Whilst on such travels, I often take photos. My camera timestamps these photos, but doesn’t have a built in GPS.

So, I want something that takes the photos, and the GPS tracks, and writes the GPS information into each of the photographs.

So far, so good - there is all manner of software out there to do this.

However, this relies on the clocks in my GPS and camera being in sync, which isn’t always true (and even if I were to remember to synchronise them every time I go out that doesn’t help with old photos which are really badly out of sync, such as from my round-Australia drive where I was crossing timezones on a regular basis and would often forget to update the time on my camera for several days).

GPSPhotoLinker, which I normally use, is almost good enough here, but not quite. It allows me to adjust the time on all my photos by a specified amount. But then I need to work out what that amount should be, and that’s a decidedly non-trivial problem.

Generally I can pinpoint fairly accurately where at least one photograph was taken, but then I need to manually find that point in my GPS tracks to work out what time I was really there at - which is also non-trivial as if I’ve stopped to take a photograph, and my GPS is logging every second, I’ll have a variety of points all roughly around the point. And it’s even worse if I’ve been past that same point several times. GPS Visualizer is quite helpful here as it will plot a GPX file onto Google Earth with timestamps as waypoints, but it’s super slow, and really doesn’t like big GPX files (of the type you might get if you drive 300+km a day logging every second…)

So what I really want is something that will take the GPS track, and a set of a photographs, and plot the photos on a map for where it thinks they were taken. Then I should be able to take one or more of the photos and drag them to where they were actually taken, and the software will use that new information to adjust all its timings and replot all the other photos. Then, when I’m happy they all look like they’re in roughly the correct location, it can write the GPS info to the photos.

Does such a thing exist?

If not, how difficult would it be to even write a little utility that does the plotting of photos onto Google Maps and then lets me “try out” different scenarios simply by giving it an offset and having it move all the photos accordingly, until I get a good enough result by trial and error? It doesn’t sound like it would be too difficult, but there are too many components of it I don’t know anywhere near enough about to actually do it.

Anyone any thoughts or pointers?

“The Home Secretary’s record on private information … displays a reckless disregard for the privacy of other people’s confidential information, matched with a determination to keep Government data just as secret as he or the Government choose at any one time. The Labour party believes that the balance should be struck differently and that it is the individual who needs protection in two ways. First, private information relevant to him or her should be protected against the state, and secondly, information possessed by the state that might result in detriment to the individual should be made available to that individual.”

– Roy Hattersley, Data Protection Bill debate, House of Commons 1983

At first glance it seems like a stupid question: of course you have to have a name. But do you? And if so, from when?

You don’t get given a name the instant you’re born, so there’s obviously some length of time during which you’re entitled not to have one. My first thought was that it was to do with the birth being registered, which is controlled by the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953. However, although all births must be registered within 42 days, there is no obligation to register a name at that time. At any time during the first 12 months the Registrar can add a name to the original record.

And although it might be possible to infer from this that you must therefore have to have a name by the end of your first year of life, it doesn’t actually say so. So if it’s a legal requirement it must come from somewhere else.

But where?

Suggestions welcome.

The first, from LoveFilm, opened: “Dear {CUSTOMER_INFO_FIRST_NAME}”.

The second, from Easyjet, greeted me: “NAME: [[Firstname]] [[Surname]]”.

Doesn’t anyone pay attention any more?

Instead I’m going to focus on one simple question that seems to have lots of people confused. More and more people are giving up on broadcast TV altogether, and buying or renting all their TV shows on DVD to watch. So, do they still need a licence?

TVL et al have been very successful in their misinformation campaigns here, as numerous people seem to think that the answer is “yes”.

The true answer is remarkably difficult to find, but is buried rather deeply on the BBC’s website in the section where they publish their responses to Freedom of Information queries. Of course these are published as PDFs to make it less likely anyone will stumble over the information, and, just to make it even more difficult, the PDFs are image scans, so Google etc can’t even index the underlying text.

So, as a public service, here are the steps to convincing yourself (or others) that you don’t need a license if you only use your TV to watch DVDs:

1. Visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/docs/responses_tvlicence.shtml
2. Find response SR2006000623 - TV Licence Requirements
3. Download the PDF
4. Read the answer to question 2: “Is a TV licence required for a television that is used for playing DVDs and videos (i.e. not for receiving or recording broadcasts)?” [you may also need the context of answer 1: "A licence is not needed simply because a television receiver is owned"]

Next week: How to deflect accusations of shady behaviour by doing everything under a name of an entity that doesn’t really exist in any legal form…

That plan too fell by the wayside, mainly due to the overwhelming tiredness that seems to follow a “20,000km in 7 weeks” drive.

And so, with great sadness, I have finally accepted that I am unlikely to ever share in this forum the many delights of that trip. At some stage I might reawaken to the task with great enthusiasm, but for now I have resigned myself to merely extol the virtues of the most underappreciated Australian attraction. I did, of course, see many of the classic landmarks: Sydney Harbour, the Twelve Apostles, the Nullarbor, Cable Beach at sunset, Uluṟu, etc., but for the most part they were all rather underwhelming[1]. One sight, however, outclassed almost everything else. It was mentioned in none of my guidebooks. No Tourist Information Centre carried any leaflets singing its praises. None of the fellow travellers I met along the way recommended it as a “must see”. But, that it is.

Even getting there was an adventure. My quest was unexpectedly delayed by a day due to the entire town of Katherine losing power for three hours, preventing me from refuelling the van and necessitating another night’s stay before being able to set off on the hunt. After a 300km drive north, I knew I was close; but it appears on no signposts, and I had to drive right around the town twice before discovering it, seemingly abandoned, beside a filling station on a road out of town.

It has no information board, nor even a simple plaque to explaining its history. So I cannot share the “why”, or even the “how”. But I can, with complete sincerity, eulogise the finest of Australia’s “Big Things” - The Boxing Croc of Humpty Doo:

[1] Other than Uluṟu. It was all I could have expected and more besides.

My best airport experience of the trip, as previously reported was in Dunedin, but as it was for a domestic flight it doesn’t really count. My arrival in NZ was quite a mess, but that was mostly due to the boarding desk in Tonga checking me and my luggage the whole way through to Dunedin, even though they weren’t supposed to, as I needed to clear immigration and customs in Auckland first. And having a pot of hot coffee tipped over me by a flight attendant on the connecting flight didn’t help much either, but that’s not really an airport story…

My arrival in Samoa was probably the simplest process of anywhere: the immigration desk was staffed by a very friendly and welcoming woman who seemed positively enthusiastic to see everyone, and customs was a fairly simple “put your bags on this conveyer belt so we can x-ray them” affair. Unfortunately I associate that arrival with the subsequent no-show of the transportation that had been pre-arranged to take me to my accommodation, and the overly aggressive taxi-drivers who volunteered to take me there instead. I was finally rescued by the mini-bus for a neighbouring hotel who then got confused as to where I’d said I was staying proceeded to leave me at a completely different place. Thankfully I noticed that the sign outside it didn’t seem quite right before the driver disappeared.

So I suspect I’m left with Sydney as the best all-round arrival process. There everything flowed incredibly smoothly and quickly, and I was outside looking for a cab quicker than getting off a lot of domestic flights.

Oslo still remains my all-round favourite airport, though. There’s a sense of design and beauty about it that you just don’t see in most airports.

And I’m still a little bemused that Tallinn airport seems to have tripled in size since my departure. I was the second person off the plane, and was very glad I wasn’t the first, as I would have had no clue where to go if I hadn’t been able to just follow someone who had obviously been through it before. We arrived away at the far side of the airport where they punish incoming passengers from the UK and Ireland for being non-Schengen, and they don’t really seem to have managed to put up any signage yet for how to get to anywhere.

I expect that any of the side trips I take over the next few months will be much smoother, however, now that most of Europe is effectively borderless.

Recently I noticed that one of their test cases seemed to have a spurious minus sign in it. After confirming that I was correct in every spreadsheet app I had access to, I decided to be nice and report this to them.

But:

• There is no email address prominent in the document to send it to
• There is, however, a link in the PDF that takes you to a website that has a well-hidden link (that looks like text, but, for no obvious reason, isn’t, so that using Find in your browser doesn’t actually find it) to a feedback form.
• When you eventually find and follow the link, you are told: due to technical problems the public “Send a Comment” button on the formula subcommittee page currently DOES NOT WORK. We very much want to receive public comments — for now, please send comments to the formula subcommittee through the <OpenDocument TC comment form>.
• Upon following that link, you discover that the mention of such a comment form was a lie, and you actually need to subscribe to a mailing  list.
• But before you can even think of subscribing, first you need to download a PDF of a legal agreement (or, more accurately, a blank template of a legal agreement that isn’t even filled in for the right specification yet).
• Then you need to read and understand the 6000 word OASIS Intellectual Property Rights (”IPR”) Policy.
• Then, even if you were minded to sign such a document without first taking legal advice, you need to work out what to do with it. The “Guidelines for Mailing List” page implies that there’s a “Subscription Manager” tool that would presumably require you to submit the filled in legal document somehow, but that link is actually just a local link to <a href=”#subscribing”>, which simply takes you back up the page by two lines, as that’s the section that the link is already in.

Maybe there are more instructions in an auto-response email when you try to subscribe, but I don’t know, because I never got that far. Instead I emailed the committee chair - only to get a response (a real one, from a live person, not an auto-response) saying that paying any attention to my email without me going through the entire process would “potentially contaminate the work of the TC”.

Unsurprisingly I haven’t reported any of the 20+ errors I’ve found since.

This one just confused me on so many levels I couldn’t ignore it. At a purely grammatical level I was surprised that dogs kill “kiwi” and not “kiwis”. This called for some further research, whereupon I discovered that although Wiktionary only gives the “kiwis” form, the Wikipedia page on English plural has an interesting discursion on how words of Maori origin can be pluralised with or without an -s.

At a purely practical level, however, I’m completely confused as to what I, as a driver, am meant to do upon encountering this sign. It’s not like I’m travelling with a pack of dogs in the back of my car that I would otherwise have let loose at the first sign of a kiwi. And it can’t just be a simple warning that there may be dead kiwi(s) littering the highway, as it explicitly warns me to be cautious at night. Although the kiwi is generally a nocturnal creature, one would presume that a dead kiwi doesn’t burst into flames or disintegrate into a pile of dust once hit by direct sunlight, and thus a “be careful you don’t run over any dead kiwi” warning should apply at all hours.

So I’m left with the rather unsettling conclusion that I’m meant to be careful I don’t drive into the midst of a frenzied midnight kiwi killing spree, lest the bloodthirsty dogs, freshly exhilarated from the kill, turn on me next.

URLs for other people’s pictures welcomed so I can make at least some of these be links:

• Come And Taste Te Puke
• Merge Like a Zip
• We’ll take care of your hazardous waist
• Te Puke Holiday Park - now with backpackers!
• Pukeko crossing
• 448 Drink Drivers caught on our roads since 1 Nov 2007

Dunedin is simultaneously familiar and yet strangely foreign. A significant proportion of streets, districts, parks, shops, etc are named after places in Edinburgh, which is, after all, the very city’s namesake (the Burgh of Edin vs. the Dun of Edin). They still even drive on the left here (albeit with metric distances and speeds and a really crazy “give way to drivers turning against you” rule). But they’ve evolved their own crazy version of English, where, for example, TV ads bemoan the fact that you can buy cigarettes in the dairy, you wheel a trundler round the supermarket, you can win a trip to a bach of your dreams anywhere in the world, shops have large “EFTPOS” signs in their windows, and radio programmes can talk for an hour about students getting their “OE” in London or New York without ever once explaining what that actually is.

They also have their own version of the Australian habit of shortening everything to two syllables: it took me much too long to realise that “Coro Street” wasn’t just a local soap (and, as an aside, the UK population should pray that no-one at the BBC decides to fill that newly created Neighbours gap with Shortland Street…)

And that’s all before you deal with the Maori influence (and have to learn how to pronounce place names like Whangarei and Ngongotaha), and the variety of words that have leaked through into everyday language.

I’m also reliably informed that calling yourself “George Street Normal School” is perfectly acceptable in many countries, but to me it sounds like someone trying to find an even more innocuous sounding way of saying “Special School”.

And it’s not just the language. I’ve also never quite worked out why you get your Fish And Chips from a Chinese Takeaway, or why soft drinks come in 600ml containers, and it’s taken me a while to get used to my toaster being inside a cupboard. And you can always tell you’re in a small country when primetime TV has ads for fork lift trucks. (I really want to provide a link so that everyone can enjoy the ludicrous jingle of “There is nothing like a Crown / For picking it up / And putting it down” but I can’t find it anywhere. Help, please, anyone!)

But there are some things that are fantastic here. A small example is that they have a TV listings magazine for intelligent people, that actually thinks nothing of running a 5 page article on an interesting topic. It’s not quite the New Yorker, but it’s certainly no Heat.

A common pet peeve of mine is also neatly avoided here in that they have at least as many warnings about drowsy driving they do about drunk driving (which accounts for a much smaller number of deaths but is much easier to detect and thus gets all the attention in most countries). Although I can’t quite see the UK adopting the slogan “If you stop a drunk driver you’re a bloody legend” any time soon.

But by far my biggest delight here has been airline travel. It’s as if it’s still 1988. When I rang for a shuttle to take to me to the airport yesterday I was first surprised that they didn’t ask what time I wanted to be picked up, but only what time my flight was at. Then I assumed they’d misheard me as they said they’d pick me up approximately an hour after the time I would have expected to arrive at the airport. But, indeed, no. You can still turn up 20 minutes before your flight, show absolutely no ID anywhere in the whole process, stroll through to the business lounge without anyone checking you should be there or having encountered any security screening at all, and even carry the Starbucks you bought downtown right on to the plane. It’s a classic example of something that has been slowly taken away piece by piece in most parts of the world, and even though you know things have changed, you’ve forgotten just how much so until you’re confronted so starkly with how it used to be. I suspect it’s as much to do with the relative isolation of the country as a deliberate plan to avoid the terrible creep, but the longer they can keep it up the better!

It’s going to take a while for all the pieces to fall into place, not least because I’m using the opportunity to take February and March off to do a Grand Tour of Australia, but I’ve already begun the first phase:

• http://search.cpan.org/~tmtm/Spreadsheet-Engine

This is a forked version of the core calculation engine from SocialCalc 1.1.0. There is no UI, no file storage, nor any of the peripheral features that would be required for a full-blown spreadsheet application. But it does provide (pace a few small problems) all the functionality for performing spreadsheet calculations at the first level of the OpenFormula specification (approx. 110 functions). It’s unclear what’s going to be happening with the “open development” model of SocialCalc itself now that neither Casey nor I are working on it, but even if that continues with someone else at the helm a fork is almost certainly required due to conflicting requirements.

One of the significant restrictions that Dan imposed on the project was that idiomatic Perl code was problematic, as he wanted it to be easily translatable into other languages. This made it particularly difficult to refactor the code in the directions that I believe it needs to move to support the next phase of the project. Now, free from those constraints, I can tear the code apart and put it back together again in the ways that I please. And as I don’t have to support a UI or a particular storage format, this gives me even more freedom to make the engine much more flexible without worrying about backwards compatibility. This is particularly important as I don’t have the safety net of a test suite. We did have the beginnings of a test suite in the public SVN repository, but as that was never officially released, the licensing of it comes with somewhat of a question mark. So I’ve started from 0% coverage again, and begun to implement all the test cases provided in the OpenFormula spec. This has uncovered some interesting bugs (some of which were no doubt caused by the manner in which I extracted the engine from the already splintered SocialCalc code, but many of which I’ve confirmed are also present in SocialCalc), but rather than get bogged down in fixing those, I’m concentrating first on building sufficient coverage, then splitting out all the functions, and then fixing the bugs. That should take me to the end of January, at which point I depart Dunedin for Kiwi Foo and a week of touring the north island, before my 8 week journey around Australia.

Feel free to play with it in the meantime, but if you have any queries or hit any problems, don’t expect a response until April!

Unfortunately for you (but not, of course, for me), in Samoa the insects don’t carry many diseases. If they did, things could have turned out a whole lot worse as my blood appears to smell like the nectar of the gods. On the first morning in Apia, following an overnight night that was too short to get quite enough sleep, and after eventually arriving at my lodgings for the week (a feat made rather more difficult by the no-show of the pre-arranged shuttle they were meant to be sending), I tried to grab a few hours kip. Approximately 15 minutes after falling asleep I was awakened by some friendly staff knocking my door and asking if I wanted any breakfast. I shouted a “no thanks” through the door, and went to turn over to go back to sleep, but then realised that I couldn’t feel or move my right leg. I frantically raced through my mental list of insect bites to see which might cause this, but I was too tired and a little too panicked to get very far in that process. I managed to clamber out of bed and walk about the room a bit until gradually the feeling returned. Relieved, and hoping it wasn’t just a temporary recovery, I jumped straight back into bed and slept for another 4 hours. When I woke I had a large red lump on my leg, but could still move. Over the rest of the week that lump was joined by about 300 more, spread all over my arms, legs, hands, face, neck, and feet.

Your other opportunity in Samoa was some sort of suntroke related fatality. There only seemed to be two weather settings: aggressive thunderstorm or oppressive heat that burns every piece of exposed skin within 30 seconds. The sunburn I ended up with in Samoa was so bad that several weeks later, on the flight from Auckland to Dunedin, after a flight attendent threw hot coffee all over me, they thought they’d scalded my arms. But unless it causes skin cancer later in life (in which case you’ll need to check Marty’s small print very carefully), it was non-fatal.

Tonga came much closer, however. Everything went swimmingly until my penultimate day when I finally got around to going on an island tour. One of the stops on said tour was to explore some caves that seemed to be very popular with locals and tourists alive. Each of us was provided with a candle to light our way, apart from a German girl at the very rear who was given the only torch. The candles were almost entirely useless, but luckily I was right behind the tour guide and relied on keeping close enough behind him to match every step he took. This worked fine until we had to stop to wait for the others to catch up (who were also presumably not having much success with the candles and had to measure each step more carefully). Some locals were making their way back and needed to squeeze past us, so the guide asked me to step to the side to give them room. I made the mistake of assuming that he would only ask me to step aside if there was actually somewhere to step to - and promptly fell over the edge. I’m not entirely sure how he managed it, but the guide managed to grab my arm as I vanished and haul me back up onto the path. My candle seemed to take a very long time to hit whatever would have otherwise have broken my fall. Thankfully I manage to end up with little more than a couple of badly scraped fingers, two very large bruises just below each knee, and a noticeable limp for the next few hours.

From what I can tell New Zealand is significantly safer than most other places in this part of the world, so if I were allowed to enter, I’d be picking Australia right now. I hear a significant number of tourists die there each year…

Although Охрид is a major tourist destination during the summer (and rightly so), by the end of September most of the flights in and out have stopped. Retracing my steps and flying out from софия again would involve getting the whole way back up Скопје first. The only plausible flight out of Tirana was much too early in the morning to have any sensible way of catching it. Eventually I discovered that British Airways fly from Θεσσαλονίκη to London, and, best of all, depart late afternoon. That just left the problem of getting there. There are no trains or buses across the border between those points. And, as most Macedonian taxi drivers don’t have a visa for Greece, the standard advice is to get a bus to Битола, a taxi from there to the border, cross on foot, get a taxi on the Greek side to the nearest town, and then a bus on to Θεσσαλονίκη. This would be considerable hassle at the best of times, and has far too much scope for something going wrong when catching a plane. Thankfully one of the hotel staff came to my rescue and arranged for someone he knew with a suitable visa to drive me there for a reasonable price. I started to get a little worried at first, as the drive to Битола took much longer than I had been expecting, but thankfully I had no difficulties at the border crossing this time, and once across the border we made up plenty of time, and I got to airport with almost an hour to spare.

My time in California didn’t go quite as expected. I’d arranged to stay around an extra few weeks to do some on-site customer research, but that ended up falling through (my long rant about this can wait for another day). I did get a lot of useful work done with Liz, though, and got to explore some more of California at the weekends (including stumbling across the rather bizarre Pescadero Apple Festival).

As per my plan to chase the light by flying south for the winter, I’d booked a round-the-world ticket onwards, rather than returning to Europe. As part of the crazy conditions attached to that, I was able to fly into San Francisco, but had to depart from Los Angeles. Thankfully it was a night-time departure, so rather than the hassle of arranging a connecting flight, I decided to drive down the coast instead.

Other than a wrong turn at Oxnard that cost me about 30 minutes heading back in the wrong direction, everything was going smoothly and I would arrive at LAX in plenty of time. Until I joined the 10 at Santa Monica, that is, and found myself in a crazy traffic jam. Apparently two different crashes had caused near-gridlock, so the four miles to the 405 took just over an hour, and then it was another hour for the next five. If the final few miles had been at the same speed I was running a significant risk of missing my flight, but thankfully the jam just suddenly disappeared in the that really strange way that sometimes happens, and I had open roads the whole way to the rental car drop-off.

And thus I find myself in the departure lounge, with several large glasses of Baileys and my last net connection for a while. Next stop Samoa, where I deliberately chose somewhere to stay with no internet service. Detox, here I come.

In Macedonia, of course, it’s even more egregious to call it Russian, as the alphabet actually originated here. I actually didn’t know that prior to this year, but it certainly helps explain why it’s so close to Greek.

Having studied both Mathematics and Theology at university level, I had enough Greek background to find Cyrillic relatively easy to pick up, but anyone who has picked up a smattering of the Greek alphabet is already 50% of the way to being about to transliterate effectively.

For me the hardest parts are glyphs that look the same in Cyrillic and Latin, but represent different letters. It’s much easier to learn what the unfamiliar characters look like than to train your brain to understand why so many shop windows and advertising hoardings are proudly proclaiming “НОВО!”

So here’s the 5 minute guide that’ll get you 90% of the way:

• Р: This is not a P - it’s an R, from the Greek rho. A ‘P’ is actually П (pi).
• С: This is actually an S. It apparently evolved from a Sigma, but it’s much easier to remember that the old СССР isn’t “CCCP”, but “SSSR”, which makes a lot more sense, really.
• В: This is a V. This is fairly common in other languages too, including Hebrew: lots of the names in the Bible aren’t really pronounced the way you were probably taught in Sunday School…
• Н: This is an N. I used to get confused between it and И, which is an I, but now I just remember all those aforementioned НОВО signs.
• У: This is a U. This one is easy for any fans of Тату.
• Ј: This is a Y. Actually it’s not - it’s a J. But it’s a soft J, like in lots of European languages that tend to confuse English speakers anyway, so it’s easier to think of it as a Y.
• Х: Again, thinking in Greek makes this easier. It’s a Chi. In practice it’s a little complicated as sometimes it’s a ‘CH’ and sometimes just an ‘H’. But it’s usually obvious from context, and even if you’re not sure you’ll be a lot closer than treating it as an X.

All the other characters that look like English (АKЕMOT) are all what you’d expect, so once you stop falsely transliterating the lookalikes, you’re well on your way.

• Ф is like the greek Phi, and is usually just transliterated as ‘F’, although sometimes ‘PH’ might work slightly better.
• Г is a G, but tricks people who only know Gamma as γ and aren’t familiar with its capital form.
• Д, thanks to Borat, now confuses people. To me it’s always been obviously a D, just written a little differently. For my part I got confused when I first saw a movie poster for “300“, as I was living in Estonia at the time and assumed the poster was in Russian, where З is a Z (not to be mistaken for Э which is a short E, but they don’t have character in Macedonian so it’s not so confusing here).
• Л, according to my keyboard and most websites, is an L. But it’s hardly ever written like that (in Macedonia, anyway) usually it’s more like an upside-down V. Unicode doesn’t have such a symbol in the standard Cyrillic range, so I’m not sure what sign-makers use in its place (the closest I can find is U+2227: ∧, but it’s not quite right). A garage near my apartment is still proudly displaying an old ∧А∆А sign (which looks much more effective with proper typography).

Occasionally you’ll come across a few other strange characters that you’ll have to learn later, but this subset will get you remarkably far.

Curiously, Macedonian doesn’t include one of the iconic characters regularly used in faux-Russian: Я (ya). This is a very common letter in Russian as it’s also the word for the first person pronoun (”I”), but doesn’t exist in Macedonian at all. This is why the capital city is spelled Скопје whereas the neighbouring capital, which is pronounced very similarly, is written София.

Within a few weeks of moving to Скопје I was able to transliterate most street signs etc fairly quickly, which helped in finding my way around. And even without being able to translate, lots of words are rather obvious once you’ve converted the letters. This sometimes goes awry though, the first time I took a slug from a carton of Млеко to discover that even though it looked like a milk carton, and ‘mleko’ sounds close enough to ‘milk’, I was actually drinking yoghurt.

And I still can’t see the T-Mobile ‘е-Ваучери’ signs without thinking that there’s some sort of hook-up with eBay…