take one onion

We've moved to Wanstead and had Christmas in less than a month, so it has been busy. Wanstead is lovely in the snow, there is a pretty forest behind our house so all is peaceful.

It has been pretty peaceful here too, but as is the way of the new year, I will hopefully change that. I've joined up with the write more project52 which should result in a blog post a week. That would be the first time since 2003, so we'll see. Writing the book has given me a taste for it, but I've not had the time other for much other than the book / job / family, then moving house took over my other spare time.

The other idea I've had is the quarterly project. I hope that three months is enough time to get one of the ideas floating around my head linked to one of the domain names I've bought and pushed out into the wilds. Briefly extending this, I mean to create a simple web app that does something useful for me and hopefully a few other people too.

Last week I had fun making a newspaper with Tom Taylor and Dan Catt. Tom and Dan have already written it up, along with Zach Beauvais at Nodalities. I spent most of my time trawling the data.gov.uk site finding data relevant at a postcode level. It was a great experience and I really enjoyed reconnecting with making things, having spent a long time writing about other people making things.

The intent was to make something that would give you a guide to a new local area, the context was something that a council might send out to you a few times a year. There is a huge amount of interesting information gathered by Government, but what we usually see is aggregated, averaged and sometimes skewed to tell a message. Taking the data and linking it directly to a postcode makes this data more impartial and meaningful, which leads me on to the gist of this post. Freeing up the postcode to census output area data as a freely available API, I'll explain.

Much of the data collected at a Government level is gathered at quite a fine grained level. The lowest level of this data collection is the output area. An output area is quite a small parcel of land, for my work it is essentially the canal basin behind my office. To see this, head over to the Neighbourhood Statistics website and type in N1 9XW on the lefthand panel, click on the More areas link and select the output area radio button. The Neighbourhood Statistics website discourages direct linking, so this direct link to N1 9XW might well fail. The ONS have a helpful guide to UK geography too.

However this Neighbourhood Statistics website is a gold mine of useful information. plus it offers a key conversion from postcode to output area. Land is hard to describe, for the patch of land your chair is sitting on there are many different levels of descriptor. Some of these are point based like latitude and longitude which allow placing on a map. Most of the descriptors for Government data are boundary based. The output area is one of these. It is the smallest parcel of land that the Census collects data for. Once you get the output area though you can then find out the higher area entities like which MP constituency or Health Trust you are inside. The data behind this is all available for free from the ONS, but for internal use only.

The whole process to figure out your MP goes something like this. Enter postcode, map to output area, from there determine which ward and thence which constituency you are living in. It gets more complex if you don't know your postcode or if it has changed recently. The Royal Mail PAF (postcode address file) is the key to managing postcodes, it links postcodes and addresses. The names of the areas of land are managed by a gazetteer which links names to boundaries and will often include older names for areas, eg the old counties of England no longer exist at an authority level, there are all now different types of council.

Coming back to the simple case of knowing your postcode, there are a lot of concerns about access to this data, including campaigns to free the PAF file, which got a pretty lukewarm response. The Royal Mail own the PAF file and the Ordnance Survey own the Boundary line data, so between them they seem to have the entire thing sown up, but the mapping of postcode to output area is the property of the ONS. It is available free of charge from them, go order a copy now. You can use it internally as much as you like.

While that is useful, what I'd like to see is the lovely service on the Neighbourhood Statistics website made available as a REST API. Give it a postcode and get back JSON listing the output areas and upwards it falls into. The data is all on the results pages for the site and as the site states Boundaries for Output Areas (OAs), Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs), Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs) and Travel to Work Areas (TTWAs) are available free of charge to all users.

Making it available as a postcode to Output Area API unlocks all the Government data that the data.gov.uk project intends to release. I feel that this should be the responsible attitude of a Government committed to an Open Data initiative. Releasing the Postcode to OA does not free maps from the OS, nor give address details which the PAF file covers. Yet it provides an immense value to online civic projects.

My book Building Social Web Applications is now generally available in print form, as an eBook and even as an iPhone application. Amazon US, Amazon UK, iTunes iPhone or iPod touch app, O'Reilly eBook and online access via Safari from O'Reilly. I'm really pleased to see it out there and I'm starting to get good reactions to it too.

Later this year, we are going to move from Walthamstow to Aldersbrook in Wanstead. We are moving for a variety of reasons, but one is green space. I was very struck by the differences in these satellite photos from Yahoo, they are at the same zoom scale, 16.

Walthamstow is on the top. The brown patch is Walthamstow Cemetery, there is green space, but not a lot and it is in smaller patches.

Aldersbrook is below with Wanstead Flats to the south, Wanstead Park to the north and east. From Wanstead Flats you can cycle right up into Epping Forest, pretty much all in forest. These are half size reproductions of the original 600 odd pixel images, click to see them larger. The difference in the amount of green space amazed me, though the stripes to the north are a private golf course.

There are some trade offs, zone 4 on the Central line, as opposed to zone 3 on the faster Victoria line and a mid station rather than at the end of the line. It is also a good walk to the tube station, but we have a long walk to get to nursery at the minute, so not as much of an increase, every journey though. Still in London too, E11 or E12 postcode, the postcode boundary is in the middle of Aldersbrook for some odd reason, the council boundary hugs London Cemetery, which is the green portion on the east.

Quite looking forward to moving, we sold our house last week, well subject to contract. It'll be my first time living properly east of GMT too. Lastly, discovering that there was a places page for on Flickr for Wanstead made me happy.

My book, Building Social Web Applications is making its way through production at the minute, I've done the last substantial edits and am creating the website to support the book. It feels odd to be on this side of it, writing a book has been a large part of the last eighteen months or so. A good feeling though and I'm generally pleased with the results. It should be out in September and the book is available for pre-order from Amazon UK and Amazon US.

Mostly recovered from swine flu now. Not great, but not too bad. Flu is never fun. As the saying goes "with a cold you can get out of bed, with flu you can't". The dull part was not leaving the house for a week or so. The restless, feverish dreams were interesting, I guess I slept a lot in the day, but dreaming I was the recommendation system for Last.fm was a new one for me.

I had the logic board in my MacBook Pro replaced under AppleCare warranty recently with fantastic service from the Regent Street Apple Store. That was all good. However when you change the logic board in a mac some things can go awry.

The key thing that changes is the ethernet MAC address of the machine. This is the low level network identity which is used prior to getting a proper TCP/IP address for use on the internet. They are (I think) unique per machine and so they are used as a key for all sorts of things. Two I have found so far are Time Machine and MobileMe syncing.

Neither of these services warns you, they just stop working, which is quite irritating. To fix Time Machine you need to reselect the drive you are backing up to, this should work, but didn't for me.

For MobileMe you need to go to the Sync tab in the MobileMe preferences and tell it that the old machine name is really the same as the new one. Then you'll get to merge the data.

It is a pity that macosx doesn't recognise that it has a new motherboard and offer to fix these for you, but hopefully this list will help you one the right path to getting things back to normal.

JG Ballard was interested in

"the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here".

Just as relevant today, quote taken from The Guardian obituary, itself taken from a longer interview with JG Ballard from last summer.

Reading The Terminal Beach and The Crystal World at about 12 or 13 and still having it haunt me 25 years later.

I'll admit it, I'd really like a Kindle 2, I'd even consider buying a US one and using the clever usb network trick to get content onto it. However I'll wait until a UK launch for a variety of reasons.

A few months back I was very tempted by a netbook, running Ubuntu as a hackintosh, but the combination of my MacBook Pro, my iPhone and an ebook reader feels like it would be enough. I don't want to have to deal with syncing my working environments. I have a MacBook Pro which I use for everything, it is my work machine and my personal machine. This means I have no context switching to deal with and something is never on the other machine.

The weight aspect of the netbooks does appeal, the 2-3Kgs of a 15" laptop becomes wearing after a while. However I realised that I can cope with a 5-6kg bag, it is the paper books that drive the weight to over 10kgs. So being able to carry more than one book around would be a real boon. Stanza on my iPhone is good for fiction, but not so good for technical books.

I'm going to try out a Sony PRS 505 for a few days to see if I like the idea. The lack of touchscreen is already annoying me. I'm trying calibre and Docudesk PRS as library management apps.

Interestingly the ebook readers are about the same price as a netbook, at around 250-300 pounds. The netbook offers a lot more for the money, but small and light costs more I guess. Computer, book and phone appeals more than computer, netbook and phone.

UPDATE: 6th May 2009. I want a Kindle DX
, native PDF support and text book sized, but only available in the USA at the minute.