I notice a couple of people have subscribed to the list in the last day or so. Hello, and welcome; would you like to introduce yourselves briefly?
Cheers,
Earle.
On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 06:36:47PM +0000, Earle Martin wrote:
I notice a couple of people have subscribed to the list in the last day or so. Hello, and welcome; would you like to introduce yourselves briefly?
Well, it was more than a day or so ago, now, but I seem not to have said hi either.
"Hi."
Thanks to Dom, a Nottingham OpenGuide now exists, though I've not yet advertised it widely, or accumulated significant amounts of content; I've not had time to lavish significant amounts of time on it yet, alas. It lives at http://www.ox.compsoc.net/nottinghamguide/ , though.
Since I appear to be running an OpenGuide, it seemed quite sensible to lurk on this list, really :-)
Cheers,
James.
hi Earle, everyone,
I'm a Semantic Web developer based in Bristol, and I was pointed at Open Guides by Dan Brickley. I've been watching developments with great interest. I love the idea (and I'd love to help set one up for Bristol, although I'm not sure if I'll have the time).
I'm currently interested in creating and using RDF interfaces like the one that Open Guides makes available, and I've been chatting a bit with Kake about that after reading her excellent perl.com article.
I've got a little bot that can talk to the RDF interface among other things - http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2003/10/whwhwhwh/
- but I'm also interested in ways of combining open guides data with other geographical and related information e.g. about events, transport, to provide services, using for example svg interfaces, mobile phones.
cheers,
Libby
On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Earle Martin wrote:
I notice a couple of people have subscribed to the list in the last day or so. Hello, and welcome; would you like to introduce yourselves briefly?
Cheers,
Earle.
-- Earle Martin hex on irc.perl.org http://purl.oclc.org/net/earlemartin/
-- OpenGuides-Dev mailing list OpenGuides-Dev@openguides.org http://realprogrammers.com/mm/listinfo/openguides-dev
Earle Martin wrote:
I notice a couple of people have subscribed to the list in the last day or so. Hello, and welcome; would you like to introduce yourselves briefly?
Hi people. =)
My turn I guess.
I'm a programmer based in Oslo, working for Mediaflex a/s with web to print solutions mostly with connection to the real estate market. The reason I subscribed here is http://thefeed.no/oslo/ . Like James, I figured it would be sensible to lurk here. I really like the OpenGuides, my main problem now is getting my lazy friends to contribute =) The main motivation for us is to keep track of interesting things to do in Oslo. Still, the site is in english to please the tourists =)
Ps. I would really like to be able to track beer prices for different pubs as that is a major concern here (1/2 l costs from 27-60 nkr (3-7 euro, averaging on 5-6)), any suggestions for the best way to do that?
Marcus
On Thu 27 Nov 2003, Marcus Ramberg marcus@thefeed.no wrote:
I really like the OpenGuides, my main problem now is getting my lazy friends to contribute =)
Keep telling people about it. Just keep plugging it, lots, whenever appropriate. See if you can get some local groups to use it as their main point of reference for meeting places and so on - for example, London.pm meeting announcements nearly always have an Open Guide to London URL to show people more information about where we're meeting. If you're meeting some friends in a pub, make an OpenGuides page for it and put the URL in the email you send around. Any time you want to tell someone something about your city, don't write it in an email; put it on an OpenGuides page and send the URL.
Ps. I would really like to be able to track beer prices for different pubs as that is a major concern here (1/2 l costs from 27-60 nkr (3-7 euro, averaging on 5-6)), any suggestions for the best way to do that?
Track in what way? You could do something like add pubs to categories like
Average Beer Price 25-35 nkr Average Beer Price 35-45 nkr
etc
and then get me to mess with the pubsearch http://london.openguides.org/pubsearch.cgi
to give you a dropdown with those categories in.
Is that the sort of thing you're after?
Kake
Kate L Pugh wrote:
Keep telling people about it. Just keep plugging it, lots, whenever appropriate. See if you can get some local groups to use it as their main point of reference for meeting places and so on - for example, London.pm meeting announcements nearly always have an Open Guide to London URL to show people more information about where we're meeting. If you're meeting some friends in a pub, make an OpenGuides page for it and put the URL in the email you send around. Any time you want to tell someone something about your city, don't write it in an email; put it on an OpenGuides page and send the URL.
Sounds like good approach. =) Thanks for the tips.
Ps. I would really like to be able to track beer prices for different pubs as that is a major concern here (1/2 l costs from 27-60 nkr (3-7 euro, averaging on 5-6)), any suggestions for the best way to do that?
Track in what way? You could do something like add pubs to categories like
Average Beer Price 25-35 nkr Average Beer Price 35-45 nkr
etc
and then get me to mess with the pubsearch http://london.openguides.org/pubsearch.cgi to give you a dropdown with those categories in. Is that the sort of thing you're after?
more like registering the price of 1/2l as metadata, and then being able to find the 10 cheapest and the 10 most expensive pubs... stuff like that.
Marcus
On Thu 27 Nov 2003, Marcus Ramberg marcus@thefeed.no wrote:
more like registering the price of 1/2l as metadata, and then being able to find the 10 cheapest and the 10 most expensive pubs... stuff like that.
This reminds me of a good idea Mark had to make it easy to create new pages - a Pub Wizard. You'd click on "add a new pub" and you'd get a form with as much information as possible already added in, hints as to what categories you might like to add the pub to, that sort of thing. I've cc'ed Mark in on this in the hope that he can expand on this a bit.
The big advantage of this would be that we could provide pub-specific metadata boxes without cluttering up the general edit form.
Kake
On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 11:58:41AM +0000, Kate L Pugh wrote:
This reminds me of a good idea Mark had to make it easy to create new pages - a Pub Wizard. You'd click on "add a new pub" and you'd get a form with as much information as possible already added in, hints as to what categories you might like to add the pub to, that sort of thing. I've cc'ed Mark in on this in the hope that he can expand on this a bit.
The big advantage of this would be that we could provide pub-specific metadata boxes without cluttering up the general edit form.
Is the intention here to prefill structured metadata into the main text? This would seem like a large step backwards. The solution I guess is to have a restricted default edit form with buttons to show specific categories of metadata in the form (which may be exactly what you mean by the wizard, it's not entirely clear). So:
"unhide pub-specific fields" "unhide restuarant-specific fields"
etc etc. This could be combined with a set of tickboxes on the "create page" form.
Cheers,
Dominic.
On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 11:58:41AM +0000, Kate L Pugh wrote:
This reminds me of a good idea Mark had to make it easy to create new pages - a Pub Wizard. You'd click on "add a new pub" and you'd get a form with as much information as possible already added in, hints as to what categories you might like to add the pub to, that sort of thing.
On Thu 27 Nov 2003, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
Is the intention here to prefill structured metadata into the main text?
Nonononono. You'd prefill 'Pubs' into the Category box. Actually that might be the only useful thing to prefill.
The solution I guess is to have a restricted default edit form with buttons to show specific categories of metadata in the form (which may be exactly what you mean by the wizard, it's not entirely clear).
Yes, that's the kind of thing.
"unhide pub-specific fields" "unhide restuarant-specific fields"
etc etc. This could be combined with a set of tickboxes on the "create page" form.
Yes, that might be a good way to do it.
Kake
On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 12:34:19PM +0000, Kate L Pugh wrote:
"unhide pub-specific fields" "unhide restuarant-specific fields"
etc etc. This could be combined with a set of tickboxes on the "create page" form.
Yes, that might be a good way to do it.
Right. At the moment the presence of location-specific fields and so on when you edit a non-geographic node is confusing; it would be nice to have them hidden by default if you create a "Category $whatever" page, or even disabled completely (i.e. not there).
On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 12:43:33PM +0000, Earle Martin wrote:
Right. At the moment the presence of location-specific fields and so on when you edit a non-geographic node is confusing; it would be nice to have them hidden by default if you create a "Category $whatever" page, or even disabled completely (i.e. not there).
I'd have thought to keep the backend simple it should just be a cosmetic change. That would of course mean that people could hack the forms in order to fill "invalid" data though; I suppose it depends whether we think that is likely to be a problem.
Dominic.
On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 12:51:17PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
I'd have thought to keep the backend simple it should just be a cosmetic change. That would of course mean that people could hack the forms in order to fill "invalid" data though; I suppose it depends whether we think that is likely to be a problem.
If we had a mechanism to specify a node as being of a particular type - modify the new page maker to first ask you what kind of node you want to create? - I don't see people entering irrelevant metadata as being a problem, because then a page marked as being of a particular type would simply not show irrelevant metadata at all, regardless of whether it had been entered or not. If people did mess around and enter irrelevant metadata, the system could accept it silently and not apparently do anything (the 'non-failure failure' approach) or return some kind of error.
Earle Martin schrieb:
I notice a couple of people have subscribed to the list in the last day or so. Hello, and welcome; would you like to introduce yourselves briefly?
Yes, hi, i am one of those people.
I am planning on running a Hamburg OpenGuide, so i subscribed... I did not come round to install the software by now because a) it needs so many perl modules installed and b) i am not root at my site gabistapler.de (it's shared hosting) so installing it will be pretty difficult and c) i don't have all that much time right now.
I hope to get it up and running in January. Is there anybody who has done a non-root install and can point me towards how to do it? (I do have SSH shell access on my server so installing Openguides should be possible by putting perl modules in a local directory). Also, what about location information for non-UK cities?
On Thu 27 Nov 2003, Gunnar Th?le list@gabistapler.de wrote:
Yes, hi, i am one of those people.
Hello Gunnar, and welcome to the list.
Is there anybody who has done a non-root install and can point me towards how to do it?
I can only tell you how to do a manual install because I don't use either CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS. It's not difficult though.
Some modules use ExtUtils::MakeMaker (they have a Makefile.PL) and others use Module::Build (they have a Build.PL though they may also have a Makefile.PL).
For Module::Build modules, see the OpenGuides TROUBLESHOOTING file, which comes with the distribution but can also be viewed online: http://search.cpan.org/src/KAKE/OpenGuides-0.29/TROUBLESHOOTING
You also want to read the second section of that file, which explains some extra things you will need to do to the CGI scripts after install.
For ExtUtils::MakeMaker modules, the incantation is:
perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/my/directory make && make test && make install
(I have been assuming unix here since you mentioned root.)
Also, what about location information for non-UK cities?
It's not done yet, but you knew that already or you wouldn't have asked. You can use Locales, and you can use the map link, phone, address, etc fields - but not the OS X/OS Y fields. Now I can give you different fields - for latitude/longitude, or if your city is covered by a square grid like the British National Grid, boxes for those co-ordinates. Then the problem is one of *using* the data.
Square grids are easy to work out distances on. I'm considering those to be a solved problem.
Working out distance between places specified by latitude and longitude may be trickier. There is Geo::Distance on CPAN but its docs warn:
"The formula used for [great] circle distances is also somewhat unreliable for small distances (for locations separated less than about five degrees) because it uses arc cosine which is rather ill-conditioned for values close to zero."
And that's not so good when you consider that we're working out distances within a city.
Any ideas anyone?
Kake
On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 11:54:53AM +0000, Kate L Pugh wrote:
Working out distance between places specified by latitude and longitude may be trickier. There is Geo::Distance on CPAN but its docs warn:
"The formula used for [great] circle distances is also somewhat unreliable for small distances (for locations separated less than about five degrees) because it uses arc cosine which is rather ill-conditioned for values close to zero."
And that's not so good when you consider that we're working out distances within a city.
Within a city you can ignore the curvature. Just assume that the grid is square. Or maybe rectangular for the far north/south. It helps that there are very few significant or big places in the arctic, and none in the antarctic.
Assume square, with patches welcome from eskimos and penguins ;-)
----- Original Message ----- From: "David Cantrell" david@cantrell.org.uk To: "Discussion of development on the OpenGuides software" openguides-dev@openguides.org Sent: 28 November 2003 12:21 Subject: Re: [OpenGuides-Dev] Location data for non-UK cities [Was: Re: Newarrivals]
On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 11:54:53AM +0000, Kate L Pugh wrote:
Working out distance between places specified by latitude and longitude may be trickier. There is Geo::Distance on CPAN but its docs warn:
"The formula used for [great] circle distances is also somewhat unreliable for small distances (for locations separated less than about five degrees) because it uses arc cosine which is rather ill-conditioned for values close to zero."
And that's not so good when you consider that we're working out distances within a city.
Within a city you can ignore the curvature. Just assume that the grid is square. Or maybe rectangular for the far north/south. It helps that there are very few significant or big places in the arctic, and none in the antarctic.
Strangely enough, Earle and I were discussing doing just that in the pub after the london.pm tech meet.
I feel a module coming on. How about Geography::Grid
Kate L Pugh schrieb:
I can only tell you how to do a manual install because I don't use either CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS. It's not difficult though.
Well, i think i can do that. It will work, somehow, so stay tuned for the Hamburg Openguide in January.
Also, what about location information for non-UK cities?
It's not done yet, but you knew that already or you wouldn't have
Yes, i knew that. I am not very good at perl programming, so i think i can't help very much, sorry.
asked. You can use Locales, and you can use the map link, phone, address, etc fields - but not the OS X/OS Y fields. Now I can give you different fields - for latitude/longitude, or if your city is covered by a square grid like the British National Grid, boxes for those co-ordinates. Then the problem is one of *using* the data.
It is quite common to use so-called "Gauss-Krueger Coordinates", these are printed on official maps (they are NOT printed onto the Falkplan (Falkplan is for Hamburg what A-Z is for London)). These are long numerals having latitude and longitude coded into them. They are not square coordinates... There is a quite useful feature: One of germany's mobile phone networks broadcasts the Gauss-Krueger coordinates of their base stations. So people wandering around Hamburg making entries for the guide can easily read location coordinates from their telephone. These are not very accurate, but better than nothing.
Working out distance between places specified by latitude and longitude may be trickier. There is Geo::Distance on CPAN but
How big is the error if we just assume the earth to be a plane instead of a ball? This makes calculation of distances from Latitude/Longitude pretty simple. Hamburg is approx. 50km across.
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