The MacAlba

I’ve had a healthy relationship with maps since I was a teenager. Living in Scotland at the time, I used to purchase Ordnance Survey maps of the local area and pore over the paper – just looking at this and that. Then, in my early 20′s, I’d go hill walking and learn the names of the hills, find old and ancient ruins, monuments and stone circles, then use the maps to find my way home.

So how does this translate to the digital age?

I’ve been collecting tracks with my GPS receiver for some years now. Initially I didn’t know what I’d end up doing with the tracks though I did submit a set of Outback Australia tracks to the Tracks4Australia project. Tracks4Australia, being essentially a one-man operation, and having a slow turn-around, didn’t give me the outcome that I was interested in which was to see the result of my efforts appear on a map.

Some time passed and I became acquainted with the OpenStreetMap project. OpenStreetMap is a community-driven venture to create a set of geographic data from scratch that can then be used for any purpose without restriction.

The outcome is a global map. It will continue to evolve as further contributions are made to it. New streets, new housing developments, changes in land-use, and points-of-interest are examples of data that are being, and will continue to be, added.

A key restriction to what can be contributed is that new data may not itself be taken from copyrighted data or data which cannot be re-used for any other reason (eg it doesn’t permit derived works).

For my own part, over the past year or more, I have generated data that I have uploaded and annotated to create a map of the city of Armidale, bush-walking tracks in and around many National Parks in the area, and major and rural roads around the region.

The map of Armidale, for example, can be viewed at:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-30.5146&lon=151.6711&zoom=14&layers=B000FTF

It may take a while to load initially; after it loads try zooming in to see street detail (click-and-drag the map too), then zoom out to see how Armidale relates geographically to the rest of the region.

To generate the data used to create the map of Armidale I drove, over a period of months, every street in the city. I initially just varied my way to and from work, and to and from the CDB. Then, at lunchtimes, towards the end of the mapping period, I would just go for drives around the remaining streets.

As an example of the type of use to which such maps can be put, if the local newspaper wanted to include a map of part of the local area to illustrate a story, they’d be free to generate it from OpenStreetMap and not incur licensing costs that may normally be associated with using third-party maps.

Another way in which this data can be used is to generate an image file that can be displayed on a Garmin GPSr. More on this later.

“The Time-Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century” [ISBN-10 0224079948] looks like an interesting book – you just never know when the information it contains would come in useful. Now I could import it from The Book Depository in the UK, with free air-mail shipping, for the equivalent of Aus$30.09, or I could buy it from my local Dymocks bookshop next time I’m in town for Aus$59.95 (where they’d have to order it in).

Hmmmm. Which one do you think I’d go for?

I’m usually always a person who will shop locally to support local businesses, but there is a limit to my support of businesses where the cost is double.

[Price comparison correct using the exchange rate as at Dec 20, 2008]

I’ve been mulling over a couple of issues that I’ve had with “charities” that have left a bad taste in my mouth. A post from Matt Cutts, ‘Charity donation recommendations?’, galvanised me to put fingers to keyboard. Matt’s asking for suggestions for charities to whom to make donations, I have some charities that I’ll now never donate to.

It’s that time of year when, more than others, we are asked to think of those who are less fortunate than ourselves. To be charitable. To think of, and give to, those who may otherwise have a less than cheery time this festive season. But charities must be having a tougher time than usual themselves.

Those people who may once have given willingly to charities may themselves now be less able to repeat that gesture this year given global economic hardships (albeit, though, most of us are still way better off than the vast majority of the populations of third world countries).

How can charities compensate for this reduction in their income?

It’s a tough one. I don’t have any suggestions. I can suggest to them, though, what not to do (based on my reaction to a couple of their tactics).

One. Don’t cold call me on the telephone. I’ve become conditioned to not give out my credit card information over the phone to somebody I don’t know and haven’t called. After I decline to hand over those credit card details, don’t abuse me and patronise me. If I ask for information to be sent to me in the mail, do it – otherwise I might be believe that the phone call was a scam in the first place.

Two. Don’t bail me up in the street. Don’t attempt to flatter me. Don’t ask me to fill out my credit card details on a piece of paper there and then. Don’t abuse me for declining to handover my card details to somebody I’ve never met before even if they have an “ID card” dangling from their neck (I can laminate a piece of laser-printed cardboard as well as the next person). Don’t then swear at me. Don’t call me stupid for declining to comply the now more excited demand for cash and tell me the “hundreds of other people do it”. Don’t call me a miser for not acquiescing to the collector’s continuing harassment. And then, after the collector tells me that he gets a portion of the “donation”, don’t expect me to ever donate cash to you ever again.

Three. Don’t expect me to hand over cash when the collector doesn’t share the values that the charity itself is supposed to hold. Do charities actually put their collectors though a selection process? Or do the charities take just anybody and hope that luck is on their side.

… and I’m talking about major, globally recognised, household-name charities here.

What works for me? Well definitely not being approached by a charity! It’s pretty much the case that I will only donate to those that I seek out.

In fact, in much the same way that Matt Cutts is, and has been, doing.

I’m a recent iPhone owner and, needing to install software to give me an internet gateway for my laptop when travelling, I jailbroke it. This meant that I could also install other non-Apple-approved software like Cycorder to make movies using the inbuilt camera.

So, having travelled to Sydney, I took advantage of a wait for a train to give Cycorder a workout in a less well lit location; the place being Museum Station on Sydney’s underground rail network. From memory, I think the iPhone/Cycorder combination can record 12 to 15 frames per second.

The result is a 90 second clip hosted at Vimeo.

It’s now been a month since moving from 2-way satellite “broadband” service to a wireless broadband network connection.

Since then an external UHF antenna has been installed to get a better signal from the 3G base station. The signal strength has increased from “low” to “low to medium”. It’s not the magnitude of signal gain that I was looking for, but, given the amount of gum tree foliage that the signal has to bore through, it’s better than nothing.

The antenna was installed by professional riggers sub-contracted to the broadband carrier; it sits extremely solidly on the roof. Given that the Telstra 3G wireless broadband terminates on the same or nearby tower to where our telephone-over-microwave service sits, I got the compass out and took a bearing. The microwave antenna is sited about 150 metres south of the house and has a clear line-of-sight to its base station. The UHF wireless broadband antenna was about 20 degrees too far to the south; I swung it around but, surprisingly, it made little difference – the quantity of foliage is being blamed for this.

The peak download speed to date has now been 2800 kbit/s with a peak upload speed of 1100 kbit/s. Compared to the 512k/128k satellite service, I’ve got nothing to complain about (so far).

I live in a rural location. I have no copper telecommunications cable to the house; in fact I’d have to install a kilometre of cable to get to my property boundary, and then Telstra, the local carrier, would have to lay about 7 km of cable to connect me to the local telephone exchange. But then, the local exchange doesn’t have ADSL or ISDN!

My telephone service is delivered by a voice-over-microwave radio link.

For the past couple of years my internet connectivity has been delivered by 2-way satellite. While I can’t complain (OK, I can think of lots to complain about), it was better than a dialup modem – just. While I could live with a maximum 512 kbit/s downlink speed, the latency injected due to the huge distance the packets had to travel was a major pain in the neck.

Just recently, Telstra, the same local carrier, finally dropped the tariffs on its 3G wireless broadband service. For $129 (which, while expensive, is cheaper than the 2-way satellite), I have managed to get a peak downlink speed of 2600 kbit/s (2.6 Mbit/s) and a latency to my place of work that’s now 100 ms instead of 1700 ms.

I can now access the internet just like most of the rest of the people I know.

Oh yes, and while my monthly quota has now “jumped” from 5 GBytes to 10 Gbytes, I still feel like a poor cousin to those using Comcast in the USA who now have to live within a monthly 250 Gbyte quota. The poor cherubs.

Arghhh! I’ve just heard a news-reader on the ABC Evening News (the Australian ABC, that is) tell us that somebody was making their “first debut” in a cricket team. This, I suppose, is a precursor to their second debut?

What a strange story from the ABC Online news service:

“Man critically injured in train platform accident” (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/19/2142088.htm)

“A man is in critical condition after colliding with a train on a platform of Carnegie Station in Melbourne on Friday afternoon.

Police say the 62-year-old approached the empty express train before he was hit.”

A man collided … (objects collide with objects; in common usage, people don’t collide with trains)

… on a platform … (the train must have risen up from the track)

… the 62-year-old approached the empty express train … (“approached”? – like he was going to ask it for the time?)