I have to admit, to me, editing OpenStreetMap is actually a little therapeutic. Sort of like gardening. My first major contribution was when I brought my little QStarz GPS unit across Indonesia, by train, sitting against the window. The most recent contribution was our trip to Dubbo, where I helped fill in a few missing roads, and added an initial outlay of Dubbo Zoo.

Nearly everyone on our team stayed up the entire night; most of us didn’t sleep at all. It had been years since I last pulled an all-nighter, but they had always been for good causes. I had just completed another one and had an immense amount of fun in the process. The reason? GovHack. GovHack aimed to encourage the Australian government to make as much information openly available as possible. The challenge was to take the scattered pieces of information already available and turn them into useful tools or visualisations for the public.

Status: ❌ It is time for a new project. I’ve finally decided I want to do some electronics stuff - at least play around in that realm a little. However, I want to “get out and about” a little as well, so this leads me to my idea: a controllable long-range RC plane. I’ve been debating whether to go the embedded Linux route, or the more simple microcontroller route. One of the first things I stumbled upon was ArduPilot, a cheap Arduino-based board allowing for a UAV. However, after looking through the requirements I would have needed to purchase an RF transmitter, and they aren’t cheap. This made me rethink the ArduPilot route and to evaluate what I really wanted to do: control the …

A normal internet connection gets attacked, a lot. The majority of attacks are of the form “hello, anybody there?” – where most people just don’t answer. But sometimes, just sometimes, the question gets an answer. Depending on the answer, the attacker will start to explore. A few weeks back I was a little bored and started fiddling. I wanted to play with my Cisco, but also wanted to play with OSSEC, but also has a GIS craving. In the end I decided to create a map of the people who ask, “hello”.

This is the laundry list of things I did while creating a mod_tile VMware appliance based on Ubuntu Server 8.04. I’ve kept descriptions limited but left all the commands in. Let’s start installing things… Useful goodies for compiling source sudo apt-get build-essential More goodies for Mapnik + Friends sudo apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-filesystem1.34.1 libboost-iostreams-dev libboost-iostreams1.34.1 libboost-program-options-dev libboost-program-options1.34.1 libboost-python-dev libboost-python1.34.1 libboost-regex-dev libboost-regex1.34.1 libboost-serialization-dev libboost-serialization1.34.1 libboost-thread-dev libboost-thread1.34.1 libicu-dev libicu38 …