January 2007 blog archives

I'm about to attempt an upgrade to Movable Type, the software that's currently running this blog. If you start to see weirdness on the site, that's probably the reason. It doesn't help that I can't find proper instructions for upgrading...

This video shows a 1.1 -> 3.2 upgrade as being seamless, so 3.1 -> 3.3 is presumably no more difficult.

Expect some template weirdness once I've upgraded.

I had been meaning to blog about this a month ago but never did, though a post by Jo Walsh has just reminded me about it.

Jo writes about being frustrated by the transport system in London and especially the changes introduced by the Oyster card - the touch in-touch out replacement for paper tickets.

I don't mind the Oyster so much: it does add a certain level of convenience, and the prices go up less quickly than the non-Oyster equivalents. It does have it's problems though and Jo summarises some of the major ones, mostly social, but below is one of the first-hand negative experiences I've had with the technological side of the system (I'll ignore times in the past when I've tried to get onto a bus, lacked credit, jumped off, topped up the card, chased alongside the bus to the next stop and then got on that same bus, noticing the Cheshire-cat grin on the driver's face) added as a comment to Jo's post:

Last time I was travelling through London, just before Christmas in the midst of the fog chaos, I managed to leave my jacket in the loos at Heathrow. Realising I'd forgotten something, I got off the tube at Hatton Cross and jumped back onto the next train going back to Heathrow. Leaving the gates, I spotted a 0.20 on the display and thought, that's a good deal for a short journey! Luckily I found my jacket again, and went back to the tube.

This time, the gates wouldn't let me through, giving me only a cryptic number for the reason. The guy at the open barrier wasn't much more helpful, especially after I told him I knew I had almost 8 quid on there. He told me I had no credit and I should see the guy at the ticket desk.

At the ticket desk I was told the same thing, that I didn't have any money on there. I kicked up a fuss, knowing that I had money on there, and thinking that the last journey had cost me 20p. I explained the situation about 5 times, and he seemed confused. There was no record of me going into the system (I'd touched in, and the gate had opened), but then I'd come out, back to where I'd started. To them, after I'd told them what had happened, that was me going in without touching in, going one stop down the line, starting another journey without first touching out and then in again, and touching out for the first time. (Although why I got charged a double fine automatically, without them knowing that I'd touched in at the same place, I have no idea).

I didn't leave the desk until he'd re-credited the fine (minus a fee for a single journey, if necessary). Thankfully, he did just that. I was very grateful because he didn't have to, but as someone who was f*cked over by the system, I would have been very angry if I wasn't reimbursed.

The London Underground guy told me that the Oyster cards had caused more trouble for the staff behind the desks than the perceived benefits, and wished they were never introduced.

As you say, the queues may be shorter, but they take longer because the queries are hellishly complex.

When I started work on the OpenStreetMap module for Drupal towards the end of last year I got pretty much to a point where I'd implemented the basics, and then slowed down as I pondered how best to proceed. The tagging in Drupal of objects from the OpenStreetMap database was perhaps the biggest issue to consider, and with Christmas in the way I didn't get much further on with it.

Everything of interest in OpenStreetMap is either tagged (e.g., a point of interest or a whole road) or helps build up other structures that are themselves tagged (such as junctions, or vertices, in roads). The tags aren't simple 'tags' as are commonly used in Flickr, del.icio.us, or any other Web-2.0ey site you may be familiar with, but are instead key-value pairs consisting of, for example, key=amenity, value=cinema (often simply written as amenity=cinema for brevity).

These tags are similar in style to some advanced tags that have been used by a growing number of people on Flickr and other sites for a while, notably those such as geo:lat=54.2, geo:lon=-4.4 to denote the location of a photo. Nothing had ever been formalised though, so those tags were listed amongst the other simple tags, looking a little out of place. That is, until recently, with the launch of machine tags on Flickr, announcing that they will be supporting this more advanced usecase even better. You can read more about all this over on Dan Catt's blog.

Examples of these advanced tags, triple tags, or machine tags in terms of OpenStreetMap could be openstreetmap:amenity=cinema, openstreetmap:name="Palace Cinema".

But for the OpenStreetMap module, where I want to store this advanced tag information within the context of the Drupal taxonomy system, I'm left a little boggled as I consider the way ahead. Sure, I could save these tags 'as is' in the taxonomy system using the triple tags style noted above. But that means they're basically just treated as simple tags, even if they look a little different, and wouldn't necessarily be easily filterable (e.g., looking for all cinemas). Another option was to go off and implement a custom tagging system just for this module, but that didn't make much sense either.

I think what's really needed is a Machine tags module that plugs into the existing taxonomy system which is in the core of Drupal. The question is, should the taxonomy system be used as normal, storing the triple tags in full, and then have another module that allows the extraction, display and use of those tags more flexibly. Or, should there be an option in the core taxonomy system of creating a taxonomy that can store those machine tags in a better way, perhaps in a separate table that has columns for the each of namespace, key and value, or perhaps even different tables for each. The extra module to display and reuse those tags would probably still be necessary, tieing into the taxonomy data and allowing it to be used in different ways.

In the past day or so Stuttgart has seen its first proper snow of the year, and it caused chaos. Schneechaos read the headlines. People weren't prepared (presumably they, like I, thought we'd skipped winter completely and gone straight into spring), roads hadn't been swept of overnight snow and buses basically stopped running as far as I can tell.

Luckily I take the train to work. Whilst a little delayed, they were running without too many problems.

Over the past few days I've been readying the KML module (thanks to AjK for starting the work) and the GeoRSS module for new releases that will work on the latest, shiny, version of the Drupal content management platform: Drupal 5.0.

They are both now ready (with the exception of some minor bugs and some feature requests) and there are a number of bits I need to backport to the 4.7 version of KML module to ensure it starts working again with recent updates to the Location module. I also need to make sure that GeoRSS module is consuming feeds properly from the successor to Aggregator2, Leech, as well as Feedparser.

I've also been helping out a little with the port of Location module as it is an essential part of getting the two modules to produce their geodata. It's not quite ready to be tagged as being ready for Drupal 5.0 but most of it is already working in this release.

If you're interested in any of these modules, please try them out and report any bugs in their issue trackers. If you have any ideas for future features, please also add them in there. Ideas (and patches, if possible) are always welcomed!

23 years ago to the day, Apple Computer, Inc. announced Macintosh. The bold commercial aired during the Superbowl, one of the most widely watched (and therefore expensive) television slots of the year in America. Something new was about to hit the computer industry with a bang.

I grew up using Macs in school and at home (between them including the Macintosh Plus, SE, LCIII, Classic, Color Classic, Performa 5200, a Mac clone and finally the iMac G3) but then switched to Windows PCs during my A-levels (programming in Visual Basic on a Mac wasn't really an option) and through university, where it was only really practical to have a PC because of the programmes I needed to use.

I was so happy to stop using a PC and go back to using a Mac in 2005, and am having a hard time trying to convince myself that I don't want a nice new MacBook.

via: Wired