After two years of working from home, I've decided it's time to make a move back into an office and look for some contract-based or perhaps permanent work in London.

I have four years of experience using, developing and helping guide the development of Drupal projects as well as a background and interest in all things geographic, from maps to open data (as you've probably seen from the topics I cover in my blog). With these skills I am looking to find some work as a Drupal developer for an organisation based in London, ideally integrating my geographic interest. Alternatively, I'm open to other opportunities that I may be suitable for.

If you have, or know of, any positions coming up from January onwards, I'd love to hear from you to discuss the details. You can find out more information about me in my CV (pdf) or on my LinkedIn profile.

I've been back in London for almost two years now and haven't met that many people working with Drupal, partly due to working from home I think, but also because there don't seem to be too many events (outside of paid training events and the like) that are aimed at Drupalers in the London area.

As I was looking today to find out if there were meetups happening already that I wasn't aware of, I came across a thread on groups.drupal.org asking about regular meetups, and left a comment to say I'd be interested if there was anything happening. In a city the size of London, there are surely enough people working with Drupal to get a group of people together every now and then for a social event. I for one would love to meet more people in the area who are working with Drupal, and maybe have a pint or two in the process.

By the end of the day, there was a meetup organised: London Drupal Pub Meet- September Meetup. Brilliant!

If you're interested in coming along, sign up to the meetup.com event, and I'll see you there!

edit: the event will be held from 7pm on Monday 28 September, at the Square Pig, Holborn.

Burgess Park in Southwark, South East London is fighting for a chance to get £2 million of London tax payers' money to help regenerate the park. Created on land which was heavily built up before the war, the park has never really been completed, and could benefit greatly from a boost to bring it closer to completion.

In true web 2.0 fashion, Southwark Council are promoting this bid through YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

If you're in support of improving the area, you can back the Burgess Park bid by signing up to the Facebook group the council have set up.

Map of Burgess Park based on data from OpenStreetMap, CC-by-SA.

It's great being in London and getting to experience some of the fantastic cultural events that are put on each year. Today was the celebration of the Chinese New Year, welcoming in the Year of the Ox. I got to enjoy (too much) dim sum, some good fortunes and a little bit of lion dance watching before escaping the cold.

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

The public opening of the new Terminal 5 at London Heathrow airport is less than a fortnight away and the Queen officially opened it yesterday. I was very pleased to have been given the chance to take a look around while it was in its final stages of preparation the week before last.

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.

Thanks to a blog post I wrote a couple of years back, I was recently invited on a tour around the new Heathrow Terminal 5 before it opens to the public later this month. More on the tour in a later blog post (also listen to the This Week in London podcast for a walkthrough of the new terminal ).

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.

I was in the Apple section of a department store in town yesterday having a test drive of the latest MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops when I noticed that they had Google Earth running on them. Trying the MacBook Pro out first, I was very impressed with the responsiveness of the machine when exploring in Google Earth. The MacBook wasn't quite as impressive, but still very nice and an improvement upon the iBook I've got at the moment.

As I was exploring, I zoomed into London and specifically into the area of Hyde Park and its north eastern corner. I had spotted a road pattern that didn't look quite right on top of the imagery that was being shown. Hyde Park is full of criss-crossing paths that are really quite distinctive from above, but what I was seeing didn't fit that pattern at all.

It rather looks like a glaring intentional error has been introduced, perhaps so they can tell when people have copied their maps verbatim (read the Maps that Lye page on the OpenStreetMap wiki for more information).

Wondering if it was perhaps a series of paths that had been introduced after the aerial imagery had been taken, I took a look at Yahoo Maps to see what they showed and they didn't have the paths included.

I suppose the logic in adding erroneous data here is that it doesn't matter if you follow it as you're in open space anyway, and so it won't matter to pedestrians if the paths don't actually exist.

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.

Whilst travelling back through London last week, I noticed this new sign showing the extension of the London Underground Piccadilly Line that will take passengers to the new Heathrow Terminal 5 that is being built.

The only thing is, it's really confusing. If you were to look at that, how would you expect to get from the city to Terminal 5, considering trains appear to go straight from Terminal 4 to Terminals 1,2,3, bypassing T5 completely. If that's not going to confuse bewildered tourists, I don't know what will.

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.

The 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.