Andrew's posterous

List the number of times each ip address has accessed the website in ascending numeric order...

grep 16/Jul/2010 access_log | cut -f 1 -d " " | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Who needs Google Analytics? :)

The future is unified, that much we know. Whether you're of the view that there will be a single database of places or some sort of geo-Rosetta stone able to translating spatial information from multiple data sources in The Future there will be a universal service available for disambiguating places. However two significant, and to my mind crucial, things are missing from most of the discussions up until now; Time and Authority.

Time

One mantra trotted out by those selling to geospatial services and products into businesses is that 'everything happens somewhere'. Whilst this is undoubtedly true it is far from the whole picture, but for those talking about and building geo-databases this has all-too-often become the primary mode of thought that informs many architectural decisions. However, if all those hours watching Dr Who has taught us anything it is that Time is important. Geographies are the spatial outcomes of a sequence of temporal events. So, I'd like to propose the following mantra:

'All places are temporary'

It's incredibly easy from our western-centric, immediate, 24/7 culture to bestow some sense of permanence on the places we inhabit, so much so that consideration of the mapping of temporary places is seen to be somewhat esoteric or tangential to 'proper' mapping. Apply any sense of historical perspective though and it's clear that any idea of a permanent place is merely an illusion and that all places are temporary. History provides us with many examples of this: Amarna (a capital of Egypt that existed for but a few years) or the many deserted medieval villages in Britain. But this phenomenon is not limited to the distant past, it's all around us today and is multi-scalar. The building of the Three Gorges Dam in China removed over 1000 towns and villages, from a geographical point-of-view the destruction of the World Trade Center towers removed a significant location, and the change in use of t business premisses changing companies. Any unified geo-service worthy of the name should be able to answer these kinds of questions:

"What was at 31°10'N, 110°50'E in January 1989?"
"How many coffee shops were there in San Francisco one year after Starbucks was founded?"

It's not just the presence or absence of a place that is temporally bound though - every single element including names and spatial extents will vary throughout time. To readers who are aware of models such as CIDOC CRM it should be apparant that what is required is something akin to an event- or process-driven schema. It's far from easy (but where's the fun in easy?), but but will enable us to ask richer questions of our data:

"Which Roman Province was Calais in?"
"What was the capital city of the residents of Bratislava in 1987?"

Yes, the data needs to be present in order to answer these questions, but our unified geo-service must be built upon the principle not of place-as-geometry but as place-as-concept. To be more than just a mirror of existing services any truly useful unified geo-service must be able to accommodate a significant temporal element in its philosophy, architecture and execution.

Next time, Authority.

Next week I'm riding this

100 miles through

(France)

to watch

(Le Tour de France)

(French flag image courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/cplapied/)

(download)

Click here to download:

some-snowdon-snaps-JvECksdoCFHJtDopgAAd.zip (11.83 MB)

from the weekend http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=2692258

If you have built, or are building, a Drupal powered website you should really consider using this - a module that displays information about missing children on your sites' 404 page.

When a visitor hits your 404 page it determines their location, grabs information (name, age, police information, sometimes a photo) from missingkidsmap.com and displays it on your site. Simple, but really useful. You can see it in action here: http://geoparser.andrewl.net/foobar

The module is based on Philip Tellis' Yahoo! hackday project which is written up on his blog at http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2010/02/missing-kids-on-your-404-page.html - I've just added some GeoIP goodness, a bit of cacheing and themeing, and packaged it up in a Drupal friendly manner.

The project page is over at http://drupal.org/project/missing_kids_404 - please try to use it in your next site.

Well it's arrived, and it looks like a boatload of compromise.

A couple of days ago I made my prediction about what the (as then unnamed) iPad would be like. It was hardly a unique prediction but one that will probably turn out to be correct.

I just don't get where you would use it and why you would want one. The iPhone, sure. It is in many ways the best phone out there and undeniably introduced a great number of innovations to a commonly used device. It grew the smartphone market beyond its traditional demographic and the App Store is great - copied but not bettered by both Nokia and Google. Likewise the MacBook is a great implementation of a notebook computer - a de rigeur device for web developers, students and creative types.

But the iPad? This is a new type of device. Where would you need one? It's too big (and maybe too fragile) to casually whip out of your pocket whilst standing nose-to-nipple on the 8:15 to Waterloo. What about at home? Maybe, but would I want to watch an HD movie on a 10" screen when I've got a 42" TV? Or play a game on a device inferior to a PS/3 or XBox? Or have to futz around with a dock and keyboard to edit documents when I can just flip open my MacBook? Or read the sunday papers hunched over a tiny screen?

I know Apple are all about content delivery these days and maybe it's as much to do with controlling the (still) nascent eBook market, but it just seems like it does a lot of stuff much less well than other devices and in an inconvenient form factor.

"We do not take payment until we have items in stock ready to despatch"

And yet this morning I received a message from the payment provider telling me that the payment for this order had be refunded. So, Forbidden Planet International:

• if you say you're not going to take payment until the items are in stock, DON'T.

A cautionary tale.

On my son's Christmas list this year was a Star Wars Clone Wars 'Shaker Maker' - basically a plaster moulding kit of R2-D2 and Yoda. This is what happened when I tried to purchase one from Forbidden Planet International.

December 5th: I went online and eventually found myself at Forbidden Planet International's website. 'Order by 14th December for Christmas delivery' it said on the site (it actually still does say that as of today, December 22nd.) Click-click-click, order placed and the order confirmation email plopped into my Inbox:

But wait, what's that? "Not all items are in stock at all times" It's an online store though, right? Somewhere along the line they'd have indicated that the product wasn't in stock, surely? Just to be on the safe side, I contacted them via their contact form on the website.

December 8th (3 days later): Received reply saying "Unfortunately this is currently awaiting restocks. This is due to arrive on or around 12th December. As soon as we receive these stocks we will process and despatch your order. I apologise for any inconvenience caused by this delay."

December 17th: No sign of Shaker Maker. Sent email asking what the status of the order was.

December 21st: No reply to previous email, no update on order status, no sign of Shaker Maker. Another email sent.

December 22nd: Forbidden Planet have an active twitter account. I tweeted them. They tweeted back suggesting I telephone sales (sure, but when I placed my order I did get an email saying:

December 22nd: Telephoned sales. Was told that the item still wasn't in stock (hey, thanks for telling me), and no they hadn't received either of my emails and would a cancellation be ok?

Actually no, it's not OK. What would be OK is if

• You tell me that a product isn't in stock before I place an order.
• You email people telling them of any delays because of restocking problems
• You fix your email system. You suggest that we contact you via email, but of the 50 or so emails I sent between 17th and 21st December, the only two that 'didn't get through' were ones to you. You're an online store ffs.
• You tell me where I can get a Clone Wars shaker maker on December 22nd.

My advice is to avoid these people like the plague.

I had a problem with a Drupal site I'm working on. Each time I'd submit a form PHP would barf with a "Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet'" MySQL error.

As the site was under heavy development I'd assumed it was something I'd done during the previous couple of hours so set about looking at what I'd done to break it...

...three hours later and I've found the problem. I'd left the Macro module in record mode. This really useful module records all form submissions and writes them to the database so that you can copy them out to a file, and replay them at a later point in time. Unfortunately the module stores every single macro you have ever recorded in a one single field in the variables table...

...until eventually it breaks.

Hopefully this is of use to someone in the future. When I get that free time in the New Year I'll have a look at fixing the module unless someone beats me to it.