Man at 9:35 PM on Friday 20 October 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: openstreetmap geo mapping isle of man

First install of Drupal 5.x

I installed what will be Drupal 5.x on my computer last night for the first time and was amazed at how easy it was to set up and get it working out of the box. Drupal 5.x is still in development but it's possible to download the current snapshot and try it out - and it seems like it's not too far from being ready for release.

After downloading the latest version of Drupal to my computer, accessing it through the web browser, it now gives a friendly screen telling you to give the correct permissions on the configuration file instead of giving SQL errors as 4.7 had done. Once I'd set those permissions, I was taken to a configuration screen that asks for database information (which I still had to set up by hand, though in the future this step may also be done for you) and that was it. Click the button and Drupal is ready to go. No more worrying about importing database tables and everything, it's all taken care of by the installer now.

I've not had a proper look around yet but the overhaul of the administration section seems to break things down into much more understandable areas (content, users, site configuration, etc) than the previous flat listing of everything. It may take me a while to find where some things have moved to, but it's a great step forwards in making Drupal more friendly to site administrators.

I'll be starting to upgrade my modules for 5.x soon, though I am planning to continue support for the 4.7 branch for some time still.

Posted in Drupal at 2:40 PM on Tuesday 17 October 2006 | Comments (0)
Tags: drupal drupal 5.x