Gary Gale

Posts tagged as "teddington"

Mapstraction, Maps and Me

It's been a while since my last blog post; my day job at Nokia has been taking up almost all of my time and what little time has been left has been spent with my family. But in between day job and family time there's evenings spent in a hotel room and hours spent on a plane, mainly between London's Heathrow and Berlin's Tegel airports. It's in these periods of time that a combination of my MacBook Pro, running a combo of Apache/MySQL/PHP with MAMP and TextMate has allowed me to rediscover the pleasure of what I used to do for my day job before Yahoo! and before Nokia ... and that's to write code.

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Mapping The Might Have Been

The moment you make a map there's a fairly good chance that it will be out of date. There's nothing wrong with this; anyone who works in the cartography or mapping fields will tell you that one of the biggest challenges in making maps is not making the map, it's keeping it up to date once it's made. Geography is constantly moving, changing, flowing thing.

One of the most fascinating aspects of old maps is not so much looking at what's changed since they were made, though that is fascinating enough, but of what might have been but then never was.

Regular readers of this blog may have worked out that out of all the maps there are, my favourite is the London Underground Tube map. A browse through the London Tube Map Archive shows just how much the Tube network has expanded and contracted over the years and how stations have changed not only in name but sometimes in position as well. But some of these maps also show what was planned but which was never realised; as Trent Reznor once put it "all the what abouts, the might have and could have beens". Take a look at this map of the network from 1938.

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Society of Cartographers Redux

To be filed under the "slightly self promoting" department, earlier this year I was invited to speak at the Society of Cartographers Summer School in Manchester, UK. It's always great to be invited to speak at a conference but I was particularly excited by the SoC. The geo world I inhabit is one of data, APIs, platforms and data mining and aggregation techniques. Sometimes the map gets lost in all of this. So it was an honour to speak at an event where it was all about the map. The Summer School was written up in November's edition of the SoC Newsletter which is only available to society members, but with permission I've reproduced below the sections of the newsletter which cover my involvement.

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Grepping And Grokking The Etymology Of Grep

I've been thinking a lot about the etymology of place names recently. That's a slightly verbose way of saying that I've been thinking about the origin of place names and where they come from. Take London for example. That's pretty easy as most sources of information seem to agree that London derives from Londinium, the name of the Roman settlement from which the modern metropolis of London grew.

Then there's Teddington, the town on the River Thames at the upstream limit of the Tideway, where I currently live. Some people believe that the name derives from Tide's End Town; Rudyard Kipling was one of the people who subscribed to this version of the name's origin. Scholars though tend to believe that the town was named after a Saxon leader, called either Todyngton or Tutington, which morphed into the modern day name over the centuries.

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