At last Wednesday's London Summer mapping party we ventured out of zone 1 all the way up to Belsize Park. It's not very far out of the centre of London, but one of those places which is just far enough that people tend to have not heard of it (although most people have heard of Hampstead) I decided it was time to get off our asses and map somewhere a bit more challenging to get to. This always means fewer people coming along, but it can be worth it for some more satisfying mapping. We'll have to go out as far as Heathrow to find a more raw mapping experience these days (noname streets) but Belsize Park had some juicy unmapped pockets of POIs. I was also finding some little service roads and gated-off private roads to add.

The Sir Richard Steele pub was rather nice. Well the ceiling was good certainly.

Firefishy arrived a little later having been on a mission to Watford and back to pick some OSM hardware which failed to be couriered properly to him. After trekking there and back and then back up to Belsize Park, he was deserving of a pint.

We met Derick. Great to put a name to an IRC face. Turns out he's involved in core development of PHP and doing a lot of work with it as a freelancer which is pretty interesting. Maybe I'll be able to get him to help me with my recent OAuth hackery some time.

We had a few coding related discussions: Garbage collection. The great tabs/spaces religious wars. "It's not copy & paste coding, it's software patterns". We got onto source control systems. Of the silly proprietary options, perforce is probably a lesser evil than some the others (but really... who pays for these things?) We got talking about git again.

There was some database diskussions. Plans for the hardware work during the downtime which is taking place right now (hmmm guess I won't be able to post this diary entry for a while then) (UPDATE: The database has been up and running since Sunday, as planned, I just totally forgot to post this until now) We also talked about how Postgres 8.4 indices are slower than on 8.3 (so some users are reporting)

We talked about Linux conferences in Germany, and which ones have the best vibe these days.

We talked about having a printer at home. Derick doesn't have access to a printer, which can be a pain when you want to go mapping. He tried a super-hi-tech technique I told him about. Hold a piece of paper against the monitor and trace the map onto it! Anyway having a printer at home is not so great because ink cartridges are so expensive. You know it's a shady industry full of con-artists when you start getting spam about ink cartridges. Evil.

Jenny had a top secret prototype device with her from her place of work. She didn't let me take a picture of it. oooh.

Thursday 15th of July seems like a good date for the next London meet-up . Keep it free!. But in the meantime we're all getting excited about State Of The Map Quite a few people are already on route including Firefishy who managed to get a visa sorted. yay! Now he's excited, and he's not the only one. I've been preparing a talk about London Mapping Parties. It only has a few embarrassing photos :-)