Shaun McDonald's Blog

Last night I went to the centre of London near the South Bank to watch the fireworks for the New Year celebrations. In the past I have taken lots of photos of the fireworks, so this year I decided to try some video instead. When started using my camcorder, a Canon LEGRIA HF M32, I realised that my Panasonic Lumix TZ20 had a wider angle lens, so I was able to get much more into the same shot. The Canon camcorder on the other hand has a bigger lens, thus is able to cope with low light conditions better. I decided to create two videos. They both take high definition video at 1080p in the AVCHD format, thus I’ll let you compare the results below.

Pansonic Lumix TZ20:

Canon LEGRIA HR M32

Prior to the fireworks I took a few photos of the London Eye and the crowds:

Afore I headed out I had some filling haggis, neeps and tatties for dinner:

Recently an article appeared on the LCC website about people being fined for cycling on the pavement of Stratford High Street where the Greenway is now diverted due to Olympic and Crossrail works. I decided to take a closer look on the ground on Tuesday evening to see if it was valid for people to cycle there.

Heading eastbound along the Greenway diversion when you hit Stratford High Street next to the Porsche garage, there is a sign directing cyclists an pedestrians to turn left. There is absolutely nothing there to say that you can’t cycle on the pavement there, it’s the kind of sign that suggests that you are allowed to cycle off road and on the pavement.

Continuing along the road to the pedestrian (not toucan) crossing you have a nice wide pavement where there is plenty of space for considerate cycling. The fact that there is not a toucan crossing suggests that cycling potentially isn’t allowed, but why isn’t there a toucan crossing there? It is where the Greenway, a cycling and walking corridor, crosses a major road. Normally I would expect a toucan crossing to be implemented in a location like this to minimise  inconvenience to cyclists, and promote the cycle route more. Also when heading in the eastbound direction there is no way to get to the Greenway without going along some of the pavement.

Once you cross the road and continue towards the Greenway you pass under some scafolding which has a sign with information on it about the work that is happening. It shows a map of the orignal closed route, and the diversion, then in the small print it states that cycling isn’t permitted on the diversion. What is the point of a diversion from a cycling route that doesn’t allow you to cycle along the diversion?

Heading in the westbound direction from the end of the Greenway, there are no signs telling cyclists to dismount. There is the sign above that I very much doubt people are going to read as it’s narrow and the route guides you fairly nicely without the sign to the pedestrian crossing. In this direction I could see any signage that suggests that the wide pavement allows or doesn’t allow cycling until you get just past the junction at the end with the Porsche garage.

Finally there is the TfL official map which shows that section of Stratford High Street as being a shared use cyclepath. (Thanks go to Diamond Geezer for pointing out their availability).

I feel that it is unfair to be fining cyclists when there is contradictory signage and design of the diversion that doesn’t make clear that cyclists should dismount. Secondly assuming that those who are cycling are doing so in a manner and speed that is appropriate for the slower moving pedestrians, especially considering the alternative road conditions that require large diversions, then I don’t see any reason why they should be fined. If it is a case of cyclists going too fast for the conditions such that pedestrians are complaining then I’d hope that we would be able to manage some education, hopefully with some better success than happened recently in Bristol.

On Thursday there was the July 2011 London WordPress meetup in the Headshift | Dachis Group offices. I recorded the presentations and have uploaded them to YouTube:

Ice-breakers & Introductions

Introduction to WordPress by Emily Webber

Beginner Theme Development by Keith Devon

Looking Under the Hood of WordPress by Chris Adams

If you’d like to come along to future meetups, please join the London WordPress Meetup group.

Some of you who were at WhereCampUK, Nottingham in November 2010, may recognise the discussion in this blog post as it is based on my talk there.

Since the early days of OpenStreetMap, people have been bulk importing data into the database. There have been various issues with many of the previous import methods, which I’ll go through, before explaining the latest methodologies to be employed.

First up was the public domain TIGER data in the US, which is produced by the US Census Bureau. It varies hugely in quality from county to county and was seen as the only way to start the mapping in the US. The prospect of the data being imported delayed many people from starting to create the map in the US. However with the data not being great, it is difficult to improve the data as a newcomer, compared to using clean osm data.

There are on going projects to try and fixup the Tiger data. These were kick started by the CloudMade London dev team when it was realised that you could not route from one side of the US to the other, like you could in Europe. Tools were built to help highlight connectivity problems and make the road network routable.

After a Freedom of Information request the Royal Mail released the rough location of all of their post boxes (they didn’t have the exact locations). Matthew Somerville built an app for making it easier to locate all the post boxes and tick them off the list. The post box data from OpenStreetMap is regularly imported and checked against the list of post boxes supplied by the Royal Mail based on their reference number with the lists updated to show which post boxes we still don’t know the exact locations of. Some mappers have gone and made sure that whole postcode districts have all their post boxes in OpenStreetMap. Over time the novelty has worn off when playing the game of hunt the post box, or it has become an distance issue to try and find some more.

Naptan data is the public transport access point database in the UK. It has been generated by local councils using a GPS on the ground. This means that the data doesn’t have any issues with copyright from the ordnance survey, which they would have if they were positioned using ordnance survey maps. The Naptan data has been imported region by region into OpenStreetMap. There have been a few communities who have taken the checking of the Naptan data seriously to ensure that OSM has every bus stop in the correct position. They have often been in contact with local councils or the appropriate Traveline department to improve the original Naptan data where there are errors.

Novam is a tool that was built to make it easier to see which imported bus stops had been edited with various data added. A few different styles were generated as mappers came up with a consistent way that the data should be. It proved a very useful tool when working with local authorities, as they could see why OSM was valuable, and it highlighted the appropriate data. The tool is primarily used by mappers to see where they need to improve the OSM data.

When the Ordnance Survey Open Data was released on April 1st 2010, there was some discussion about how the data should be used. The consensus is that the data should not be blindly imported, rather local knowledge should be used to update the OpenStreetMap data. There are cases where the Ordnance Survey data that has been released is already out of date due to changes on the ground since the data was last collected or released. There have been cases where people have changed the correct OpenStreetMap data for the out of date or incorrect Ordnance Survey data. This is one of the reasons why you need to have local knowledge to be able to get good OSM data. Some tools have been implemented so that OSMers can improve the completeness of their dataset based on OSM. These tools are being used actively to increase the OSM coverage and accuracy.

The Bike Shop Locator was built by Andy Allan and myself as a tool to show a different method of importing data into OpenStreetMap for cases where there is significant portion of the data already in OSM, some of the data being imported may be inaccurate as the shop on the ground either doesn’t exist or has since changed name, and all of the data only having an approximate location to within a post code. The automation of the ticking off of this list is somewhat hard due to the fuzzy matching required for the names and other attributes. Also when visiting an area again to check to see exactly where the bike shop is you’ll spot other things in the OSM data that needs to be edited in the area.

WhereCampUK, November 2010 location:

For the presentation, I flipped between the following web pages in different tabs in my web browser:

• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup/250_cities
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup/250_cities/duplicate_nodes
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Duplicate_nodes_map
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey_Opendata
• http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Naptan
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NaPTAN/Import
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NaPTAN/Request_for_Import
• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NaPTAN/Novam
• http://mappa-mercia.org/novam/?scheme=hull&zoom=15&lat=52.94958&lon=-1.14643&layers=BT
• http://mappa-mercia.org/novam/?scheme=hull&zoom=15&lat=53.74419&lon=-0.3458&layers=BT
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/shop/missing
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/shop/missing.map
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/shop/1076
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/shop/1513
• http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/shop/recent
• http://gitorious.org/bike-shop-locator

With the English bank holiday weekend (Scotland has the August bank holiday on the first Monday instead of the last), I thought that I would go for one of my longer cycle rides and see if I could beat my previous record of 150 miles. On the Saturday morning I packed the 4.5 litre of water, home made pasta, chocolate and extra clothing layers into my panniers. I finally got going at 1pm, which was a lot later than I was expecting.

The first part of my journey was heading north to the River Thames on the Waterlink Way/National Cycle Route 21. Then I followed the Thames to the Woolwich ferry using the NCN4 and 1. I decided to add a little extra adventure to my journey by crossing the River Thames a couple of times. First using the Woolwich Ferry to get to the North bank, which is free. Then following a part of the new Cycle SuperHighway 3, which is a rebranding of the previous cycle path that it runs along, to head east towards my next crossing. To get back to the South bank of the Thames, I used the Dartford crossing. You can’t cycle over, however a free pickup truck service is provided to take cyclist and bike over to the other side.

After a nice chat about traffic and cycling with the traffic officer who took me across, I then re-joined the National Cycle Route 1 most of the way to Whitstable. I decided to follow a straighter new cycle route from just before Gravesend to Strood, which is part of the old A2 prior to it being upgraded.

Shortly after Sittingbourne while following the NCN1, I seen on the right hand side of the road a car with the two door windows smashed a couple of people and another vehicle, which looked rather unusual. I continued further up the road until I was out of sight, as I didn’t know how they would react and then reported the car break-in to the police via a 999 call. As I didn’t know how to describe my current location well, thus I took a photo of the screen on my phone (which ended up against my face while talking thus unable to look at the screen) with the latitude and longitude, and gave the lat/lon to the operator, which worked. On Sunday afternoon I got a phone call from the police following up with some clarifications to the useful evidence. They were pleased that I had phoned in the incident as a witness as most people would have just turned a blind eye.

A bit further down the road I stopped to eat some of my pasta, and suddenly some dark rain clouds came over and the heavens opened. Luckily it was just a fairly short shower and I had managed to find a bit of shelter for it to pass. It did worry me a bit as to how much more rain there would be for the rest of my journey. Luckily once that cloud passed it was clear for the rest of my journey.

From Whitstable I followed the coast, much of which was on the path or promenades that runs along the edge of the sea. As I was getting into Ramsgate at about 2 am after 107 miles, I was getting too tired to be able to continue the rest of the night further round the coast safely, so I found a nice bench and shelter overlooking the sea to put my head down for a few hours. Luckily I had a towel with me that I was able to use as a pillow.

Shortly after 5am I set off again slightly refreshed with the first signs of dawn. The route of the NCN1 down to Deal is quite nice. After Deal however it turns inland a little and into a very long climb that seems to just go on forever. It was nice to be able to get to the top and see the nice view across the English Channel. After a little decent there is the White Cliffs of Dover National Trust site, which has a nice view overlooking Dover ferry port. (Yeah, I’m sure you already know that I quite like travelling by ferry from time to time.)

From there I headed down the short and steep downhill into Dover, the downhill was over way too quick considering the amount of uphill. I then took the train home, going the full length of the straight track from Ashford to Redhill (with a change at Tonbridge). The reason I mention it, is because it does look quite strange or unusual at lower zooms on a map, when there generally is more curves in rail lines.

On the Sunday late afternoon/evening I took a nice 5 hour nap to catch up my sleep, before getting up for a few hours to catch up on a few things before heading back to bed for a full nights sleep.

In total it was 133 miles over 20 hours, which is my second longest cycle in one go. The Dunwich Dynamo was 127 miles including the ride to the start. At some point in the future I want to ride from Dover anti-clockwise round the coast, particularly to try hill out of Dover and the long downhill into Deal. I’d also like to do Dover-Brighton via the NCN2.

You may remember some of my tweets from the end of last year from an accident on my way home from work.

I was cycling past Peckham Rye Park along the London Cycle Route 22 as I was usually doing, a motorist decided to come out of a side road even so he didn’t have priority and had plenty of time to stop rather than me ending up going over his bonnet. Luckily the people in the car behind me stopped and helped, including calling the police and ambulance, unlike the driver of the car that I had the collision with who drove off instead. He did come back to see if I was ok, but needed convincing from the paramedics to stay to talk to the police, who hadn’t quite yet arrived.

I was taken to hospital as a precaution after giving the police a statement while lying on the bed with my head strapped in position. The police took my bicycle to the police station for safe keeping until I was able to pick it up. It turned out that I only had a few bruises, grazes and some shock, so was discharged and took the bus home.

A day later I picked up my bike from Peckham Police station. At this point I found that the front wheel was a little buckled. Thankfully due having a hub brake rather than a rim brake I was still able to ride the bike safely to work and back home. It took 3 weeks to get a replacement front wheel for just short of £100. The train travel also cost an extra £100 that I wouldn’t have have spent otherwise. It was quite nice as the Oyster Pay As You Go had come in just after the accident and turned out to be a bit cheaper than a travelcard based on my specific travel pattern.

After a couple of months I was sent a witness form to fill in, which I filled in and sent off:

Yesterday I got a letter from the Metropolitan Police stating that the court proceedings with incident were completed last week. The result was the driver being convicted of driving without due care and attention with a £100 fine pus 7 penalty points.

It’s good to see that the driver has been given some punishment for not being careful enough with his driving, rather than it being ignored by the police as I’ve heard has happen on many occasions in the past.

Last Saturday I took a train from Selhurst to Milton Keynes and started cycling back home. (At the moment you can get 15% off off-peak Southern tickets when you buy them at least 2 hours before travel, online.) I’d been thinking about doing that cycle since the Milton Keynes Mapping Party back in May last year.

The first part across Milton Keynes to the Grand Union Canal, and then down to Leighton Buzzard went fairly well as the towpath is paved and some of it is part of the National Cycle Route 6. South of Leighton Buzzard however, the towpath turned to grass and for some of it mud. There were patches where it was paved nicely. There was one point the mud had got so bad I had to stop to clean the bike.

Heading through Berkhamstead there were some birds that  really didn’t like anyone going along their path, so had to hop off the bike and walk around them.

Past the M25, and almost into Watford and I find another pile of mud in the path, so I stop to take a look at TrackMyJourney’s map viewer to see if there is an alternative route that may be better. Via the help of the OpenCycleMap (from within TMJ), I seen that there was the National Cycle Network Route 61, that hopefully would have been less muddy. About to move off and notice I had a puncture. So instead of trying to fix in the dark, with a muddy bike to hinder things, I decided the best option was to push the bike to Watford Junction station to get the train home and deal with the puncture once the mud had dried a bit, thus the mud would flake off.

Also on the way to the station pushing the bike I manage to map a couple of missing street names, post boxes, benches, bike parking and found a street name that was mis typed into OSM.

After the first attempt, I found that I had a slow puncture. It was another puncture elsewhere in the tube rather than the repair failing. It was a total of just shy of 40 miles, which is about half of the distance I was expecting to do. Considering that I’ve been doing very little cycling at the start of this year due to the bike being serviced from the accident at the end of last year, and the not so great weather, it’s not too bad. I suppose I’ll have to just postpone my annual maddly long first long cycle of the year until March. I also got a bunch of nice photos to add to the CycleStreets Photo Map, and test a new method that makes it faster to import photos from Flickr. This will mean that there will be photos of the route, when someone plans a journey that takes part of the route that I took.

As part of my recent job search I setup a few job alerts. One of which was with the keyword OpenStreetMap on CWJobs. I wasn’t expecting there to be anything coming up.

Out of the blue a job alert did appear, and it sounds rather interesting, though I have just started a new job at Headshift.

It is for a three month contract, and is asking for some quite high requirements, such as requiring to be security cleared; experienced using Ordnance Survey data; OpenLayer; Python; and optionally Mapnik; OpenStreetMap and QGIS. Based on the job description, I’m speculating that it is a contract for some government job. I’ll let you readers to speculate about the details of the job in the comments.

See a PDF of the Job Advert: 20091214-OpenStreetMap GIS Developer – CWJobs.co.uk

On a side note, I found that putting my CV on CWJobs yielded quite a high number of recruiters phoning, however the recruiters seem to all be chasing for candidates for the same handful of jobs. My current job was found through the help of the wonderful people who use twitter and directly talking to the potential employer.

Yesterday I presented to the Greater London Linux User Group (GLLUG) how to edit the OpenStreetMap data, with a short field trip. Apart from running a little late, I think it went fairly well with some good participation from the audience. Things I’d do better the next time include:

• preparing the slides more, particularly the server side ones for this audience;
• giving the 2 minute introduction to OpenStreetMap, as there were people who didn’t know the basics about OSM in the crowd;
• also doing it as a lab session, rather than rushed example demonstration of the editing before being thrown out of the lecture theatre.

I have made my slides from the talk available below.

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ajc2v9mk3cvb_4cf9wsthd

Yesterday (Saturday) I done one of my rather large February cycles. I didn’t go quite as far as last year’s 150 mile cycle, though I still done more than the 70-100 miles I was anticipating doing. In total it was about 115 miles (the last 4 miles were from Bromley South station home). The total journey time to Dover was about 12 hours. When I set out I decided that my camera would stay at the bottom of the pannier, otherwise I’d spend too much time taking photos, rather than getting somewhere.

The route I took was heading out fairly direct to Faversham, via Bromley, Swanley, unmapped Cobham, Rchester, Rainham, and Sittingbourne. After Faversham I headed to the coast all the way round to Ramsgate, where I hit the A256, and then the A2 to race down the road to Dover to get the last direct train back to Bromley South.

I hadn’t prepared quite enough with my GPS tracking. For those who don’t know I use a private beta of TrackMyJourney on my Sony Ericsson K850i with a bluetooth GPS for most of my location logging and mapping. I know that my main 5Hz bluetooth GPS lasts only about 8 hours, so I got my older, less reliable on cities, GPS partially charged, but not enough to last until the phone ran out of power. After I ran out of power I was using a fast direct route, so it was easy to get the route’s distance using CloudMade’s routing. I did have a GT-11 GPS as a backup, however the 16MB card is too small for my extravagant cycle journeys, though the battery did last for the whole journey. Ah well, couple of lessons learnt.

It’s been great to be able to have live re-routing over the web,  constantly updating my ETA, and the ability download map tiles live, thus able to have the cycle map wherever I am within mobile phone signal range.

I did find a part of the NCN1 to the east of Sittingbourne, where the route took you into a pile of trash at the side of a traveller camp, with no further signage.

I really enjoyed cycling along the coast, I found it quite rare to be able to go for so far that close to the coast, because usually you have private properties next to the coast for much more of the coastline. There was one place where I saw a sign telling cyclists to slow down and give way, where you would normally just get the irritating and unnecessary ”cyclists dismount” sign. I really should have taken a photo of it, but then would I have had to go via London Bridge?

In the future I’ll hopefully get around to cycling from Margate to Folkstone at a more leisurely pace to be able to take in the scenery.