On the way to Wednesday's London pub meet-up I was meaning to do some mapping to check this, but I forgot. No mapping. Just a pub. ...and curry house!

We were out East in Shoreditch. Actually the Ten Bells pub is maybe not quite in Shoreditch but it was still crowded with trendy afterwork bar-goers like the best/worst of them. Ed reckoned the pub is in Spitalfields not Shoreditch, but the address is listed as Shoreditch. We discussed this in the pub, and I said I could settle it by looking at the Yahoo flickr geotagging polygons. This is a cool API, but weirdly it doesn't actually let you see the alpha polygons very easily ("Shapefiles"? Who uses those?) So this is where boundaries.tomtaylor.co.uk comes in handy. I'd link to WOEID #34709 for Shoreditch, but amusingly it's the default example. So based on people's flickr geotagging, the Ten Bells pub is in the southern end of Shoreditch, but also in Spitalfields. Of course for something less fuzzy and pychogeographic, based on the rock solid dataset that is OpenStreetMap place nodes, we should really be looking at Nominatim polygon for Shoreditch. So there. Definitely in Shoreditch.

We talked about Potlatch 2. It has a data bug to do with deleting ways which are hanging off the edge of a downloaded area (or at least it did have on Wednesday. Maybe fixed now) It's also gained a 'sharpen' function for the background imagery now. I'm yet to see this in JOSM but apparently it's in the pipeline. Competitive coding!

We talked about the bing credit text appearing in the editors. It includes a date "©2010", which is confusing. The real age of bing imagery is variable, but generally a least a few years old.

Bing imagery in England is pretty awesome, but Ollie and Steve8 said they'd taken a look at some areas of Scotland and found it to be not so great. I just found some weird patchiness. What's this boundary for? Maybe it forms a random stripey pattern like in Turkey.

Steve8 was asking us if we thought it was worth the effort (and expense) of continuing with the project to scan his full collection of Ordnance Survey 7th Series maps. Of course there's less appetite for this since the OS Open Data and now the bing imagery has arrived, but still very valuable particularly in these parts of Scotland and it seems a shame not to scan the complete set.

At some point we went for curry...

We talked about Mapnik, in the light of my remarkable achievement (That's right... I managed to install it) Then we talked about Mapnik 2 which Ollie and Jon have tried out. This alpha version apparently handles icons as SVG, which could give some fun flexibility, but unfortunately means it consumes silly amounts of memory when rendering a map area containing dense POIs. On the plus side it has a "data tile" capability, which sounds really neat. It allows you to determine/separate out all the data involved in rendering a particular meta-tile. This could lead the way to more tiled data server innovations.

Speaking of data tiles, I recently saw and played with a really neat iPhone app from a Norwegian company who are launching in the UK in the coming weeks. This is using OpenStreetMap served with a tiled data approach, and the best on-device vector rendering I've seen. We're doing some work with them, to supply placr.co,uk London transport stats into the app.

And speaking of that, there's snow predicted for next week, and another tube strike for Friday (just on the Northern & Bakerloo line) so Londoners don't forget to try using placr.mobi and the dashboard map (OSM) (blog)

Friday is also the day of the OpenStreetMap Xmas Party!. I'm sure travel won't be too disrupted. The idea of doing it on a Friday is to allow people from outside of London to make the journey in for this one. Let's get everyone along for a big Christmas bash! There's details and sign-up list on that page now. And if you're nowhere near London see the worldwide Christmas party page