Hacking All over the UK 
There has been a flurry of discussion on various mailing lists recently with the hopeful creation of two hackerspaces in the UK.

A hacker space is a place where people (mainly geeks) can come and use the facilities on offer to collaborate, hack and learn. Usually it's technology based, so there is wifi, computers, and electronics gear but this is not the limit of what could go on. Small grass-roots organisations could use the meeting rooms, people could learn to sew or even build machines and art there. Anything could happen, it just needs a place to nucleate all the talent of the city.

It all started off with a suggestion, from Jonty Wareing, to start a Hacker Space in London on the Open Rights Group Discuss mailing list. Almost immediately a Google mailing list was set up, and more people started getting interested. There are now 80 members of the mailing list and have a meeting planned in a few weeks date to be confirmed. The London crew have since gone even further and have set up a limited company called the Hackerspace Foundation!

The London Hacker space discussion then spawned an offshoot here in Birmingham, with Antonio Roberts setting up another mailing list to try and start a hacker space in Birmingham! Our mailing list is currently at a membership of 25 people, not too shabby for about 3 days! But we need more people willing to get involved, to build momentum, to build a place for us to hack and collaborate in.

If you are interested please join the Google Mailing list for your area:


Say hello and join in the discussions!

For the Birmimgham group a meet-o-matic has been set up, so we can organise a date to meet. Visit meet-o-matic and put in the dates you are available. I will be closing the meet-o-matic on Thursday and announcing the best date for the meeting. The meeting is likely to be held at The Bull Inn (Birmimgham City Centre)(map) It has free wifi, good beer and a nice atmosphere.

Got all that? Good! Now blog, twitter and tell people, friends, family, artists and enemies. As we said we need people to do this, people willing to get their hands dirty.

Goodbye, and see you on the other side!

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I'd just like to say... 
Hi Mum! Look at me! I'm on the interwebs.

My mum has figured out how to subscribe to RSS feeds. Well done Mum.


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2 Years of Mapping in Birmingham 
Now that Birmingham is complete, I did a video party render of all the GPS tracks I could get a hold of for the Birmingham area.

Here is the result



This is the slow version, a higher (time) resolution version is available from here.

This video represents an enormous amount of raw data 398MB. That is also just the GPS data. It doesn't show the ways and points-of-interest associated with them, which is what gets rendered by OSM and is viewable on the website.

Hope you like the video.


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Scraping OSM with Python 
The OpenStreetMap API lets you do lots of things with the OSM data, like uploading and downloading GPX traces. Unfortunately when you download GPX traces the data/time stamp has been removed. If you download GPS traces individually from the public gps list, then you get the raw original (I think) GPS data with date/time stamps.

Now since Birmingham is complete. I wanted to generate the party render for the entire city over the last 2 years. I neede a way to download 170+ traces. I certainly wasn't doing this by hand. What follows is my most hacky python script yet, it will parse a page and look for the GPS trace IDs, then construct a URL to download. You have to change the page to scrape manually, but hey I wrote it in 30mins what you do expect?


#! /usr/bin/env python

'''Python GPS downloaded for OSM'''

import sgmllib

class MyParser(sgmllib.SGMLParser):
"A simple parser class."

def parse(self, s):
"Parse the given string 's'."
self.feed(s)
self.close()

def __init__(self, verbose=0):
"Initialise an object, passing 'verbose' to the superclass."

sgmllib.SGMLParser.__init__(self, verbose)
self.hyperlinks = []

def start_a(self, attributes):
"Process a hyperlink and its 'attributes'."

for name, value in attributes:
if name == "href":
self.hyperlinks.append(value)

def get_hyperlinks(self):
"Return the list of hyperlinks."

return self.hyperlinks

import urllib, sgmllib

# Get something to work with.
f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.openstreetmap.org/traces/tag/Birmingham/page/9")
s = f.read()

# Try and process the page.
# The class should have been defined first, remember.
myparser = MyParser()
myparser.parse(s)

# Get the hyperlinks.
links = myparser.get_hyperlinks()
working = []
final = []
traces = []
nonduplicates = []

for i in links:
b = i.find("user")
print i, b
if b > 0:
working.append(i)

for i in working:
b = i.find("traces")
print i, b
if b > 0:
final.append(i)

for i in final:
parts = i.split("/")
lastitem = len(parts)-1
traces.append(parts[lastitem])

for i in traces:
if i not in nonduplicates:
nonduplicates.append(i)

for i in nonduplicates:
url = "http://www.openstreetmap.org/trace/" + i + "/data"
print url
trace = urllib.urlopen(url)
localfile = open(i, "w")
localfile.write(trace.read())
trace.close()
localfile.close()



Credit - the HTML parseing class was written by Boddie.

I plan on tidying this up (a lot), as it is extremely useful, until the OSM API catches up anyway.



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Birmingham is Complete! 
There was agreement among the mappers of Birmingham in November to complete inside the motorways before Christmas, it was a mammoth task, but OpenStreetMap now has a complete map for the Birmingham area! This is thanks to the hard work of multiple mappers in the Birmingham area, but most of all to Andy Robinson, BrianBoru and Xoff. These 3 guys between themselves mapped more than 75% of Birmingham. My own efforts only managed to contribute about 1.3%!

The announcement by Andy can be found here.

This is not to say there is anything left to do, as there are plenty of things to add to the map. I for one am going to keep adding data.

The next step is to get this data into the hands of people who can use it. Please send in suggestions, or edit the Mappa Mercia page on the OSM wiki to include anything you think is useful.

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