Mapillary is a Swedish organisation that, like Marvin the Paranoid Android in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has a Data Centre for storing photographs as big as the planet. When you Register with them you can store GPS-registered photos on their site (really useful when surveying for later mapping).

My profile on Mapillary shows that I’ve uploaded 3,500 photos and have travelled 179.6 km whilst doing that. It also shows that I’ve uploaded the last 81 photos 6 times (making 486 total uploads in that sequence).

I’m currently mapping in the north of Nottingham in a district called ‘Gedling’ (south of Arnold Lane and north of Westdale Lane). 81 is a very typical number for me to shoot in a morning or afternoon whilst mapping. I used to use the Mapillary app in JOSM to upload, but tend to upload directly from a browser these days (the JOSM app requires a confirmation within a browser, so I cut out the middleman).

The sequence went very normally with those 81 photos, except that the Mapillary browser did not confirm the uploads within my profile. At first, I also got zero reply from Mapillary support. I kept trying to upload…

I eventually got an email from Katrin at Mapillary support, and she copied the email to Peter. According to the email that Peter sent this morning, the issue was because the “harvester for manually uploaded images has not been running” (he restarted it, so all 6 identical sets of images were harvested at once). Problems with a Harvester seem the correct kind of issue for this time of year.

Update:

I sent an email to Peter saying “So, no-one could manually upload photos? And I’m the only one that manually uploads photos?? Good lord.” Fortunately, he seems to have a sense of humour. He replied that:

• no web-uploaded images have been processed in the last 2 days
• that affected ~200 people
• it involved ~500k images
• mobile apps use another method, so uploads did not actually stop
  (they halved, hence no-one at Mapillary noticed)

Joke:

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To distract me from the difficulties of mapping the houses within Manderley (a recent development of £400,000 GBP houses ($494,000 USD, €467,000 Euro), half of which do not yet appear on Bing) here is a useless challenge for you:–

Find the Tree Rat

Non-golfers are warned of the danger of death from hi-speed golf-balls, and therefore not to trespass on to Mapperley Golf course. However, I walked all around the perimeter of the course, and took pictures every few seconds the whole way. At one point I came across some of the local wildlife; it tried to hide from me but I did manage to get a single frame with it in view.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to (virtually) walk the perimeter of the Golf Course. As a virtual walk protective head-, elbow- & knee-gear are optional.

So, starting at the first frame of the walk, find the tree rat (sorry, squirrel). Be warned that the only way I could get it in shot was to photograph from a distance, so it is small & well blended in with the tree trunk as it rushes to get away from me. If you reach the houses then you have missed it (although the walk continues after the houses are mapped until we reach the clubhouse).

Golf:– a good walk, spoiled

words — wrongly — attributed to Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)

After surveying the desert of Manderley — it was midday Wednesday, 16 November & the place was almost entirely devoid of human life — I walked clockwise around Mapperley Golf course starting at the traffic lights at the top of Arnold Lane (having bought Pink Floyd’s single + LP as a young man I love that road just for it’s name), passing through Digby Park along the way (check out the Alphabetical Arboretum if you think that you can identify every tree & bush from it’s leaves) & finishing at Mapperley Golf Club-house. The Golf Course is full of dire signs warning walkers of imminent death, so the walk does not dare trespass upon the course but instead circumnavigates the perimeter.

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Test out your detection faculties: what is wrong with this picture of the 4 Seasons?

It was shot last Wednesday with the kind permission of the householder on Plains Road, Mapperley. Try to ignore the fact that the camera is within a cheap smartphone & that the operator still does not know how to manually control the contrast whilst mapping.

The answer, of course, is that one of the Seasons is missing (stolen!).

Although they look like marble, they are in fact made of fibreglass, and are thus nice & light. That is exactly what some youths discovered many years ago when first put in place, just before those youths absconded with the statues. The police discovered the abductors, but only three of the Seasons. The statues returned are now concreted into position (whilst they yearn & mourn for their sister, of course).

86 + 92 Plains Road, Mapperley NG3, UK

• Q: What’s almost as good as a Green Field to a Housing Developer?
• A: A single house on a large green site at the edge of town close to shops & schools

Here is the view between two houses positioned 100 yards up the road from these two properties to try to underline why developers want to build there (the view is of Mapperley Golf Course, shot on Wednesday 16 Nov on a classic sunshine-&-showers English day):

Finally, my mapping gets me (almost) to the Ultima Thule (the lands beyond the suburbs of Mapperley & Gedling) (‘Ultima Thule’ was a bookshop in my University town of Newcastle Upon Tyne, and the name was explained to me as meaning “the unknown, unmapped, dangerous realms beyond the civilised world”) (or, Gateshead). Finally, my photos can begin to show not just bricks & tarmac but trees & mud. Excellent.

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…than to go out mapping with him in the face of an English soak-to-the-skin drizzle.

I’d gotten an invite to a “Shakespeare Schools Festival” for Friday 11 November at Gordon Craig Theatre (4 schools, with Micky’s Presdales School on first with an astonishingly good extract from The Tempest).

Friday was dry, but the following day was a classic English day (which is to say, it was wet). Just as the Inuit are said to have 32 words for ‘snow’, we English have 32 words for ‘rain’, and this one was “drizzle”, which is a light rain that looks ever so innocent, but will be running in small streams down the inside of your trouser legs in 30 minutes if you do not have the correct clothing.

I was fine. I’d bought a Mountain Warehouse Extreme ISODRY 10 000 fully-waterproof jacket (Mountain Warehouse have a store in Nottingham centre, so I could try it on before buying; it is not only fully waterproof but also breathable). After an hour I was perfectly dry, but their jackets were soaked through, poor little sots. We did both sides of one little road then quickly scooted back home.

I did take a photo of them & Buddy the dog, but their mum did not want them plastered across an international Diary page. So, instead, I present to you (ta-da-da-daa-da-daaa! (fanfare)) more Ware Khazis photographed on Queens Road, Ware:–

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Do other parts of the world display odd and/or strange figures on their garage tops? It certainly has proved to be a popular meme in the parts of Nottingham that I’ve mapped (see also [1] [2] [3] [4]). Here is the latest, a stick figure in a top-hat on the top of a garage in Westdale Lane East, Gedling:–

If it’s funny then it gets into these Diaries (possibly a “Never Mind the Dog…” series? [1]).

This one was on the end of a garage facing the street, on Digby Avenue in Mapperley (a very posh area of Nottingham but with, I’m delighted to say, very approachable & down-to-earth occupants) (a complete contrast to some other posh areas, who are very up themselves):–

At 09:45 UTC the OSM sites are back up again after ‘too many people accessing’ notices for ~45 minutes. Do we have some info on what was happening, please?

The Existential Question

08:45 5 November
Having slept on this I’ve come to realise that it is far more important than at first I realised, since it concerns the very existence of OSM: in what form is it going to continue? (all life on this planet grows, withers or transmutes; what is OSM going to do?).

In short (there is fuller info with links at bottom):

1. 28 Oct: zerebubuth (Matt Amos) opened a discussion on Github : the tile-servers are hitting capacity; what policy is OSM going to follow in the future? Restrict to open-source apps or restrict to publicly-accessible sites (notice that both options involve denial of access)?
    
   There are 59 machines internationally — including 20 globally distributed tile-caches — serving up OSM tiles to anybody that asks for them. Funded entirely by donations. Outbound peak traffic on tile.openstreetmap.org (served from cache) peaks at 1 Gbit/sec (6,800 GB/day; 528 million requests at 13.6 kB/request), but a recent measurement indicates that just 11% of this is supplied to OSM websites. The rest is 3rd party sites and apps.
    
2. 4 Nov: the system seized up tight.
    
   ironbelly had to be restarted (look at ‘uptime’) and re-init (at a guess) on the ramoth network (look at ‘memory’ and also ‘network’ - the server system became saturated with FIN_WAIT & TIME_WAIT connections for all of 2 Nov, possibly indicating TIME-WAIT loading problems)
    
3. As soon as you provide something good at zero cost there is large demand. How is OSM going to respond? 

Added at 24:00 4 November:

Zero assistance from OSM Folk, so had to find an answer myself. Took a long while.

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GNJ Motorsport (removed - thank you) - this is known as Profile Spam.

0 Edits; 0 Traces; 0 Diary posts; just 1 Comment on day of Profile creation to make sure that Google will find the spam.

Please remove this turd.

One thing noticed by seasoned webmasters is the clever spammers that post an innocuous message which they leave until suddenly it gets edited into being a conventional spam message (reported on SFS as sometimes being left untouched for years) . That behaviour is made more difficult on OSM since many many folks make just one edit & are never seen again.

I’ve spotted a lot of these nonsense Diary postings. This is simply the latest (the single letter ‘A’). On my own website I simply deleted such users; if they were not spammers, then they were a total waste of disk & db space. However, after 7 months mapping for OSM my anti-spam brain has suddenly clicked into place; these potential spammers need watching. That needs to be done programmatically (links of latest updated diaries crosschecked with original postdates) but in the meantime I’ll assemble a watchlist here (almost all these folks are 0 Edits 0 Traces 1 Diary):—

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• Pakistani ‘Escort’ whilst Mapping in Dubai (removed -thank you) (‘hot body language’ promised)
• Burger Grill Varlemann (removed -thank you) (0 Edits, 0 Traces, just 1 spam diary entry)

My target was to finish mapping a patch local to me in Nottingham, bounded (roughly) by The Wells Road, Woodborough Road, Westdale Lane West/East and Carlton Hill. It took 7 months & is now complete.

I’m a careful & thorough kind of chap and thought that I’d done a good job. Nevertheless, I was really pleased to recently come across OSM Inspector, which is provided by Geofabrik Tools to be able to quickly find a whole range of errors. There is a wiki page for it and, naturally, it provides virtually zero help in using the tool. I’ve used it for just a couple of days, so here is…

An Idiot’s Guide to OSM_Inspector

or, OSM Tools Considered Useful After Mapping

1. Open OSM Inspector in a browser of your choice
2. Type your desired map location into the Search box & click search
   (for me “nottingham”)
3. Click on the desired link from the Results box
   (for me, “Nottingham, East Midlands, England, United Kingdom”)
4. You will now dimly see your desired location on the map
   [my view in your browser]
   (there is a slider next to the Base Layer option box which will adjust the contrast of the base map)
5. Click the ‘+’ and/or drag the map until you have the correct territory before you in the screen
6. Click on the View dropdown & choose “Addresses”
   (there are a lot of other options, but that has been my activity all this year)
7. Click the “Buildings” checkbox OFF to allow the errors to be seen
8. Click on an error within the map to show that selection in the RHS selection panel. If you use JOSM & have the RemoteControlPlugin installed (not needed if > v3715) + JOSM is already running, then clicking on the icon will switch JOSM to the current view + load the data (I haven’t tested that yet). Icons are also provided for iD + for Potlatch2.

It was mostly very useful for finding + fixing errors in my mapping. I found only 2 useless aspects:-

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On my final day mapping Porchester Gardens last Tuesday 25 October (the day before my birthday) (67, since you ask) I photographed & recorded the name of a house near the top of Sandford Road. Only long afterwards did the name of the building strike home: “Coronation Villa”.

Porchester Gardens was divided into lots for allotments & houses following it’s purchase on 26 March 1887 (history: [1], [2]). The first house is generally reckoned at 1889, and single houses were built on each square in the Gardens in the 10 years or so that followed purchase†. Odd houses were built throughout the next years, but it was the period between the 2 World Wars (1920s & 1930s) that saw the true spurt of building as gardening allotments were abandoned & houses built on each plot (all except one).

I find it very interesting to track the history of building, but the difficulty is to find the start_date for enough houses (especially the old ones). And that is where the building-name comes in, and exercising little grey cells…

This house can be seen in Google StreetView (it’s the double-fronted detached house with a blue door, but I cannot show that here). Here is the panel-name (not very clear):

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No-one seems to remove spam anymore. Here are the latest turds:

• عمليات طفل الأنبوب و الحقن المجهري في تونس (user: DR Skander Ben Alaya)
  (translation: “operations tube children and ICSI in Tunisia”)
  (spam for a Tunisian-based gynaecological clinic, supposedly from one of it’s doctors)
• Globale Protection (user: Globale Protection)
  (spam for web security company based in the Ivory Coast, Africa)
• Надувной мешок Lamzac от “Junkstore” (user: Junkstore)
  (spam for UA company Junkstore)
  (zero map edits since 5 Oct; pure spam)

Sat 29 Oct update: these 3 removed (thanks)

Here is the Kent Road big brother to the stone/metal guardians that have featured recently ([1],[2],[3],[4]) in these diaries:—

The photo above required digital zoom to be able to show it closely. Here is a more distant shot in better quality:—

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In Mysterious Markers (22 Oct) I showed the following ancient markers from the NCWW:

Really, this was a case of “Nothing to see here, please move on” as they were simply older variations on the modern “Sluice Valve” (SV) & “Fire Hydrant” (H) ‘grave-stone’ wall plates used by Severn Trent elsewhere in Nottingham. As escada pointed out in the comments, both hydrants and sluice-valves can be mapped (though currently shown only on the specialist osmhydrant.org or openfiremap.org). The kicker came in a comment from Andy Mackey, giving a link to a blog post from Chris Hill in 2012. A 2016 comment in that blog post said that the UK authorities consider mapping Fire Hydrants to be a terrorist act (no kidding):

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For those that do not already realise: I appear to be as obsessed with the stone creatures that Nottingham householders use to guard their homes as they are. Here is the latest one from Robinson Road, Porchester Gardens:—

Current values for Porchester Gardens’ houses seem to be somewhere north of £250,000 GBP each (5-bedroom detached houses are common on those slopes). With more than 800 properties in that neighbourhood, the total value is climbing rapidly towards the £billion GBP mark.

Of course, there’s always someone that will let the side down…

The latest survey of Porchester Gardens — just another couple of days surveying before it should be completed — has unearthed more of these lead markers and, possibly, has answered what they are. Here are two pictures from today’s trip [1] [2]:

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Further to the Marshall Hill gargoyles that were featured here in August 2016, today we have 2 rather more distant gargoyles that guard the top of a garage annex. Their distance from the ground, time of day & equipment available to me meant that I had to shoot them against the light. However, I do feel that the Autumn back-light & digital zoom-induced blur actually enhance their menace rather delightfully: