On Sunday I got up early and got a train over to join in with the Milton Keynes Mapping party.

It's a funny old place. Or rather it's a funny new place. Built in the 60's. Very spaced out, with lots of car parks. Built for the motorcar, but also pretty good for the bicycle. Francine and I (yes I dragged my long suffering girlfriend along too) were on foot.

I had planned some unambitious POI mapping around the city centre. This had several lazy advantages: a) less walking, b) stay out of the rain in the all the massive shopping malls, c) keep Francine happy by making occasional clothing purchases. We did this in the morning, and also went and took a peek inside what turned out to be the XScape indoor ski-slope centre. So that explained the funny shaped roof!

But even Francine realised, when she saw the monstrously huge cake diagram printed on the wall, that this wasn't going to help finish the whole of Milton Keynes, and so she volunteered us to map one of the suburban cake slices too.

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I finally cleared my mapping backlog including the past two London mapping party locations. I've just been adding POIs along Charing Cross Road. They'll be appearing shortly, but I have to say the area's already looking superbly POI'ed up.

As I was doing this I dived onto the wiki a few times to improve the shop tag documentation. I can see there's plenty more work to do on that. Each shop type should be documented with example photos and short sharp descriptions, followed by explanations of how to distinguish one type of shop from another. Although it's tedious wiki fiddling, it is important because no matter how obvious these things may seem, people can find ways of misunderstanding. Non-native english speakers don't always have a clear idea of what these english words mean, and also in other countries shops are different, so to nail down exactly what kind of shop we're actually talking about is important.

It's also important as a kind of land-grab exercise. If well established and well used tags don't get documented, then the ever churning mass of tag proposals and their wiki discussion/debates will spill over into areas of tagging for which mappers (the important people) already feel like they have tags established. Then of course we've set ourselves up for a big clash of opinions, which could easily have be avoided by a quick few sentences being added to the wiki. With this in mind, I've decided not to turn a blind eye each time I need a tag and can't find it on the wiki.

Speaking of finding things on the wiki... It just got a whole lot better. Firefishy installed lucene search for the wiki which on some keywords is a lot more effective than the basic old MySQL powered search. So go search out those tags!

We finally had a Latimer Road mapping party last night. The patch of unnamed streets in this bit of West London had been bugging me for about a year now. Why had nobody ventured into the area in all that time? We thought the reason was that it's a horrible bunch of dodgy concrete jungle housing estates. As it turned out it was a combination of concrete estates and super-posh georgian terraced houses strangely existing side-by-side. Quite similar to slice 7 at last year's session near Elephant & Castle (woosh! the map's come on a long way since then!)

We converged on the pub, and discovered that "The Station" had a new name "Garden Bar & Grill". That kind of thing causes a problem for meet-up logistics, but look on the bright side node number 391843331 makes us more up-to-date than beerintheevening.com, fancyapint.com, google streetview ...well for that pub at least. And a very nice pub it was too, although at those prices it would be. I guess this pub caters to the inhabitants of the georgian terraced houses rather than the concrete estates.

Everyone found us in there eventually, although we did start to wonder about someone who had signed up on the wiki at the last minute by the name of 'Wynndale'. He'd volunteered to map the westerly cake slices 15 & 16 which were rumoured to be the skankiest of the concrete estates, deep within White City gang land. We started to fear some sort of mapping casualty before we'd even met the chap, but he turned up a bit later on.

Whilst enjoying expensive beers on plush sofas we chatted about various things: Our encounters with dubious bugs in JOSM, which (still in fact) don't make it clear when an upload has failed. JOSM should perhaps offer an old style uploading option, as a fall-back alternative to the new diff upload. The causes of 'precondition failed' error responses and how they are triggered in the API by relation editing.

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Last night I entered data (successfully this time) for shops along High St Ken and Tufnell Park Road mapping including that sneaky pub. So... starting to catch up, but I still have a lot to enter.

Tonight we're off out gathering more data at the Latimer Road mapping party. Come along and grab yourself a slice of cake:

This is near the BBC offices in White City. Know anyone who works at the BBC who might find this event interesting? Fire them a message today!

On Saturday I went out in the sunshine to eliminate a funny little cluster of unnamed streets quite close to my house, by Tufnell Park Road. I wasn't sure if this was a cluster of insignificant streets which don't actually have names, or an real area which nobody has mapped yet. Turns out it was the latter, complete with two unmapped parks and a very pleasant unmapped pub!

Going out mapping was kind of a bad idea, given the increasing backlog of data I had to enter. But hey it's a long weekend. Plenty of time to get stuck in with JOSM right? So that's exactly what I did. Unfortunately I didn't take the time to update JOSM. It would seem version 1526 has a rather nasty bug causing it to pretend upload without doing so in some circumstances. And it would seem the circumstances are rather common. I've just realised that out of the four different hour-long mapping sessions I've done this weekend, three of them have been lost completely. Gah! Not happy.

I knew that some JOSM versions were having upload problems, I just didn't realise it was quite so prevalent, and devoid of any errors/warnings.

Lesson 1. During this period, update JOSM regularly and check changesets are appearing on 'my edits' before closing down.

Lesson 2. Don't worry about creating too many changesets. Upload regularly.

hey ho. Looks like I still have a backlog.

Good mapping session in the Oxford Street area for last night's mapping party. Given the state of exhaustion some London OSMers are in (still), I thought an easy central location would be the best bet.

The cake diagram covered some big central london shopping streets: Oxford Street itself (eastern end), Regents Street, Charing Chros Road, Tottenham Court Road. These all have bazillions of POIs (mainly shops) to add. It's very different from mapping streets in the suburbs. Insanely busy with people walking to and fro, presumably mostly on their Wednesday evening journey home. Standing still and looking at things feels like highly incongruous behaviour, but of course people are used to seeing weird characters in central London. You get a few people staring as they bustle past, but hopefully I didn't induce too much excessive paranoia

Writing down the name of every shop gets tedious quite quickly, but just as I was reaching the end of my slice of the cake, I found a missing street! What excitment! I'll have to try to find time to enter this data in now.

The blue posts pub was good apart from lack of food. I've been there a few times mainly on busy Fridays/Saturdays, but Wednesday evening the pub was very pleasantly quiet. It was almost eerie how well we could hear each other, and no problems getting a big table, which was lucky because we had quite a good turn-out

Having said that we need to work on attracting newbies, but we did at least have one: Emma, the CloudMade secretary/PA! She accompanied Matt mapping Tottenham Court Road, and seemed to quite enjoy it. Her bloke joined us all in the pub too. Always fun trying to convince these people that we're not a complete bunch of lunatics.

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Hurrah! The API is up and running and looking reasonably fast now. Over the past few days Matt, TomH and Firefishy have been working their asses off. They always planned to have a busy weekend of server watching, but this turned into a four day migration job followed by an intense period of poking the servers to figure out what exactly was slowing things down. It's no exaggeration to say they've been depriving themselves of sleep!

The new Recent Changes display is looking spectacular (see those map edits rolling in!) and the 'history' tab and 'my edits' page are starting to give everyone more monitoring power, which is what the changeset features are all about. I was involved in developing these bits, so it's great to see them up and running. These visible new features are proving popular, but the vast bulk of the improvement work has taken place in the database back-end and API. It really has been a complete restructuring. Also the changeset displays at the moment are really just the tip of the iceberg of what's possible. I'm sure we'll see enhancements to them over the coming months to make them even more powerful as monitoring tools.

phew!

It probably wasn't such a good idea to have a mapping party arranged so soon after all this action. TomH, Firefishy, and Matt probably just need to chill out for a bit, but no! ....API's working ...Must map!

Mapping party TONIGHT in Oxford Street. Come along!

That's a new wiki page for the summer! A new wiki page... a new API... a new era.

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Make your own improvements to the police anti-terror billboards

Feeling full of the joys of spring, I decided to declare last night the last of the London winter random pub meet-ups. It's time to get serious about the mapping again, so the next meet-up will be the first of the London Summer 2009 Mapping Party Marathon. As punishment for this springtime enthusiasm, I've been struck down by a very wintery snotty cold.

In fact we didn't wait till the end of the random pub meet-ups to begin the mapping goodness. I drew the first London cake diagram of 2009 for last night's meet-up. Nothing too ambitious, but a slightly odd shape, to reflect the estimated concentrations of POIS (particularly shops along High Street Kensington)

It was partly Matt's enthusiasm for a bit of mapping that spurred me to do this. He also helped me chose the location, and the pub, and finally realised that he'd got his dates confused and couldn't make it!

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I spent the Easter break up in West Yorkshire. I had planned to fill in some of the more boring streets of our town, which my dad has been missing out (only interested in countryside footpaths), but on Friday the weather was too rubbish for mapping, and on Saturday and Sunday it was too glorious for mapping housing estates, so we just bagged a few more footpaths I'm afraid.

We did do some walks further afield than normal though, exploring some interesting spots including Greenfield and Bradfield. Not to mention walks to go see the new spring lambs.

I forgot my GPS cable, so along with tonight's mapping, I'm starting to get a backlog of data to input (always worth avoiding).

Tonight back in big smoke we're going POI mapping around High Street Kensington for the last of the "winter" London pub meet-ups

Couldn't sleep, but I'm also not quite awake, so I did some utterly mindless clicking tasks like sketching moorland rivers in Yorkshire from NPE, and updating the component diagram for the Develop page :-)

I went for nice long sunny mapping session around the area North of Crouch End South of Alexandra Palace. The area probably has a name. Actually a lot of shops etc said "Hornsey", but I thought *I* lived in Hornsey, and that's the other side of Crouch End. These people who came up with names for areas obviously didn't talk to eachother beforehand.

The walk took in Hornsey Church Tower, which is a nice little old building which I'd always been curious about while speeding past on a train out of London. Very noticeable from the train window for some reason. Well now I've found it on the ground.

I also found some new (not on Yahoo imagery) very modern apartments of New River Avenue, leading to a curious cyclepath which tunnels under the railway tracks and onto the "wrong" side of the tracks. A run down industrial estate. On any other day this would've been an unpleasant place to explore, but today the sun was shining, and that whole neighbourhood was echoing with the sounds of a live gospel choir music coming from the "Faith Miracle Centre". Supercheerful! Shame I don't really know how to tag it.

The pub choice was a bit disastrous for last night's random pub meet-up. An England match was on, and it seems the Freemasons Arms in covent garden is a good place to watch it (screens on every wall), which pretty much makes it the worst place ever for an OSM pub meet-up.

Chris Osborne got there early (or maybe on time) and managed to bagsie half of a table. I sat with him and Jeff, who had some questions about editing with JOSM. I showed him how to set the projection so the UK streets don't appear vertically squished, and basically reassured him that he could go ahead and move the streets which other people had put in, but which appeared to be in the wrong place.

Meanwhile a bunch of people were furiously discussing the new database hardware, and how well PostgreSQL is performing on there while Matt makes the poor server do somersaults and pirouettes for his amusement (and testing API 0.6 migration scripts) No doubt MySQL vs PostgreSQL was discussed too. No. We're not switching to Monet DB.

Speaking of which, I don't think we actually played any April fools tricks last night, but we chatted about the various April fools blog posts. Steve's announcement was followed up by more foolish technical details from Matt. I particularly like the tweeting planet diffs idea. Meanwhile we decided Shaun's Crap-o-surface Detector project idea was a bit too plausible. Someone should submit it as google summer of code project.

The pub got more overcrowded as time went on, so we abandoned Freemasons Arms and went around the corner to the Lowlander; a far more swanky establishment where we enjoyed a whole floor all to ourselves, and belgian beers aplenty.

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I finally finished the Cairo sketching I started back in January. By "finished" I mean I've worked around the entire edge of the city, creating landuse=residential areas to dilineate the extents.

It's now reasonably clear how big the city is, although it turns out its quite a strange shape. Some areas particularly in the East near the airport, have lots of new upmarket construction projects happening (or did when they took the aerial photos)

I suppose I should fill in the grey patches in the middle. But that's even more tedious. Also in the middle there's probably areas which are not technically residential.

Maybe I'll look for another "armchair mapping" project to keep me occupied whilst half watching TV.

After seeing a talk about kayaking, I'm inspired to try and go kayaking more. Haven't been in ages. But apart from that, I'm also inspired to make sure we have "the Grand Canyon of the Stikine" on the map, and also on on kayakwiki.

It's a big wide wilderness out there in that part of Canada. The SRTM data presented as releif maps (by the cycle map), makes it fairly obvious where the big rivers are. But it took a bit of detective work to figure out which one the river Stikine was. I guess it would be fairly doable to take SRTM data and draw in all big rivers in an automated way. Could be good for remote wilderness areas where nobody's going to get around to adding in even the big rivers any time soon.

In this case I sketched the river's path in from yahoo (satellite) imagery. This is more precise than SRTM, but less machine automatable.

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The Random pub meet-up was in Marble Arch last night. And we had reason to celebrate!

I remember the Tyburn in Marble Arch is a pleasant pub to head to from the park on a sunny afternoon, because it's very bright with its full glass front. In the evening you don't really notice this, so it's just like any other wetherspoons... a bit skanky. The main reason for going there was, I thought we'd be guaranteed plenty of space, but actually it was pretty crowded. We managed to do our usual trick of slowly taking over more and more tables and chairs.

I thought the Marble Arch area might present some interesting opportunities for a spot of micro mapping. 15 minute mapping sprint to pick up nearby shop POIs along Oxford Street and Edgeware Road before we met at the pub. But then we were running late, so didn't do any. We'll have to go back there. Also one of the interesting things which I thought was missing, the marble arch subway tunnel complex, in fact no longer exists. It's mostly been closed and filled in!

So anyway we all went to the pub

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Which country is this?

(flickr)

Last night's random pub meet-up was on a Tuesday, and Tuesday night means QUIZ NIGHT!

We were in 'The Island Queen' pub in Angel (map). Which was a little more off the beaten track than I had expected, hidden away down some very quiet residential streets. Matt tested the cloudmade pedestrian routing, by walking to the pub (3.6km apparently) in the rain!

The pub was actually a recommendation from my dad, and it also scored high on fancyapint.com. Sure enough it had good fuddy-duddy crudentials. A fine ale selection, genuine olde decor, and no loud music. It didn't have enough seats for all of us even though we'd bagged the biggest table in the place, but then there was about 15 of us. Another great turn out, and though I hadn't particularly noticed at the time, we had five females present. Five! Unheard of.

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I surveyed some more fine-grained POI nodes for various shops down my local Hornsey Road. Couldn't see any proper tag documentation for newsagents, betting shops, or how to distinguish between convenience store and a supermarket. Then there's those mysterious 'make international phone calls' shops, often offering internet. Haven't even got a name for them, let alone a tag.

Noted down a few missing pubs around Covent Garden while I was wondering around there last night. Just now I added them, and also straightened out some obviously wonky streets (live rendered view) It seems like the area's hardly been touched since ye olde London Mapping party of Jan 2007. We need to figure out a way of organising a second pass on all central London areas. How to see which bits are "done" though? That's always the problem.

I went to Liverpool for the weekend. This was a sight-seeing weekend away with the girlfriend, so I'd ruled out any mapping.

But before going, I did check on the mapping progress, comparing with yahoo imagery, and I couldn't resist an hour or so of sketching in streets. These were all to the North of the town centre. Now showing up nicely on the live nonames map. So that's the streets which need surveying now if you live nearby. For the armchair mappers, the unsketched streets need extending outwards into Liverpool's suburbs to the North and East.

The mapping which I could have done from observations while walking around (if I had known) would've been to put in some more details in the city centre here where the yahoo aerial imagery doesn't show the spectacular newly constructed retail landscape. There's pedestrian walkways at multiple levels, and steps to get up and down between them, so that's quite a complicated bit of details for someone in Liverpool to tackle!

Update: I should of course mention that the mapping progress so far in Liverpool is pretty awesome. It's always amazing to see maps coming together, but Liverpool's reached that sweet spot where you're able to use a printout from OpenStreetMap for getting around and seeing the sights. What's more I notice that if I'd taken the same printout from google maps I would've had a much less clear view of the shape of the docks, and that the big Queensway road is in fact a tunnel!