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Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
OpenGeoData
I've been blogging at OpenGeoData recently.
Monopoly Google Map?
Has anyone done a real map for the Monopoly board, in London or elsewhere?
If it must be a Google Maps mashup, it should display house prices, electricity/water rates and rail delays on the appropriate pins. For bonus points, it should show the route from place to place, taking in the nearest water works etc. Creative interpretation of Chance and Community Chest is encouraged. No prize for putting community chest on a Soho strip club, OK? It's not that kind of chest..
Good luck finding Free Parking in London.
Update: the excellent Wayfaring has a London Monopoly Pub Crawl map.
Gnarls Barkley Download Hits Number 1
This Gnarls Barkley thing has me thinking about music distribution again. My previous thoughts are here.
I don't understand why CD shops don't offer a 'burn on demand' service (and do nice glossy artwork prints) or a 'top up my ipod' service for the tracks they don't physically stock. HMV in Islington only had 50% of the things I wanted today, and I'm still looking for the odd thing that I know is out of print (Coffee & Cigarettes soundtrack, anyone?).
Frankly, an entire record store could be replaced with one of those little buggies that people kit out to serve coffee (like this one). Mount an array of touch screens, provide USB jacks and charging points, scoot around looking for a captive audience. Why not put the same hardware on tube platforms, bus stops, or in the back of aeroplane seats.
I'm thinking of a mobile data centre, but it could be done through a network instead. Without the restrictions of a shop, where would people be open to buying download tracks? Could I walk along the beach with a custom laptop and sell you things for your ipod? What about parks? Nightclubs? Why aren't pubs and clubs offering a bluetooth-powered 'get the ringtone' service for the current playing track (why do they let services like Shazam have that potential business?).
The totally untethered version doesn't even need much in the way of upstream bandwidth - a 3G phone could serve the requests and they could be delivered from the iTunes store by satellite. For one user at a time, a 3G data connection alone would be enough.
How long before the iPod can access the iTunes store all by itself over GSM/3G/WiFi/Bluetooth and all of this speculation is rendered moot?
ModRewriting for Blogger Archives
404 errors for nicely formed URLs like www.tom-carden.co.uk/weblog/2006/01 occasionally show up in my stats. It should be really easy to serve something useful (if I wrote anything that month), but Blogger is currently providing me with archives in the form of www.tom-carden.co.uk/weblog/2006_01_01_archive.php which isn't quite right.
Here's the fix I used, for this blog and my p5 blog, in the .htaccess file for www.tom-carden.co.uk:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteRule ^weblog/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/$ weblog/$1_$2_01_archive.php [L]RewriteRule ^p5/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/$ p5/$1_$2_01_archive.php [L]</IfModule>
Your mileage may vary of course, and I'm aware that the above two rules could easily be just one, but this is good enough for now.
You can try it here: /2006/01/ should be the same as 2006_01_01_archive.php. Not sure what to do about unadorned years though - perhaps just point to January?
Similar Music to Saul Williams
Last.fm's similar music to Saul Williams station is the most consistent seam of laid-back, groovy and intelligent music I've found in a long while. Thanks, fans of Saul Williams, for cross-fertilising on last.fm so effectively.
MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation
Over at Computing for Emergent Architecture, I just posted an overview of the MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation programme I help out with at University College London.
Glastobury Barrel Walker
Some kids making the most of the 2006 Glastobury rain, balancing on some overturned bins, at youtube.
The X of Y
I'm playing with YouTube. I'm a bit confused as to why I have to write my own RSS feeds out for all my friends, but apart from that it's doing most things right and not getting in my way. Fun!
YouTube is the Flickr of video, or something. I discovered today that this lazy turn of phrase is known as a snowclone. Undeterred, I watch with anticipation as Steve takes steps towards making OpenStreetMap into the Flickr of GPS traces. (It's already the wikipedia of maps, of course.)
Processing Blogs, Processing Hacks
Processing Hacks is progressing nicely. Toxi made a few updates this week, so we have better Processing source code highlighting (and links to the official reference) as well as the ability to post applets. We've moved the contents off the front page, and you can also generate an index to see what articles actually exist right now.
I've just added Chris O'Shea aka Pixelsumo's Processing category to Processing Blogs, as well as Ricard Marxer's fantastic Caligraft sketchbook. As always, if you're posting regularly about Processing or closely related topics, let me know and I'll add you as soon as I can.
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