Richard Fairhurst - Slashdot User

Comment This really needs to be a Slashdot poll... (Score 0, Redundant) 371

by Richard Fairhurst on Sunday March 21, 2010 @05:47PM (#31560524) Attached to: If ET Calls, Who Speaks For Humanity?

...with Cowboy Neal as the final option.

Comment We can help! (Score 5, Informative) 235

by Richard Fairhurst on Wednesday March 10, 2010 @06:03PM (#31431700) Attached to: Digitizing and Geocoding Old Maps?

First, ask on the OpenStreetMap mailing lists. There's lots of us who've done this kind of stuff before, and we'd be really pleased to help. I collected, scanned and rectified the Ordnance Survey's New Popular Edition - a complete set of England and Wales maps from the '50s, now out of copyright. It's all available in OpenStreetMap as a background layer and loads of people use it for adding rural roads, rivers, placenamese etc. Others are scanning other old Ordnance Survey series right now. Seriously, we love this kind of stuff. (#osm on OFTC can help too.)

Secondly, GDAL is definitely your friend. It's the most amazing set of command-line tools for rectifying and reprojecting data. gdalwarp and gdal_translate are probably the two you'll use most.

Comment Re:MapMaker vs. openstreetmap (Score 3, Informative) 167

by Richard Fairhurst on Monday September 14, 2009 @05:22PM (#29419345) Attached to: Google Data Liberation Group Seeks To Unlock Data

But there's not a lot point exporting the data if you don't have the rights to use it.
That's what the top-ranked Data Liberation suggestion is talking about - great that we can get the data out; but now allow us to use it elsewhere without fear of being sued for breach of copyrighted.

Comment Re:MapMaker vs. openstreetmap (Score 1) 167

by Richard Fairhurst on Monday September 14, 2009 @05:03PM (#29419103) Attached to: Google Data Liberation Group Seeks To Unlock Data

Try maps.cloudmade.com - there are numerous others. The point of OpenStreetMap is to make the data free so anyone can build a routing site, custom map or whatever - and not so much, in itself, to be an all-singing all-dancing alternative to Google Maps.

Comment Er, not just Google Maps (Score 4, Informative) 81

by Richard Fairhurst on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @09:29AM (#29364877) Attached to: <em>Monopoly</em> Uses Google Maps To Go Live Online

It also uses street data from OpenStreetMap. And, you know, this being Slashdot and all, you'd have thought the "open" stuff might be mildly interesting... maybe a bit more so than "New Site Uses The Same Maps API Seven Million Sites Have Used Before". Still, meh.

Comment Oh cripes, not Daniel Eran Dilger (Score 1) 276

by Richard Fairhurst on Sunday September 06, 2009 @06:35PM (#29334893) Attached to: A Different Perspective On Snow Leopard's Exchange Support

The author of TFA is renowned as one of the least clueful Apple apologists there is, even amongst plain ordinary OS X fanbois. He's also a regular sock-puppeteer, although not a very convincing one.

John C Welch rightly reams him out over this latest burst of idiocy. Worth reading for the headline ("Douchebags fondly eviscerated") and such prize comments as "You'd have to be smoking hobo crack (as in 'ass' not 'rock') to say that without snickering".

Comment Re:local knowedge (Score 3, Informative) 297

by Richard Fairhurst on Wednesday March 11, 2009 @10:17AM (#27149863) Attached to: How To Keep a Web Site Local?

I run our town website. 1,000 registered users but very, very little spam - over seven years I think I can count the amount of spam from China and Russia on the fingers of one hand.

Two reasons. One: a completely bespoke system, hand-crafted from finest dodgy Perl and inefficient SQL. Put simply, if you're not running phpBB or something well-known like that, they're simply less likely to find you. These guys search for phrases like "powered by punBB" to find targets.

Two: postings in the news, events and ad sections require approval before they go live. Postings in the forum don't - but you can only get access to the forum by clicking through a JavaScript "I agree not to be a dick" page, which sets a cookie (yeah, I know, accessibility yadda yadda). So, again, they're less likely to find it because it doesn't show up on Google. (Oh yeah, not having frickin' Googlebot hammer the server is a plus, too.)

I realise this isn't an option for everyone, but the OP sounds reasonably tech-savvy so should be able to do similar.

Comment Google Groups (Score 1) 538

by Richard Fairhurst on Thursday September 18, 2008 @03:45AM (#25051543) Attached to: Best Reference Site For Each Programming Language?

is the place that I find most rewarding for Hard Algorithm Questions.

Regular Google is cluttered up with SEO crap and dear old experts-exchange. Clicking on the Groups 'tab' gets past all that to a load of really useful stuff that isn't indexed by regular Google.

Of course, you have to wade through the Usenet kooks, but hey, at least that's more fun than paywall sites.

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