Category: Thoughts

More on Open Geodata

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date April 15, 2005

I went along yesterday to the Open Knowledge Forum meeting on Open Geodata in London. Overall I was very impressed by the debate, apart from a couple of exceptions we seem to be moving the arguement away from the simple “free data good, charging for data bad” mantra – in particular Roger Longhorns’ presentation was a well balanced review of the availability of geodata around the word and the various models used to fund it. Hopefully this along with the other presentations will be posted on the web in due course.

The process of community-based efforts to capture copyright free geodata is slowly beginning, it will be an uphill struggle as the capture and maintenance of Geodata is expensive, but then again so is the development of Operating Systems.

No I don’t see a Linux like Mastermap appearing anytime soon, but a national street map could be possible within a couple of years.

Written and submitted from the BMI lounge at Dublin Airport, using a free 802.11 network.

Technology Thoughts

Is that a gadget in your pocket …

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date April 12, 2005

Silicon.com reports that the average London commuter carry’s £500 ($1000) worth of electronics with them on their journey to work. It’s easy to see how this all adds up, and I’m often packing a mobile phone, blackberry, ipod and powerbook whenever I travel.

What ever happened to device consolidation most of the above devices functions could be combined and delivered on a smartphone like the Sony Ericsson P900?

Well I used to have a smartphone and for me anyway it is a question of ergonomics, I find it easier to use my blackberry for email and diary/contacts and my SE V800 as a phone because I need to look at the screen of one at talk into the other at the same time.

I’m sure convergence will come but I think we need some far more innovative smartphone designers – roll on the much talked about iPhone from Apple ?

GIS Thoughts

Would you like a iPod with that..

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date April 5, 2005

No surprises but the 1,650 first year students at Duke University supplied with a ‘free” iPod to help with their studies are not using them as hoped for to enhance their academic studies – no they are using them to listen to music – shock !! A few language students are using them to play back foreign vocab, but it is estimated less than 2% of courses have even attempted to integrate iPod’s into their lecture programmes.

A cheap stunt to entice students to the university then.. how soon will UK universites follow, my old place of work Kingston University like all universites will have to compete increasingly for its students, is it just a matter of time?

There was a time when having a GIS course was enough 🙂

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Thoughts

Back-up or else

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date April 3, 2005

Spent a lot of yesterday trying to recover our neighbours teenage boys ibook and then his ipod following a hard disk corruption. Quite a lot of data was lost in both places as a result of some damaged sectors on the ibooks hard disk. The disk problems needed a reformat and re-install of OS X to fix, but as you can guess – no backups in place.

But before we all throw up our hands and rightly point out the error in his is ways, we are talking about 2000 + songs in itunes, Gigabytes of data both to backup and restore, hours of work for an impatient teenager I think not !

Perhaps the missing part of the “digital hub” strategy is not an iphone or a iMac with a TV tuner but some better way to protect our digital lives…

Thoughts

Autodesk changes image

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date March 31, 2005

A new logo, a new font,, WHY ??

Thoughts

My new blog

After a few years maintaining the familiy blog www.blakeparsons.com I think it is time to try and develop a site more related to my day job and to technology in general. – No kids pictures here. I’m also trying out some different technology, WordPress a php based solution that is dynamic and which will allow me to experiment more. The first experiment a real time weather feed – watch this space..