Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Google Earth London Update
Google Earth just updated its imagery, bringing London up to date with 10cm resolution photography from Blue Sky. 2lmc did the shadow-forensics to date it around February of this year, so it's a crisp winter morning.
One artefact of Google's variable coverage is the patchwork effect their updates have on the world. The UK has strips of photography from this provider or that provider, but some of the coverage remains plain old 15m landsat. Ironically some of the low-resolution stuff actually looks the best when viewed at a distance. The high-resolution stuff has been over-processed and resampled beyond recognition, and that's a real shame.
Greater London is particularly bad at the moment, coming out a muddy brown that looks like the result of aggressive high-pass filtering (useful for making tiling textures in games, and apparently fpr getting aerial photos to stitch together).
Coming in closer you realise the Thames is completely obliterated.
The only reprieve is that close up the detail is fantastic, and these shadows on the Thames are gorgeous, like architectural elevation drawings. See also the amazing crowds in Trafalgar Square.
Perhaps the resampling system could be tweaked to fix the brown patch though. I mean, in some ways it reflects reality (London is a horrible confusing mish-mash until you concentrate on one particular area for a while), but in other ways it rather spoils the illusion of a seamless view from space. Of course there are no seams if everything is one colour!
Home, kind of…
I'm back from the U.S.
Photos of the trip are up on Flickr (along with photos from the UCL Waiting Workshop and Futuresonic 10) and loosely grouped into sets.
What a trip - it's taking me a little while to adjust back to London life though. Not just the jetlag, but also the fact that I moved house just before I left and I'm still living out of boxes and bags until I get furniture organised. Once broadband is up and running I'll try and flesh out my thoughts on Chicago, New York, Boston and the U.S. in general.
Ask Later #1
Last night was our first technology-themed 20x20 talk night (20 slides, 20 seconds each). Well done to Steve for getting it off the ground by organising the room and presiding over the slide collecting. The final line-up was as follows:
- Sean Varney spoke about data capture for film special effects and the progression from scanning 3D models and objects to scanning whole sets and people.
- I spoke about a few things that are connected by some of my favourite books. Slides to follow.
- Robert McKinnon spoke about topic maps and how del.icio.us and flickr are sneaking them in the back door.
- Alex McLean spoke about live-coding and his new project, a domain specific language for live-coding audio, written in Haskell.
- Steve Coast counterbalanced all the positive vibes with a talk about negative things.
- Matthew Westcott rocked the house with his poignant tale of home-grown Ruby OCR code for hacking an online Sudoku puzzle.
- Paul Hammond talked about the effect of constraints on creativity and productivity, by way of Scrum, Ubuntu and Ruby on Rails.
- Jon Crowcroft gave us 9 (count them) levels of indirection, and wondered what would happen if football teams were programming languages.
- Simon Willison tried (and, I think, succeeded) to explain the whats, whys and hows of closures in Javascript.
- Yoz Grahame talked about the joys of cloning applications, by way of Ning, Second Life and LambdaMOO. With bunnies.
- Natalie Downe spoke about usability testing at torchbox, and some of the recent lessons learned.
- Muki Haklay spoke about usability testing for online mapping sites, and gave some pointers for the future.
- Tom Armitage reprised his talk from Reboot 8, making the case for telling stories with social software.
As we waited for people to arrive, Paul Mison played a bit of live Electroplankton on his Nintendo DS on the big screen, which worked really well (naturally, since it's designed for performance). I think we had about 30-40 people, plus speakers, and hopefully people enjoyed it enough that they'll come along again. We'll be starting a mailing list soon, so leave a comment here if you'd like to be notified when it's ready.
NB:- though originally publicised as Techa Kucha Night, we changed the name to Ask Later.
Techa Kucha Night becomes Ask Later
To avoid collisions with Pecha Kucha Night's UK trademark, in the future we won't be calling our event Techa Kucha Night. Nobody has specifically asked us to change, but a brief and civil exchange of emails with the London Pecha Kucha people has made it clear they'd rather we'd asked them first, which is fair enough.
In honour of this, and of our preference for leaving question time to the pub afterwards, we've changed the name of the night to Ask Later. I hope the topics remain sufficiently different between our night and the original architecture and design themed night so that there are no hard feelings. I can thoroughly recommend you check out the original Pecha Kucha - the next one in London is at the ICA on August 30th.
Techa Kucha next Tuesday
Techa Kucha is shaping up nicely. So far the confirmed speakers are: Steve Coast, Yoz Grahame, Tom Armitage, Ben Russell, Paul Hammond, Toxi, Simon Willison, Robert McKinnon, Alex McLean, Sean Varney, Jon Crowcroft and me.
Full details are on the Upcoming page and on Steve's blog, but here's all you need to know:
Tuesday 25th July, 7pm, New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster University. Entry is FREE.
There's still time to submit a talk if you'd like to join us. (Just get 20 slides of 20 seconds each to Steve by Monday night!) Of course, you don't have to speak to attend. This isn't like Fight Club... Yet.
NB:- though originally publicised as Techa Kucha Night, we changed the name to Ask Later.
Why Wait?
Abstracts and attendees are now online for Why Wait?, a workshop being held at UCL next week.
Here's a summary of what I'm thinking about in this area:
There are several ways to manage a waiting process (e.g. numbered tickets at the cheese counter or single queues for multiple service points at the post office). These methods can be objectively measured; the effect on waiting times and processing rates can be quantified. But the effect on the experience of waiting is less objective and cannot easily be measured. How might we better understand these issues, in particular the perception of fairness, to design better waiting experiences that are optimal not only in their use of resources but also in their impact on the people who are waiting?
Nice to note that Dave Chatting will be attending. My brief conversation with Dave about our shared interest in time-based maps led to a couple of interesting posts on Computing for Emergent Architecture. It will be good to pick up that discussion again.
Cally This and Caledonian That
I walked home for a change last week, as I've been intending to do for too long now. The simplest route takes me along Caledonian Road and I finally remembered to stop to take photographs of all the shops that are named after it. See Cally This and Caledonian That, a photoset on Flickr.
London Techa Kucha Night, 25th July
Enterprising chap that he is, Steve has booked a room at London Westminster University for what he's dubbed "Techa Kucha Night", a night of technology themed talks in the Pecha Kucha style* on Tuesday 25th July at 7pm. Entry is free, which is a bonus.
See Steve's post for more details, and please consider volunteering to give a talk (you'll be in illustrious company) as well as coming along and enjoying the fun. It should be a good night with a wide range of topics: basically, anything goes!
* that's 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, no more no less. A strict version of a lightning talk, if you will.
NB:- though originally publicised as Techa Kucha Night, we changed the name to Ask Later.
TimeContours
Nicholas Street, a recent MEng Computer Science graduate from Imperial College London, posted last week to the mysociety maps mailing list about his final year project work, TimeContours: Using isochrone visualisation to describe transport network travel cost.
His work includes a comparison with my own maps, which he says are "effective prototype implementations, but the unfamiliar unlabelled layout makes it difficult to relate to the underground". Touché! To his credit, Nicholas addresses almost all the deficiencies of my tube maps with his own software and goes significantly further in implementing the same kind of analysis for other transport networks (even including an example of using street data from my friends at OpenStreetMap).
His approach and background reading are covered in detail so the final paper will be a great resource for people working in this area in the future. I do hope he finds time to release the software for us all to use too. As well as the more traditional academic and print references, it's nice to see a hat tip to people putting their thoughts and experiments online such as myself, Rod and Oskar. Whilst a blog is no substitute for peer review and academic rigour, I strongly believe that the more of these ideas we share then the better all our work will become.
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