timwarr.net

Do you love Java and have experience with the Spring Framework? Do you have a passion for software design?  Do you want to work for an exciting Swiss based company (Axon Active) doing some cool stuff with transaction data, risk data, geospatial technologies and social networks?  If so please drop me a line (via my contact page) telling me about you and your experience.

We are a international team and working locations are flexible, but you must be prepared for some travel.

No recruiters/agencies please.

I have talked about embedded maps before, but Map Channels have released a new tool, Switch Maps, which allows you to easily embed a maps in a web page.  But the cool thing is that you can select from your map provider of choice (Google, Bing, Open Street Map, Yahoo, etc).

So for example here is one of my favourite spots at the moment with some google contour magic:

And you can embed street view images like this one (an image of the office):

Pretty cool! This kind of picking and choosing from the best web mapping provider for the location/task is perhaps the future…

This snowy image of the UK on 7th January looks amazing:

Photo: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response.  From BBC News

And I love this little story:

Plymouth Ski Centre at Marsh Mills was forced to close on Wednesday due to the icy conditions.

(from bbc news)

What?!

So there are all kinds of rumours flying around today about apple’s immenent release of a tablet type device.

From the geo perspective there is some interesting speculation (initially based on trademarks) on the Vector 1 blog and Geek.com about a new apple mapping application (or platform) coming with it.  Do we have another disruptive mapping technology about to arrive?  Google needs some decent competition in this space and the idea of apple ‘doing maps’ is rather exiting…  On the other hand is it always going to tied to apple’s ‘closed’ platforms?

The Guardian reports:

The government is to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April…..Gordon Brown announced the change at a joint event in London today…In the new year Brown intends to publish 2,000 sets of data…

Is this too good to be true???  We will have to wait until April to see what this really means.

Perhaps this could be a renaissance for Ordnance Survey and massively increase it relevance to the economy and society?  It will be nice to be looking at more of the UK’s home-grown cartography on the web (rather than the bland cartography from Google and Microsoft).

A video of the announcement is here.

Here are the slides I presented.  They are all pictures, so you need to use your imagination!

Taken here.

I really enjoyed the BBC radio programme Archive on 4 – In the Beginning Was the Nerd by Stephen Fry. It is great retrospective in the ridiculousness of the Y2K panic ten years ago and a broader reflection on society’s relationship with and attitudes to computing in the C20. I was working in Local Government in the years preceding 2000 and there were some ridiculous efforts going into Y2K projects. IT contractors were the only winners! It is well worth listening just for revelling in the wisdom of hindsight. Perhaps there is also a pertinent lesson in how the media can poorly understand technology issues but still stir up a frenzy (think about the recent crazy privacy stories on Google StreetView).

So I have started to use Prezi.com (a ‘cloud’ based presentation tool) as I have been interested in any alternative to slide based presenting. The real test was my presentation at AGI Geocommunity. So far it has been well received by audiences and I am enjoying the ’single canvas’ format.  

An introduction video is here.

My thoughts on prezi so far are:

• It is great for sharing your presentation and easy to insert into a blog. In fact it is all about sharing, as soon as you have created a prezi it is shared (no conversions, uploads etc). In fact you can share before you present (great for those projector/beamer failures!).
• It is a great way of working on a single canvas, you can work on a high level structure first and then start filling out the details.
• Editing is tedious! It is a lot slower than working with powerpoint and it takes a while to learn. I now realise how much I use copy and paste! When I need to do something quickly I still use powerpoint.
• It seems to work best when you have a high level view of the structure, zoom in to see some detail, then keep on zooming out again to see where you are in the structure. See these tips.
• Paths can help with a formal presentation, but navigating free-hand is great too.
• It is simple to download your prezi for offline presenting and less stress.
• I will carry on using it (and may even part with some $$$$ for the pro version!)

Give it a go… Happy presenting!

So I have made a (rather late as usual) defection:

I went for the 15-inch 2.66GHz Mac Book Pro

So some thoughts after a few weeks are:

• I feel like a poseur on the train/plane
• I’ve dropped it once and it survived.  Phew!
• I love the slim form (it slides into my bag nicely)
• Windows 7 is really just as good as OS X.  Apple is just better at marketing!
• I’m still struggling to see the benefit of the snow leopard upgrade (apart from a pretty wallpaper of a snow leopard).
• But where it wins hands-down is with the ability to run multiple operating systems (using something like Parallels) which is something every geek needs.  This reason alone has won me over…