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Geotagging my Flickr photos

2006-10-24T21:46:00Z

Tonight I finally got round to adding my photos to the Flickr mapping feature. I guess I got inspired by taking and uploading my first photo using Zonetags with my phone (Nokia 6680) and my Holux bluetooth GPS receiver.

Zonetags

Zonetags is a trivially easy-to-use beta-ish application for Series 60 Nokia smartphones that acts as a wrapper for the standard camera software. It can record the cell id (I think it uses the last known value if you’re not in reception) and attach it to each photo you take. You can also connect an external GPS device to add much more accurate longitude and latitude information to the photo. Once you have taken a photo you’re asked if you want to upload it to Flickr. If you do, Zonetags can optionally add action tags to do things like rotate your photos as well as suggestting extra tags based on your location and the tags that other people have given to nearby photos.

For example, when I uploaded a photo coming down from Snowdown at the weekend, “Caernarfon” and “United Kingdom” tags were added along with the geotagging and celltagging ones. Over time, this could get really smart.

Unfortunately, my camera can’t use my bluetooth GPS. I think as a workaround way of geotagging those photos, I might also take one with my phone and upload it with private permissions via Zonetags (to get the geotags into Flickr) and just replace the photo with the better camera shot when I get back to a computer. We’ll need to wait and see if that is too much of a pain in the arse to be practical when out in the hills though.

Flickr map

I’ve wanted something like this for a while now - being able to browse photos by location is nifty stuff. It’s super easy to get photos on the map (if you’re using a supported browser, of course…), but I find it is limited by the poor quality of the maps, at least for most of Scotland. Of course, Flickr can’t help this and it will improve given time, but it would all be so much cooler if the maps I use most were worth looking at! There are 3rd party apps that are more accurate or you can hand geotag the photos with the lat/longs yourself and import them instead, but I haven’t bothered looking at any of those options yet since my priority was to just get them all geotagged.

In some crazy alternate reality where I actually have some spare time, I will use the Flickr API in my desktop mapping software to give the same functionality in a faster and much more detailed environment. That’s after re-writing it so that it’s not just a prototype, adding in GPS tracklogging and a million other neat things… sigh.

The good

Flickr map is very cool, I like it
Zonetags is very cool, I like it

The bad

Yahoo! Maps isn’t as good as Google Maps
Yahoo! Maps is vastly inferior to Google Maps
Scotland has pish quality maps - ces’t la vie
Zonetags doesn’t allow you to change your mind and upload a photo you previously took with it - pretty poor
My phone/bluetooth/software combination only allows one phone -> bluetooth connection at a time

The ugly

The admin map interface doesn’t work in Opera - boo

From that list it looks like I’m not too positive about this stuff, but that couldn’t be further from the truth - it’s excellent and is going to keep getting better.

Update (26/10/2006)

I forgot to mention that I was a little annoyed that Flickr didn’t add geotag tags to my photos when I added them to the map. Last night I found this excellent bookmarklet which embeds Google Maps into Flickr, giving you much more accuracy. It totally rocks. Or, it will totally rock if it starts to work in Opera. For now it just rocks. It adds the geotags as well as giving your photos a link to Google Maps (you can see the singletrack!). There is a little discrepancy between Yahoo! and Google Maps (about 100-200m), but it is definitely preferable for me to use Google Maps for the forseeable future. Now I need to go back through my photos again…

Loch Treig hills

2006-09-17T18:15:00Z

Another weekend, another day in the hills. The weather was awesome for a round of the Loch Treig munros - I got a suntan while my friends in Edinburgh were contending with fog. Wicked.

The second third of Ramsay’s Round was a total contrast to last weekend. Setting off from Fersit, I trudged up the pathless, boggy and heather covered Stob Coire Sgriodain (which has lovely views to Loch Treig, once you get to the top), then nipped over to Chno Dearg. I descended by the stream near Meall Garbh, but I think I will try just dropping down the ridge, or maybe the stream, from the top of Chno Dearg next time - it would probably be about the same and would shave a little off the distance. Climbing to Beinn na Lap was gentle and straightforward and I expected to have the top to myself. Instead, I arrived at the same time as a party of about fifteen who went on to celerbrate someone’s last munro. I politely declined the champagne and headed down through more bog towards the fireroad and rail tracks below.

From there, a lovely few kilometres of scenic track got me to the bottom of the vague ridge that climbs Stob Coire Easain. Really, I was a bit dumb - I should have carried on along the track until I got to the bottom of the Stob Ban descent, so that I could have climbed the same route as when running the whole round, but I was starting to feel it a bit and I just wanted to get back to the car. As it turned out, I was hit with a severe bout of tiredness on the climb, like I experienced on Ben Macdui a few months ago. After some food and five minutes off (and some digestion time) I felt a bit better, but it felt like a long climb up into the clouds. Stob a’ Choire Mheadhoin, the final hill, was nice and easy but the descent was not. It involved far too much traversing for my liking, which game me a really sore ankle. Eventually, enough was enough and I dropped down to the east and ran round the dismantled tramway back to the carpark.

So, mixed reactions to the day but generally all positive - made me realise that I really, really need to sort out the eating/food situation for longer runs and I would like to work out a better descent route to Fersit too. On the other hand, I wasn’t that tired when I got back to the car, having done a little over twenty miles and about 7500 feet of ascent, so I’m definitely getting fitter. Which is just aswell, because I’m starting to realise that this Ramsay’s Round thing, even without a time limit, is an absolute monster!

Google Earth KMZ file

_{I suspect the distance is over-estimated. I should really be using an SVG here, but some folks use IE (and I doubt they’d want to install the plugin).}

Ben Nevis to the Grey Corries

2006-09-13T21:18:00Z

Last weekend was glorious weather so I dodged home early from the pub and went running in Lochaber on Saturday. The plan was to run about a third of the Ramsay Round as a recce for next summer and just a good day in the hills.

I woke later than planned (didn’t dodge away that early) and only managed to start running from the Ben Nevis car park around 11am. The Ben seemed even busier than usual, with around a hundred people on the summit who were hip-hip-hooraying about something, so I was really glad to start dropping down to Carn Mor Dearg. After going off in a spak direction, I got to the arete which was rocky so I took it easy (I’m a bit soft when it comes to running on rocks). Steeper terrain leads down and then back up to Aonach Mor and Aonach Beag (water available at the bealach), which provided a great view of the approaching Grey Corries and the Mamores, which are the final stage of the round. Descending from Aonach Beag provided a bit of steepness and could perhaps be tricky to find in poor weather, but the Grey Corries involved less vertical action and were straightforward, despite the rockier ground and me feeling tired, until coming down from Stob Choire Claurigh when I got lost on a grim boulder field. Climbing Stob Ban was short but a three steps forward, two steps back affair and I was very glad it was the last hill. On the home stretch now, dropping down to the lairig was a complete joy - soft earth and heather made for a fast and delightful contrast to the rocks from the rest of the day, which just left the 7km downhill firetrack to the road.

As I approached the road, the light was fading fast and my plan to hitch back to the Fort (and the car!) was looking dubious. I was especially concerned as I realised I had left all my money in the car and that my phone had no battery left. I wasn’t really looking forward to having another ten miles to cover. Fortunately, I spied some walkers just getting in their car.

“I wouldn’t normally do this” I lied, “but I was wondering if you can give me a lift to Fort William.”

They were a little taken aback, but fortunately they were cool and had recognised me from the ridge (they were going the other way and had decended from Stob Coire Easain). After a decent chat about hills, I was back at the car and went direct to the chippy then necked a can of Red Bull for the drive home. Forty-five minutes later I was asleep in a lay-by. I woke up at 2am, headed home and sunk into my bed - I was knackered.

Migrated blog software (yet again)

2006-09-12T20:47:00Z

I’m checking out Mephisto just now, RSS/Atom readers might have just got some double posts - sorry! I’ve written some more mod_rewrite rules so most of the important old URLs should work fine and, to be honest, I don’t care about any of the more obscure ones.

Recently, I’ve hardly had any time to write here and I hate switching blog software - so why have I done it yet again? Mostly to abandon the downright abysmal Typo and Mephisto offered a simple migration process away from that. So far so good, but we’re a whole two hours in…

We’re also (thankfully!) at least considering using Rails for some projects at work and every little helps when getting back in the swing of things.

My phone is broken

2006-08-22T10:14:34Z

If I don’t reply to any calls or messages for the next wee while, I’m not being super-rude. Thanks to a combination of bad luck and me just being an arse, I managed to drop my phone on the road and have a car run over it this morning on the way to work.

What a donkey.

UPDATE: fair play to Orange – they got me a new phone within twelve hours of me reporting it to them. My numbers are backed up to my Mum’s computer, so I should be able to get them this weekend. I’ve only just noticed you can store the numbers to the memory card, which is much more useful than the phone memory.

I don’t spend much of my life crossing the road or dropping my phone. For both to happen at the same time seems a bit unlucky!

Fast forward in Opera

2006-08-13T11:47:22Z

Fast forward is a totally wicked feature in Opera which allows you to use the forward button/gesture/whatever to navigate to the next page in a sequence. Something like the next lot of search results or the next page in a tutorial. You can also use the space bar to page down and it will automatically forward you to the next page when it hits the bottom. Pretty cool.

A file called fastforward.ini provides the config for this (in Gentoo it is in /opt/opera/share/opera/ini/). In order to make fast forward work properly with PHPBB based forums (I want fast forward to go the next page in the thread, not the next thread), I brought the weighting of the next <link> to below 100. This seems to fly in the face of the default setup which ranks it with the highest score. While this is understandable since the link element is for navigation, I’m not that convinced by some of the poor uses of the link element I’ve seen.

Remapping caps lock (again)

2006-08-13T11:11:05Z

I was using xmodmap to re-map the caps lock. I’m not sure why – a better way, which means it also works on the console, is to alter the keymap file. For me (using Gentoo, UK keymap) this was as simple as:

cd /usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwerty
gunzip uk.map.gz
vim uk.map (change “Caps_Lock” to “Escape”)
gzip uk.map
loadkeys uk.map.gz

Cairgorm 4000ers

2006-08-07T22:45:30Z

I ran the 4000 foot hills in the Cairngorms yesterday (Braeriach, Cairn Toul, Ben Macdui and Cairn Gorm). It’s the classic and most obvious round in the Cairngorms and was one of the best days I’ve ever had in the mountains. Brilliant running and definitely recommended.

Although it’s far from being a properly long run, it was a spot on introduction to longer distances in the mountains for me. I took it steady, but felt pretty good and definitely had some more miles in my legs (although maybe not too much more ascending…). I’m totally hyped for this stuff and I’ve got some cracking monster days out in the works for next summer.

The Scottish Hill Runners website reckons it is 25 miles and 7600 feet of ascent, but I parked a bit closer and so probably did a couple less (but I also took in Sgor an Lochan Uaine, which I don’t think they counted).

Google Earth KMZ file – Nodds, please let me know if this works for you
Online SVG – if you’ve got a crap browser, you’ll probably need a plugin

What an excellent day out.

Arkle and Achnashellach

2006-08-01T21:17:12Z

Stuart and I headed up to the north-west for couple of days biking at the weekend. We made good time to Ullapool on Friday night but then arsed around so much looking for somewhere to sleep that it was 2am before we parked the van on a little pier near Achiltibuie and drank some of Stuart’s very nice, posh whisky. There were some spooky noises coming from below the pier when we were bivvi-ing, which I swear weren’t because of the whisky. As expected, it was a brilliant place to wake up and we were hyped.

We’ve had a route up that way on the hit-list for more than a year and were super excited. It comes recommended on a website as well as a bunch of forums and we also had a personal recommendation. So it was a real pity that it was totally shite. The views were moderate and the trails were dull. And, no, I don’t mind hiking with my bike. Admittedly, I’m a self-confessed mountain bike snob, but I couldn’t really recommend it. Perhaps worth doing if you’re in the area and can’t get to Torridon, but definitely not worth the drive. Still, it was another day in the hills, which is never a bad thing.

In case anyone’s interested (but more importantly, because I’ve got a cool new toy!), here are some files from the route. This sort of stuff would be much cooler if Scotland had decent aerial photos:

Tracklogs (GPX)
Google earth/maps (KMZ)
SVG once GPS Visualizer stops throwing 500 errors

I’ve left the section where we missed a turn in there – it’s tricky to spot (or at least it was for us) and it might help someone.

On the way out we found a large shed/barn which was clean, sheltered from the ever worsening weather and accomodated us, the van and two cheery, chirping birds with acres to spare. After a wash in the river, we managed a quarter of the monster tin of 100 hot-dogs (thank you Phil sandwich!) and a plate of pasta before crashing out. Stuart liked his bivock (bivvi-hammock thing).

On Sunday we headed down to Achnashellach for a route that I had spotted on the map on my last trip up there – Gleann Fhiodhaig, west to east. It’s a nicer route than Arkle – a little climb, then ever so slightly downhill singletrack with just a little too much lumpy grass to have to contend with to be really good. Not as good as some of the other rides up there, but probably still worthwhile and with some fun, muddy singletrack to get you back to the road. No GPS data for that one, I’m afraid – managed to run out of phone battery half-way round.

I felt like I hadn’t been up north for ages and it was a great weekend. I need to see about getting a couple of long weeknds away before the summer is out – this recent rain has got me all keen to squeeze what I can out of the rest of the summer.

Les Arcs

2006-07-17T13:22:00Z

Dave, Karl and I went mountain biking in the Alps. It rocked. Here are some photos.

Notes:

Big hills.
Sore fingers.
Everything’s expensive.
When there’s a storm it really goes for it – take a jacket!
Don’t need full suspension (although everyone has it, except me).
Nobody rides up the hills (except me).
The best trails are unmarked. Spot them from the lifts, then find ‘em.
French girls are lovely.
The French are lovely.
Riding singletrack is still brilliant.

Ring of Steall

2006-06-18T10:52:00Z

Ran the excellent Ring of Steall with Tweedley yesterday. It starts from Glen Nevis, goes through Steall Meadow and up onto the ridge behind the waterfall, taking in a bunch of tops before dropping back down into the Glen. It’s been on my hit list since last year so it was extra-great to get it done. We both felt OK fitness wise, but the start the ridge was a bit too rocky for decent running (although Mike seemed to manage to float over the rocks on the descents pretty well).

The only real let down was that Mike’s knee started playing up on Sgurr a Mhaim, so he dropped back down to the glen early (or not as it turns out). I necked an energy spunk and went up Stob Ban and down that ridge instead, mistakenly taking in an extra munro. If I’d bothered to look at the map, I would have realised there was only one more on that side of the ridge and headed over that way while I was up there (shrug).

It was a quality run though and I’m pretty psyched for more.

Here’s a Flickr set for some photos. Mike has a few words and few more photos too.

The hell of mobile phones

2006-06-13T23:15:00Z

I upgraded my phone yesterday. Although I was due for an upgrade a month ago, it’s taken this long to muster the courage and enthusiam to go into the phone shop. To be honest, if my old phone battery could survive being on for a couple of days I wouldn’t have bothered, but it was becoming frustrating.

It was all going too well – I had decided what phone I wanted and I was totally happy with my current contract. No problem. Then I was told the phone I was after was only free if I was a new customer. Seems like Orange (or any of the others, I’m assured) don’t value their existing customers as much as new ones (although I ended up sticking with Orange, so maybe they’re onto something). The pain began.

The sales drone explained how keeping my old tariff was tantamount to genocide and proceeded to rattle off deal after deal – minutes, texts, magic numbers, traffic TV (WTF?), free photography (WTF?), this for 2 months, that for 6 months, something else for 12 months. Urgh – it was all too much to take so I bailed out to absorb all of this nastyness and sort out what to do.

I went back an hour later with a clear head and told the guy exactly what I was after – I wanted to sign up for the maximum 24 months. “Excellent, sir! Which part of the offer made you choose that?” he asked, surprised. “None of it.” was my honest reply. “I hate this experience. It’s horrible. I’ve spent far too long trying to work out the best way to give you my money and I realised that if I can delay it for another year I’ll be doing well.”.

He was a little stunned and apologetic, but it wasn’t his fault – he just works there. The entire industry stinks and I hate every second I spend dealing with any of it. I’m sure I’m not the only one. I remain convinced that there is a market for a phone company that is staightforward, honest and doesn’t make me feel like I’m getting marketed something for the sole benefit of making the salesperson some commission. That said, I wouldn’t take on the task.

Wicked – I won’t be dealing with this crap again until mid-2008.

Using Rake to automate PHP testing on linux

2006-05-15T21:56:00Z

I’m getting really into Rake, a build tool like Make written in (and therefore able to use the full power of) Ruby. Martin Fowler has a nice article about it.

I’ve been doing some PHP work again recently and, inspired by autotest, knocked together a Rake task which monitors directories and runs my tests when it notices a change. Unlike autotest, which checks for changes every few seconds, this task uses inotify and is rapido enough that it always manages to start the tests before I can switch consoles. Of course, this can be used for running anything, not just the PHP tests I’ve been using recently.

Aside: Simpletest is the nice PHP testing package that I use.

Requirements

Linux kernel with inotify (version 2.6.?+)
Ruby – only tested with 1.8.4
Rake – only tested with 0.7.1
ruby-inotify – only tested with 0.3.0, older versions will probably not work


 1 desc "Run the tests." 
 2 task :test do
 3   # assign "out" so that test errors don't cause an exit
 4   out = system "php test/init.php" 
 5 end
 6
 7 desc "Run tests automatically when files change" 
 8 task :keep_testing => [ :test ] do
 9   require 'io/INotify'
10   require 'find'
11
12   # allows us to re-run the tests
13   class Rake::Task
14     attr_accessor :already_invoked
15   end
16   Rake::Task[:test].already_invoked = false
17
18   inotify = INotify::INotify.new
19
20   thread = Thread.new do
21     inotify.each_event do |event|
22       # .swp files are used by Vim
23       if event.type == 'modify' and event.filename !~ /.swp$/
24         puts "#{event.filename} modified..." 
25         puts "===" 
26         Rake::Task[:test].invoke
27         Rake::Task[:test].already_invoked = false
28         puts "" 
29       end
30     end
31   end
32
33   # default list of directories
34   ENV["directories"] ||= 'lib test'
35
36   # start watching the directories
37   ENV["directories"].split.each do |directory|
38     Find.find(directory) do |file|
39       if ['.svn', 'CVS', 'RCS'].include? File.basename(file) or !File.directory? file
40         Find.prune
41       else
42         begin
43           puts "Adding #{file}" 
44           inotify.watch_dir(file)
45         rescue
46           puts "Skipping #{file}: #{$!}" 
47         end
48       end
49     end
50   end
51   puts "" 
52
53   thread.join
54 end

The default list of directories (relative to the current directory) is specified on line 34. You can override this at runtime by specifying the “directories” environment variable.

ScottishClimbs has a wiki!

2006-05-05T12:47:23Z

In case you missed it over on SC, we launched our wiki last night!

We expect the entire site to migrate over to the wiki in the coming months and this is a direct replacement for SC3. A wiki should be such a perfect fit for the community-based contribution model that has been the basis of ScottishClimbs all along.

Random flickr photos

2006-04-27T09:30:00Z

Jonathan says

Man, it’s odd finding random pics of yourself on flickr.

I couldn’t agree more. Although it’s not a total belter like his one, I found it by just randomly clicking around.