The Open Data logo

I don’t know how many people know about this but the Ordnance Survey now give away astonishing mapping tools as part of their Open Data. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this came out of Gordon Brown enlisting Tim Berners-Lee to see how government could free up data it held to help the economy. I have now used it for postcodes.

Up until now the only way I knew of confirming a postcode inside a London Borough was through the Post Office Address File (PAF) which is resold by people like Quick Address Systems to junk mail (snail-mail) houses for hundreds or thousands of semolians.

If you go to Ordnance Survey’s download page you’ll see Code Point Open which is what I used. Every postcode in the country, it’s co-ordinates and the Administrative district and ward not to mention National Health area.

Currently I’m using it for a CAB website where people can see if they live in the borough or not from their postcode… or which CAB they should go to….

But look at some of the other datasets… it really has some exciting possibilities.

The Government Open Data licence reads just like the GNU Open Source licence – you’re free to use the data how you like as long as you attribute the source and don’t use it for evil. ;-)

So here I have uploaded the remaining 13 panels which start with no. 30 Moctezuma – the last emperor of the Mexica.

The ‘history’ takes a number of non-sequential diversions along topical themes during this part of the series  before returning to feudal europe at the end.

If you haven’t seen any of these cartoons, I recommend that you start at the beginning.

[Some of the panels you may find difficult to read due to the size of print. Remember you can use CTRL + to increase the image size (CMD+ on Apple)]

The place looks nice and it’s relaxed. It does coffee and cakes a lot and clearly expects to have an elevenses crowd. The lunch menu was limited but careful. It didn’t have the feel of comfortable everyday vegetarianism (the proprietor has another restaurant for omnivores in Woodford)… but it was trying very hard. The Buddhist temple next door is their landlord and no meat is a condition of their lease.

I had a crepe with a broad-bean and tomato curry filling with a quinoa, mint, apple salad with roast cashews and cranberries (£6.45) and Zainab had fried tofu satay, peanut sauce, ground peanuts with roasted squash, chickpea, baby spinach, feta and pomegranate salad (£6.45)

The salads were wonderful. They had so many taste firing away on the senses that we both wished the meal had consisted just of that, although the crepe and the tofu were nice enough if a little lack-lustre. We asked if next time we could just have salads.. oh yes, we do that, they said. Wasn’t on the board though.

The deli part is quite an eclectic mix of things at posh deli prices but fans of Friends Foods, the old Buddhist business it partly compensates for, won’t be that shocked. Their bread looked good. They had some fresh stuff like organic butter and lots of jars of jam and bottles of apple juice.

We liked the general vibe. The settee and mushroom stools. The breakfast bar. The tabled area. They’ve kept the garden and even have some funky metal benches out the front (until the Borough make them move them). Let’s hope they find their feet and thrive.

• FontDeck advent calendar
  one annual subscription for 1 font a day :)
• 24 ways
  an article a day till christmas, now also available in print as annual to support Unicef
• appvent calendar
  an iPod/Phone app a day

Enjoy :)

As these slides might contain a few useful points for anyone thinking about getting themselves online for the first time – I thought I’d share them here :)
So here are the slides for a talk I am giving tonight at the ‘Women’s Business Club @44‘ and the download link to the slides as PDF:
↓ download slides [PDF, 8.2MB]

An alt-media project expanding within the constraints of very limited funding (which doesn’t provide for a paid sysadmin) aspires to offer a portal for a variety of ‘community’ managed video channels.

The previous iteration was self-hosted running on Ubuntu Desktop behind a DSL gateway in their office. They’ve since moved to commercial hosting on a non-dedicated server ( http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/rps3.xml ). Additionally but perhaps not a deal-breaker, it is envisaged that the project could eventually lead to a roll-your-own distro.

Their mission commits to open standards, open source, #openvideo, #opentech and thus to use a GUI wherever possible. For this reason they’d prefer to use Ubuntu Desktop to as far as possible limit any divide between geeks and video producers. This would then be administered using Remote Desktop. Any unavoidable use of the command line would be limited to very precisely documented short sessions. The portal is Liferay Community Edition – little known in the UK third sector but used more extensively by grassroots organisations in the US – https://www.liferay.com/ linking to a MySQL database. As an alt-media project security becomes an issue, some of the content on some of the channels is highly likely to come under attack from hackers. When/if hacked they envisage a scenario of an easy-ish restoration process of re-installing the OS and necessary MySQL, openJDK, etc and then loading up latest backups of the database and the portal directory (although in truth they really lust after a mirror to switch over to).

So is this a sensible strategy, or would they be better advised to abandon this degree of openness and go with Ubuntu Server with the administration restricted to yet-to-be-found geeks?

That same studio will soon be off to Edinburgh for Climate Camp

See also his Wikipedia entry
and the Guardian obituary

The free San Fransisco and Bay Area magazine that Brian Wilcox’s work appeared in was Harpoon magazine which lasted 3 years in the beginning of the nineties. Spencer, whose brother worked on the magazine, told me that he has lost touch with Brian but that he was allowed to make up a comic book of his work from the magazine provided it remained not-for-profit.

As an extension of that permission, I offer another B.Wilcox strip featuring his most enduring character Ed. Here is “Ed explains it all for you”

p.s. the link is to a .jpg which you may need to magnify in your browser to see some of the finer detail. you can do that using CTRL + (or CMD + on Apple)