Posts about california

The Curious Cartographical Case Of The Island Of California

I want it now, dammit". Nowhere is this more evident than in maps. If something is wrong on a map, we expect it to be fixed. Now. Ten or so years ago, it would be common to wait somewhere between 12 and 18 months for a map's updates to be collected, validated and published. These days, thanks to our modern digital maps, we get our updates in more or less Internet Time and that means fast. It hasn't always been that way.

Although waiting over a year for a map update seems almost unthinkable now, consider for a moment having to wait almost half a century for a map to be updated. Yet this is what happened in the curious cartographical case of the Island of California.

I should state up front that I've been to California, quite a few times. The weather is fine (apart from San Francisco's fog), it's home to the technical hub of Silicon Valley and the local food and wine are rather good. It is most definitely not an island and what's more, there's a distinct lack of tribes of beautiful Amazonian warriors wielding gold tools and weaponry. Yet in 1510, Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo published a novel entitled Las Sergas de Esplandián, or The Adventures Of Esplandián, which mentions the Island of California, populated by the aforementioned female warriors. The name and concept of an island stuck and early Spanish explorers of what we now call Baja California were convinced the new territory they had found was part of the Island of California.

In retrospect, early maps of the New World actually got the geography of California right. Both Mercator, he of web map projection controversy, in 1538 and Ortelius, in 1570, made maps that correctly showed California as a peninsula.

We've become firmly accustomed to the instant gratification of Internet Time, which can be roughly summarised as "I want it now, dammit". Nowhere is this more evident than in maps. If something is wrong on a map, we expect it to be fixed. Now. Ten or so years ago, it would be common to wait somewhere between 12 and 18 months for a map's updates to be collected, validated and published. These days, thanks to our modern digital maps, we get our updates in more or less Internet Time and that means fast. It hasn't always been that way.

Although waiting over a year for a map update seems almost unthinkable now, consider for a moment having to wait almost half a century for a map to be updated. Yet this is what happened in the curious cartographical case of the Island of California.

I should state up front that I've been to California, quite a few times. The weather is fine (apart from San Francisco's fog), it's home to the technical hub of Silicon Valley and the local food and wine are rather good. It is most definitely not an island and what's more, there's a distinct lack of tribes of beautiful Amazonian warriors wielding gold tools and weaponry. Yet in 1510, Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo published a novel entitled Las Sergas de Esplandián, or The Adventures Of Esplandián, which mentions the Island of California, populated by the aforementioned female warriors. The name and concept of an island stuck and early Spanish explorers of what we now call Baja California were convinced the new territory they had found was part of the Island of California.

In retrospect, early maps of the New World actually got the geography of California right. Both Mercator, he of web map projection controversy, in 1538 and Ortelius, in 1570, made maps that correctly showed California as a peninsula.

americae-sive-novi-orbis-nova-descriptio

But that all changed in 1602.

A merchant, Sebastián Vizcaíno, was appointed by the Viceroy of New Spain to examine the coastal regions and make new maps. On board one of Vizcaíno's expeditions was one Antonia de la Ascensión who wrote ...

that the whole Kingdom of California discovered on this voyage, is the largest island known…and that it is separated from the provinces of New Mexico by the Mediterranean Sea of California.

This geographic blunder was further reinforced by Antonia Vázquez de Espinosa, who wrote in 1615 that ...

California is an island, and not continental, as it is represented on the maps made by the cosmographers.

The notion of California as an island was thus firmly cemented in the minds of the day's cartographers, featuring in the first general atlas of the world that was published in England between 1626 and 1627. Even European cartographers finally gave up in their portrayal of California as a peninsula and by 1650 all maps of note showed the Island.

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And so it remained until 1705 when a Jesuit missionary, Father Eusebio Kino, made a report of his journeys, with an accompanying map, that showed that California really was attached to the rest of the North American continent. Even then, it took until 1746 when another Jesuit, Fernando Consag, tried and failed to sail around the non-existant island, to put an end to the Island of California.

Despite this, it took a further 50 or so years before maps showed California as we now know it to be, part of North America and not, as de Montalvo wrote, being close to the Asian mainland and also "very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise".

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Next time you get annoyed and frustrated by a modern map not being entirely up to date, you can rest assured that it'll probably take a month or two at the most to be updated and not a half century. In the meantime, the Island of California remains an enduring oddity in the history books of exploration and cartography and one which is showcased on Stanford University's web site as part of the Glen McLaughlin collection.

Image credits: Stanford University Library and the Glen McLaughlin Collection

WP Biographia v2.0 Goes Into Beta

gobsmacked at the reception that WP Biographia has received since I first released it in August of this year. People are downloading it; people are emailing me about it; people are discussing it and asking for new features on the WordPress forums and since I put the code up on GitHub, people are even forking it, improving on it and sending me pull requests. But I've been buried deep in my day job over the last month or so and as a result coding has had to play second fiddle to what I do for a living.

I continue to be genuinely gobsmacked at the reception that WP Biographia has received since I first released it in August of this year. People are downloading it; people are emailing me about it; people are discussing it and asking for new features on the WordPress forums and since I put the code up on GitHub, people are even forking it, improving on it and sending me pull requests. But I've been buried deep in my day job over the last month or so and as a result coding has had to play second fiddle to what I do for a living.

But thanks to Travis Smith getting in touch with me via Twitter and taking the time to make his changes and bug fixes on a GitHub fork there's now a new beta version of WP Biographia up on GitHub for testing or for those who like to live on the bleeding edge.

NEW & IMPROVED 50% BRIGHTER LIGHTS

In addition to Travis' changes I've also reworked the plugin structure to reflect the recommended WordPress plugin file and directory layout and this, coupled with 6 other new features and big fixes is sufficient, I think, to up the version number straight to v2.0.0. Here's what's new.

  • You can now set the size of the author's Gravatar image
  • The plugin now supports the [wp_biographia] shortcode
  • You can now exclude the Biography Box from specific posts based on the post's ID
  • You can now place the Biography Box at the top of the post as well as the bottom of the post
  • You can now further customise the behaviour of the plugin through a short circuit filter
  • The issues with CSS on some WordPress installations have been fixed.

Once the beta's been tested out and given the general community nod of approval I'll push the new version to the WordPress Subversion repository so people who are using the plugin and don't want to manually update the plugin or test the new version out will get the automagic update notification in their WordPress dashboard. Photo Credits: Leo Reynolds on Flickr.

At The Airport, Not All QR Codes Are Created Equal

bags X-Rayed or searched and on engaging flight-safe mode on your mobile phone/tablet/e-book reader/laptop.

Last week, flying from London Heathrow to Berlin's Tegel airport I found a new addition to the increasingly detached-from-reality world of airline security ... the electronic boarding pass. In principle, the electronic boarding pass is a great idea. First introduced in 1999 by Alaska Airways, checking into your flight online and putting a QR code on a graphic of your boarding pass cuts down queueing and waiting at the airport. Some airlines either send you the boarding pass as an SMS message, as an email attachment or as a time limited web URL. Some airlines provide an app on your phone; British Airways falls into this category and their app covers Windows Phone 7, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

Another day, another flight, another addition to the ever growing and increasingly arcane number of steps that you need to go through in order to get through an airport and actually take off on a plane. I've written before on the world of airport security, be it having your bags X-Rayed or searched and on engaging flight-safe mode on your mobile phone/tablet/e-book reader/laptop.

Last week, flying from London Heathrow to Berlin's Tegel airport I found a new addition to the increasingly detached-from-reality world of airline security ... the electronic boarding pass. In principle, the electronic boarding pass is a great idea. First introduced in 1999 by Alaska Airways, checking into your flight online and putting a QR code on a graphic of your boarding pass cuts down queueing and waiting at the airport. Some airlines either send you the boarding pass as an SMS message, as an email attachment or as a time limited web URL. Some airlines provide an app on your phone; British Airways falls into this category and their app covers Windows Phone 7, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

With this in mind, consider the following electronic boarding pass, taken from last week's flight.

Berlin Boarding Pass - Original

This boarding pass gets checked three times between the time I arrive at the airport and the time my posterior makes contact with seat 11C. The first time is at security when the QR code gets scanned; if the QR code is valid, I'm granted access to the airside part of the terminal at Heathrow, but my passport isn't checked so as long as the QR code says it's valid, I'm through. The second time is at the gate. Again, the QR code is scanned and this time it's cross checked with my passport; so not only is the boarding pass valid, but I can prove that the name on my passport and the name on the boarding pass matches. The third and final time, is when I actually board the plane and the cabin crew visually check that the boarding pass is actually for that flight.

Now consider this version of the boarding pass. The QR code is able to be scanned and it contains exactly the same information as the previous one. It will get me through the first two boarding pass checks but apparently it won't allow me onto the aircraft. Why? When boarding last week's flight the member of the cabin crew who checked my boarding pass told me she needed to "scroll your phone" and "check that your boarding pass isn't a photo". the underlying assertion here being that if I wasn't using a boarding pass on BA's own mobile app, I couldn't board the flight.

Berlin Boarding Pass - Copy

If your eyes are crossing from concentration at this point, you're not alone. I still haven't been able to comprehend what the difference is between a valid QR code, which is itself a graphic image, in BA's mobile app and a screen shot of the QR code, which is, err, a graphic image. I have an even harder time comprehending how this makes the theatre of airline security any safer for me or for my fellow passengers.

Will The New Delicious Still Be ... Delicious?

Delicious is dead! Long live Delicious. Like a lot of Delicious users, I recently received a mail urging me to authorise the transfer of my Delicious account and bookmarks to the new service once ownership transfers from Yahoo! to AVOS.

The reception to the news of Delicious's new owners has been ... varied. Marshall Kirkpatrick has written a post in favour of the transfer, but Violet Blue is not so sure. If you do a little bit of digging, you'll see that the new Delicious has the potential to be far more restrictive on what you can, and what you can't bookmark, especially where potentially offensive content is linked to. Offensive is a horribly vague and subjective term; one which means many different things to many different people.

Delicious is dead! Long live Delicious. Like a lot of Delicious users, I recently received a mail urging me to authorise the transfer of my Delicious account and bookmarks to the new service once ownership transfers from Yahoo! to AVOS.

The reception to the news of Delicious's new owners has been ... varied. Marshall Kirkpatrick has written a post in favour of the transfer, but Violet Blue is not so sure. If you do a little bit of digging, you'll see that the new Delicious has the potential to be far more restrictive on what you can, and what you can't bookmark, especially where potentially offensive content is linked to. Offensive is a horribly vague and subjective term; one which means many different things to many different people.

Delicious

At the heart of the issue is the difference in wording between the old Delicious terms ...

The linked websites’ content, business practices and privacy policies are not under the control of Delicious, and Delicious is not responsible for the content of any linked website or any link contained in a linked website. (…) In accessing Delicious or following links to third-party websites you may be exposed to content that you consider offensive or inappropriate. You agree that your only recourse is to stop using Delicious.

... and the new ones ...

You agree not to do any of the following: post, upload, publish, submit or transmit any Content that: (…) violates, or encourages any conduct that would violate, any applicable law or regulation or would give rise to civil liability; (iii) is fraudulent, false, misleading or deceptive; (iv) is defamatory, obscene, pornographic, vulgar or offensive (…)

If a complaint is made and if the new terms are upheld, you run the risk of having all your bookmarks removed, without recourse and without warning. Admittedly that's a lot of ifs.

A cursory trawl through my Delicious bookmarks doesn't seem to have anything obscene or pornographic, but there's a lot of linked content which is fictitious and could possibly be deemed misleading or deceptive. As the saying goes, you can please some people, some of the time, not all people, all of the time. When you have terms of service which are vague and ambiguous, you can rest assured that someone will exercise their right to be offended. For now, I've authorised my old Delicious account to be transferred to the new service, but I've also taken a backup, just to be on the safe side.

What's also unclear is whether the Delicious API and RSS feeds will remain; one of my web sites relies on these to dynamically update the site's content.

While Delicious lives on, whether I'll continue to be a user of the service or migrate to my own, self hosted solution, as I've already done with my URL shortener, remains to be seen. Photo Credits: Shaneblog on Flickr.

Through The Window # 3

Through the window: Campbell sunrise

This week I'm deep in the heart of the city nicknamed The Capital of Silicon Valley, San Jose. The view from the window isn't nearly as appealing but it shows that the annual Geo industry extravaganza that is Where 2.0 is only a few days away.

Through the window: downtown San Jose

The view from the window has changed again. Last week I was deep in the Silicon Valley suburbia staying with good friends in Campbell, where the sunrises were gorgeous.

Through the window: Campbell sunrise

This week I'm deep in the heart of the city nicknamed The Capital of Silicon Valley, San Jose. The view from the window isn't nearly as appealing but it shows that the annual Geo industry extravaganza that is Where 2.0 is only a few days away.

Through the window: downtown San Jose

Mental Note to Self

I'd been told that the lesser spotted flight upgrade does happen. But despite travelling the Heathrow to San Francisco route on British Airways roughly once every three months for the best part of four years, despite knowing at least three members of the BA cabin crew who put me down on the upgrade list (but no promises, it's at the discretion of the Captain you know) and despite frequently travelling with a colleague whose best friend is not only a pilot but a BA pilot, the elusive upgrade had never happened. Until today.

The BA Club World Experience

So what have I learnt from the experience? Firstly that Club World on BA is very, very, nice. Now nice is a much abused and cliched word but Club World is the sort of nice that makes me ponder what the rarified heights of First Class are like; nice staff, nice food, nice wine (Cline Cellars "Ancient Vines" 2007 Zinfandel plus three other red choices and four white choices if you're interested), just ... nice. Secondly that the seats (which put themselves into all sorts of configurations, from bolt upright to totally flat on your back and all points in between, at the touch of a button) are a world apart from the BA World Traveller Plus seats (AKA premium economy) that I'm used to.

On Board Power

But first and foremost, the lesson I've learnt is that Club World seats have power sockets. Proper power sockets. Power sockets that actually charge a laptop. Not an airline seat power outlet that needs a special adaptor, but a proper, plug it in, power socket. Which for some reason takes US power adaptors not UK. This could have meant disaster; good as the battery life is on my MacBook Pro it's not up to some 9 and a half hours of usage including PowerPoint deck wrangling and watching a movie or two. But luckily the day was saved by a nice lady in a BA uniform who rummaged in her personal luggage (which isn't a euphemism by the way) and loaned me her own UK/US adaptor for the duration of the flight. Now that's service in my book.

But mental note to self ... upgrades do happen so sticking a US power adaptor in your hand baggage next time is probably a good idea.

Written on BA 285, somewhere between LHR (51.47245, -0.45293) and SFO (37.61476, -122.39178) and posted from Chateau Bell, Campbell CA (37.2655445, -121.963743).