#“Clay Shirky on Git, diffs and Government legislation”
The reason I like Clay Shirky’s talks so much is because he communicates complex “stuff” in a way most people can understand.
Here he ties together Git, diffs and Government legislation beautifully. If you are similar with the law but not Git or diffs, it’s well worth a watch. And vice versa.
#“From tiny CSV acorns, many #OpenData oaks can grow. Now where is Ireland’s CIO/CTO?”
This has been a superb week in Ireland for showing what motivated geeks can do with even the most clunky of Government data. After the Oireachtas XML debacle, it was a joy to see the new Residential Property Price Register site make its data available. Sure, it was poxy old CSV files per year and it wasriddled with errors but I really am pleased with what it triggered.
Within hours of the data going up, we had:
I hope those working on data in the Public Sector take encouragement and ideas from this. Most of what was done took very little work. I’m sure many of the people involved would be only too happy to share their technical approaches.
If we all keep leading by example, I expect the quality and quantity of Public Sector Web Services and Data to improve in leaps and bounds over the next 12 months.
Three years ago next week, I suggested a regular BarCamp called IRLCamp where public sector and private sector get together and present interesting projects, ideas and technologies and learn from each other. I still think we should do this.
Three years later we still need a CIO/CTO for Ireland too.
#“Tats and piercings are so over. True hipsters are now sporting Nose LEDs.”
Get in there quick before the normals get their hands on them. Warning: I’m not sure if they are compatible with large hipster glasses.
#“Visualisation of Irish Property Price Register Data using Interactive Map from Google Fusion Tables”
UPDATE: Second attempt at this:
I just grabbed the three CSV files from the Residential Property Price Register site (why is a Captcha needed for that?). I merged some address columns in Excel and added “Ireland” to all of the addresses. I then just imported into Google Fusion Tables and told it to Geo-Code the data.
Note that zero data validation has been done. Everything on this map may be completely wrong. I’m sure some of the more obscure addresses (or non-unique ones) are missing.
Aha! There are daily limits on Geo-coding so I’ll have to do this over a few days before the full map of points appears. But this is a decent start:
UPDATE 2:
2011 Fusion Table. 2011 Map (this will populate properly over next few days too):
2012 Fusion Table. 2012 Map (this will populate properly over next few days too):
UPDATE 3: Replacement 2010 Fusion Table and Map with Euro symbol correctly encoded:
UPDATE 4: Of course I should have pointed out earlier that the Fusion tables themselves are very useful. You can filter on location, date, price etc without having to fill-out a silly captcha.
Anyone interested in one aggregated Table/Map with all the data from all years in it?
UPDATE 5: As of 16:09 on Oct 1st, the 2012 and 2011 data is 100% geo-coded and 2010 is at 63%. However, based on Brendan’s comments below, we may be missing a lot of data points because Google can’t geo-code them. Once the process is complete, I’ll see if we can extract the missing ones and manually adjust the addresses so that they work. There are also plenty of errors from what I can see.
UPDATE 6: As of 9am Oct 2nd, the final data from 2010 is now geo-coded. Short follow-up post to come on how Google could do far more intelligent and less error-prone geo-coding on Irish addresses without post-codes.
#“Notch makes getting fit a little less po-faced”
Getting fit and losing weight is a very serious subject. But it shouldn’t be. All the talk of burn and crunch and walls and plank and core and bootcamps and weigh-ins would put anyone off. No wonder so many people are obese.
I’ve been reading Scott Jurek’s book Eat & Run for the past while and it’s incredibly inspirational. Not in a happy-clappy sense but in the pure joy of running that leaps off the page. This guy runs 150 mile ultras all the time, including through Death Valley and is a vegan. When I’m running 12 miles slowly around Bandon and staring to fade, I just think about some of the stuff in his book and I recover quickly.
That’s why I found Notch.me so brilliant this week. It takes your Fitbit or RunKeeper info and turns it into a very funny infographic. I think RunKeeper should integrate it into the mobile app. It’s a damn sight more motivational than their robot voice at the end of the run saying “You ran 14 miles in 3 hours and 4 seconds. Your average pace was blah blah blah”.
We need to put joy back into exercise and fitness. I hope Notch.me is just a start.
Click through for the full infographic.
#“APIs, Web Services, Cloud, AWS - Slides from my talk yesterday at #OFFSITE2012”
The first ever OFFSITE event in West Cork yesterday was a big success. I learned a lot from all the other speakers both about technology and business. The real stand-out for me was Ger Keohane’s talk on eCommerce conversions. It was pretty stunning how you can seriously improve conversions to actual purchase with some very non-obvious changes.
I’m really pleased to see the West Cork Development Partnership get into the area of supporting local tech enterprises in addition to all the other areas they have supported over the years. If you are in West Cork and you are thinking about doing anything on the web or mobile, make sure to get in contact with David Tuohy there.
My talk on Web Services and moving to the cloud was a bit of a mish-mash. I was trying to cram a lot of info into 20 minutes. Unfortunately there is no video or audio so you’ll have to try and guess what some of my analogies mean e.g. Pig vs Waifos, FlyLo vs Butlins. Leave a comment if you get stuck :-)
Original on Google Docs:
Also on Slideshare: Coming whenever conversion is complete. Now waiting 2 hours!
#“Harbour Hopping in West Cork - Apple uses Google Maps hand-me-downs”
We’ve had much hilarity online today over the awfulness of Apple’s new iOS6 Maps. I finally just got it installed on the iPad and of course decided to check the local situation. Actually notdisastrous. The golf club is notlabelledas an airship landing strip for a start. But then I spotted something interesting.
Back about 6 years ago, Google Maps was completely useless in West Cork. At one point it seemed to think there was only one road down here, the N71. Andbizarrelyit wasn’t labelled as the N71, it was called “Harbour Hopping in South West Cork”. Seriously, that’s what Google thought the road was called. I never found out how such a ridiculous bug got into the data.
Eventually Google re-mapped the country itself and bought some better data. Their maps around here are now pretty fantastic and Streetview even went up tiny one-car-wide lanes locally.
So imagine my surprise when I saw this on the iPad:
Welcome to 2006 y’all.
#“I’m speaking at the OFFSITE Conference next week about AWS, APIs, SaaS etc”
I mentioned the OFFSITE Conference over on Web2Ireland recently. It’s the frst time a major technology event is being held in West Cork and everyone in business in Munster and beyond should consider attending. It’s all happening next week, 27th September in Rosscarbery.
The title of my talk is “Building on The Shoulders of Giants: How Irish businesses can quickly deliver Enterprise-quality products through the smart use of software services“
The bulk of the talk will be about all the lessons we have learned over the past few years in running the LouderVoice service on a cloud infrastructure and how you could do similar.
Some of the topics I’ll be covering include:
Let me know if there is anything in particular you would like to hear about.
#“Standing Desk Update”
My standing desk experiments have been intermittent but I’ve put some renewed effort in recently due to some back twinges. I finally cleared out the tiny annex office off my main office and changed the standing desk over to my main laptop.
Overall it works brilliantly and is more stable than the previous set of cardboard boxes :-) The floor mat is important to avoid getting sore heels. I either go barefoot or wear the Vibrams when standing.
The main lesson learned is that it’s not something you should do 12 hours a day. Mix it up and make sure to keep moving, don’t stay stationary for long periods. I generally take phone calls sitting down or when I have to read long technical documents. I think trying to read too much from a screen that is a few feet away whilst swaying slightly on your feet is just too hard.
Anyone else been trying it out? Any lessons learned you’d like to share?
#“How the hell did I miss the upcoming shutdown of FeedBurner? Another lesson in lock-in.”
How the hell did I miss the fact that Google is shutting down FeedBurner in October?
I always remember Dave Winer warning all us bloggers back in 2007 that we were nuts to insert a single company between us and our readers.Most of us thought he was being a crank. It turns out he was right.
My big worry is that we will all lose all of our Blog Subscribers. In my case, built up over 11 years. I’ll be optimistic and assume some sort of skeleton FeedBurner service will exist which will 301 re-direct all the feeds to the original sources.
Great round-up piece on the problem by Neville Hobson. Two solutions offered by Dave.
How many times are we going to fall for this before we learn? We see a service that offers us some really nice benefits for free (FeedBurner, Facebook , Twitter, etc etc). Then we choose to ignore what will happen if they go away or change the rules or just break. We decide lock-in is a fair swap for free. Then they go away or change the rules or just break. And we’re left high and dry, swearing never again. Until the next time.
Luckily I’ve only got two blogs left using FeedBurner. Unluckily they are the two most trafficked. I’ll see if I can do the CNAME transition before D-Day and report back.
UPDATE: Someone left a comment on Google+ saying that it is just specific APIs that are getting shutdown, not the overall service. If I can confirm that, I’ll report back. Meanwhile, I’m still going to make the CNAME move.