Fox - Hunted
Anyone who's ever been into any kind of alternative scene and spent time in London will know
The Intrepid Fox in Wardour Street. No frills, no pretence, no fake just-because-it's-trendy pretend goths, punks or rockers. Yes, it's a total dive, but more importantly it's a geniune place, and one without any attitude.
Unfortunately,
the Fox is closing. The manager and staff have been
given two weeks' notice by the brewery, after which it'll be closed, sold on to property developers, and turned into
flats luxury apartments.
There's a
petition to try and save it -- doubt it will do much good but it can't hurt -- but otherwise the final night at the Fox will be
9th September. See you there!
Another kneejerk reaction
In the news today, it was announced that the Government is to bring in a
ban on violent pornographic images. Which is probably a good thing, but the article then goes on to state that it would be illegal to view "
material featuring violence that is, or appears to be, life-threatening or is likely to result in serious and disabling injury".
So if I were to look at, say,
a picture of one of the planes hitting the WTC five years ago, surely that's an image "featuring violence that is, or appears to be, life-threatening or is likely to result in serious and disabling injury". Will it now be illegal to see that?
Nunscan!
The
BBC News Online ticker just came up with the wonderful summary:
Scans on nuns reveal there is no such thing as a single God spot in the brain.
So now you know. Someone out there has been scanning nuns. Amazing!
Something new every day
Whether or not it's true that you really do learn something new every day, it certainly happens at times.
While passing through
Slough station earlier today, on the way to spend Bank Holiday Monday pottering around
Windsor, we spotted a strange unit parked up on the railway lines.
Well neither of us are in any sense of the words trainspotters, but we took a picture so that we could try to find out what it was. A quick web search soon found that it was an "Amey Tamper" machine, but that wasn't a great deal of help as I haven't a clue what a "Tamper" actually does. So once again the internet came to my help, and a quick
request on usenet soon gave me the answer I wanted.
A Tamper is a machine for packing down the stone ballast that supports the sleepers on a railway line. So now I (and you!) know.
Older than the tube!
Well I don't normally do tube stuff here, but this one's a bit different :)
I live out in northeast London, towards the eastern end of the
Central Line. I've known for some time that the above-ground part of the line not on the Hainault loop was initially a separate rail line that got incorporated into the tube network early in the 20th century.
But according to a recent press and publicity campaign run by T
fL, that section of line is
exactly 150 years old. Which means that the station I use every day to go to work predates the oldest section of the tube proper by 7 years. Quite amazing, really.
Old planes and torrential rain
We went up to
The Shuttleworth Collection of vintage aircraft in Bedfordshire this afternoon, for one of their most excellent flying days. Unfortunately after a fairly short time the heavens opened big style and so most of the rest of the flying was cancelled, but I did manage to
get a few pictures.
A wet friday afternoon
Not the most exciting thing in the world, but for a short while the skies turned black and the heavens opened. When it finally stopped the rainbow at least managed to appear to be hovering artistically above the Westway.
Oyster card rant
Gah, why
is it so hard for people to learn to use their
Oyster cards correctly? Every morning without fail I see people tutting and cursing because the tube barriers have refused to let them through, but 9 times out of 10 it's due to their own inability to use their oyster correctly.
As a hand-written sign at my local station said years ago when Oysters were first introduced:
Remember, Oyster cards are plinky-plonky, not swipey-wipey.
Maybe a little whimsical but it makes the point perfectly. In my experience Oyster cards work every time without fail, as long as you follow a couple of simple rules.
- Always put the card flat and fully on the reader, don't hold it at an angle or with half the card hanging off the side.
- Keep the card there without moving it for a couple of seconds so that the reader and card can communicate successfully.
And that's it! Not too hard really, and it means you just go straight through the gates without any issues. The more you swipe your card around or jab angrily at the reader, the more likely you are to not get through.
A simple Google Maps mashup
Well
I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was putting together a Google Maps interface to display the
Local Heritage Initiative data on behalf of
MySociety. As is the way with these things it turned out to be a bit more complex than I expected, but I've finally got something useable turned out.
There were several problems to surmount.
- Firstly, the new Google Maps Geocoder doesn't currently work from UK postcodes, presumably due to Royal Mail PAF licensing issues. Whatever the reason, it meant I had to find someone with access to PAF data to add a latitude and longitude to every record and wait for that task to be completed.
- Next, simply loading and processing the data from XML files takes 10-15 seconds, depending on computer speed. It's unacceptable to have a web page hang around for that length of time apparently doing nothing, but by (a) showing the map before loading any data, and (b) displaying an updating "loading..." status to the user, that problem was soon minimised.
- Finally, there are approximately 2,700 projects to map. At a zoomed-out view of the whole of the UK that's simply a couple of orders of magnitude more than needed. Although there are a number of strategies for handling too many points in Google Maps, none of the simple solutions suited me. The best solutions all assumed a database backend, but for the purposes of this project everything was stored as XML, loaded once at document startup and then processed dynamically on the client.
I tried developing a couple of "clustering" algorithms, so that at higher zoom levels I could display a marker (preferably in a different size/colour to the standard one) with an info box of (eg) "
This marker represents 120 projects, please zoom in to see them in detail". However after a couple of false starts it became clear that this functionality was going to take some time to implement correctly, and there was a need to get
something online as soon as possible.
So in the end I created a compromise. At lower zoom levels, when large chunks of the country were visible, I simply wouldn't display anything at all (other than a message requesting the user zooms in). Once the zoom level rose to displaying approximately 30km on each side then I'll create marker pins for only those projects currently displayed. This seems to work reasonably well, although if you were to scroll around the whole country without ever zooming out there would eventually be several thousand markers for the browser to keep track of. C'est la vie.
If you want to see the finished product (well not really finished, but published) it's here:
MySociety / Local Heritage Initiative / Google Maps mashup. If you're interested in
the raw data that's also available.
Aeylind GL3 cabrinators for sale
An excellent and funny
post on this blog demonstrating just how gullible people can be, especially if something appears online.
It's raining, it's pouring
There's been heavy rain all day today, on and off. Early this evening I looked out the window to see that the road outside seemed to have become a river. I grabbed the camera but none of the stills really seemed to capture what it was like, but a flavour can be got from
this video.
Most of the cars were slowing down but there were a few who merrily carried on down the road at the usual 35-40 mph that they do along here. No accidents (that we saw) but there was an awful lot of panic braking judging by the number of brake lights that came on.
A local shop for local people
On my way towards the
tube station this morning I popped in to the bakers to pick up a roll and an iced bun. Nothing very exciting there, but I noticed they've had some leaflets printed to extol the values of using the local bakers' shop rather than the supermarket.
Most excellently it proclaims in 48 point
Comic Sans that as their flour is all sourced from nearby farmers they offer:
LOCAL BREAD for LOCAL peopleAbsolutely terrific. As soon as I get close to a scanner I'll get a copy of that on the net.
MySociety and Heritage Lottery Fund
I've been on the developers' team for
MySociety.org for a few months now, but haven't really done much more than a few noddy bits of coding for them. But this evening I've managed to get my teeth into something a little bit more meaty.
One of their "bubbling under" sites is
YourHistoryHere, which is hoping to grow up into a community-based site giving "odd factoids, rumours or tidbits" about places all over the country. MySociety have been given the opportunity to get in touch with the Heritage Lottery Fund to collaborate on building that site into something much bigger, more powerful, and of even more use.
What they wanted was someone to try to scrape some of the data from the HLF website about projects they've already funded, and to plonk that into Google Maps in some fairly basic but functional form. That way MySociety can present the HLF with a good working example of what can be done, and hopefully that should help things move forwards much quicker.
Well, scraping data from websites, mungeing it in various ways, and chucking it back on the web interfacing with the
Google Maps API is exactly the sort of thing that
Perl excels at, and the sort of thing that I've done many times. So I was happy to offer my help, and I've just finished getting the main data-scraper working, pulling down the details of several thousand projects from the
Local Heritage Initiative site and writing it out as XML.
I'll be kicking that off on its full run in a couple of hours time (to try to minimise any potential load on the LHI server, although it seems a nice fast Apache box), and then the next stage is to pass the XML over to MySociety so that they can append latitude and longitude data to it, based on postcode lookups. Then it's back over to me for the Google Maps side of things. With a bit of luck and patience that should all be up and running by the end of this weekend.
Yay!
Free online graph paper
Yes I know it doesn't sound too exciting, but this website offering
free online graph paper actually offers so much more than just that. As well as all the standard sorts of graph paper, there are all sorts of other weird and wonderful options. Whoever knew you could get
Semi-bisected Trapezoid paper (apparently used for sketching piping diagrams). There are also non-graph papers, things like
Engineers Ruled paper,
Musical Stave Notation paper and even
Chinese Character guide paper.
Once you've chosen the paper you want, you go to an options screen where you select the size of the grids, the size of your paper (both European and American paper size formats are catered for), and even the colour of the gridlines. One more click, and you've got a PDF of your paper, ready to be printed out, and of course saved to be reused as many times as you want. What an excellent resource!
It's a national emergency! Don't panic!
So apparently the Evil Terrorists [tm] have been at it again, this time
planning to blow up America-bound aeroplanes with Coke bottles full of liquid explosive or something.
Even more shockingly, the new official government
terror alert has been raised to its highest level, which is
CRITICAL according to the
Government Intelligence (ha!) website. It's all terribly worrying of course, so I think instead of the existing levels we ought to have some less scary, far more, well,
British ones.
So without further ado, here's my suggestions:
- LOW - Nothing to see here, please move down the bus.
- MODERATE - Best put the kettle on.
- SUBSTANTIAL - I hate to be a nuisance, but would you mind awfully blowing yourself up somewhere else.
- SEVERE - Better go and have a little lie-down.
- CRITICAL - I say chaps, this is all getting a little bit worrying really.
Of course if something actually happens (as opposed to it not happening), everyone goes into the top secret and unpublished "STAGE 6 - Steady on, that's just not cricket old boy. We'd better all just
sit down and have a cup of tea till this all blows over."
Boo!
No, seriously. I've just found out about a programming language called
Boo, which is basically a language with
Python-like syntax that runs on top of the
Common Language Infrastructure (more commonly known as .NET or Mono). You could think of it as Python.NET.
Even better, there's a very high-quality open source
IDE called #Develop (SharpDevelop) which provides full visual form design and class/code generation for Boo (and C-Sharp.NET, VC++.NET and others) which means that in effect there's now a Visual Python.NET. All the goodness of a
PPR (Python / Perl / Ruby) programming language combined with the excellent API provided for by .NET. I'm very impressed indeed.
