Meter Reader

I've put up a web site for recording one's electricity meter readings. It's very basic at the moment. If you try it, please let me know how you find it. The idea is that you get the site up on your phone, and take it to the meter and enter the reading. Later on there could be graphs added, and perhaps a button for submitting the reading to your supplier. Also, I think it probably needs a way of downloading a spreadsheet of your reading. What do you think?

One thing that is that it requires an OpenId. It's hosted on Google App Engine, and they have a white-list of the following OpenId providers:

• AOL
• Google
• MyOpenId
• Yahoo
• MySpace

Also, I don't have a name for it yet, so let me know if you have any ideas.

Lostwithiel II

I took the photo below when I went to the Co-op yesterday:

This is a much older building.

I took this today. It's an in-joke. How my colleagues will laugh.

A view just outside Lostwithiel.

I think this is the best photo.

I put the unmapped parts on Open Streetmap.

MOSM

I've done some work on MOSM, the mobile web site for seeing a map of where you are. For fun I thought I'd use HTML5. It worked out okay on the browser you get with Android 2.2.

One thing I had to learn to get a web page working in a mobile was to use the meta viewport element:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

If you try out MOSM, you'll notice that it has two flaws:

• The downloading of the tiles is really slow. I've turned off the tile buffer, where it downloads tiles off the edge of the screen, but it's still slow.
• To get the current position, it doesn't trigger the retrieval of GPS coordinates. An app does, but a browser app doesn't.

If you know how to solve these problems, please let me know.

Herland

Went for a stroll this morning, and mapped a new road. Finished reading Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland is a feminist utopia, an undiscovered realm populated entirely by women. It's easy to mock utopias, but they're much harder to write about than dystopias, so I admire anyone who has a go. The wondrous place is revealed to us through the eyes of 3 male characters, of varying degrees of masculinity.

I'd prefer to live in a Gilman novel than a Dostoevsky one!

Danger, Sheep Drop

Went for a walk and put some extra bits on Open Streetmap. I took a snapshot of the map beforehand:

I've now added in things on the route from the cottage to the Co-op. There are quite a few unmapped areas, I'll add in some more tomorrow. I took a photo on the way to Restormel:

I can report that no sheep landed while I was in the vicinity.

The Picture Of Dorian Grey

Alastair Reynolds is a consistently fine writer. I've recently finished Zima Blue, a book of Reynolds' short stories, and every one has been superb. Reynolds is becoming one of my most highly rated sci-fi authors. I've lent the book to Bob at work, who's a sci-fi fan, he's sure to like it.

I'm writing this at Willow cottage in Lostwithiel. I traveled by train, the return from Trowbridge costing just under £60. It's a littoral line for part of the way; here's a photo out of the carriage window:

An advantage of the Kindle is that I don't have to take bulky, heavy books around. I'm not sure how many books the Kindle will hold, but there are 4 stored at the moment, and I'm sure there's room for thousands. I charged it up on Christmas Day, and haven't had to recharge since, and that's having read 2.5 books on it so far.

On the train to Cornwall I finished The Picture Of Dorian Gray. The first two books I read on the Kindle both had the word Gray (or Grey) in the title. Proof, if proof be need be, that God exists. I won't write much about TPODG because I've got a headache at the moment, but it's a salutary book that transmits the protagonist's desperate feelings to the reader.

To Kill A Mockingbird

The one plot flaw is that Atticus or Aunt Alexandra would have gone to the pageant. It was a big event in Maycomb, and their daughter / niece was in it. Also, Alexandra was in the same social circle as Mrs Merriweather the organizer of the pageant, and Alexandra wouldn't snub Merriweather by not attending.



Incidentally, I've noticed what I think is an error in the Merriweather section on Wikipedia, let me know what you think of my edit.

The book was lent to me ages ago by Clive at work. For some reason it sat unread on a table in my dining room, on top of Matt's collection of Clint Eastwood western DVDs. I've received increasingly strong hints from Clive about returning the book, so I read it on Friday / Saturday. Just gotta remember to put it in my bag, and then hand it to him.

Back to the book. At the end they were wrong to cover up what actually happened with Ewell. There should have been a proper investigation. What do you think?

Btw, I'm not very good at saying how good a book is. Needless to say, this is a good book.