20 July 2023
Updatable views in PostgreSQL: Why and how?
A technique useful both in relational spatial datasets and when you can't change the structure of your database
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17 March 2023
Returning to games
Having skipped consoles, the kind gift of an XBox shows me what's changed, and what's still the same
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19 January 2023
Alan Garner
The greatest living English author? Certainly the most astonishing speaker and three novels.
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14 October 2022
Green sanity
A few days after World Mental Health Day, I find it a no-brainer to associate my own mental health with something green.
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30 October 2019
qgis2web: The Story So Far
On qgis2web's 500,000th download, it seems a fitting time to look back at how qgis2web got where it is today.
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7 June 2019
A walk without Max
My less than cartographic unsuccessful entry to @pinakographos's #MonoCarto competition
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2 February 2019
Scraping webmaps with web2qgis
I wondered if one could write code to do the same thing in reverse—scrape a webpage for webmaps, and import any maps it found into a QGIS project.
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20 December 2018
Reiver!
Many years ago, inspired by flocking algorithms, I made a Flash game based on the Border Reivers. Try it now on your desktop, before Flash finally dies for ever.
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23 November 2018
Bellingham must stay three-tier
Northumberland County Council initially consulted on changing the whole of west Northumberland to a two-tier school system. At the same time, Hadrian Learning Trust consulted on converting their Hexham schools to two-tier. After overwhelmingly negative responses on both issues, both decided against this change in the Hexham partnership.
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17 September 2018
Where next for qgis2web?
Those of you who follow QGIS closely might have noticed that development of qgis2web has significantly slowed since QGIS 3 was released. Is this of concern? What next for the plugin?
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20 August 2018
doublespeak: Northumberland County Council
The Council’s consultation report on education in west Northumberland, published at the end of the stage-two consultation period, contained the following emotive text: “Feedback from schools and the wider community in the Haydon Bridge Partnership has not expressed a desire to return to the 3-tier system therefore this would be an unpopular and retrograde step.”
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24 July 2018
OS Zoomstack: first impressions
Zoomstack is “a comprehensive vector basemap from a national overview to street level detail”. It comes in various extremely powerful and/or user-friendly formats such as GeoPackage, PostGIS, and vector tiles (both downloadable as an MBTiles file and hosted online and accessible via an API).
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10 July 2018
Surplus places in west Northumberland schools
Surplus places were cited as a reason for the proposals to close successful schools in the region. My argument was that if a school’s budget is balanced or in surplus, why do surplus places matter?
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6 July 2018
A once-in-a-generation opportunity
Haydon Bridge High School catchment area is more than twice the size of any other Northumberland high or secondary catchment. It is nearly four times the size of its neighbouring catchment of Hexham, the other school partnership affected by Northumberland Council’s consultation and proposed changes to education in west Northumberland.
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5 May 2018
A time for free maps
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it seems to me that enthusiasm for Leaflet and OpenLayers web mapping libraries has cooled over recent times. After several years of real excitement, many seem to have drifted away to proprietary platforms such as Mapbox or Carto. Or Google Maps.
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25 April 2018
Decisions are made by those who show up
Northumberland County Council have abandoned all three proposed options, and now propose to keep Greenhaugh First School open.
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4 April 2018
We Say No
Northumberland County Council, you represent us. Your Councillors are elected by us, and your budgets come from our purses. To you, and to this whole exercise, we say no.
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27 March 2018
Mapping Emotion: Fighting school closures with QGIS
At FOSS4G UK 2018, Ross McDonald gave an amazing talk in the cartography stream on visualizing school catchment areas. Little did I know at the time how relevant to my family this would prove.
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12 March 2018
Owt for Nowt and Tuppence Change
As we all know, the ‘FOSS’ in FOSS4G stands for *free and open-source software*. Open-source advocates often rightly stress that the ‘free’ in FOSS means free as in speech, not free as in beer.