Guy Roberts

This is about how I cycled from Nottingham to John O’Groats in May 2009 to buy a mug. Fifteen Years ago I did the complete Lands End to John O’Groats trip and bought a souvenir mug at each end. I dropped the one from Scottland and have often thought about [...]

Here is a demonstration of Postcode geocoding. It is a Ruby on Rails app that shows a Google map in one iframe and an (Active Scaffold) list of places in another. I have altered the Active Scaffold plugin so that when a postcode is edited, a request is sent to [...]

Earlier this year I worked with some clever people in Nottingham on a project for the Geological Society of London. The Rock Cycle is a quiz for school children and my role was to write a set of templates that the geologists can use to set Multiple Choice or Fill the Gaps quizs. [...]

Here is a map of flight I had yesterday. The red balloon shows the launch point at Saltby. If you zoom in you can see gliders and cars on the ground at the opposite end of the runway (the aerial pictures were taken on another day of course, when the wind [...]

England and Wales are divided into about 7000 Middle Level Super Output Areas that are used for statistical purposes. For instance the Indices of Deprivation were collected for SOAs.
I have found a way to quickly produce thematic Google Maps for SOA data. The finished maps could then be copied to another web [...]

Here is the current state of play of a trial site to produce thematic maps on the fly using Google Maps, Ruby on Rails and Java.  A long list of tasks need to be completed before its useful, not least fixing the way the map tiles look under IE (try Firefox - it handles PNG files [...]

I have a cunning plan, to write a web application that automatically generates a Google map showing thematic data from an ESRI shape file. On a previous contract for Leicester County Council I used MapInfo’s MapXtreme for Java to render raster maps for each request, but found that it can often take up to 20 [...]

Since the start of LSORA in 2004, we’ve used MapXtreme for Java to draw thematic maps in real time. This can work fine, but it can also be reaaaaaly slow.
So I’m looking for a way to do thematic maps with Google Maps, and this is my best effort so far.