Obama in Ottawa

Barrack Obama visited Ottawa yesterday. I had intended to walk up to Parliament Hill to see him arrive, but got delayed and by the time I went out they were stopping people at the end of Rideau Street. This ended up being not a bad place to watch the motorcade go by as it has to slow a bit for the corner.

There's a 50% chance he's in the photo above, though could well have been in the second limo which I only got a partial picture of.

Later in the day he made an unscheduled stop in the Byward Market, visiting the baker I normally get bread at to buy some maple leaf cookies.. now being sold in vast numbers as "Obama cookies".

More pics of the visit here (the Whitehouse), here (CTV) and here (mine).

You can now write ubiquity commands in python

See here for details.

A cool blackberry

Never really thought of Blackberries as cool until now ;)

Winterlude

The annual winter festival in Ottawa started this weekend.

It has been a good weekend so far, relatively mild. Last night in fact was a bit too mild, +6C, for the ice sculptures.

OC Transpo bus spotted in its natural habitat

Spotted the above today in Ottawa. Previously thought to have become extinct at the end of 2008.

Good to have the buses back at last.

Openpistemap and Mt Tremblant

I've done a bit of work on the tracks I collected at Mt Tremblant and started working on mapping it for OpenStreetMap.

I found JOSM a little painful at first, partly because I did not really know what I was supposed to be doing.

Switching to the latest version proved a good move, as the Ubuntu Intrepid version had a bug making the preferences dialog too small to change the things.

Anyway, with some help from the IRC channels, you can view the results here. Still rather a lot of pistes to add though.

UPDATE: the map link was showing my changes earlier, but they've now disappeared. I'm sure the rendering stuff will catch up again soon.