july 2002 archives

Sunday, July 28, 2002

Subscribed for the SVG developers mailing list the other day: about a hundred e-mail on Friday alone! Not very constructive discussions either... Will just read them online instead of having every new post sent to my mailbox. I would like to follow things closely, but this is just too much. At last we got a copy of the O'Reilly book on SVG!

Friday, July 26, 2002

Webmapper.net is back online. Not everything is working yet, but this will be shortly corrected. Bear with me, while you encounter the 404 pages. Anyway, most of the time those are more interesting than my ramblings...

Thursday, July 25, 2002

Just to fit back in here in the UK, there is the “Dictionary of English slang and colloquialisms of the UK”, a real web-gem. Very funny and helpful.

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

Back from mainland Europe, and missing it! Finding myself back in the UK is a harsh realisation. Ah well. I'll just hang in there. Before I go into the latest and greatest thoughts I have on SVG, there is another funny thing happening in the world called “mapping”: the accurate centre of Great Britain is a lively thread on the CartoSoc mailing list.

A man by the name of Charles Howard is claiming to have spent the last 40 years calculating the accurate centre of the mainland of Great Britain, not including any island masses such as Anglesey, IOM, IOW or Scottish islands. He has purchased a field near Stone Edge, Ashover, near Chesterfield in Derbyshire which he claims is the 'Centre Point' and now wishes to build a large visitors centre, 60 bed hotel and health spa.

This had resulted in a list of centres, amongst others the small town of Allendale Town in the North Pennines (OS Landranger Sheet No. 87 Grid ref 8355), marked by some sort of monument in the church graveyard. On the OS website, the “Geographical Facts” state "...Centre of Great Britain - Mainland only 5.5 km SW of Clitheroe. Between Whalley, Billington and Calderstones Hospital. Grid Reference: SD 72321.72 36671.1...". The obviously highly-accurate Bartholomew/Collins database has a centre of gravity for mainland Great Britain at NGR 372038, 437646, just north of Calderstones Hospital, Whalley, BB7 9PE, to the south west of Clitheroe. Stone Edge near Chesterfield is at least 93 kilometres to the south-east of this point!

Harper Collins were asked a while ago to establish the centre of gravity of the United Kingdom (i.e. including relevant offshore islands and Northern Ireland) which rounded on a bridge over the M6 just to the north of the Lancaster University campus. But the most curious of all, noone has ever heard of a cartographer Charles Howard before...

Friday, July 12, 2002

Just to warn you all, this website will become unavailable from 14 July. My website has been hosted for the last 5 years on a server in Warande, Zeist. Since the infrastructure is going to change, I have to go and find another provider. I already have some thoughts, so it shouldn't be too long that this website is unavailable. Thanks a lot Roel for hosting my website!

Tuesday, July 09, 2002

Another comparative “study” into online travel directions services, this time from the Wall Street Journal: “Cranky Consumer: Planning That Road Trip Online May Be Trickier Than You Think”. Unfortunately you have to subscribe to be able to read the full article.

The goal of the article was simple enough: leave from the New York office of the Wall Street Journal for a four-day getaway in Atlantic City, N.J., and Cape May, N.J., with a few detours (such as find a good lobster shack, play skee-ball on the boardwalk, etc.) There is an interesting table at the bottom of the article summarising the findings:

Company	No. of driving steps	Disclaimer	Points of interest	Map quality	Comment
American Automobile Association	59	"Directions provided solely as a guideline."	Couldn't find Lobster House in Cape May, or Flipper's, the dinky boardwalk arcade up the coast.	Classic AAA "TripTik" format with directions along right and maps on left with highlighted route and helpful info about construction snafus.	Top Choice. One of only two to find the ferry from Cape May to Lewes. The construction info was a plus, too.
MapBlast	41	It's a "rough guideline. Please be sure to call ahead to verify the location."	Couldn't locate Lobster House or Flipper's -- but has a "yellow pages" feature for address searches (which we hadn't seen).	Line maps are clear and easy to follow. Too bad ours didn't print out all the way.	Lacking a compass, we got lost in Atlantic City when the map said to go "north." On the plus side: It's the only other site to find the ferry.
MapQuest	49	"MapQuest and its suppliers assume no responsibility for any loss or delay."	Only one to locate everything we wanted (but sometimes the driving directions were wrong).	Offers choice of overview map with directions or turn-by-turn maps with text. Also, will remember your destination choices.	Found the Lobster House (but the directions were wrong). Also mapped the longest drive from Cape May to Lewes: 4 hours.
Yahoo Maps	59	"It's a good idea to do a reality check and make sure the road exists."	No luck finding the lobster restaurant, Flipper's -- or the town of Lewes, Del.	Click "enlarge" before printing or end up with a tiny map.	Concise directions, but couldn't locate all the places we wanted to go.
RandMcNally	63	"It's always a good idea to consult a printed Rand McNally map or road atlas before you start."	No dice on the restaurant or Flipper's either.	Print options in color, grayscale or black and white. Choice of overview map or turn-by-turn map.	Data Overload. Too many steps made map-reading a chore. But graceful Web site made mapmaking easy.

Thursday, July 04, 2002

There are quite some interesting consumer reviews for Multimap.com, especially regarding the travel directions service. Other websites discussed are Mapblast and Mapquest.

Hmm... Even the Blogger edit interface shows some glitches in Mozilla. It's the first time me using this browser. Very embarrassing: the layout of my website has completely vanished viewing it in Mozilla, whereas no browser does a better job of standards compliance according to The Web Standards Project. Requires some researching. Will get back to you on this later...