Offmessage

I done gone made a thing – portify converts audio files from any format to one more suitable for your portable player.  For me, sadly, that means converting everything to mp3.

Testers are welcome, particularly on non-Linux platforms, but please be gentle

[youtube http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ]

Homer tries to vote for Obama.  Thing is, we’ve all read enough about Diebold to know this is true, so why’s it in the Simpsons?

Tim Bray highlights Christine Peterson’s talk from OSCON; No Secret Software. As Tim says, we are in her debt (again) for providing us with a powerful rhetorical tool.

(A large part of me hopes that the second commenter was being ironic, given the purpose of this new rallying cry is to dispel the sense that Open Source  is “associated with ill-groomed inarticulate geeks who have odd opinions about lots of things”.)

UK politics makes yet another attempt to claim Open Source as its own.  You tried last year…  What happened?

One of my subversion repositories broke.  Nastily.  I thought that I was going to have to rebuild it and lose the changes that came after the corrupt revision.  I googled for help, and found someone who had written a script to fix my very problem.  I ran it, it worked, I was very grateful.  I blogged about it on the Isotoma blog.

4 hours later the author of the script commented on my blog post. How awesome is that?

…Or how I have come to think that Stephen Fry is in fact a living God.

You sue us, we sue you. The OIN threatens Microsoft with the nuclear option.

heh

I’ve been muttering previously about geocoding in the UK. It sucks. Everything is under heavy (and expensive) license restrictions and the Open Source alternatives are a long way from getting there. Luckily the latest job we‘re working on is an Australian Google Maps mashup (map my adventure, soft launched last week)…

One of the things that we’ve been asked to do is tie points on the map to the State that they’re in. Doug and I had been worrying about this for some time, as we thought that we would end up manually building polygons to represent state boundaries from a map ourselves. But no. Of course, we live in the UK and think that all map data is sacred. In Australia, and a lot of other countries too, the data is freely available and provided by the Government. You can download it yourselves too if you want.

We‘ve been thinking about a couple of web apps for a while that need UK geocoding, but Sleevenotez and Forkd (and some others that we *still* can’t talk about!) have kept us rather busy.

Over Christmas I got the time to start thinking about the next applications and the first thing I started researching was the excellent Google maps API, with a plan to some very basic geocoding. It took me a while to realise that the reason my test code wasn’t working wasn’t that it was bust, but that Google don’t allow UK address geocoding.

Further investigation showed that there’s a very simple reason – the UK is one of the few countries where the geocoding data is not in the public domain (despite being generated with public funds).

There’s a good piece on the current state of play, and the new alternatives, over at The Guardian. Both alternatives (npemap.org.uk and freethepostcode.org) are a way from being a viable alternative to the PAF file, but they’re definitely worth watching.

Luckily one of the two applications we’re thinking of is equally well served by the excellent Geo-Names web services. Quite what we’re going to do about the other one though, I don’t know…