Now that I’ve got pastebin back on an even keel, there’s lots of Geograph work to be done. I’ve been slowly working on a tagging engine which is nearing completion, but this morning Barry Hunter pointed me in the direction of Yahoo’s ZoneTag project (via HighEarthOrbit)
ZoneTag can suggest your location and tagging information based on [...]
I’ve heard about PhotoSynth, Microsoft’s rather cool technology for placing photos within a 3D space, but this Photosynth demo by its architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas is truly impressive – listen to the gasps from the audience as the penny drops on what they are seeing.
I’d love to throw it at some Geograph squares – [...]
Way back in May I wrote an entry about possible problems faced by Geograph’s planned use of “closed” content like Ordnance Survey (OS) maps in combination with our use of Creative Commons (CC) licences.
There are a few areas we need to be sure of before incorporating OS maps into the site:
Can an OS grid reference [...]
In a recent post about data archival, Ed Parsons linked to an interesting piece about how the 1986 Domesday Project was rescued.
The original project was distributed on laserdisc and accessed with a BBC Master micro, but is now available online at www.domesday1986.com. The interface is a copy of the original BBC interface, and looks archaic [...]
Interesting post on the memcached mailing list about how Digg are using Memcached for session storage. Memcached is intended as a caching layer, but after their session database crashed, they simply went with using Memcached for session storage period.
The new Geograph setup should wind up with around 10GB of memcached space across 5 nodes, and [...]
The new servers for Geograph arrived this morning, behold the almighty Tower of Power!
The supplier for this lot was World of Computers and they’ve been very helpful in my dealings with them. They were recommended to me and so far they’ve been great. They even deliver the stuff themselves in their own van. I [...]
While pondering the power consumption of the Geograph servers I wondered how tricky it would be go “carbon neutral”. What that means is we’d counterbalance the effect of CO2 emissions from our electricity consumption by planting sufficient trees to mop it up.
Seems appropriate to me!
http://www.carbonneutral.com is a site that allows you do this, and our [...]
I had been planning to use Debian Sarge on the new Geograph servers, but the buzz around tomorrow’s new release of Ubuntu is hard to ignore. I’d previously dismissed Ubuntu for server use assuming it was too focussed on the desktop, and while they are doing admirable work in that area, it seems they aren’t [...]
I’ve done all the hard work, the servers are specified, they are ordered and now we must wait for delivery. Now is the time for that most important of tasks.
What to call them?
I think it’s a trait of all geeks to want to give their equipment cool or amusing names. At one of my first [...]
Finally got all the quotes in for Geograph’s brand spanking new hardware platform and we’re ready to order. It’s all rather exciting.
What Geograph currently runs on…
700MHz Celeron server with 512MB RAM and 70GB hard disc space
…and what it will be running on
3 x application servers with dual 3Ghz Xeon CPUs and 4GB RAM
2TB storage server [...]
