Thingomy.co.uk

I arrived. The trip out to the middle of nowhere to visit my aunt was good, I enjoyed it. The travel was not really a problem either.

I was lying down in my bunk in a 4 person shared cabin on the boat, thinking about putting down my sudoku and going to sleep; every 5 seconds everything was going mostly weightless for a couple of seconds.

One of the other blokes from the cabin came in and rummaged about with his stuff for a minute or so, I siad hi, then he went to the bathroom. There was a short delay, then some unpleasant gurgly sloshing sounds. “oh here we go” I say to my self. I was pleased to find I’d just solved all the 5s.

There was another sequence of gurgles, then he oaged out and muttered something about seasickness, not using the bathroom for a bit and getting something form somewhere; he wandered out. By now I was having a great deal of trouble with a 7 and a 9 in the top right block, owing at least in part to the distractions.

5 minutes later a bloke in a uniform wanders in and takes a look in the bathroom; wanders out an comes back with an empty bucket. I was as bemused by his antics as the 7s and 4s in the bottom row. There was some clacking and fidgeting for a bit, and another bloke in a uniform joined him. “If we take that bit off, we may be able to get at it from there” one said to the other, followed by “nah, that’ll have to be done by the engineers in the morning”. I found a 3 in the bottom corner.

In the end it was announced that the guy had thrown up in the sink, and managed to block it, I fail to understand how, anyway, we were moved to another cabin with functional sink. The soduku was finished the next day.

Walking around a boat like that is really fun, as the environment drops to nearly zeroG, and then moves sideways, traction is really quite tricky to maintain let alone balance.

I’m going to be travelling down to Edinburgh this week, and will be stopping by Aberdeen on the way for a couple of days.

I will have no access to anything internet in the meantime. my mobile should work just fine, but it wouldn’t rely on it. It should be good to get away from everything for 2 days.

Packing is done and took about a couple of hours — i’m getting good at that. However packing my data took significantly longer. it seems that they just don’t write software to be portable, even well designed software seems to have considerable issues with you trying to move data from one machine to another.

As for the ferry tonight, it lasts 14 hours, and it’s going to be rather rough, although it should not bee horrific.

The project to map Lerwick in the Shetland Isles off Scotland for OSM continues.

A few months ago, a company called Cloudmade provided me with the use of a gps receiver for the purposes of this project.

Having had someone I know driving around the area for months with the GPS set, virtually all of which would have happened anyway regardless of the presence of the GPS set.

(you may have to link through to the main post page to view the images properly)

There is a lot of data, about 300MB in total, and filtering it was not simple, (I spent a good 3 days up to the oxters in batch files, and even cygwin, thanks to Heliomass for help on that bit) but now most of the gibberish bits are gone, and the data is mostly clean and good. You can see some fully edited data here (please view full size, it really is awesome):

I’ve done a load of work tracing out the roads from the data, there is still some small bits missing, but nothing major. I’m about half way through the process of classifying and labelling everything, below shows just how bad it was before and my progress about half way through:

The town centre — notice that there are roads in entirely the wrong place in the old version:

Wider view of the town, notice a load of new housing on the periphery:

Unfortunately the system takes a while to update, so my last day’s work or so is missing, to follow the updates as they happen, view these links:
narrow
wide