I was down in London last weekend for OpenTech, which was up to the usual high standard and full of useful talks on all manner of techy things. I made some useful contacts during the course of the day and have some ideas for how to take a couple of projects forward as a result. My hotel was cheap and cheerful, although the clamp for the shower was broken and the ceiling in the bathroom was so low that I had to crouch—I dread to think how anyone much taller than me would have coped.
Some boredom earlier this week made me decide to hack together a basic API for ScenicOrNot in response to a post on the mySociety mailing list. I’m quite pleased with how easy it was to get something up and running, as it’s been a long time since I did any programming for fun instead of research or work. If I get a bit of spare time this weekend I have a few extensions planned, such as returning all location points within a given set of coordinates (not entirely sure how this will work yet).
The T word is still coming along slowly, chapter 4 has now been provisionally accepted and I emailed across a first draft of chapter 5 this evening. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I will have a complete first draft of the entire thesis ready, and then it’s just a case of going through as many iterations as necessary to produce the final version. I expect there will be several such iterations, but it’s much easier to tinker with an existing document with most of the words in place than it is to write something from scratch.