Recently awarded a four star rating and located in the hamlet of Ballakilpheric near Colby, the cottage is just a short drive from the airport, the golden beach and sunset views of Port Erin, the working village folk museum at Cregneash, the historic capital of the Island at Castletown, and many more things for visitors to see.

If you're looking for a comfortable, family-run B&B in the middle of the beautiful Manx countryside - perfect for outdoor activities such as walking, cycling or just as a base for exploring the Island - look no further than Cronk-e-Dhooney.

The website is based on Drupal to make it easily maintainable, includes some mapping from OpenStreetMap and also photos that I took in and around the property to help show it off to prospective visitors.

I'd probably recommend visiting Peel for a wander round the old streets, maybe the castle and the coast, especially at sunset. Just south of there is a little place called Dalby/Niarbyl where there are some more great coastal views and walks as well as a pub and cafe.

Also, I'd suggest the village of Cregneash and possibly its living museum. Port St Mary is a nice quaint fishing village just down the hill from there.

In Douglas the museum is worth at least a quick visit.

Up north, the Point of Ayre is quite breathtaking. The village of Laxey on the way up there is quite pretty.

If they know anything about the annual TT races, perhaps a trip around the course would be worth doing.

Otherwise, I'd just say head for the hills for a bit of a walk.

I was typing it out on the iPod touch, so the responses were getting shorter as I went on. I also didn't know what his friends would be interested in seeing, or how much time they'd have, so I tried to keep it general enough that any visitor would like it (though I'm aware it centres around places I love to go to take photos). I must say, despite my 'quick visit' recommendation, the Manx Museum in Douglas is well worth more than just a quick visit, as long as you've got the time to spare.

Have you been to the Island, or live there? What would you add to the list?

Having found the British Airways office, a small group of us (people who had blogged about Terminal 5 or may be interested publicising the opening) were given a tour of the terminal by a BA guide. Paul Parkinson of the This Week in London podcast was also on the tour and gives a great overview of the afternoon in his latest episode, and the terminal5insider has been doing a great job of sharing Terminal 5 photos and videos in the run-up to its public opening.

So, what were my impressions? Looking at the terminal from a distance, it doesn't look all that impressive, and it's only when you approach that you start to realise the sheer scale of the place. Departures are at the top of the building, with a passenger drop off area that gives great views of the countryside out towards Windsor. Entering the terminal via the pedestrian bridges, you start to get a better feel for the building, with a number of floors in view beneath you and an airy departures area welcoming you in. Standing in the main hall, the first thought I had was that it reminded me a little of Stuttgart Airport but on a much larger scale.

The terminal is laid out in such a way (see a diagram on the BBC News guide) that passengers should just flow through from the entrance to the gates with little hassle. In the door, to the self check-in kiosks, drop your bag off at one of the many bag drops and then pass through security to the main shopping and departure area. One thing that I really liked was that even before you go through the usual hassles of security (now even more complex, with biometric information being taken for domestic passengers) you can already see the sky through the glass walls on the other side of the terminal.

Even arriving from the Tube, it looks like there will be a relatively comfortable and short trip from the platform, through the wider than normal ticket barriers, and straight up the escalator to the check-in area.

Transport around the airport is set to be made easier as well, with the introduction of the ULTra PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system scheduled for 2009, initially taking people to and from the car parks (apparently only for privileged passengers) and later around the rest of the northern side of the Heathrow complex. I also read somewhere that travel on the Tube and Heathrow Express between terminals will be free.

It's obvious from the tour and from the photos that security will be paramount in Terminal 5, with cameras designed into the fittings and signage wherever possible, self check-in desks that have space for a camera to be embedded at some point, the added biometric security, and the new design for X-ray scanning machines that physically separate off anything that needs to be checked by hand (which also has the added disadvantage that it's easy to lose track of where your trays are when passing through), to name just a few of the features.

All in all, I was very impressed with the new terminal building, the only real niggle I had being about the precedence of advertising over information in some places (such as arriving into the baggage collection area to be greeted by an advert instead of pointers to the correct belt, but it's still vastly improved over the design in the other terminals where Vodafone adverts take precedence and you actually have to hunt out the information screens).

I'm looking forward to trying it out as a real passenger, and will probably take the Tube out there to take some photos around the place when it opens to the public on 27th March.

To get to the British Airways headquarters for the tour on Monday, I had typed the postcode (UB7 0GB) into the Transport for London Journey Planner website and found a set of connections that should have taken me there with plenty of time to spare. It did strike me as a little weird that the headquarters were situated so far from the airport itself (see the same location on Google Maps), but didn't think too much more of it as mt flatmate and I started on our journey to Uxbridge and the end of the London Underground Metropolitan line.

Walking through a residential estate and arriving outside the Uxbridge Royal Mail delivery office, I did start to wonder where the British Airways office was. Named Waterside, it was bound to be next to some water, and of course there was a canal flowing through to lull me into a false sense of security. With desperation growing, we walked into the delivery office to inquire there. As I walked towards the counter it suddenly started dawning on me that BA had perhaps had their mail directed to the delivery office. The Royal Mail guy confirmed this, saying something along the lines of "They do have a PO Box here, yeah. Did you follow your TomTom to get here?".

We were already running later than planned, and it turned out we were miles away from the actual headquarters bordering Heathrow (see map). Luckily we managed to get a taxi and caught the tour group just as they had given up hope on us arriving and were starting to head off.

Postcodes can be a great way of finding a location, with mapping websites and journey planners typically having knowledge of postcode locations across the whole of the UK. That said, how can they be useful considering their sole purpose is not for telling everyday people where something is, but instead for telling a postal delivery worker where to take the mail? How do you know when a postcode is going to relate to a building (often for large users such as businesses, schools, hospitals, etc.), a street (as is often the case), or somewhere completely unexpected such as a postal depot?

Perhaps this is where the user-generated databases of postcodes can start to step in. I've added the postcode UB7 0GB to the New Popular Edition Maps website that allows people to add postcodes they know the location of, as long as they can work out the location from 1940s Ordnance Survey maps. The database of postcode locations is then available to anyone without restriction.

Curious to find out more about the different ways to crack into the freelance photography market, I reached for my iPod touch and tapped out the address for Amazon into its Safari browser. Amazon had detected I was on an iPod (well, it thought it was an iPhone) and gave me a nice mobile interface to work with.

I found the book with ease and added it to my basket. Wondering what the minimum order was for free shipping, I went into their help section to try and find out. It was then that I noticed that they punish people for using their new mobile interface, stating 'All items ordered from your mobile device will be shipped standard shipping, unless you are an Amazon Prime customer.'

Why make it easier for customers to buy products from you but then not give them the shipping option that must have attracted them so more customers over the years? Admittedly, they do give the option to use their full site instead, but it's not as convenient on a mobile device.

In the end I resorted to using the laptop, so Amazon didn't lose the custom, but it would be nice if they'd give the free shipping option as part of their iPhone/iPod beta site.

The new site features an improved availability calendar that makes it both easier to maintain and easier for visitors to understand as well as the ability for the customer to edit any of the pages themselves whenever they want to change any of the information.

Also featured is a location map thanks to data from the OpenStreetMap project.

As you might expect, the website is built using the Drupal open source content management system with the addition of the image module, a customised version of the zen theme and a heavily customised availability module to drive the calendars.

I'm hoping to release this availability calendar module back to the community as a new module in the near future.

When planning my purchase I was torn between the iPod Touch and the iPhone, the only differentiating factors being the camera and the phone capabilities (and therefore its ubiquitous data connection). At basically the same initial price for both, it didn't make sense for me to go for a mobile phone with an 18 month contract that had a below par camera when I could also go for a free Nokia N95 and its embedded 5 megapixel camera while paying around the same amount of money on a contract. Thanks to my employer I already had a chance to try out Nokia's internet enabled camera and loved its quality and ability to post photos directly to the internet and am looking forward to being able to do that again in the near future.

There's quite a bit of overlap between the iPod Touch and the N95, but the Touch has an interface that's just so much nicer to use than the N95, for mail and web browsing especially. Talking of overlap, at eight gigabytes the device isn't big enough to hold my entire iTunes collection, so I don't think I'll be ditching my 80 gigabyte iPod Classic any time soon.

Despite being very pleased overall with the Touch, there are a few things that I'd really love to see added to the device:

• Media streaming from other iTunes libraries on the network
• Wireless syncing with host computer
• Jabber chat client
• Video plugins for Safari to allow viewing of RealPlayer content (e.g. from the BBC)
• Email search in the Mail app (server-side)

Without a cellular data connection, the wifi on the device is very important for those times you want to access the internet when out and about. There are a number of UK companies and organisations starting to provide free wifi in their premises (e.g. Wetherspoons pubs, McDonalds, local libraries and other places) and in public spaces which is great, and the Cloud has dropped their monthly fees for iPod Touch owners to a price that mirrors what you'd pay for a single hour at most wireless hotspots.

It's also amazing how many other venues have wifi available in them thanks to some unknown third party provider. This is a grey area when it comes to the law though, with wifi theft already being punished under the Communications Act 2003 in a number of cases. I say it's a grey area because there is often no easy way of telling if an open wifi hotspot has been intentionally provided free of charge either by a venue or by someone else actively sharing their connection for passers-by.

The organisation of this event significantly trumps my involvement in a Young Enterprise group as part of a similar scheme when I was at school. We managed to make some novelty items and Christmas decorations as well as coming out with a slight profit for members of the group, but nothing quite on the scale of this.

If you're going to be on the Isle of Man next Tuesday, go and put a bid in for a piece of local artwork, perhaps a photo of the Point of Ayre Lighthouse ;)

So that means that every now and then I need to resort to dictionaries (dict.leo.org is a great community-built one) or machine translation software such as that used by Google Translate to give me a better idea of the information that I'm trying to read.

Trying Translate today on the Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German Pension Insurance) website, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before. It may just be that I don't often translate whole web pages, but when trying that today I noticed that on each phrase you hover your mouse over, you get a little popup and the option to 'suggest a better translation', thereby giving a feedback loop to continuously improve the machine-translated text.

There goes Google again, using individuals in the huge crowd that is their user base to actively improve their information services for all, and for free. They also announced this week that they will be allowing people to tweak address locations, improving their geocoding capabilities. It's not quite at the level of their efforts in India to let people generate map data for them, but it's starting to look like that's the direction it's moving in... and it's all with the aim of improving information availability around the world, so I'm all for it.

Update: It looks like Google switched to their own in-house machine translation system last month, but has been letting people suggest new translations for some languages since earlier in the year.

So, here goes, with a sample of places I've selected from around the world, starting with perhaps the most unique styles I've seen so far in Google maps and generally working westwards:

Shanghai, China

The Chinese maps (available through maps.baidu.com, Google's Chinese subsidiary, not through other Google Maps portals) show business locations such as KFC, with a handful of other markers used to highlight different services, each named respectively.

There are very few building outlines included and, as in most places, the streets are simple lines, many of which appear to be unnamed.

Update: I confused Baidu (not a Google business) with Ditu, the Chinese version of Google Maps. The maps of Shanghai are quite similar to the Baidu ones I described, though seemingly without commercial entities like KFC on there.

Tokyo, Japan

The maps of downtown Tokyo seem to be very pedestrian-centric, with prominent stores and landmarks being represented, sometimes with a logo (e.g. 7-Eleven and am/pm stores) and sometimes with a red dot and the name of a building. Some of the larger buildings are depicted in 3D though for others, just the outlines are included.

In addition, streets are shown not just as lines, as they are in most other Google cartography I've seen, but actually as they are laid out on the ground, with pavements and crossings clearly marked.

St Paul, Minnesota, United States

The downtown area of St Paul, MN is covered by 3D buildings, including all of the skyways that link together to form a vast indoor network above the ground. Further from the centre of the city, there are very few buildings to be seen.

Other than this network of pedestrian walkways, the rest of the map could be considered very vehicle centric, with no public transport information (surely there are some bus stops at least?).

New York City, United States

Downtown Manhattan Island in New York has a more extensive coverage of 3D buildings and also has public transport information included, with both stops/stations and the services that run through them. With so many tall buildings in the downtown area, especially around the central business district, it can be difficult in places to make out roads in between buildings.

Google has been extending its transit information to all sorts of new places, providing easy access from within their maps wherever possible.

London, United Kingdom

London has no building outline data, though Google has tried and failed to obtain the the information. Google and the Ordnance Survey never reached an agreement, so the excellent data sources that were built up from OS data as part of the Virtual London project aren't (yet) available to be used outside of academic circles.

The London maps also show transport information, but few other landmarks (Covent Garden Market being one).

Moscow, Russia

Moscow's map depicts building outlines and their (street) numbers as well as Metro stops, though there is no embedded transport information there as of yet.

One thing I find interesting about Moscow is the delineation caused - presumably - by combining different datasets, showing stark differences in the levels of foliage in and around Moscow compared to its surrounding areas. Is that due to different ages of datasets, an actual difference in coverage up to a physical boundary, or a desire to show Moscow as being a greener city than it actually is? (Having never been there, I'm not sure which of those is most likely).

On Friday 26th October there is going to be a Flickr meetup here in Stuttgart. We'll be meeting at 6pm in the Calwer Eck pub in downtown Stuttgart. All are welcome to come along, just leave a comment or add yourself to the event on upcoming.org if you're interested.

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Am Freitag 26. Oktober kommt ein Flickr treffen in Stuttgart. Treffen wir uns um 18h in Calwer Eck. Jeder ist wilkommen! Kommst du auch? Bitte hier Kommentar einlegen oder unter upcoming.org anmelden.

The People's Map is great in some places (such as over the Isle of Man) because it has high resolution aerial imagery in places where OpenStreetMap doesn't yet. I might even be keen to spend time mapping the Isle of Man from their imagery, allowing them to use that data for their own purposes, as long as I could also re-use the time and energy I'd spend on that. In their 'fair and straight forward licensing' they even suggest that this could be possible (though I never got a response when I asked for clarification):

Users can associate their own private data to the People's Map without any ownership transferring to the People's Map Partnership

However, when going to sign up to try out their editing tools today, I would have had to agree to the following term in order to contribute:

You agree that the information you submit may be freely used by the People's Map in perpetuity. You will have no rights over the information once you provide it to us.

It will be really interesting to see if people actually take People's Map up on their offer of mapping the British Isles for them without being able to use that data until they pay for it. At least with OpenStreetMap data, you're free to do what you like, as long as you credit the project and make the data available again to others wanting to do the same. Oh, and it's all free.

Can the People's Map add extra value to what OpenStreetMap is already doing, by putting their revenue to good use, perhaps using it to validate the crowdsourced data?

The map above shows the approximate locations of over 400 of the DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 attendees, based on the city or country they entered when registering for this year's DrupalCon. People travelled from every continent except Antarctica (maybe next year?) to visit the conference though most attendees travelled from Europe or the US.

If you're reading in an RSS reader, or if you prefer using Google Earth rather than Google Maps, you may want to load up the KML file, otherwise you'll need to move the map around a little to make Google Maps load all the locations for you.

(Sorry for all the pushpins. I was hoping to move beyond pushpins but the GeoCommons server didn't seem to like my file, probably due to the lack of attribute data in it.)

Much like last year's OSCMS Summit (which basically turned into a DrupalCon) and DrupalCon Brussels it will be a great chance to meet up with other Drupal developers and users, see what others are using the platform for, join in discussions about its future and hopefully promote some of the pieces that we've been developing at work or have sponsored.

I'll hopefully be doing a lightning talk on the use of Drupal as a GeoCMS - if there are enough people interested - perhaps demonstrating some Google Earth integration through the KML module, GeoRSS integration, or even WFS integration (if I can get it working before then).

If you're going to DrupalCon and are interested in the geo aspect of Drupal (or geo in general), let me know or catch me there - I'll be the one with the 'geodaniel' name badge.

When people view the diary entry they can now click through to view or edit that area of the map to see what you're writing about. Each pair of coordinates is wrapped in the geo microformat too, so if your browser knows how to handle them, it should be able to pick them out.

The feed of diary entries also includes the location information (currently only W3C geo, but should soon have actual GeoRSS too), allowing you to visualise them on Google Maps, for example, or any other geo-enabled feed reader.