CVS access at SourceForge.net has been shaky for the past month. Couldn’t check anything into Geograph yesterday, and the SourceForge.net Service Status suggests it won’t be fixed until the 12th May (though even that looks like a guess).
Looks like it’s time to migrate it over to Subversion…
I had an email recently enquiring about a freeware Windows application I wrote nine years ago called CleanEx. I was amazed people still use it, even more amazed it still works. Nine years is a long time!
CleanEx is a little shell extension to clean a directory of temporary files, originally conceived as a way to get rid of C++ compiler intermediate files. Here’s a rolling demo of it in action
CleanEx can be customised to add your own file groups too. I must have the sources around here somewhere, I’ll open it up if anyone is interested.
The new expiry option has been live at pastebin.com for over 24 hours, it’s been interesting to see the usage patterns. There have been just under 2000 posts in the past day, breaking down as follows:
In a few days I’ll take a look at some of the “permanent” posts to see what other features might be useful…in meantime, feel free to make suggestions by commenting below!
Last night Geograph British Isles covered its 100,000th grid square. It’s just incredible that in just over a year we’ve got an image for 40% of the 1km grid squares in Great Britain. It’s also good to see that depth is being developed too – we’ve over 160,000 images in total, and it looks likely that number of images per grid square will only increase over time.
The growth has been remarkably steady – we’ve averaged around 500 new photos a day for some time now…
It’s pretty impressive going for a site that has had a zero budget, and the end result is a wonderful, growing resource of Creative Commons licenced pictures and information.
A huge thankyou to the thousands of crazy individuals who’ve got the “Geograph bug” and go out taking the pictures. I salute you!
Pastebin was conceived as a way to post code into an IRC or IM conversation, so the post itself was thought to be quite ephemeral. Therefore, the database didn’t retain posts for very long. However, this has surprised some users, who expected a little more permanence.
I’ve rectified this in v0.50. There are three options to suit various users
I’m going to add more features that will make pastebin more useful for long term storage of code snippets, watch this space!
Download GPL’d source code, or just play with it at pastebin.com
The OpenStreetMap project is going to map the Isle of Wight this weekend, using hundreds of volunteers simply recording a tracklog with their GPS units.
This is fantastic, and it will be interesting to see how successful such an effort is. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Geograph, it’s that if you can attract even a small dedicated band of contributors, there’s no end to what can be achieved.
I hope the event is a success, it would be great to see local events springing up. On the geograph site we have the concept of “geograph points” awarded to the first person who contributes a suitable image for a grid square. This has worked tremendously well in encouraging coverage, as well as friendly rivalry between contributors. Something similar might work in OpenStreetMap’s favour, maybe tracking people by distance covered in their tracklogs, or points for completing a particular motorway or A road…
Mike Leggett has been sharing his musings on Geograph and it’s interesting to read an outside analysis of the phenomenon. I only came across it today even though Technorati keeps a watchful eye on Geograph related blog posts for me. Seems it’s been mentioned in the forums and the observer has become the observed!
Interesting reading!
P.S. For the record Mike, the “LordElph” moniker is explained in my about page 
A new article at phpriot walks through using the Zend_Search_Lucene which is part of the new Zend Framework. I’ve been playing with Xapian recently and liking it a lot, but Lucene is next on my list. There’s a scholarly comparison sheet (PDF) which compares several open source IR engines, which suggests the information retrieval performance is between Xapian and Lucene is broadly similar. However, it will be interesting to benchmark the two to see what differences in speed there may be.
Since the last release of pastebin a few days ago I’ve fixed a few bugs, added clipboard support for IE, and upgraded to the latest version of GeShi. To everyone who’s been asking for Ruby formatting, it’s finally here!
Expect more tweaks over the next few weeks…
Download GPL’d source code, or just play with it at pastebin.com
