Alex Little

I’ve now been back in Ethiopia only 2 weeks and I’ve got back into the way of life here very quickly. Work has been very busy making arrangements for the networking and furnishing of the two new computer labs, ensuring all the necessary equipment has been ordered. Most of the orders have now gone off, the final part is the order for the tables for the labs. This morning I went up to the agricultural college in Wukro to ask them to build the tables for us – the photo above is one of their main workshops, now just waiting for them to return with a quote.

I’ve been spending far too much time in line taxis (local minibuses) traveling between the three university campuses, my office is at one campus and the labs we’re building are at each of the others. So I’ve had little time in front of the computer. In a way this is fortunate as the power supply has been very poor, so I wouldn’t have got much done in my office anyway. We’re also due to be moving the Computer Science dept to the main campus later this week. The new building still has no network connection, so I’m not sure how that will work when the new students arrive in less than a month.

All the traveling around town has given me plenty of opportunity to use my GPS and contribute towards the OpenStreetMap of Mekelle (there was none before). Here is the map as it currently stands (I’ve yet to upload the changes following my trip up to Wukro):

View the ‘live’ version of the map with my most recent edits.

Last weekend I had a few people over to visit and I finally went to visit the second of the only two tourist attractions in Mekelle, Emperor Yohannes palace. Good to finally go, though not entirely sure it was worth the 10 month wait before visiting!

After a little time away from programming and active web development, I thought I’d get back into things by giving myself a little project to create a Google maps and Upcoming mashup.

At the moment it’s fairly basic as I’ve only spent a few hours working on it, but seems to be working well. I’ve deliberately tried to keep the number of options and fields down to a minimum (I know there are far more options and functions I could add).

Enter some search text in the ‘What?’ field, then a location in the ‘Where?’, finally select ‘When?’. All the events matching your search (within a 50mile radius of the location) will be shown on the map. Click on the marker to get more info about the event.

Neither the ‘what?’ or ‘where?’ field are required, either or both may be left blank. If the ‘what?’ is omitted then all events in the area are shown and if the ‘where?’ is omitted then the centre of the current view of the map is used.

All the events are from Upcoming and you can use their interface to add your own event, to then appear on the map.

For the technically minded, the site uses the Google Maps API (including for geocoding the location) and the Upcoming API.

If you know of any other feeds I could use for adding events to the map, then please let me know so I can try adding them.

I’d also be grateful for any feedback, problems or suggestions – just leave a comment below.

After a long time of not doing much (ok, any) development on my Moodle online users map block, I’ve finally had chance to return to the code to make the necessary changes for the block to run on Moodle 2.

It was always going to be tricky trying to maintain this block whilst in Ethiopia, not only with the slow internet connection, but the university firewall blocks many ports and this is my normal internet access point. So now that I’m temporarily back in the UK, I thought I’ve got chance to get back up to speed.

In the end only minor changes were needed to get the block running on Moodle 2. If you’re downloading the block from the Moodle modules & plugins pages, then please check you get the right one (v1.9 and earlier or v2) for your Moodle installation.

If you’re getting the code via CVS then HEAD currently contains the version for v2 and the MOODLE_19_STABLE branch has the version for 1.9 and earlier.

I’ve also set up a demonstration Moodle site so you can see the block in action. Just sign up, and you should see yourself marked on the Google map. You may have to wait until the location lookup script has run before you appear on the map, but this should only be a few minutes.

Please let me know if you have any problems with either getting the block to run on Moodle 2 or with the demonstration site.

Maybe I didn’t need to buy myself GPS after all… (from tecznotes):

Walking Papers is a website and a service designed to close this final loop by providing OpenStreetMap print maps that can be marked up with a pen, scanned back into the computer, and traced using OSM’s regular web-based editor, Potlatch. It’s designed for the casual mapper who doesn’t want to fill their pockets with gadgets to record what’s around them, the social mapper who might be out and about taking notes and comparing them with friends, and the opportunistic mapper who might make notes during a commute or a walk if they had a notebook-sized slip of paper to write on. Finally, it’s designed for the luddite mapper who would like to help the OpenStreetMap project but needs help from a distributed community to convert their handwritten annotations into OpenStreetMap’s tagged data and local conventions.

Since I’ve been back in the UK, although I’ve been pretty much tied to the house, with Amazon now back available to me, I’m able to spend money again. One of the items I bought was a GPS. Originally I was going to be borrowing one from someone in Addis to be able to do some mapping of Mekelle, but since I’m in the UK it seemed to make sense to get hold of my own whilst I was here. I eventually opted for the very basic Garmin eTrex H, thinking that it does everything I would want and I’m unlikely to spend money buying maps to download onto it – the main reason for buying it was to contribute to the OpenStreetMap project.

Once it had arrived my first challenge was getting it hooked up to my Asus EeePC (running Ubuntu) and installing the right bits of software.

For up & downloading to the GPS I installed QLandkarte, which only started recognising my device once I’d also installed the gpsbabel package.

Next I needed a desktop program for editing OpenStreetMap – using the online Potlatch application wouldn’t be a great option for me once back in Ethiopia with no decent internet connection.

I started off by installing Merkaartor but quickly ran into problems. When I tried connecting to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) server to download a map to edit, I kept getting “403: Forbidden” messages. The problem was that the particular version of Merkaartor the Ubuntu package manager installs doesn’t work with OSM Protocol v0.6. I think there may be a version of Merkaartor which works with v0.6, but I’m not generally very keen on installing software outside the Ubuntu Add/Remove Applications

I then tried Java OpenStreetMap (JOSM), again installing from the Add/Remove Apps and I was getting similar problems in being unable to connect to the OSM server. Again the problem was the protocol version.

Merkaartor and JOSM appeared to be the only programs available for editing OSM on Ubuntu (please let me know if there are others), so I had to resign myself to manually installing one of them. I opted for JOSM as it was quite easy to run manually and once installed all seems to be working relatively well.

I do however had a few gripes about the user interface, especially on the small screen of the Asus EeePC. For example some of the dialog boxes are fiddly to expand to get the OK/Cancel buttons to appear. Also, the drop down list of “presets” (the different map features, places of interest, amenities etc which can be added) is too long to appear on the screen, but there’s no way of navigating down to the bottom of the list to see which options are available.

Apart from that, I feel like I’ve got the hang of OSM editing (a little at least) and I’ve managed to add a few new roads. Hopefully once I get back to Mekelle, I’ll be much more productive, especially since I’ll be starting on a blank canvas.

Here’s a Google map with my house and office in Mekelle marked

When I was developing the MSG presence maps we also thought about how we could replace or enhance the BuddySpace custom maps – which give you an office plan and presence icons for who is in the office and where. The original BuddySpace maps worked well, but they were a pain to update when staff started or left – meaning it was often out of date.

As the MSG presence maps were using the Google Maps API, we thought about using a custom Google Map for the office plan. Unfortunately, it remained just a thought and we never got time/chance to actually implement anything.

What reminded me of all this was a posting on the excellent Google Maps Mania blog about a couple of applications using custom Google Maps. The first is a map of the UCL campus, with the buildings overlaid – I really like the option of setting the transparency of the overlay. And the second is an office plan from LaudonTech.

UCL Campus Map:

Office plan:

Now what would be really good is combination of these 2 apps, so at a certain point of zooming in on a Google Map with the campus outline overlaid, you zoom down to the office plan for each building (would need to think about how to cope with different floors) adding in presence info from MSG. How about something like this for the OU campus?

This morning I received an invitation to join Fire Eagle – Yahoo’s location sharing application, so I’ve just been having a little play. I’d actually forgotten all about it since I saw a presentation about it at the FOWA last October and must’ve asked for a beta account then.

On it’s own Fire Eagle isn’t much use – but the idea is that you allow Fire Eagle compatible applications and devices to read and/or update your location, so you only have to update your location once for all the applications to know where you are at any time (subject to all the privacy settings available). So to actually try it out I downloaded the Loki toolbar – which can automatically update your Fire Eagle location based on your (wireless) network connection. Though I’ve installed it on my desktop PC so my location is unlikely to change much (I’ve not moved my desktop PC for nearly 2 years!) – but it did pick up my location reasonably accurately for what I assume is an IP based lookup (I’m actually about a mile from where it autodetects).

The privacy with an application such as Fire Eagle is a high priority (as I remember being mentioned in the FOWA presentation) and there are plenty of ways you can allow different applications different levels of privacy (e.g. how exact the locations are) – but then each application (as with Loki) has it’s own set of location sharing privacy options. All of which seems to make for a mind-boggling array of confusing options (in my mind anyway!).

My main reason in looking at Fire Eagle initially was to see whether we could hook MSG up to it, so your MSG location was auto-updated, so I’ll have a look into the Fire Eagle developer section and see how feasible and quick this will be to get set up.

Google have just launched a browser plugin which allows you to embed Google Earth into your web browser:

Currently looks like it’ll only work on Windows. The video above seems to make it easy to switch from a Google Maps API mashup to a Google Earth API – here’s a example and the plugin download is only triggered if someone selects the ‘Earth’ view.

Not sure if this would really give any great benefit to the MSG Presence Map, but if anyone can give me case when it may be useful then I’ll get it added!

This morning I gave a little presentation about Google Maps at the IET Technology Coffee Morning. It’s a very quick look at some different things you can do with Google Maps…

| View | Upload your own

(update: unfortunately the embedded links don’t seem to have come though on the slideshare version :-/ so you can download the original ppt)