The English Cemetery

Some days ago I posted about Basque geo data getting free to the web. Now it's the turn for Catalan geodata. Thanks to Marc Belzunces, in KML and spreadsheet formats, and distributed with a nice free license. Well done!

It's a set of over 1800 municipalities in the territories where Catalan is spoken.

This weekend was the 70th aniversary of the bombardment of Durango, March 31st, 1937. By some accounts, it was the first time in Europe when the aerial bombardment of civilian urban areas was carried. It was Italian bombers which carried the attack, under the command of Spanish generals Francisco Franco and Emilio Mola.



Some 300 people died in Durango that morning. My father survived, without injuries, surrounded by debris, in the middle of Ezkurdi square, right here. Then a teenager, now he's 85 years old, and he's quite well at his age, he remains an avid reader of history books. Memory and history have retained the name of Guernica (Gernika), the city destroyed by a similar bombing some weeks later (april 26th), although the number of mortal victims was probable lower in Gernika than in Durango. However, not just italians, but Nazi germans of the Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe took part on that attack, and the physical destruction of the city was bigger.

Germany has apologized for Gernika. I haven't heard a word from the army of Mola and Franco, the Spanish army.
    
Ten years ago, I was a journalist for Basque newspaper Euskaldunon Egunkaria, and I wrote (together with Basque historian Josu Chueca) a report about Durango, using, among others, the direct account of my father (I showed little modesty, you see). That series of reports about the Spanish Civil War in the Basque Country was converted into a book by Egunkaria. Then, in 2004, Spanish judges closed Egunkaria: the material written content of that newspaper, including my half-book, remain hijacked by the judge. No, that's not Turkey, it's the European Union, basque newspapers are closed under unproved accusations of terrorism, it's former directors were tortured... Three years later, not a single evidence of links to terrorism have surfaced anywhere.
    
The perpetrators of Durango's and Gernika's bombings still have streets named after them in Spain.

Great and well documented Flash reconstruction here: the criminal Bizkaia campaign carried by fascist forces in the spring of 1937, one of the darkest moments of the Spanish Civil war.

I am very glad with the news at Geonames. The geographic data of the region where I live, Gipuzkoa in the Basque Country, has been liberated, put on the Internet (ceded to Geonames) with a liberal open license (CC-by), and made available to everybody thru Geonames's brilliant web services.

Nearly 250 locations have been corrected (moved to exact positions, and official and alternate names have been added, mostly in Basque), and other 750 new records were added, populated places most of them. The data set is from the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, the regional administration, and has been kindly provided by the officials in charge of the local public Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), the B5M office, as it is called there.

I took part on it, just brokering the contact, convinced B5m about the utility of open data and Geonames, and Geonames about the interest of the data provided. There are other wikipedia-like Geographic sites out there, but for me, Geonames is the Wikipedia of geography.

Previously, Gipuzkoa’s places looked like this in Geonames:

A regular distribution pattern of some scarce populated places, due to rounded coordinates of old gazetteers. And only Spanish names appeared, despite Basque forms being the official ones for 20 years or so. Now, that region appears like this:

More places, updated Basque official names show first (Spanish names haven’t been deleted, they remain there as alternate form), and exact locations. In the case of municipalities, for instance, latitude and longitude are those of the town hall.

The International Polar Year begins today. Some days ago we watched the Oscar-winning documentary film at home, an inconvenient truth. How frightening, specially for our children, the legacy we are leaving for generations to come.



Will our children play with our grand-children as happy as we did with them some days ago? It's a good day to think about ice, snow, receding glaciers... Let's support IPY related activities around the world.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a project that is getting more exciting day after day. Not long ago, the permalinks of their maps showed public satellite imagery from Landsat, but now they have their own maps sufficiently developed, to show them directly (using the interface based in OpenLayers). BTW, the way to get permalinks in OpenStreetMap is not that obvious, but there's one easy method: Browse the OSM world, drag the map with the mouse, zoom somewhere, double click on the map to center... and then, above the map, click on View. The permalink will appear on your browser URL bar.

World coverage varies greatly, but London and the UK look great, and then there's this new effort for Baghdad, something promising, in my view.

And besides, there's Eibar, my hometown, and workplace:



That's the first free and open map of some piece of the Basque Country, a bunch of roads and streets in Eibar, traced by my coleague Gari Araolaza.

Is there any OpenStreetMap coverage around your place? Tagzania let's you check that. Below every individual map, there's the option to open the OpenStreetMap link to look.

Finally, the place where I work is decently viewable in Tagzania. See the screenshots in the Basque side of the Cemetery or at my Flickr set, the Basque Country from above, as seen on the web.
 
And when I leave the workplace, I go to a city that looks much more pleasant now:

Previously, Donostia looked awful:

There has been a great satellite imagery update in Google Maps, that also reaches Tagzania and the other mashups based in the API.

The whole Basque Country is now at a resolution of 2.5 meters, at least in the areas of low resolution that were seen as in this screenshot above. That's not as detailed as the previous hi-resolution cities that could be accessed until now, but it's much more better than the average low-resolution areas.

Context: There's IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, and we have ETA and Batasuna in the Basque Country. More context: last year, ETA declared a permanent ceasefire. No more bombings, no more killings. Hope for a political solution arose.

That ended last saturday. ETA put a 500 kilo bomb in Madrid's Barajas airport, two young immigrant workers were killed by the explosion.

Yesterday, a political leader for Batasuna (Pernando Barrena) spoke: they have no indication, he said, that ETA has broken the ceasefire. They're waiting for a communication from ETA. No further explanations for what happened. Analysis is pending: let's wait for the communication. They'll think about what happened after that.

Waiting. Waiting for Godot. A brilliant Basque writter and blogger, Anjel Lertxundi, found this analogy. I just may add the original text from Samuel Becket's masterpiece.

ESTRAGON: (his mouth full, vacuously). We're not tied?
VLADIMIR: I don't hear a word you're saying.
ESTRAGON: (chews, swallows). I'm asking you if we're tied.
VLADIMIR: Tied?
ESTRAGON: Ti-ed.
VLADIMIR: How do you mean tied?
ESTRAGON: Down.
VLADIMIR: But to whom? By whom?
ESTRAGON: To your man.
VLADIMIR: To Godot? Tied to Godot! What an idea! No question of it. (Pause.) For the moment.

Merry Christmas and happy new 2007!

I sort-of initiated a blog tradition of Christmas posts last year, with my children's best picture of the year. The jury has decided that 2006's best photo is this one at the Los Angeles Zoo. Lili, Peru and the prairie dog.



Love and peace to everybody.

The 5th anniversary of Sustatu, the Basque Slashdot, was nice. And reviews have been positive afterwards, more positive than in the other European tech event of the week, LeWeb 3 with Loic Le Meur, where opinions seem to be unanimous.



It was a bilingual event, all in Basque, including the Ubuntu Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox software used for presentations, except Ed Freyfogle's (ex Yahoo, now Lokku/Nestoria) speech and frantic 80-slide presentation, shown in mere 10 minutes of English talk. Yet, the mixture of the languages was perfect, and the tone, which began provocatively with Ed, followed that line with Iban Zaldua, a local writer and blogger, and myself. Ed called the audience, you, the leaders of Internet in Euskal Herria (Basque Country).

Were we that, really? A bunch of friends, maybe, those 100 people that attended, people that suspect Internet is big, and care about our country. Leaders or not, we took good note of Ed's advice:

• aim big
• focus on whatever is most important, forget the rest
• measure twice, cut once
• Chinese are cheaper, therefore we should hire them.

More pics from my coleague Zaloa Etxeniz, about the event and the beatiful setting, a centuries old cluster just renewed, which we had the occasion to user even before official inauguration.

Ed's presentation is here, and the rest in Basque as well. Thank you, Nestoria, for celebrating with us. We enjoyed you presence, and I suspect that the whole team of that company enjoyed the Basque Country as well: there's graphic evidence of that (location of the surfspot: Sopela).

Sustatu, the Basque Slashdot (please do understand the difference of scale), has turned 5 years old. There's no formal birthdate, it slowly came out of the shadows, without a formal presentation, during november 2001. At the time, Kuro5hin and Slashdot were our references, altogether with Spanish Barrapunto. It was the first weblog in Basque. The standard model for weblogs has shifted since then, and now it's personal blogs (looks as if a semantic nuance distinguishes blog from weblog) which are en vogue. We've got plenty of them nowadays in Basque (for instance, in Blogak.com), but Sustatu remains as a clear reference in the Basque web scene.

Just 3 or 4 daily notes (on labour days), plus a picture. Sometimes, there are comments, and even discussions. Not much greater than that, but that's how the Basque modest flagship of the Internet sails, and we are proud of it.
    
Next week, we'll throw a party in Arrasate (Mondragon). There will be prizes (some iPods) for a little contest we've organised (Best blog post in Basque), and two invited speakers, very ironic blogger (a companion in this small community where the English Cemetery sits) and writer Iban Zaldua (our local Pullitzer, Basque literature award 2006), and Ed Freyfogle, american technologist, who served as a leading search engineer in Yahoo Europe for years, and now is a co-founder of London-based start-up Lokku, the creator of Nestoria. The Basque connection of Freyfogle is Javier Etxebeste, who met Ed while he was the director of Yahoo Europe, and now is the other co-founder of Nestoria, and it's from that connection that we've managed to get Ed at this event.



If you know Basque, click on the icon and you'll manage to get an invitation to attend, and know more details about Sustatu's party and contest.