There are several such projects already in existence. The oldest is Free The Postcode which invites visitors to collect the location of a postcode by visiting a location and recording the latitude and longitude of its postcode using a GPS. There are simple mobile applications to automate this process for the iPhone and other GPS-enabled devices.
If you don’t have a GPS, it might be worth heading over to the New Popular Edition Maps site to explore some out of copyright Ordnance Survey maps. This project collects data by allowing people to pinpoint a postcode on these maps. These data are less accurate because of the way the old maps are presented, but you don’t need a GPS to contribute, and the site has managed to collect an impressive number of postcodes this way.
Another project that has recently popped up is the Open Postcode DataBase, which is more ambitious, aiming to capture street and town names as well as postcode data.
Lastly, the Locating Postboxes site is using information collected, ironically, from an FOI request to the Royal mail concerning the location of these postboxes, and asks users to pinpoint the postboxes on a map.
These projects are placing their results into the public domain. At the moment they only provide data equivalent to a small fraction of those that the Royal Mail makes available (NPEMaps has around 45,000 postcodes, whereas Royal Mail will give you around 1.8 million). For many applications, however, where only area/district accuracy is required, they are already useful sources. Free The Postcode and NPEmaps allow download of the complete data, for individual postcodes, and averaged over postcode prefixes and sectors, and NPEmaps offers a basic geocoding API suitable for low traffic sites.
I am currently involved in both Free The Postcode and the New Popular Edition maps, and we’re interested in making these data sets more accurate and readily available. We would welcome offers of help from developers who are interested in making this happen, and of course more contributions of data!
This post is Copyright 2009 by Dominic Hargreaves, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales licence and originally appeared at Liberal Democrat Voice.
]]>I am writing to complain about the recent service I have received from Vodafone concerning the repair of my N95 phone which has developed a hardware fault.
I reported the fault (handset speaker produces no sound) via your telephone service number, and after some ridiculous fiddling around with network settings which were clearly going to have no effect, you agreed to accept the phone for warranty repair. I posted the phone to you.
You then contacted me last week telling me that you had diagnosed the fault as an "audio fault" and that the "A-cover" would need replacing, and also that the repair was not covered by the manufacturer's warranty, and that you would charge £40 to repair the phone. When I asked for the precise reason why the fault was not covered, and pointed out that the manufacturer's warranty at
http://www.nokia.co.uk/get-support-and-software/repair/main/warranty
did not mention any such exclusion, you were not able to give me an explanation.
I then contacted Nokia Care who confirmed to me that there was no reason the fault wouldn't be covered, and suggested that I take it to one of their care points.
Since taking it to a care point will use up several hours of my time, and in view of the fact that as retailer you are responsible for upholding the terms of the warranty and fixing the obvious defect with the phone, I persisted in trying to communicate with you to get the phone fixed.
I contacted you again by phone last Friday and related my conversation with Nokia. Again you claimed that the phone was not covered, that you were following Nokia's own (unspecified) guidelines, but that if I provided written confirmation of the situation from Nokia you would fix the phone free of charge.
I considered this to be a pretty ridiculous request; it is surely your own responsibility to liase with the manufacturer in this case and your tactics of avoidance and blame-shifting have merely served to aggravate your customers.
However, I accepted this and asked that you keep hold of the phone for a few days to give me time to provide this written confirmation.
It was not until Tuesday that I was able to communicate with Nokia. Owing to problems with their email system and online form, I was not able to request the written confirmation as I had intended; however in any case, I then received from you a text message informing me that you had posted my phone back to me unfixed.
This action, of course, makes a complete mockery of your service, given the ongoing conversations between us. You have deliberately forced the problem onto me still further by sending the phone back before giving me a chance to provide the documentation that you could not be bothered to collect yourself.
To make matters even worse, when I received the phone back yesterday (Wednesday) I discovered that two scratches had appeared on the phone which were not there when I sent it off, and that the reassembly has been done so carelessly that the sliding portion of the case is at an angle to the main part of the case - mainly of cosmetic consequence,
but I am also concerned that this weakens the moving parts and introduces a possible weakness that would cause further failures.
I am writing now to make you aware of the appalling experience I have had in dealing with your company and its agents, in dealing with what I still consider to be a severe fault with the handset which developed in normal use, and your actions leading to a phone with additional flaws that were not present when I sent the unit to you.
Given this description of events, I trust that you will offer to fix the original fault free of charge and ensure that the phone is properly reassembled at the nearest opportunity, so that I can receive a fixed handset back by 22nd December (after which time I will be away travelling and require the use of this handset). If I do not receive a satisfactory resolution to this problem, I do not intend not to renew my contract with you when it expires.
Please note that I require a reply tomorrow (Friday 12th December) in order to have time to send off the phone for further repair.
Regards,
Dominic Hargreaves
I hope to be able to post more fully my experience with Drupal in the future, because although there were some definite pitfalls, I found it an interesting experience.
One of the things I ended up playing with was the Amazon Associate API, which allows us to embed Amazon product details into our pages. I've added a 'recommended recording' metadata field to our concerts, which automatically retrieves cover art and provides a link to the product on the Amazon web site (you can see an example on the page for our March concert).
The nice thing about this is that we also take a cut of the profits on any product purchased via a link from our site (even indirectly). I also added a link at the bottom of every page as a 'support OBC' style link to Amazon.
I also set up a redirect so that http://www.oxfordbachchoir.org/shop goes straight to Amazon as a referral from us, which meant that I could advertise it as part of the weekly email bulletin to members. So far (probably mostly as a result of that advertisement to members) we've earned a fee on 18 ordered items, with another 10 or so not yet dispatched). We'll have to see how much this makes over the course of the year, but at that rate we'll pay for the hosting, which would be nice!
The Oxford Bach Choir, for those who don't know, puts on two main concerts a year with professional orchestras, in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. The cost of these concerts can be around the GBP20,000 mark, sometimes more, and with the capacity of the Sheldonian it's generally impossible to break even on ticket sales alone. So we rely largely on charitable donations, membership subscriptions, and other income. So whether or not you've been to a concert in the past, if you shop on Amazon, do consider bookmarking our shop URL and support us with very little extra effort (as well of coming to our concerts, of course).
Lastly, I note that Amazon has launched a DRM-free digital downloads service, which arguably marks the end of the DRM-obsessed era for music downloads.
]]>Photos? here, but Art's are much more worthwhile.
Best moment? Too many to choose from, but Flame Oz were fantastic.
Best gig? Probably Franz Ferdinand, despite having people stepping on my feet.
And yes, it hardly rained!
]]>In other news, I suppose I may as well blow my own trumpet about this post about my Movable Type packages. It really is overstating things, but it's nice to be appreciated.
]]>Obviously we got married (I mentioned that already). We went on honeymoon to South Africa, and were greeted on arrival by rose petals. The relatively uninteresting set of photos is here.
I also, a couple of weeks later, started work at OUCS (I also mentioned that briefly). Working at OUCS is very different to Black Cat, unsurprisingly, but generally good fun. It's good to be able to leave the office at the end of the day.
Only a few weeks after joining, I persuaded OUCS to pay for me to go to Debconf up in Edinburgh, followed by a train journey from Edinburgh to Castle Cary, and then onwards to Glastonbury 2007, my second. It was, of course, a muddy one, made somewhat worse by the idea of having to queue for a bus back to the station for two hours in the rain, at the end of the weekend. The sight of all the mud on the train (a specially laid on HST stopping only at Castle Cary, Reading and Padddington!) was very surreal.
Talking of rain... well the other main feature of 2007 was being flooded out of our house in July (again, see previous posts). We were very kindly housed by Wadham College, and then, once the students came back, David, whilst we waited for our management agents to sort the place out (mainly get a dehumidifier in, wait a long time, and redecorate). We waited, and waited, and waited, and finally, after the work slipped into October, we gave up waiting, and found a nice house in Summertown (or "Posh North Oxford", as it has been known). It's quite similar in many ways, and overall we're very happy with it. We finally had a housewarming party last weekend.
Christmas was again spent up in Glagow with the Hamnett tribe; although this year much of the time was spent looking after unwell people... there followed the tour of my parents through the rest of Christmas and New Year.
Here's a (very) belated Happy 2008, for anyone reading this who I haven't already spoken to! And no, I'm not going to make it a New Year's resolution to post more here, because my life seems to be far too full up to keep such a resolution, but expect to me to pop up just when you thought I'd given up for years to come..
]]>Photos at http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/photos/albums/events/200707_vicarage_road_flooding/.
(Update 2007-08-02: moved photos to my normal photo albums)
]]>We're fine at the moment, and it sounds like the water's going down now.
]]>Oh. And I'm married. Yay! You can see a handful of photos taken by people there at our wedding site. (more details and official photos to follow in a subsequent post)
]]>Which means we're definitely in Oxford for another few years to come :)
]]>It seems like it's been a long time coming, and yet simultaneously it's upon us without any warning. I'm now wishing that it was now, and not in a whole two weeks' time.
We spent a day today getting various wedding things done, which is good - having niggling tasks waiting detracts from the antipication slightly. I still have a speech to write, although I hear it's traditional among my friends who've got married (and, to be honest, most people I expect) that that's done very close to the wedding.
The honeymoon is all planned now - at least, the bits that need to be. The train line up to Glasgow is mended, and we're being teased (in the South) by nice weather. Seating plans, orders of service, menus, timetable for the day, gift list, all sorted, and almost fading into the past now they've all been organised (or that might just be that Gillian has it all under control).
It's worth us focussing on the fact that the only thing that we really need to happen is that we get to Glasgow before 4pm on the Friday, so that we can collect the marriage schedule (the document that, in Scotland, you sign to as the official record of marriage). It needs to be collected by either or both of us, in person, the week before the wedding, during office hours.
Now, back to that to-do list...
]]>I've been going to donate blood for a few years now; it's a small price to pay for the knowledge that you are helping to provide an essential service — and you get free tea and biscuits!
Around the start of January (or possibly before Christmas; can't recall exactly) I got a letter from the National Blood Service about the possibility of giving platelets. These are the cells in your blood responsible for clotting. Platelet donations are needed for patients who have leukaemia and other cancers (as a result of their treatment) or those who have suffered serious blood loss sustained after injuries or major surgery.
The process of giving platelets is a bit more involved than for whole blood: they want you to go every month or so (technically you can donate once every two weeks); you have to go to a dedicated donor suite, and you're potentially there for nearly two hours.
The letter told me that, after some preliminary tests, they thought that I might be a suitable platelet donor candidate, and invited me to an open day where they would show me round the donor suite (in the John Radcliffe hospital) and take some further samples for analysis. I didn't really have any reason not to go; since I'm already giving blood it seemed like a small step to go and have some more tests to see if I could be even more beneficial to the blood service.
The open day was interesting and welcoming; much tea, and many biscuits and sandwiches were consumed, and my samples were taken. We also spoke to a few current donors about their experiences, and got a tour of the labs, where we got to find out more about how the donations are processed.
It turned out that my blood was suitable (in fact the phrase they used was "we like you!") and an appointment was duly made. A couple of weeks later, I turned up, filled in the usual tick-box questionnaire about blood safety, and listened while they told me a few more things about the process. They also asked me some specific questions about any drugs I might have taken recently (aspirin based drugs are a big no-no).
Platelets are extracted from you by a process known as apheresis, whereby the blood is passed through a centrifuge. After the required components (platelets in this case) are removed, the whole blood is then passed back through the needle into your vein. This is a little unnerving at first, but the parts of the machine that your blood passes through are part of a disposable kit which they fit to it, so your blood doesn't touch anything which isn't sterile. I found it difficult to picture this so didn't really realise how it worked until I saw them dismantle it after my first session: it's essentially a band of plastic, with leads at the centre, which is fitted to a spinning disk — obviously some sort of rotating joint is used at the axis. There are various channels within the band which contain your whole blood and the product.
These kits cost £100, apparently, and are fitted before you arrive. For this reason, they are understandably insistent that you give them plenty of notice if for some reason you can't make it!
After the initial mild nervousness, I found the process itself quite relaxing. The needle is a bit more scary looking than the whole blood donation needle (it has three lines going to it) but once it's in you can mostly forget about it. My blood flow rate when donating has tended to be quite low in general so I ended up having to make fists quite a lot.
The first time I donated, the (very friendly) nurse who did most of the work wanted to take a triple donation (i.e. the bag would be heat-sealed/split into three equal doses) but another nurse said that for the first donation they would take a double donation (they want people to give at least a double each time). At least I knew that at that point my platelet count seemed nice and high.
So, the relaxation. So far, I've been donating after work (leaving a bit early to fit in with the blood service schedules) and reclining on a couch and having as much tea and biscuits as you can manage brought to you, and reading a book, after a day at work, is just as good as it sounds! You get a nice LCD display of the progress of the donation (which takes between an hour and an hour and a half, depending on your count, and how much they're taking) including how many platelets have been collected, and how much longer you have to go.
Of course, it isn't wholly relaxing. Yesterday (the second time I've been) I ended up with a funny vibration feeling through my circulatory system, which I'd been warned about. It's caused, I was told, by the needle being close to a valve in my vein. For those who don't remember from GCSE biology, veins have one-way valves periodically throughout, to ensure that the blood flow remains towards the heart. Presumably the vibration was caused by the returned blood (flowing in the opposite direction to that in your vein) hitting the valve at some speed.
Other odd sensations include a sort of "fizzing" feeling caused by the anti-coagulant they add to your blood so that the donation doesn't clot, some of which remains in the returned blood. Even if you don't experience these effects, you're bound to feel a slight tingling near the site of the needle when the blood is returned (the "rinseback", as they call it). The cycle of extracting your blood and then replacing it happens about once a minute (you can hear the machine change tone, and it's displayed on the panel). The vibrating effect only lasted until a few minutes after I stopped donating, in any case, so it wasn't problematic.
Sadly, when I went yesterday, my platelet count had gone down so they weren't able to take a triple donation from me. However I did get my tacky "bronze award" pin (you get two, or maybe three ordinary donation "points" for an apheresis donation), and gave a respectable double dose. They said that the platelet count is related to stress levels — clearly I'd got complacent after feeling nervous at the first session, and was too relaxed about the affair the second time round!
So that's my story about donating. I'm posting it in case anyone feels moved to investigate it themselves as a result. You can read more about the process on the National Blood Service website. Do get in touch if you want to ask me anything about it.
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