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OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.
An animation showing edits to the www.OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world and this animation displays a white flash each time a way is entered or updated. Some edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official data.
OpenStreetMap started in 2004 and the rate of contributions is accelerating with four times as many people contributing to the project in 2008 compared to 2007. During the year, edits were made by some 20,000 individuals and there were bulk imports of data for many places, including the USA, India, Italy and Belarus which are clearly visible in the animation. (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potential_Datasources)
This animation was produced by www.itoworld.com. It is licensed CC-BY-SA and can also be downloaded if you are logged-in. Various stills are available from http://www.flickr.com/groups/itomedia/pool/. The music is ‘Open Electro’ by Vincent Girès’ http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/silence and can be downloaded from http://www.archive.org/details/silence-silence.
ITO World provide free online support software for OpenStreetMap (http://www.itoworld.com/static/osmmapper) and also provide online mapping services to organisations and individuals.
Developed with support from ideasintransit.org.
I love visualisations because when well done, they can show complex information. I’m in Tbilisi Georgia talking about new media with journalists and people working with NGOs in the Cacaucus. This is so powerful.
Suw Charman, London Copyfighters’ Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop speeches at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London by Cory Doctorow
For Ada Lovelace Day, it will probably come as no surprise that I’m choosing to blog about Suw, my wife and mad ninja geek soulmate. Suw came up with the idea for Ada Lovelace Day because she often went to conferences where no women were on the panels, even though she knew plenty of incredibly talented, intelligent women who would contribute to the discussion about technology and social media.
As she said when she launched Ada Lovelace Day:
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised.
It’s not necessarily a lack of women in technology that Suw was mourning, but a lack of visibility.
Suw also wanted to highlight the contributions of women in technology and science so they can serve as role models for girls. I’m from the US, and it’s long been known that girls start school with strong math skills but lose interest in their tweens, mostly due to social pressure. Suw said that the situation is similar here in the UK.
One of the reasons I chose Suw is because I think she’s a great role model for girls who want to study technology and science. When Suw and I first started dating, I remarked to a friend that she was probably the first woman I dated who out-geeked me, and while that might sound like typical male insecurities, I love her for it. Being a geek is not just about skills and knowledge but also about passion, and she has a passion for knowledge, not just in terms of computers and the internet but for all kinds of knowledge, whether it was the geology she studied at university, physics or psychology. Her curiosity is limitless, and if we share a common failing it is that we’re so curious about nearly everything that we sometimes find it difficult to focus on just one thing. She is a keen observer, and she quickly turns from noting a trend or a pattern to asking deeper questions about the underlying causes and motivations driving that trend. She wants to understand the world around her.
She also is a pioneer. I felt like a blogging charlatan when I met her. I started blogging in 2004 at the request of my editor at the BBC. I quickly fell in love with it, but Suw had been exploring blogs and other forms of social media long before. She set herself up as a ‘blogging consultant’, and many people told her that she couldn’t make a living with it. But she has, largely because she was years ahead of the curve of blogging and social media consultants that have sprung up in the past few years, and she remains ahead.
One of the things that keeps her ahead of the curve is not just her knowledge of the technology but also a deep understanding of people’s relationship to the technology and how social motivations influence our use of technolgy. I think the psychology of social media is fascinating, and I think Suw’s understanding that the fundamental human need to not only express ourselves but to communicate drives so much of the current trends online and on mobile.
She’s also a doer, and I think that Ada Lovelace Day proves it. She realised that highlighting women’s contributions in technology is important, and instead of getting frustrated, she did something, something that she hopes to build on. For all these reasons and more, that’s why I have chosen to blog about Suw Charman-Anderson, my wife and someone who I think is not only inspirational to girls looking to become tomorrow’s technology leaders but someone who inspires me.
more about “One year in 40 seconds on Vimeo“, posted with vodpod
I just love this video. It’s almost meditative. I remember growing up in rural Illinois how I used to mark time in seasons, planting in the spring, the corn growing in the summer and then harvest in the fall. I miss that languorous sweep. Now, time seems to rush by without any particular rhythm. Taking a minute to think about it, I guess it’s a bit ironic that an entire year compressed into 40 seconds reminds me of that slow seasonal sweep of time. It takes a pause of less than a minute to remind me of the slow passage of seasons.
Thanks to Adrian Holovaty for Tweeting this to my attention.
Suw’s MacBook under destruction, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.
I actually deconstructed Suw’s old MacBook even more than this. At one point, to get at the inverter cable, I had to take out the hard drive (easy), the DVD drive (not quite as easy), and take apart the screen (quite difficult). The inverter cable, display cable, mic cable and iSight cable are crammed in a channel from the display very tightly. It’s no surprise that the display was flickering before finally giving up the ghost.
It took three or four hours and a lot of concentration and patience to put this all back together together, but now, it’s even better than the original with faster processors. I’ve got a temperature sensor programme telling me that it’s keeping itself cool. After 24 hours, everything seems in order, apart from the up key, which doesn’t seem to work. No worries, that is what two-fingered scroll is for. Thanks again to iFixit.com for their wonderful repair guides.
And here she is, running happily again. However, Suw and I agreed to rename her, Lazarus. Is there a feminine version of Lazarus? Lararina?
The Daily Show gives people tips on how to get a message to the White House. (And how to get any video into WordPress.com using the lovely Vodpod bookmarklet/plugin.)
more about “How to get a message to the White House“, posted with vodpod
For all of my friends who believe that I’m a well-adjusted geek, you might want to look away for a moment.
Suw and I recently bought a terabyte of drive space so that we not only have fast, modern hard drives but also so that we can back up all of our crucial files. It also allowed me to take Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux that I had on two small and slow drives and put them on a single dual-booted drive. I was able to simply clone the Windows drive using MaxBlast from Seagate. However, I wasn’t quite able to clone my Ubuntu drive because I wanted to change from Ext3 to ReiserFS file system, and despite Ubuntu’s alternate installer having a way to copy an install from an existing partition, it just wasn’t clever enough to copy the partition when they weren’t the same file systems. I also tried ArsGeek’s directions on how to use dd to clone the drive, but I also ran into the same issues in terms of different file systems.
I wondered if there was a way to effectively clone an installation by exporting the packages that I had installed. A quick Google search found a post that said it would be easy, but that didn’t quite work. It never generated the file of installed applications. I also tried to use the Synaptic installer to create a script to install the marked applications. Again, promises, promises, but the script was empty no matter how many different ways I tried to select things.
However, I found several posts that suggested simply that I run the following command:
dpkg --get-selections > some file name
That managed to generate a list of all of the packages I had installed. I read some other suggestions about command line options to install all of those packages, but I actually just ended up using Synaptic. Under File, there was an option to read the file of installed apps that I had created. I might have even been able to do it all in Synaptic, but this method worked the trick. It’s now happily installing 254 packages that were on my old installation. After I sort a few more settings and copy over the old files, and I should have new life for my old Ubuntu installation.
Can somebody find the Technorati monster please?, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.
When you do find the Technorati monster, please put him back in his server cage. He’s been getting out too much lately.
Suw’s MacBook under destruction, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.
This would have been a perfect rainy bank holiday Monday project, but with great enthusiasm, I started the project to replace the logic board last week. Unfortunately, the connector from the inverter to the logic board appears to be fused. In trying to unfuse it, it ripped off the connector on the logic board and stubbornly refusing to unfuse itself. Now, I am going to go ahead and replace the inverter and get a new inverter cable. I’m still pretty sure that I can put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but it’s never nice encouraging when you’ve got to pull short in mid-repair. Wish us luck.
…of control.
Steampunk (photo by vonslatt), originally uploaded by pashasha.
Suw has started a making jewelry as a hobby. It’s something to do with her hands, and it’s a break from working with a computer. I need something else to do until we move to a place where I can hike and paddle a canoe again. Via BoingBoing, I’ve marveled at these steampunk creations, and I’d really like to have an outlet for my creativity. I’m thinking that steampunk might just do the trick.
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