I’ve finally finished my response to the consultation on Ordnance Survey data. It’s here (five-page PDF, 64k).

The tl;dr* version:

Generally good. Don’t release 1:25k and 1:50k rasters, that’s just gratuitous and we don’t need them. Provide an aerial photography API for rights-free tracing. Use PD or a database rights-aware licence, not CC-BY. kthxbye

* link almost certainly Not Suitable For Work, or indeed anywhere else

Every month I spend beyond ridiculous amounts of time drawing maps for the WW cruising guides. Along the neatlines (sides) of each map are black and white bars. Each bar represents one mile. It looks like this.

I do it like that because Old Charts do it like that too; because there’s a deliberately slightly retro feel to the WW maps (they’re essentially strip maps, like cruising guides used to have); and because I think it’s a great signifier of “we care about cartography” rather than “we have just thrown an OS map at our designer and told him to trace it, though not too obviously”.

Old Charts do it for a proper reason.

Roughly every two months someone complains that either a) the scale on OpenStreetMap is wrong or b) that OpenStreetMap doesn’t have a scale. (To be precise, a) happens, then the scale gets removed to stop the whingeing, then two months later b) happens.) You can read typical threads here and here but, in brief, the reason is because the scale isn’t consistent across latitudes, and that’s quite significant when you’re zoomed out a lot.

A bunch of us were talking about that this weekend, which is what just made me remember this.

On Old Charts, one bar represents one minute of latitude (or longitude). So the length of the latitude bars actually differs across the map.

The above is from a 3Mb university course presentation which blethers on about it for a while. 

It’s an excellent solution. I wouldn’t imagine there’s any likelihood of OpenLayers et al adding it any time soon. But doesn’t it look great?

The usual sources are going haywire about an impending Apple Tablet.

I used to have a tablet computer. It was a beauty. It was A4 sized and had a full, moving-parts keyboard. The word-processor was speedy and yet powerful; but it was a proper computer, too. You could even program it. And it cost about £150.

Ah, Amstrad NC100 Notepad, how I miss thee.

It was such a great little machine. I’d tuck it under my arm then head off to the University Library in Cambridge to research some article or other I was writing for Keyboard Review. Then, at home, I’d connect up the serial-to-AppleTalk lead, run ZTerm, and fire the documents across. Bar a bit of search-and-replace to get rid of extraneous control characters, that was it. Done.

(The word-processing software was actually Protext, with which I was of course very familiar. Protext was the WP of choice on the Amstrad CPC, but also a ridiculously fast raw text editor. It came on a 16k sideways ROM; on another ROM I had Maxam 1.5, Arnor’s assembler. You’d write your source code in Protext then type ‘asm’, and Maxam would assemble it. To this day, the reason I indent code with hard tabs rather than spaces is Protext’s doing; a tab took up one byte; a space took up six. When you only had 38k for text, that was a big difference.

At one point I wrote 90% of the code, but only 30% of the UI, for a wizard hack that brought WYSIWYG editing and embedded graphics to Protext (CPC). It was going to be called Fidelity, after the utterly superb Durutti Column album. I never finished it but you should still buy the album.)

The NC100 used four real AA batteries, which is almost always better than any proprietary solution. (Maybe excepting Sony’s digital camera batteries.)

It had two failings. One is that Amstrad had always, from the CPC on, skimped on the keyboard decoding circuitry. If you pressed three keys together, a fourth character would also result. For the fast typist this is a real problem. On the NC100 there was one very common three-key combination (might have been I-O-N, I can’t remember) where the ghostly fourth key was cursor-up. So you’d be touch-typing at eight billion words a minute, and would briefly look down at the screen, only to see that three sentences ago you’d unwittingly ‘pressed’ cursor-up and all your subsequent text had been inserted into the previous line. This happened to me so many times.

The other failing is that Amstrad was enormously value-conscious. Which is generally a good thing, but I’d have preferred a £180 armour-plated NC100 to a £150 where I broke the power socket twice (which Rob Scott could fix) and the screen once (which he couldn’t).

If Apple were to build one of these, maybe with Mobile Safari and 3G networking, would I buy one? Hell yes.