Charles Colbourn

Sunday afternoon I looked at the weather forecast. Mild temperatures for another week, OK, I'll put the winter tyres on *next* weekend then.

Sunday evening it snowed.

So yesterday (Monday) morning I thought "just put the front snow tyre on, a lot of people don't bother with a back snow tyre at all".

Those people don't live in hilly areas. My commute to work starts with a 1/4 km 1 in 10, then a 1km 1 in 12. Halfway up my back wheel slid out, but thanks to the front snow tyre I retained control and didn't land on my face. Back down the hill to put the back snow tyre on.

45 minutes and one blown out inner tube later I had the back snow tyre on, and apart from having to stop to adjust the chain tensioner again, the rest of the journey was easy. Well, not easy exactly, the snow tyres have about the same rolling resistance as a flat tyre (not kidding, I keep looking to see if something is rubbing or I've got a flat), so pedaling is hard work, and the noise is very similar to riding on a flat tyre. But they do grip very, very well.

These are the tyres in question:

http://www.wiggle.co.uk/schwalbe-marathon-winter-performance-rigid-road-tyre/

It took a couple of days of hacking around before I got a sensible looking map in QGis using opendata, so here's the result of what I learned:

1) Before you open a raster VectorMap District file (e.g. SE05.tif) move all the .tfw files from 'georeferencing files' into the same directory as the .tif files. Otherwise the .tif files will be placed in the bottom left hand corner of the map, miles from any other layers.

2) You can convert .dxf files (from OS Panorama/Landform) to shape files using the QGis dxf converter plugin.

3) Try enabling 'Labels' in the layer properties, but make sure you remove the default label from the text field below. There are various things in the label fields, have an experiment to see what you can find.

4) Ordnance Survey don't own right of way data, that belongs to local councils. I've asked my local council if they'll let me have a file from their GIS (they do use one) and so far they haven't said 'no'...

5) Walls. There are no walls marked on the maps I've been able to find. This is something of a difficulty for using OpenData maps for navigation. If someone has found wall data, please can you tell me where it was.

That's it so far...

Happy New Year!

2011 is here, and I'm back tinkering with SAML and webservices.

Currently building a webservice architecture that can be switched from SOAP to XMLRPC to REST easily.

Also back to running after a couple of weeks taking it easy. Rombalds Stride is coming up soon.

Lots of plans for the year.

Success! Got a basic Rails 3 plugin for Clearsilver working yesterday afternoon. The code is by no means fit for release, but the work in progress is accessible here.

We'll see if this gets updated regularly