First day of phpconference.es is finished and it was very enjoyable. The location was the same as last year, so was the quality of the organization. I saw six talks, here are small summaries: KISS by Derick Rethans: Pretty much a beginners, introduction and common sense talk. Most of it not even directly relevant to PHP. A bit of a disappointment, might have been more interesting for customers than developers. No slides up yet, but they were very similar to these: Kiss Phpnw08 Trees in the database by Lorenzo Alberton: ...

I always loved the idea behind OpenStreetMap. Mostly because of my open source experience and sites Wikipedia, these show that with enough people doing a little bit of work in the area they know, it is possible to create results which are better and more free than the conventional commercial offerings. I remember the time in London, when we had our little start-up and needed location maps for our customers and couldn’t find a good provider for this (there was no google maps or map24 at that time). So fools that we were we decided to write it ourself. We got the raw data on CD from TeleAtlas and one of our programmers got pretty far with a renderer. But before we could get anything useful map24 produced a much better version which we started using. But I always have been frustrated by the lack of open map data and open source renderers. ...

Another look at my New Year resolutions. I decided to do them every four months now, every three was a bit much. loose weight fail - I am doing more mountain biking and eat sensible, but I gave up on the gym. Working out with my N79 Active turned out to be a lot of fun. use my motorcycle more a little bit more use, small trips and some usage in town. Now I need to get a new ITV. ...

Last week Cat and I went to Cádiz for our Summer holiday. It was just a week this year and we didn’t really decide what to do this year until the last minute. It was either a motorcycle tour around Catalonia, France or a short flight to somewhere in Europe. Because Cat likes the Atlantic and we had never been to the very South of Spain we decided to take the Trenhotel night train from Barcelona to Cádiz and rent a car there for a few days. We booked train and car and I also bought a backpack and some trekking shoes for the trip. ...