taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

A last-minute notice — the Irish Linux Users’ Group are organising an introduction to Open Streetmap tomorrow:

Open Streetmap : An Intro

The ILUG committee is organising an introduction to the Open Streetmap project on Saturday, 1st September, 2007 in Dublin.

This will include info on how to use your GPS and upload your data to the project, to contribute to a free and open map of the world.

The Hamlet Pub, Balbriggan (N 53.61396 W 6.20608 degrees)

Sat, 1st Sep 2007 2pm ~ 5pm

If you have a GPS and a laptop, please feel free to bring them. Wireless internet is available in the venue.

To register interest, please e-mail chairman-at-linux.ie

Tags: balbriggan, dublin, geowanking, ilug, ireland, mapping, open-streetmap

Nat at O’Reilly Radar mentions that Multimap have added a public API . It’s great to see more sites adding public APIs, but sadly, as I note in a comment there, Multimap isn’t any use for me — they, along with Google and Yahoo!, have really crappy Irish mapping. Their geocoders (the part that turns an english-language address into a GIS coordinate pair) are pretty much non-functional for Ireland.

I moved from the US to Ireland earlier this year and found this pretty frustrating, after the joys of using the US mapping sites to get driving directions etc.

Thankfully, another contender has emerged recently — Map24.

They have a great geocoder for Ireland, and very reliable directions, which are even accurate for some of the more baroque one-way-system traffic-management changes that Dublin’s city planning department have come up with recently. The look and feel of the website is a little clunky in Firefox — not as smooth as Google’s — but it has some nice AJAXy touches now and seems to be heading in the right direction.

Interestingly, they now offer a public API for third-party mashups, and even offer an API for their geocoder — so someone preferring the Google look and feel could mash that up, using Map24 to find the coordinates and Google to display an area map! (Actually, I think that may be how John Handelaar’s earlier hack worked – I note in the comments that he mentions Map24 provide Lycos’ mapping backend. aha.)

Anyway — Map24 — if you’re looking for a good Irish mapping/driving-directions site, it’ll do the trick.

Tags: directions, dublin, geocoders, google, ireland, map24, mapping, multimap, yahoo

Update: This is now fixed. See here for details…

Here’s the 2lmc boys getting rightly annoyed about Flickr’s new mapping feature, which displays geotagged photos overlaid on a mapping UI — as they note, it’s basically a steaming pile of crap outside the US:

However, because Flickr are owned by Yahoo, they’re using their maps. And, like all Yahoo! products, if you’re not American, it sucks.

Compare this lovely data-rich map of SF:

With this featureless grey blob:

That’s just pathetic — there isn’t a single place name visible, and even the Phoenix Park, the biggest urban park in Europe, is simply displayed just as a light-coloured splat with a road going through it.

It appears the Yahoo! mapping data for the UK and Ireland just isn’t really there. What someone needs to do, is take the geotagging data from Flickr, and overlay it on the far more informative Google map data instead ;):

It’s a real shame — I used to rely on Y! Maps to get directions everywhere while in the US. They’re missing out on so many customers here…

Update: good news — the Flickr maps are now things of beauty to match Google’s:

Tags: flickr, geodata, geotagging, insularity, ireland, mapping, yahoo

Windows Live Local, with its isometric, Sim City, “bird’s eye” view, is quite nice.

However, what gets me is — do MS do this deliberately? I’m referring, of course, to the way it’s broken on Firefox 1.5, requiring you to drag twice to get it scrolling around the viewport, and the jumpy, clunky UI on that browser.

Pretty lame — and lazy, too. By now, it’s essential for a new fancy website to work under Firefox; even if only 20% of your users will be using it, a good proportion of those are the bleeding-edge, ‘taste-maker’ types who’ll be blogging about it, writing reviews for newspapers and news sites, and generally generating buzz for you, and thereby attracting the other 80%.

I’m told it works great in IE, but there’s no way I’m starting Windows and opening up that app. If I want to be infected by 700 different malwares within seconds, I’ll ask. ;)

On top of that, coverage seems spotty — Ireland is AWOL, of course.

As a result, my one line summary would have to be: idea = cool, dataset = probably cool, execution = half-assed and crappy. I’m looking forward to Google doing a much better job with their implementation of the Sim City viewpoint.

Tags: google, mapping, microsoft, panopticon, simcity, web

Images: Jim Winstead’s walk up Broadway from a few days ago has already garnered a few interested parties, since he’s Creative-Commons-licensed all the photos, and they’re easily findable via Google and on Flickr.

I find this interesting; the collision between open source, photography and cartography is cool. The result is a version of maps.A9.com, where you can actually use the images legally in your own work. More people should do this for other cities.

Tags: images, jim-winstead, los-angeles, mapping

Mapping: NASA’s Earth Observatory has put up a 4 MB high-res topographical image of Ireland. A rough calculation indicates that each pixel is under 0.1 of a mile on a side. It’s fantastic. ;)

Best of all, since NASA operate under the US’ enlightened copyright and licensing policies for government-funded data, it’s free — the masthead notes ‘Any and all materials published on the Earth Observatory are freely available for re-publication or re-use, except where copyright is indicated. We ask that NASA’s Earth Observatory be given credit for its original materials.’ Copyright is not indicated on this image as far as I can see. So go ahead and save a copy for future use, too.

(via EirePreneur in turn via Irish Typepad)

Tags: calculation, copyright, earth, image, licensing, mapping, mile, nasa, observatory, pixel, side

Some folks reckon that mailservers should have reverse DNS — in other words, that the SMTP server should have a fully-valid forward-to-reverse mapping for its address, to cut down on spam and forgeries. All well and good.

Some other folks reckon that filtering on it is therefore a good way to cut down on spam.

It’s a nice idea, apart from 2 things:

• filtering based on this suffers the same problem some DNSBLs have: a false positive hurts the user, rather than the person who is at fault; also the user is virtually powerless to fix it.

• the correlation between spam and missing reverse DNS is no longer as strong as it used to be, as far as I can tell; spammers know they should pick a relay or proxy with a reverse DNS entry to get through filters, and as it becomes a requirement for relaying in general, more hosts have this anyway (regardless of exploitability or not).

Tags: address, dns, idea, mapping, reverse, server, smtp, spam, user, way