Some data analysis I’ve done has been featured in the Financial Times today – see this article (the link may not work any more unless you have a FT subscription – sorry). The brief story is that I had terrible back pain over Christmas, and spoke to an out-of-hours GP on the phone who prescribed […]
I don’t seem to have time or energy for long posts these days, but here’s another quick post which might save you some time and frustration. Recently, I’ve been trying to import OpenStreetMap data into a PostGIS database to use with pgRouting. I wanted to import data for the whole of England – which has […]
I’ve got into a bit of a habit of writing occasional posts with links to interesting things I’ve found (probably because it’s a relatively easy blog post to write). This is another of those posts – this time, written in June 2025. So, let’s get on with some links: Why COUNT(*) can be slow in […]
I recently gave a careers talk to students at Solent University, and through that I got to know a MSc student there who had previous GIS experience and was now doing a Data Analytics and AI MSc course. Her GIS experience was mostly in the ESRI stack (ArcGIS and related tools) and she was keen […]
I did a post a while back which was just a lot of links to things I found interesting, mostly in the geospatial/data/programming sphere. Since then I’ve collected a lot more links – so here are some of them. The theme, such as there is, seems to be ‘this would have really helped me about […]
As always, this post is very delayed – apologies. In fact, I was encouraged to write this by a friend who I see at PyData Southampton (Hi, if you’re reading this!). I mentioned my talk in passing to her, and she asked if I’d blogged about it yet. I admitted that I hadn’t, and promised […]
Summary: I’m involved in organising a hackathon, and I’d love you to take part. The open-source GeoTAM hackathon focuses on estimating turnover for individual business locations in the UK, from a variety of open datasets. Please checkout the hackathon page and sign up. There are prizes of up to £2,000! (Click image for a larger […]
A quick post today to talk about a couple of PostGIS functions I learnt recently. I had a CSV file that contained well-known binary (WKB) representations of geometries, stored as hexadecimal strings. I imported the CSV into a PostGIS database, and wanted to convert these to be proper PostGIS geometries. I initially went for the […]
It’s been a while since I posted here – I kind of lost momentum over the summer (which is a busy time with a school-aged child) and never really picked it up again. Anyway, I wanted to write a quick post to tell people that I won two awards at the British Cartographic Society awards […]
Summary: I’ve created a demo web app where you can search an aerial photo of Southampton, UK using text queries such as "roundabout", "tennis court" or "ship". It uses vector embeddings to do this – which I explain in this blog post. In this post I’m going to try and explain a bit more about […]