Guy Roberts

Its a good time to be working with software. Over the last two years many excellent and free tools have become available, for instance Wordpress (with which I write this blog), Drupal and the whole Ruby on Rails thing.
I am sure there is a lot to be gained from mixing and matching […]

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. In LSORA I used MapInfo’s MapXtreme for Java to render raster maps for each request, but found that it can often take up to 20 seconds to render a complicated thematic […]