There's a handful of interesting events coming up in and around London, in and around OpenStreetMap:

Saturday tomorrow there's a Brighton mapping party if you fancy a short journey out of London. The cake diagram is looking quite epic! I'll be missing this Brighton action, which I'm quite sad about. Instead I'm going camping (brrr)

Next Thursday 24th Nov - #geomob! The quarterly presentations evening on geo topics. This time the guy behind the BusMapper app, which consumes placr transport data, will be presenting. So not directly OpenStreetMap related, but a bunch of OSMers will be there.

Then on Sat 26th / Sun 27th Nov we have the OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend. Looking forward to this one. It's a chance to discuss and hack with the developers working on core components of OpenStreetMap, or just with pet projects and applications using OSM. Come along to join in the fun! By the way I've just experimented with setting this up on lanyrd, so if you're a twitter user (and who isn't??) be sure to "attend" or at least "track" the event on there.

I didn't manage to squeeze in another winter pub meet-up between all these things. I'll probably wait till the week after. But how did the first one go? Well I'll tell you...

In the monkey puzzle, we huddle around and lamented the lack of mapping fun. But we got over it pretty quickly :-) And we talked about...

Transport ticket prices. Always a good conversation to kick things off.

We had Shaun there, and he was back from google HQ where he'd been at the Google Summer of Code Documentation Summit. He and Kate Chapman, Ian Dees, Anne Gentle, Nóirín Plunkett, Tomi Toivio, and Anne Goldenberg had all been working on a new OpenStreetMap book, a copy of which he had with him:

You can order a copy on lulu.com. I think he was saying it will soon also have a proper ISBN number and be available on amazon, but you can also just see it/print it/download it for free from flossmanuals.net. Clearly this is awesome, but I have some philosophical musings on how this kind of thing can fit into the wider documentation challenge the project faces. A topic for another diary entry I reckon.

As well as a book, Shaun came along with some funky google branded magnetic toys. While happily playing with these we talked about Google Map MaKer, how evil it is, and how it gives me a big sad face

We also discussed the fagility of AJAX web mail clients. Is it true that google mail was the first really prominent well known use of AJAX? Arguably google maps with its slippy map came first, but actually technically this isn't a great example of AJAX because there's no XML involved. A slippy map loads in images asynchronously, whereas a proper AJAX "rich internet application" is something a bit different.

We talked about filling in timesheets, what a pain this is, and how it's made slightly easier for software developers through the wonders of "svn log". We joked that the next step is for someone to make an svn2timesheet utility.

And we talked about some stuff which is now out of date. At the time TomH was describing how he had (just that day) rolled ruby on rails version 3 onto the live OpenStreetMap server, but had to back out when he realised that sessions were getting crosswired. Nasty. But it's all solved now. OpenStreetMap is rolling with rails version 3! Nice work Tom! Besides deploying it, he did the work of porting the code over, in a code branch he's had going for a while now. There's a bunch of differences in rails 3, including a changover of database querying to use AREL

No doubt we'll talk about that kind of thing some more on the weekend after next: the hack weekend, but before that it's the Bright Mapping party (TOMORROW)