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Archive for the ‘Geograph’ Category

Run (& Develop) Geograph locally!

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

I’ve prepared a VMware virtual machine, that contains a ready to run instance of Geograph (British Isles). This was primarlly for my own purposes as my current working copy runs on windoz, so didn’t replicate fully the real enviroment. Now I can still run my IDE on windows, but have the code running in a almost totally faithful copy.

The compressed image is available from:

Geograph Torrents Downloads (346.62 MB)

Requirements to run the image:

WMware workstation or WMare player
a 7z uncompression tool (apparently the best compression method for VM images)
At least 3GB diskspace (the image’s disk uncompressed needs 2GB – but could expand to 10GB)
a web-browser (to actully view something)
A smattering of linux know-how (to actully login and view the files – also to try changing things)
To do anything useful, experience with PHP, mySQL and website development in general, is a big bonus

The image’s application database is empty – it contains no photos or other data from Geograph British Isles, other than the bare minimum to get running (but contains the non-copyrighted BI geodata for map plotting etc). If you want a developers dump to try loading some real data please get in touch with the team.

Hopefully this should be a real quickstart way to get a local working copy running – ready setup with required software, cronjobs etc – ideal for:

Just finding out more about how the site works
Doing real development work – with the aim to contribute back (its ready setup for easy SVN commits)
To customise the code for a new country! (we have plans to make this even easier)

(NB. only torrent download currently available – others probably available on request)

Enjoy!

Tags: development, virtual machine, wmware
Posted in Experimental, Geograph | 1 Comment »

How Geograph survived the BoingBoing effect…

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

… so its 1am on an idle Wednesday (and you really thinking of heading to bed) when someone on the forum mentions the 1 millionth photo will be going soon, so you think Na, its too early, but out of interest you go and check anyway… And you find in fact its right there about to go in a matter of seconds (going on moderation time) … and then you exclaim,

oh carp, oh carp, oh carp (or words to that effect)

… why do I say that? Well the thing is I know that Geograph runs pretty close to the limit* hosting wise, and this milestone, could, should and probably will, make a big splash, suddenly have mental images of Geograph exploding in a fireball, … not good!

(note, the rest of this post uses a few technical terms, and is rather long, turn away now if that scares you…)

(more…)

Tags: Geograph, slashdot effect
Posted in Experimental, Geograph | No Comments »

Over one MILLION Geograph Images!

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Geograph has just reached a pretty significant milestone, we how have over 1,000,000 images live on the site, all creative commons licenced for reuse goodness. The image that took us over the tipping point is reproduced below, but it is but one image of a million, so thanks to all the amazing contributors that has made this milestone possible.

Update, In the Press: Offical (login required) (RSS), Paul’s Blog, Boing Boing, Reddit, and Digg.

(more…)

Tags: Geograph, milestone, million
Posted in Geograph, update | 2 Comments »

Geograph: Watching the Fire build

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

As we near the Million mark on photos uploaded to Geograph British Isles, the coverage is really building up; and the project has definitly matured from just capturing a photo of every square (but that is still continuing!), to capturing each square in ‘depth’. We display the current coverage on the site as a depth map, but here we present some animations to watch the progress.

There are a number of interesting artefacts in this, if you are quick you can follow people as the hike long distance paths, but you can also see the people making concerted efforts to knock of hectads.

Of course the raw frames are available under Creative Commons, and a bonus prize to who can make an good mashup of these. The animations include both weekly frames, and monthly versions (labelled quick)

(the fire reference)

Depth Key

Tags: depth, Geograph, hot, maps
Posted in Coverage Maps, Geograph, maps, update | No Comments »

Geograph by Bittorrent!

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Lordelph has just setup a new system to distribute the Geograph archive by bittorrent! For this to work really well we need as many people to help seed as possible, so if you are able please do!

I have a number of servers sitting around that could help with this, so I am particularly keen to have a client that can be setup on linux boxes easy, Lordelph pointed me towards rtorrent which so far seems to be working well. I don’t have time to document it fully now, but below is a quick start guide to what I did to get it going (on Fedora, other flavours very similar), with minimal fuss. The next step will be to have a script to automatically discover new torrents.

#install rtorrent (using yum as fedora)
yum install rtorrent

#create user and folder
adduser geotorr
mkdir /var/geotorr
chown geotorr:geotorr /var/geotorr

#setup initial enviroment
su geotorr
mkdir /var/geotorr/session
mkdir /var/geotorr/watch
cd /var/geotorr/watch/
wget http://torrents.geograph.org.uk/torrents/geograph_vol001_image_0_to_49999.torrent

#create config file (setting up to use created folder, and to setup watch and session folders)
# paste in the example from http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/browser/trunk/rtorrent/doc/rtorrent.rc?rev=latest and edit
# or see my version available at http://barry.pastebin.com/f6f861f59
nano ~/.rtorrent.rc

#but see also (haven't read it myself!)
# http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2007/05/02/howto-use-rtorrent-like-a-pro/

# then to add new torrents in future just drop the .torrents files in the watch folder
# - a little script that follows that RSS feed would do nicely here!

more… on the geograph forum.

Edited Tues PM for spelling and grammar – the previous post wasn’t proof-read!

Tags: bittorrent
Posted in Experimental, Geograph | No Comments »

Piclens viewer for Geograph

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Piclens is an amazing program for very simply viewing photos full screen, in a fluid browser plugin, minimising distractions to focus on the photos. Really you have to try it for yourself to experience it, but below are a few screenshots, I highly recommend downloading it yourself, works on Internet Explorer, Firefox 2 and 3 amongst others. Even more interesting is thanks to the team at Piclens we have a special version that incorperates a Geograph search, so download Piclens using the special link below:

http://download.piclens.com/partner/aT78rK8wv9ML

If you already have it, it might ask to reinstall again.

(click to enlarge – my graphics skills don’t do it justice)

Also of note the search box uses Geograph’s new experimental full text engine, so should be quick and intuitive to use… Also when viewing the search results, continues rightwards in a continuous 3D wall – no paging required.

As expected the piclens display page on Geograph still works, which can be used to visualise any standard results. Choose the ‘piclens’ option using the dropdown on the search page.

Tags: 3D, full text, Geograph, piclens
Posted in Experimental, Geograph | 1 Comment »

Reusing Geograph Images

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

The Creative Commons licence used for ALL (768,000+) Geograph Images was chosen for a very specific reason – it allows moneyification – helps preserve the archive forever – but it also makes the archive freely available to all – at least as long as reuse is attributed.

As evidenced by the number of images put in forums, blogs, and en-mass in sites like Wikipedia, there is clearly interest in reusing our images, but it its also clear there is some confusion on how to credit photos, and many people also hotlink images directly from the Geograph Servers.

To make it easier we have recently introduced a new page that helps explain the requirements, however as its linked directly from each photo it can be aware of the photo in question, it can also provide snippets of code ready for copy/pasting.

We currently have HTML, code for BB-compatible forums, Creative-Commons RDF matadata, even Wikipedia templates. Example here, look for the link under the big image on the main photo page.

This last entry is particularly new and interesting – this outputs three Wikipedia templates, making sure the image has the maximum amount of the data we have available – this includes the information box (title, links and licence), geotagging, as well as the specific Geograph Template.

Suggestions for other snippets welcome….

Also while here will also mention we have created a Google Gadget, which makes it easy to embed a small selection of Geograph Images in any webpage, or iGoogle itself. To change the selection, run a suitable search on Geograph and copy the i number from the url into the Gadget preferences.

Tags: images, photos, reuse, Wikipedia
Posted in Creative Commons, Geograph | No Comments »

Geograph … three years in the making!

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

(more)

Tags: birthday, Geograph, mosaic, three
Posted in Geograph | 1 Comment »

Another Whole Myriad :: TG

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

The pace new photos on Geograph is not relenting, so much so we how have another whole Myriad! This time its TG and covers East Anglia and Norwich area, covering 1991 land squares. There is more on the overall progress here, which shows the coverage by Myriad (which by the way is a Geographism for a 100×100km square on the National Grid)

To try to showcase these have been creating some Zoomable viewers to really see the coverage:

Geograph Mosaic Collection

Unfortunatly they require too much manual work to be part of the real site (creating a ‘printable page’ at the appriate scale, stitching all the images, and then running it though zoomifies utility) – but it would be really good to get a Flash programmer to be able to create a viewer like this that runs directly off Geograph tiles!

Tags: Geograph, map, mosiac, photographs, zoomify
Posted in Geograph, UK | No Comments »

Playing with (geo-enabled) Full-Text Searches

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Recently I have been playing a lot with Sphinx full-text search engine, in particular with regard to indexing the Geograph archive. (a bit of background – Geograph has a fairly good homegrown site text search – but its not full text, so many queries will not return that many results – not to mention been based on MySQL ‘like’, so is pretty slow – so a full text search is the next level). And I have to say I am liking it a LOT, in fact I would say I am a fanboy

So to that end of created a whole bunch of demos based around the flexible indexing it provides, location based searching is even possible!

At the most basic is simple text based search, one point of note, there is no pagination, simply add more keywords (including negative) or grid references to refine the selection.

Next is a ‘auto-complete’ style image finder, this is designed to find ‘that image’ quickly, in a similar way to the above but shows the results in a autocomplete box immediately!

A refinement of the first is search with location, this allows you limit the search to near a particular Grid References – this is particully cool in that there is Sphinx powered auto-complete for place names for finding GRs. (a real auto-complete not a like the search in the previous one pretending to be one)

This is all building towards the Illustrator demo. Which from a block of text attempts to find relevent images. The idea is that a (geolocated) news article, walking route, place description and such could be automatically have relevent(ish) images shown. (an example demo here)

(a few more ‘toys’ can be found in GeographTools!)…. Try them out and let me know how you get on…

I have learnt a lot about search indexing from this, including how to perform location searches in the index (I know latest versions of sphinx include a lat/long based geosearch – but I think this r-tree method in text has better scalability), and how to create an autocomplete function with sphinx. If anybody is interested in these, they will eventually make it into the geograph codebase, or let me know and I might make a separate post.

Interestingly (huh?), it was actually creating a ‘autocomplete’ textbox for finding trigpoints (which included the forerunner to the sphinx location search in but implemented in mysql), is actually what inspired me to actually go the trouble if figuring out how to install Sphinx on linux, which I have been interested in for a long time! – that is also now sphinx powered for text searches

As a side note have now reached the ‘linux sysadmin’ level that I can compile it on Geographes servers, yay! But I do worry for the sanity of others due to this (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!)

Tags: auto complete, autocomplete, full text search, Geograph, image search, indexing, Search, Sphinx, text search, web service
Posted in API, Geograph, Location Search, Nearby, PHP, Sphinx, UK, Web Services | 1 Comment »

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