Last night's London random pub meet up was a late one. I had to take a night bus home, and I'm feeling a little worse for wear this morning. But as far as I recall, it was an enjoyable evening over in South Kensington at the Drayton Arms

Matt was inspired by (and felt a burning desire to compete with) randomjunk's building mapping, and so earlier in the day he knocked up a cheeky JOSM plugin Update: Now released as the "Terracer plugin". Basically it lets you do terraced houses like this in a jiffy:

And having put this particular patch of buildings in, just to the north of last night's pub, we did a quick ten minute mapping session on the way to the pub to gather some house numbers along these streets. We still need to input that data. (house numbering tagging description on the wiki is codenamed the 'Karlsruhe Schema')

At the pub we welcomed along some new faces. Someone called Steve, which is not an unusual name. Someone called Stefan which is vaguely unusual in England but he was over visiting from Germany (where it clearly isn't unusual). Someone called Ashok, which is an unusual name, and made we wonder whether it might possibly the same Ashok who I studied at Imperial College with. And it was indeed the self same Ashok. But first prize for unusual names, goes to Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason. He was over visiting from Iceland. He did explain how to spell his name last night, but I see now why it wasn't making sense. There was also a guy who works for simbian (now nokia) with Jenny. He had a T-Shirt with a latitude and longitude on it, which prompted an amusing guessing game. I don't remember his name. Pretty sure it wasn't as unusual as Ævar, but I could be wrong.

Given how far various people had travelled, it was quite appropriate that the attendees got a prize for showing up: some glossy limited edition posters of a map of London. Matt organized a print run of 50 of these as a test, and what with the numbering on the back, and the glaring error which nobody ever notices on the front, these posters are truly unique.

Conversation quickly turned to the wiki server, which had slowed to a crawl yesterday afternoon. Firefishy had been monitoring the problem and was forced to put it in read-only mode. We discussed various ways of improving this situation. Ideally it would be moved to some better server hardware, but it seems the 'Map Features' page (with all its complicated template inclusions) is one of the main problems. Some more agressive caching of this particular page could help. If this means the latest edits dont always show up immediately, so be it.

Firefishy's a busy man though. He was also under pressure to get the foundation donations website up and running in time for... today! I guess he was putting the finishing touches to this after the pub last night, or early this morning, because sure enough, before you can say "harryshorrifichangover" it's there! . Give it a try:

>>> donate.openstreetmap.org <<<