[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: William Lachance
Member since: 2001-07-29 07:53:10
Last Login: 2009-07-03 23:05:12
Notes: 28 year old software developer in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Worked on a whole gamut of projects, mostly desktop and/or network related.
You can reach me at wrlach@gmail.com
Goodbye LiveJournal
For reasons which are probably obvious, I've decided to move this log to my own server:Syndicated 2009-02-02 14:13:59 from Ginger tea and channa masala
Podcamp Halifax Talk Notes
Today I gave a talk at Podcamp Halifax about OpenStreetMap, trying to stir up a bit of interest in "wikipedia for maps", particularly on the grassroots level here in the HRM. At the end, I promised I'd give the links to the various resources I cited in my presentation. If there's enough interest, I might try to write up a summary of what I was talking about here later to put these resources in context for those not lucky enough to hear me speak. Anyway, without further ado:Syndicated 2009-01-25 22:37:56 from Ginger tea and channa masala
Livejournal FAIL
For the SECOND time, LiveJournal decided to replace one of my perfectly cromulent userpics with that of a Thai ladyboy (unfortunately taken down before I fully appreciated the humor in the situation). So if you're wondering why the image attached to this post (on livejournal) is stupid, that's why.Syndicated 2009-01-03 10:04:52 from Ginger tea and channa masala
Geobase: Free Canadian Geodata for all!
Up until today, I was under the impression that the options for someone wanting raw Canadian road data were quite limited. Yahoo and Google maps are great, but their terms of use prevent creative and novel use (it's against their terms of use create a derived work). OpenStreetMap is free of these restrictions, but its coverage can be kind of spotty in outlying areas. What's a geohacker to do?gpsbabel -i kml -f RoadSegment.kml -x simplify,error=0.01k \ -x polygon,file=restrictpoly.arc -o osm -F hrm.osm
The empty space in the middle is the Bedford basin. The dense structure towards the center is the Halifax peninsula, connected via two bridges to the city of Dartmouth. The cluster to the north is Bedford.
I'd like to emphasize that, internally, this is a complete map, with street names and everything. Apparently GeoBase also provides a data set with address information which could be useful for writing a free geocoder, but I haven't had the chance to look at that yet.
If all that was nerd speak to you, just wait. I'll be bringing this topic down to earth in a way that any conscious being can appreciate in a few weeks...
Syndicated 2008-12-19 22:48:06 from Ginger tea and channa masala
Green Party Rally in Halifax
Decided to head out to the train station yesterday to see the conclusion of Elizabeth May's whistle stop tour across the country. She gives a pretty good speech: definitely the most forthright and articulate person in Canadian politics these days. If you care about such things, you ought to listen to her appearance on cross country checkup last week.
http://www.cbc.ca/checkup/archives.html
Yes, this means I'm not voting for the NDP this time around. Maybe I'll consider them again once they start talking seriously about global warming and peak oil. As it is, their focus on "kitchen table issues" (basically a few new proposed social programs) seems like nothing more than politics as usual, a totally inadequate response to the serious problems we're facing. I've been cynical about electoral politics for a long time, but seriously guys, get real.
The crowd was decent (maybe 100?) in spite of the fact that there was virtually no advance publicity for the event. Not being an actual member of the party, I only found out about this through some digging on the Internet. I'll bet anything that with better organization, that number of people present could have been multiplied by 10. Something to think about...
Syndicated 2008-09-28 17:45:31 from Ginger tea and channa masala
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